Millennium Witch.

Chapter 88 - How come you're almost turning into a savage now?

The Purple Commander's retreat from Cux lasted all night. Due to poor visibility at night, the surveillance footage was too dark to see clearly, so Yvette went to sleep. When the next morning arrived, she saw that the entire Cux was deserted and had become a dead city with almost no living creatures.

Without alerting anyone else, Yvette quietly returned to the ruined city that was perpetually covered in frost and snow, and saw the enormous pit where the Pale Mother Nest had once stood.

Standing at the edge of the pit, with the help of a beam of light that converged like a flashlight, she looked down and saw the material details in the pit after the mother nest had disappeared.

At first glance, it looks like an ordinary pit. The cross-section of the pit wall shows that the top layer is modern fill soil, mixed with steel bars, pipelines and various debris; the middle layer is an alluvial layer, composed of alternating sand, clay and gravel; further down, grayish-white limestone appears, which means that it has entered the bedrock layer.

But as the light continued downwards, illuminating deeper details, what entered Yvette's eyes was no longer the usual bedrock.

Instead, there were neat, reflective metal walls with obvious rust, like tiles, clinging tightly to the rock wall below the pit and extending further in.

Yvette was immediately surprised. In the Origin Civilization map and related information that she had copied, Cux was just a beautiful snowy town. It was not economically developed and was roughly equivalent to a large urban-rural fringe area. The only thing that made it popular was its outstanding tourism industry, making it one of the most popular cities in the New Eden United States.

In a small place that is no different from the countryside during the off-season for tourism, why would there be a buried and sealed metal tunnel leading deep underground deep in the city center?
And this tunnel is so huge that even a giant aberrant creature like a mountain whale could easily crawl through it and come to the outside world.

After a few seconds of surprise, Yvette quickly dismissed the possibility of an air-raid shelter, since a normal air-raid shelter wouldn't be dug as a straight tunnel that large.

This looks more like the aircraft entrance/exit of some kind of military base. When the base is operational, the tunnel opens, and fighter jets, space battleships, or magical mechs can fly out from here in succession to quickly support the battlefield.

After observing carefully for a while, Yvette no longer hesitated, and leaped into the endless darkness below.

After traversing a distance of about one or two hundred meters, what came into her view was a huge underground space. Numerous load-bearing pillars, like giant towers rising from the ground, supported the ceiling. The floor was made of alloy material and looked quite old. When she stepped on it, she could hear the crisp sound of her footsteps echoing in the darkness, spreading into the distance.

Yvette immediately unleashed an even more powerful illumination spell, spreading outwards from her center like a golden sun, restoring light to the massive metal tomb that had been sealed for hundreds of years.

However, after it was lit up, Yvette floated into the air and looked around, but didn't find much.

Perhaps it had been dealt with by Commander Zi before she left, because she didn't see any written information or useful items left behind. The entire base was just empty except for its size.

It's like an open-world game with only a shell; the map is huge, but after wandering around for a while, there's nothing to explore. After looking at it over and over again, Yvette couldn't even figure out which faction this base belonged to.

Two hours later, having explored the entire underground cavern without finding anything, Yvette returned to the surface.

She thought that the Purple Commander chose this place as his base not only because it was spacious enough to accommodate the Pale Mother Nest, but also because it held other important secrets. So much so that when he left, he made a point of erasing all traces of those things.

However, this must be a secret left over from before the apocalypse, so if she has the chance to enter the dream again, she will specifically search for information on this.

……

By the time we left Cux, it was nearly noon. The beautiful spring sunshine, like melting syrup, flowed across the meadows covering the mountains. In the distance, the snow-capped mountains cast tower-like shadows against the blue sky. The basalt on the mountainside was dark and rugged, with icicles still clinging to the crevices from the previous winter.

Having received notice yesterday that she would be leaving this afternoon, Yvette slowed her pace slightly, her gaze falling on the white cotton balls that were scattered like clouds in the distance.

Those were sheep raised by the kingdom's shepherds, mainly to provide food for Dugrabi.

But perhaps because of the bond they had developed, when he learned that everyone was about to leave, especially the dragon, the village shepherd was the only puppet to show any joy, probably because he felt that his sheep could finally live a good life.

Standing on a black rocky ridge, Yvette watched the sheep grazing for a while, and suddenly thought of the food chain in the End of the Land, where wild animals, especially herbivorous ones, are truly an indispensable link.

After all, mutants devour each other, like raising poisonous insects, until a higher-level mutant is produced. Their numbers will inevitably decrease, and the mutant factors will become more and more concentrated. At the same time, mutants cannot mate and reproduce. The only way to increase their numbers is by infecting various wild animals.

Therefore, once the number of wild animals in a place decreases, it won't be long before the number of low-level aberration variants also becomes scarce. During this period, wild animals will take the opportunity to reproduce, and the number of low-level aberration variants will increase again...

While insects are also included in this model, their small size and low intake of mutation factors make it much more difficult for them to become aberrant variants. Furthermore, once aberrant, they often become easy prey for other aberrant variants… Of course, this is a snowy region; in the south, the presence of insect aberrant variants would likely be much stronger…

As for higher-order aberrations?
This should be considered another race called the Divine Heirs, since their intelligence level is different; they are naturally outside the Three Realms and outside the Five Elements.

Lost in thought about the food chain in a very unromantic and unpoetic way, Yvette stared blankly at the sheep in the distance until, after more than ten minutes, a figure lurking in the meadow below suddenly caught her attention.

That is……

Spider Witch?
Yvette blinked in surprise and saw that the fifth-stage lord who had once shattered a magical mech with a single slap was now crouching behind a large rock, staring menacingly at a sheep not far away, looking like a mother leopard poised to pounce.

Compared to when she was released two days ago, she looked much more miserable. Her gorgeous black backless dress had been reduced to strips of cloth resembling straps, revealing black armor that looked like underwear. Her once fair skin looked like it had been washed with mud and was covered in grime. She was missing one of her high heels, and it was unclear what kind of willpower made her insist on wearing the other one.

Yvette looked surprised, thinking that she was, after all, a stage 5 aberration, and an aberration with human intelligence. Even if she lost most of her aberration factors, she shouldn't have ended up like this, right?

How come they're almost turning into wild men now? Are their survival skills really that bad?
However, after hesitating for a moment, she did not go over to disturb them immediately. After all, they were hunting, and what if she ran over and scared away their prey?
She remained standing, looking down at the scene below, and saw a sheep approaching from behind the rock where the spider witch was lying in ambush.

This seemed like a good omen; a normal hunter would surely have had a successful hunt. But then she saw the spider witch, perhaps lacking strength, being thrown aside by the struggling sheep just as she grabbed it.

The scene that followed was even more horrific. Upon seeing this unexpected intruder, the lead sheep of the flock charged forward and rammed into the Spider Witch's waist, causing her to lose her balance and tumble down the grassy slope. Even after getting up, she was still being chased around by the lead sheep, completely powerless to fight back...

Yvette lowered her eyes silently, thinking how terrifying this was.

(End of this chapter)