There can't be a Harvest Moon in the RimWorld.

The man who had transformed from Little Hook into Old Man Hook stood before that colossal behemoth for the second time.

At this moment, the dark mine has been transformed into a ruin of time and space. In that uncertain chaos, an amorphous and ugly head grows out, and as the neck continues to stretch, bulging eyes begin to appear on it.

"bring it on……"

Although Old Man Hook had his eyes closed and was alone in a twisted place beyond human imagination, he could still imagine the scene before him.

On that chaotic, inhuman, nauseating, deformed limb assembly hung a human face with its eyes tightly closed.

Old Yorkson's face.

Chapter 163 Back to the Death Zone

"Wait for me for twenty minutes."

Harris took a deep breath and looked back intently out of the mine. Under the deep blue sky, stars shone brightly, holding an unparalleled gathering.

In the west, Venus and Pluto, which had been in a square aspect, transitioned into a blunted angle. Elsewhere, Mercury and Uranus were retrograde, and the massive Jupiter was releasing unusual gravitational pull, creating chaos in the celestial phenomena.

Harris strained to see into the distance, as if under the endless night sky, he could see the rather opulent two-story building with its pointed roof, attic with skylights, and neocolonial-style porch.

He could even hallucinate the furnishings, the interior panels and furniture that upheld the taste of that era. Because he had stood countless times in that attic, gazing out over the town, facing Mount Mads.

Just like his father's job decades ago.

Gotz sat dejectedly against a dirt slope and asked, "What if you don't come back?"

Harris paused in his steady steps, but quickly regained his composure.

"Then I will never return."

…………

The mine shafts, untouched for years, were thick with dust, but time had long since abandoned this place, as if neither aging nor rebirth had anything to do with it. Only eternal emptiness deserved to be here.

The excavation progressed very quickly back then. Before the calamity occurred, many layers of mine shafts had been dug using old Yorkson's unique method. However, according to Old Man Hook's recollections, even during the time when strange events were frequent, countless desperados still went to risk their lives.

Every night, a furtive shadow would appear at the plantation gate, holding its breath and waiting for Old Man Hook to fall asleep before leaping over the plantation fence and escaping into the dense forests of Mads Mountain.

After they left, Old Man Hook would come out of his room, coldly watching these uninvited guests slowly disappear into the distance, silently noting down the numbers before returning to his room. The next day, news would arrive of the same number of missing persons.

Harris greeted the men with feigned politeness. These greedy fellows were now living peacefully in their cramped quarters in the mine, pressed into various shapes and embedded in the walls.

The deeper one goes into the mine, the more deformed the limbs on the walls become—heads swollen, bodies shrunken, curled up in a ball, hands and feet entangled around their bodies. The oldest and most ancient figures are no longer recognizable as human; only a terrified human face can be vaguely discerned from the soil.

But Harris wasn't afraid.

He knew that in this ominous cave, human remains were the most logical thing to find, and could even give people a sense of relief from a long-awaited reunion.

Before the town collapsed, a chilling rumor was circulating.

The panicked miners said that the mine in the lake had not truly stopped being dug after it was abandoned. This terrifying pit had developed its own consciousness, constantly tempting the miners to wander there in a daze, toiling away in the dark caves, sweating profusely, without sleep or food, gradually turning into humanoid skeletons.

Until the very end, before their lives end, these miners will spontaneously approach the walls that writhe like flesh and blood, becoming the support, partitions, load-bearing structures, and tracks of this layer of the mine, never able to leave.

The miners believed that even as they recounted these stories, the horrific enslavement continued underground. The evil mine was relentlessly being expanded, cruelly and resolutely advancing towards the earth's core.

Such a story is not unfounded; anyone who sees so many bones piled up into a wall would feel a chill.

Harris walked cautiously through the mine, his mind filled with all sorts of bizarre and fantastical stories. His clothes offered him no warmth. Only when his fingers touched the solid wooden grip of the gun did he experience a fleeting sense of security.

He knew it was an illusion.

Because this gun wasn't meant to deal with the enemy, but rather to end my own life before I went completely insane.

What guided Harris forward was the trace left by Gotz's walk the day before.

Gotz's footprints, penetrating the dust, were deeply imprinted on the ground, becoming a conspicuous trail marker. Were Gotz's steps just as resolute the day before yesterday? Did he hesitate as he walked here silently?

Harris tried hard not to think about Gotz's failure, but the terrible thoughts grew stronger and stronger.

He remembered Gots's expression, Old Man Hook's face, the day he suddenly had his memories awakened, and the day he returned to the town in a daze.

Harris was still wearing his West City police uniform that day. As he was taking off the sash, a button popped off, and the hard sole of his boots hit the stone pavement. He looked flustered and disheveled.

"You don't look like a policeman, you look more like a criminal being chased."

Dart, whom I hadn't seen for two years, still stood behind the bar with a smile, showing no surprise at Harris's sudden departure or his unexpected arrival today.

"Boss... Anzo... where is he?!"

Harris, panting heavily, braced himself on the table and glared menacingly at Boss Dart.

Mr. Dart tidied up the tableware with displeasure: "Officer, if you don't settle the debt from two years ago, I can report you for defaulting on your debt and making intimidation."

The young owner of Dart's face was utterly calm, as if he were an enlightened being who had seen through the truth of the world. "If you are looking for Anzo, she left the town and went to the city some time ago."

Harris felt as if he had been struck by lightning. After rushing all the way here, he finally remembered that it was two years later.

"Anzuo...is gone?"

Mr. Dart nodded: "Dick originally wanted to send her to West City to study at university, but she refused and chose another city, where she seems to have taken up a clerical job."

Harris stood there, stunned, and asked incredulously, "She... just... left?"

Harris didn't know what to say. Should she angrily rebuke Anzo for leaving the town to start his own life? Or should she accuse her of being heartless for a relationship that never existed?

Mr. Dart poured him a glass of bourbon and handed it to him, saying casually, "I don't know the specifics either. Two years ago, Dick stopped letting his daughter work at my shop, so I rarely saw her. Only every Wednesday, Anzo would secretly bring me a letter and ask me to mail it to the same address."

Dart's smile remained as perfect as ever: "But strangely, she never received a reply. This went on for two years, until news spread that she was leaving. I heard that Dick sold off quite a few properties to support her."

Harris suddenly remembered that for the past two years, he had frequently received an unsigned email in the police station's mailbox around the time his family bills arrived.

However, he never opened the letters. He simply instructed the cleaners to clean the cabinet regularly, throwing all the letters except those signed by the police station into the police station's trash can, disposing of them along with those insincere family letters.

An invisible wall rose before him, imprisoning him in a prison called time. No matter how much he shouted, roared, cried, or begged for mercy, no judge could pardon his punishment.

He was enveloped in damp, filthy air, and a hoarse wail emerged from the illusion into reality. The sound was sharp, drawn-out, and fluctuating in intensity, like the wailing of an abandoned soul in the depths of hell.

Hell is right in front of us.

Chapter 164 The Robber

Harris felt a bone-chilling nausea that spread through him with the air.

The songs seemed to fill the sky, clinging to all living things, instructing, flattering, mocking, and ridiculing all finite things in the ears of the living. The songs tempted the listeners to quickly abandon this fragile body and embrace eternal existence, to praise and worship with their weak hearts, to contemplate and depict with their foolish wisdom, and to walk together on the funeral path of the chaotic world.

Harris downed a mouthful of Perrin's potion and felt a violent electric current pierce his auditory nerves, plunging the entire world into utter silence. Those seductive voices drifted in and out, isolated in another dimension.

"Auditory deprivation".

Harris silently recited the words in his mind, and the voice echoed in his head.

This is a method passed down from the miners, using a magical potion to strip the mind and body of their experiences, temporarily preventing abnormal interference. Old Yorkson always believed that ignorance is humanity's last refuge, which is also his core view on the memetic catastrophe. It is said that when the disaster first appeared on the island, he tried to use this method to reduce the damage and once gained the upper hand, single-handedly suppressing the memetic catastrophe for ten years until the Great Collapse occurred.

However, it must be said that among miners with limited education, his ideas were the most advanced. He even hired a high-stakes investigator of unusual disasters to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the end result was just the addition of another alcoholic to the town.

In the quiet world, the tunnels in the mine no longer contain any remains; only desolate walls remain, barren of vegetation and devoid of any buried minerals.

The texture on the wall gradually took on an irregular striped appearance, and the passageway began to resemble a tunnel. This layer of the mine was beyond the reach of human excavation.

There could never be a mine in the world that allows one to freely traverse a whole basalt vein, easily carving out the desired spiral path as if a camel were threading a needle.

Upon closer inspection, the basalt walls on both sides have replaced the fragile human skeletons with countless ancient animal skeletons, including ancient remnants such as nautiloids, trilobites, and graptolites, as well as brachiopods with chitinous shells. Even jawless fish struggling in freshwater have suddenly appeared.

Harris suspected that this tunnel contained the spirits of all those who had perished since the Ordovician extinction event. Those pale-faced losers occupied their places, eternally confronting their former enemies, cursing these lucky survivors.

In the endless competition for ecological niches, there are only winners and losers. As the ultimate dominant species that has survived to this day, humans naturally become the enemies of these extinct creatures.

Gotz had told him that when he drank the first dose of the potion that blocked his hearing, it wasn't a sign of safety. A greater terror would silently descend upon the unsuspecting and vulnerable in this silent world.

Harris stopped in her tracks, trying to dispel the hallucinations in her mind.

Because a strange creature walked out of the passageway in front of him. It was a human corpse, human hands, feet, body parts, and various other human parts cut into pieces and haphazardly sewn together with thread to form the shape of a giant ape.

It wasn't some Frankenstein-like stitched-together monster, but rather the ultimate fear in the hearts of the losers in the biological competition, the greatest terror manifested through curses and resentment, the winner who achieved dominance of the biosphere in a short period of time.

The terrifying upright ape.

…………

Antonio lay quietly on the cold ground, his bones shattered and blood gushing from his seven orifices, as he faced the final moments of his life.

A man can survive as long as he knows how to throw a punch.

In Antonio's memory, the world was nothing but endless battles and plunder.

His father was a skinny underground boxer who earned his right to survive through a brutal, life-or-death fighting style. That wolf-like man expressed his joy and anger with his fists.

Antonio grew up amidst countless beatings. Those punches may have damaged his brain, but they also forged his wild nature.

When he was eight years old, his father, who was riddled with injuries, finally died in the underground ring.

He had the enemy's ear in his mouth then, but he couldn't get up again as he had countless times before. The loser lay on the ground, his life hanging in the balance, and no gambler cared, except for young Antonio.

His father struggled to spit out the ear from his mouth, and after two violent coughs, fragments of dark red lung flew out as well. The wolf-like man, barely breathing, looked at his wolf cub, his eyes devoid of any warmth or lingering affection, and uttered his final words: "You little bastard...you better live...on..."

Antonio didn't shed a single tear. He was like a newly appointed young alpha wolf in a pack, brimming with inexhaustible energy, wanting to bite a piece off the moon.

Thus, during those ten years, the most brutal and ruthless new star rose in the crime district, earning his place through murder, ambushes, and violent struggles, and for a time no one dared to challenge his prowess.

Until this demonic man was brought down by a flimsy tip-off, imprisoned on trumped-up robbery charges, and faced a just trial under federal law.

Antonio was extremely dissatisfied with the charge. In his view, robbery was a means for the weak to oppress the weaker, a despicable trick. In prison, he repeatedly boasted about his "glorious deeds," trying to have his sentence changed to those "noble" crimes.

However, the federal judicial system, which had long been bribed, received so much hush money that it no longer had any intention of carrying out any form of enforcement. It was willing to become a puppet following the rules without making any mistakes.

Antonio, who was desperately seeking death, was sentenced to life imprisonment for robbery in a way that was both laughable and pathetic. He then naturally became a member of the prison's "supply" trust mines.

Wolves are social animals.

During Antonio's period of despondency, he unexpectedly amassed his own gang. These audacious accomplices were exactly to his liking; they not only plotted a daring escape but also devised a mad path to wealth and luxury!

Antonio transformed from that fearsome lone wolf into the sharpest tooth in the pack, and he remains adept at using force to overcome any obstacle in his path.

Similarly, he also thought highly of the homeless child.

Those were wolf-like eyes, just like when he was a child. That wolfish gaze, that hawkish distrust of no one—he was born a wild wolf. Besides, this kid was smarter than him; he would surely be able to dodge the arrows from behind and complete the thorny path he hadn't finished walking.

All that's needed is for a new alpha wolf to grow up, then the old alpha wolf will drive it out of the territory, forcing it to find its own wilderness...

Antonio's thoughts were fragmented, his mind revolving around the being he had recklessly challenged the night before. That towering figure, with its countless limbs swaying, emerged from the darkness at the bottom.

He exerted all his strength and willpower, but still could not defeat the enemy.