135: Chapter 135 The Seawater Floods Upwards

At eleven o'clock at night, the first building in the Linhai Old Port District began to sink.

It wasn't the entire building collapsing with a roar; rather, the floor of the underground parking lot sank by half a meter first. The water seeping from the walls did not flow to the lower areas, but instead climbed up along the tiles, escalators, and glass curtain walls. When the water line passed over the doorknobs, all the elevators in the building rang at the same time.

"Ding."

Twelve buildings, twelve rings.

Tide stood in the dispatch center, pressing her headset against her ears until it hurt. Alarm points kept popping up on the screen: shopping malls, office buildings, hospital annexes, port warehouses, old residential buildings. Every point was related to an elevator, and at every point, ticket holders or the families of the missing had appeared.

"It is not one point spreading," she said. "The entire Old Port District is being dragged down."

Zhao Ye had just come out from the first basement level of the shopping mall, his body still carrying the fishy, cold air of the Black Sea from behind the walls. He didn't ask "how is it being dragged," but simply slammed his Evil Suppressor tool into the ground: "Give me the three that are going to collapse first."

Tide was stunned.

"What are you planning to do?"

"Stop the people in the buildings from falling down first."

The first location was the Port Administration Building. Half of the underground garage had already sunk into the Black Sea, and a dozen people were trapped on the ramp. When Zhao Ye arrived, the water line was rushing up the ramp in reverse, as if something on the other end was sucking hard.

He raised his hand, and five Fire Nails shot from his palm, nailing themselves into the four corners of the garage and the center of the ramp.

Suppression Domain unfolded.

The fire patterns were no longer just thin lines on the ground, but a translucent grid pulled between each Fire Nail. When the Black Sea hit the grid, it didn't explode; instead, it hit an invisible dam, and the entire surge of water came to a forced halt.

Zhao Ye stood in the center of the grid, his shoulders and back tensed like iron. Dark red fire patterns emerged on his skin, crawling from his arms all the way to his neck. The power of a Tier 2 Evil Suppressor was not to shatter monsters, but to forcibly press the statement "this place cannot sink any further" into reality.

"Go!" he roared at the people on the ramp.

Some people were too weak-kneed to move. Chen Jue and Lin Zhao rushed down from the other side, each grabbing one person and dragging the elderly trapped in the garage out. Chen Jue saw a return ticket floating in the water, the name of a woman on it. He reached out to grab it, but Lin Zhao slapped his hand away.

"Do you want to have another episode?"

Chen Jue's face darkened, but he didn't talk back. He bypassed the ticket and carried the old person on his back as he ran up.

The second location was the hospital.

Jiaoyue was guarding the emergency room; the beacon light in the freight elevator had already illuminated a wet path to the door. She didn't let anyone block the door, because blocking the door would only make the patients outside hear the broadcast more clearly. She led the nurses to push the hospital beds into two rows, leaving a passage where the Guardian Lamp could be seen.

"Whoever wants to leave, look towards the lamp," she said to the patients. "Don't look at the elevator."

Someone cried and cursed at her: "That is my son calling me!"

Jiaoyue didn't say "it isn't." She simply shoved a medical record into the person's hand: "How old is your son this year?"

"Twenty-seven."

"He registered you last month, and you have a follow-up exam tomorrow. If you leave, who is going to sign?"

The person froze, and the ticket in their hand began to heat up. Inside the Guardian Lamp screen, Lin Zhao gritted his teeth, the fire of the bronze bell compressed to the size of a bean. Xu Minglan remotely instructed the nurses to administer the Tempering Needle into the veins of critically ill patients, while Jiaoyue repeatedly confirmed each patient's real-world information—names, addresses, relatives, bank card passwords—asking about everything.

It wasn't to humiliate them.

It was to make them remember that they still had things unfinished on this side.

The third location was the most troublesome.

On the twenty-third floor of an office building in the Old Port District, seventeen employees were trapped in front of the elevator. Someone had already stuck a return ticket to their forehead, chanting, "I am just going to pick her up." When Tide arrived downstairs, the entire glass curtain wall was seeping water upwards.

Bai Ya's Patrol Lamp circled the exterior of the building, and he suddenly spoke: "Don't take the main entrance. The twenty-third floor is no longer in the building."

The Space Venerable squatted on the steps, clutching the blueprints, his hands shaking constantly. He measured with a ruler for a long time, finally pointing to a maintenance passage nearby: "Go up from here, switch to the fire escape after the eighteenth floor. Don't trust any door that smells like the sea."

"Are you sure?" Tide asked.

"I am not sure," the Space Venerable said, his face pale. "But this route has the oldest load-bearing structure. False things cannot borrow it."

Shen Qinghe was the first to enter the passage.

When her Illumination Realm unfolded, the shadow of the bronze bell did not grow larger; it only caused a layer of extremely faint Purifying Flame outline to emerge on the four walls of the stairwell. Those extra doors that shouldn't have been there, the suddenly branching corridors, and the elevator openings labeled "Exit" were all illuminated to a gray color. The real staircase, like a bone etched by fire, led straight upwards.

Upon reaching the twenty-third floor, everyone could hear the waves.

The ceiling of the office area was dripping water, but the droplets were floating upwards. Zhao Ye arrived from the garage; only two Fire Nails remained usable for his Suppression Domain. He nailed the Fire Nails into the corridor, forcibly flattening a section of floor that was folding downwards.

A man clutching a ticket stood by the window; outside the window was not the street scene, but an inverted sea. He looked at the blurry shadow of a woman in the water and suddenly smiled.

"She is waiting for me."

Shen Qinghe's bell toll fell.

A broken boundary was illuminated on the woman's shadow. That was not a person; it was a silhouette borrowed from the seawater.

The smile on the man's face slowly dissipated. He sat on the ground, covering his face and crying.

The building was still sinking.

But the roof began to drip water.

Tide looked up and, through the cracked ceiling, saw the entire night sky being suppressed by the Black Sea on one side.

The electronic map at Tide's dispatch center was quickly stained by the color of water. Each alarm point was initially just a red circle, but later, thin blue lines appeared between the red circles, as if the blood vessels beneath the city had been filled with seawater by someone. She stared at those lines and suddenly realized that the most dangerous ones were not the twelve buildings where incidents had already occurred.

The ends of the blue lines all pointed to several residential areas where no warnings had been issued yet.

"It is looking for places with many people," Tide said.

She immediately switched the routes for all public buses, ride-hailing cars, and ambulances in the Old Port District to manual dispatch. Many drivers cursed at her over the phone, saying that the navigation had already provided the fastest route. Tide suppressed her anger and explained over and over again: do not go underground, do not enter tunnels, and do not follow any wet footprints.

Some did not believe her. Ten minutes later, a private car followed the navigation into an underground passage that had been closed for years; in the last frame of the dashboard camera, the road ahead was filled with water flowing upwards.

When Zhao Ye was holding up the Suppression Domain at the Port Administration Building, he heard Tide curse with a very dirty word over the headset. She apologized immediately after cursing, but Zhao Ye said: "No need to apologize. Keep cursing, don't stop."

Bai Ya replied from the other end: "Is it useful?"

"At least she isn't crying," Zhao Ye said.

After rescuing the people from the twenty-third floor of the office building, Shen Qinghe did not leave immediately. She stood at the real stairwell outlined by the Illumination Realm, looking up at the water droplets crawling toward the ceiling. Every time the bronze bell rang, a string of unfamiliar names appeared in her ears. Some names were no longer remembered by anyone, while some names had just been called out by someone.

She wrote one of the names on her palm.

It was the name of the missing worker in the warehouse.

She had no way to pull the person back from the water, but at least she would not let that person immediately become an "unnamed disappearance."

The water line on the roof suddenly sank downwards.

A new elevator prompt sound rang out from the entire Old Port District simultaneously.

[-14]