Infinity: Kill your way through the movie world.

The post station was completely out of control.

At the same time, the lottery station for the lottery in Gano collapsed amidst the ruins of the southern coast.

The pent-up discontent was more direct and unvarnished than that of the post station, because the lottery is a game of probability. The invisible wall between those who won the lottery repeatedly and those who never won was worn thin by the dried wooden slips. Finally, someone couldn't take it anymore and tore it apart.

Dom was still in the crowd, like a piece of driftwood being swept along by the waves. He wasn't pushed over or overturned, but was being pushed towards the high platform.

The young woman next to him shrieked, "Let us jump in! We'll jump ourselves!"

Dom didn't turn around or respond; he heard many people shouting the same thing.

Their voices blended together, like the roar of an underground river.

He shifted his gaze from the edge of the platform back to the enormous crack suspended overhead, which resembled a half-open iron gate, narrow and deep, its boundary blurred by a grayish-white light.

The lottery platform in the dock area was completely dismantled within fifteen minutes. The wooden stakes and beams were kicked, trampled, and thrown into the water below.

Gano had already left. He was dragged away by his men halfway up the platform as the crowd surged up. They grabbed his arm and pulled him away through a passageway on the side of the platform.

He tried to look back at the lottery station, but in the chaos, a hand pressed down on his shoulder, and he couldn't see anything.

Standing at the very back of the port, people were still moving along the rusted pier toward the open space below the hole. No one was directing or urging them, but they formed a new, unnumbered, unordered, and unmanaged procession. The procession was slower and quieter than the post station and the lottery platform, like an underground river that had been exposed to the scorching sun for years, flowing silently toward the crack.

Meanwhile, in the frozen mining areas at the northern tip of the mainland, a riot far exceeding the scale of the post stations and lottery platforms was silently taking shape.

It was a giant open-pit mine that had been hollowed out; before the catastrophe, it was the world's largest producer of highly reactive minerals.

After the cataclysm, the mining area was not completely abandoned. It was taken over by Allen Thorne and used as a raw material supply hub, continuously supplying molten minerals and insulating ores to laboratories around the world.

However, deep within the mining area, a group of descendants of miners from the old era still live. These people are mostly descendants of miners who were not incorporated into the workforce in the early years. They have no fixed place to live and can only take refuge in the abandoned tunnels and subsidence layers of the mine.

They had no death stations or lottery platforms; they relied on scavenging through the slag heaps for anything that could be used as a bargaining chip, then walking for days to the nearest town to try their luck and get a license plate.

The odds were so low they were incalculable, but they kept walking and waiting because they didn't know what else they could do but wait.

Beside a sinkhole on the southern edge of the mining area, a person wearing a tattered gray cotton coat leaned against a half-buried piece of ore, gazing absently at the distant horizon.

He was wrapped tightly in a grayish cloth, as if afraid it would be blown away by the wind; below his right ankle was a rotten and blackened area, where the skin and muscles had turned into a sticky paste, oozing a yellowish-green liquid, and occasionally tiny white maggots would crawl out of the paste.

His name is Harold, and he has been in the mining area for a long time. No one knows which year he came here, nor does anyone know who he originally was.

The man next to him was digging in the ground with a rusty pickaxe. After digging for a while, he unearthed a fist-sized piece of dark ore, picked it up, weighed it in his hand, and put it back on the ground: "This won't do, it's too broken, we can't exchange it."

Harold didn't turn his head, his throat slightly trembling as he hoarsely asked, "If we can't get a new number, are we just going to rot here forever?"

The person next to him didn't answer, but the silence itself was a response.

On the other side of the mining area, a crowd gathered in an open space was listening to someone speak.

The speaker was a tall man, around fifty years old, with skin like rock that had been dried for a thousand years, clinging tightly to his bones. He had high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, yet still retained a sharp gaze.

He claimed to be from the eastern settlement and had worked as a porter at a certain goods transfer station. His words were intermittent but not somber: "Half of the people at that station have already left, and the lottery platform has collapsed. There's nowhere to manage those people who are holding onto their lottery numbers."

Someone asked, "What about us?"

He paused for a moment, then replied, "We've waited too long, we can't wait any longer."

Someone whispered, "If we can't wait, where should we go?"

He looked down at his festering hands: "Go to hell, I'll die no matter where I go, so I might as well find somewhere nearby."

No one objected, because he was right. They had waited too long, so long that they no longer needed a precise route, only a direction that could be propelled by the flames.

Torches were lit one after another in the mine, and the flames spread along the edge of the tunnel like a snake lying on the ground, spreading silently.

The slag heaps, abandoned tunnels, and toppled steel frames cast blurry outlines in the firelight. Some people emerged from the depths of the tunnels, some peeked out from behind the slag heaps, and some dropped the piece of ore they held, which wasn't even worth half a grade, and joined the black line that moved slowly along the edge of the tunnel.

They didn't knock down anything or break through any barriers, because there were no fences here to begin with, and no one built fences for them.

They simply walked, following the mine tunnel toward the only slope leading to the surface of the mining area.

The slope was steep, and gravel and sand slid down underfoot, making each step unsteady. But they walked slowly because they had waited long enough that they no longer needed a clear destination. As long as the slope led to higher ground, they would keep going.

The night wind blew down from the top of the mine, through the tunnels, and through the abandoned steel frames and ropes, making a low whistling sound.

The whistling sound, like a whistle or a horn, traveled through the cracks and ventilation shafts of the mine, spreading far into the distance.

On the edge of the mining area, on that frozen ground covered with slag, dark gray figures were climbing up the slope. There were no ranks, no formations, no numbers; they were just a slow-moving black dot, like ink spreading on water. Further away, on the wasteland on the edge of another continent, riots were also taking place.

There are no post stations, no lottery platforms, no demons, no cracks, only a patch of hard earth whitened by the wind, and those withered figures slowly walking on the ground.

They came from several settlements, walking for a long time, until their soles were worn through, their shinbones were exposed, until they no longer knew what they were originally looking for.

Some people squatted on the ground, patting the soil with their palms, striking the surface that was too hard to dig; others huddled together, leaning against each other's backs, like a pile of dry firewood stacked in the cold wind, waiting to be ignited by something.

They no longer know who they are waiting for, or what they can wait for.

Someone whispered that the wind was blowing from the other side of the crack; it was the north wind of hell, and it wouldn't stop until dawn.

No one objected, because the wind was indeed blowing continuously.

Meanwhile, in three other ruins on the same continent, fires were lit at different times.

One of the ruins was once the site of an old-style hospital. The ground floor had treated a large number of patients with severe decomposition. The building structure collapsed in the years following the disaster, leaving only the load-bearing columns on the first floor and a section of sloping corridor.

Those terminally ill patients who couldn't move gathered there for a long time, waiting for someone to bring in the demons, but the demons became fewer and fewer. They waited until there was no more echo in the corridor.

That day, someone lit a pile of hay and old bed sheets deep in the corridor. The flames spread along the corridor, and thick smoke billowed out from the cracks in the collapsed ceiling.

Some of the people huddled in the corridor stood up, while others did not. The firelight reflected on the festering marks on their faces, as if gilding those old wounds with a red edge.

Another location is in the ruins of an old-century religious building.

This building was once a cathedral, but most of the dome collapsed during the cataclysm, leaving only faint traces of murals on the remaining walls.

There weren't many people gathered there, but they burned some old things in front of the mural. Some burned an old piece of paper covered with names, some burned a piece of hair cut from who-knows-where, and some burned a piece of blackened cloth.

No one shouted slogans or made any plans. They just burned the things, and then someone stood up and walked toward a collapsed door. The others stood up and followed silently behind.

Further away, in an old-fashioned research station, several people pushed over a large piece of equipment that had long been out of service. The metal casing crashed to the ground with a loud bang that echoed throughout the entire corridor.

There weren't many people in the corridor, but the sound was like a ripped open wound, causing the previously silent space to tremble.

No one stopped them, because there were no people maintaining order there. The equipment had been abandoned for many years, and it didn't require much force to knock it down, but the weight it felt for a moment still made the ground tremble slightly.

Starting from the three post stations, the intermittent firelight and the parallel spreading of the crowds were slowly unfolding.

They are not yet connected, but they are all moving in the same direction, slowly, silently, and unhindered, like undercurrents gradually merging into a dry riverbed, each advancing along the cracks in the ground.

No one knows where they will eventually flow, but everyone can feel them moving forward, like a tide, like lava, like the empty space left behind after the old order has been slowly collapsed.

This tide of resistance, rushing towards death, continues to expand, flowing from one post station to another, from one ruin to another, from one city to another, growing wider, deeper, and more unstoppable.

The riots spread faster than any order collapsed.

News of the first post station's breakdown spread like a bundle of burning hay, carried by the wind to all corners of the continent.

Those settlements, mining areas, and coastal ruins that had not yet erupted fell into chaos one after another, simultaneously, and in a chain reaction, like dominoes that had been triggered.

First it was a post station, then another, then a whole industrial belt of mining areas, and then a remote coastal wasteland. Like oil droplets falling into boiling water, it spread rapidly, covering all the areas that were still quietly queuing and barely waiting.

Shortly after Raymond’s post station collapsed, unrest began to break out in a valley settlement 300 kilometers to the south.

There was no death station, no demon-infested area, not even a proper lottery platform. Only a few spontaneously gathered seekers crouched in the sheltered corners of the rock face, waiting for the occasional passing ghost or demon. When news spread that the lottery platform had been toppled and the register thrown into the fire, those crouching in the sheltered corners began to stir.

The rubble pile below the cliff clattered underfoot as people rose from the crevices, some discarded the ore fragments they clutched, and others surged outwards along the dried-up riverbed at the bottom of the canyon. They no longer waited for the demon, for they understood that waiting had no end.

In the more distant central part of the continent, unrest began to stir in the abandoned industrial city clusters. On the ruins that spanned the old civilization's highway network, people seeking death gathered from several directions. Some had walked from settlements dozens of kilometers away, while others had been in the ruins for months, surviving by rummaging through rusty iron pipes and broken glass.

When the news came, they were silent for a long time. Then one of them stood up, threw away the broken glass in his hand, and the people behind him stood up as well, like a clump of grass bent by the wind slowly recovering.

The riots, like a silent avalanche, spread in all directions along the continent's topographical fissures and transportation arteries. In the frozen mining areas of the north, the abandoned coastal ports of the south, the old industrial belts of the east, and the arid valleys of the west, almost all remaining human settlements showed similar signs at the same time.

The signals of the breakdown of order seem to be triggered synchronously; they do not require the crowd to inform each other because they originate from the same deep trigger point.

After accumulating too much and waiting for too long, it will eventually overflow, like the groundwater level rising above the surface, first seeping out from the cracks, and then flooding the ground.

After the high platform of the lottery draw was pushed down, it wasn't just the wooden stakes and beams that fell; the order of those areas also began to crumble at a visible speed.

Registration points ceased operation, resource distribution was disrupted, the previously fixed rations of anesthetic plants were split among the population, and transportation routes were blocked. The fragile connections between settlements, which had been maintained through the exchange of goods, broke down one by one within just a few days.

Those communities that once relied on basic supplies to function collapsed one after another, like old tents without support, once food and medicine could no longer be transported in. The people scattered and poured into wider areas, like water overflowing a riverbed, spreading to lower-lying areas and covering those long-parched corners. (End of Chapter)