Stepping over the caution line, Bologue walked up the gently rising slope of the bridge, stepping on scattered rubble. The sunlight was glaring, and he couldn’t help but shield his eyes.
"I never thought that Oath City, Opus, would ever have such a bright day."
As Bologue marveled, he tilted his head back, squinting at the clear blue sky.
After Fuen conjured the storm, sweeping all the decay epidemic into the atmosphere, his power also carried the poisonous fog and emissions accumulated in the Great Rift for years high into the sky.
After the drizzle, the Great Rift, once shrouded in fog, beca clear and bright. A massive circular cloud hole, spanning several kiloters, sliced vertically through the sea of clouds. The residual power of the Seekers of Glory lingered in the sky, continually disrupting reality. Even after a month and a half, the enormous cloud hole showed no sign of dissipating.
"Ti flies; it’s already been a month and a half."
Bologue refocused his gaze ahead, muttering to himself as he stepped forward.
Ti has passed quickly, and it’s been a month and a half since the decay epidemic event. Bologue had long left the Border Sanatorium and thrown himself into busy work. Although he still occasionally had nightmares, they no longer affected him.
The Confession Song brought terrifying nightmares, but it also allowed Bologue to see Adelle once more in the illusory dream. Bologue knew she was an illusion, a fignt constructed from his mory.
Yet, for so reason, this illusion gave Bologue rare comfort, as if it fulfilled the regret etched deep in his heart.
Bologue finally bid farewell to Adelle in person, as if a knot in his heart had been untied. Although troubles had been constant lately, Bologue’s mood was unexpectedly good.
He felt he’d completely walked out of the shadow, returning to the mundanity of his ordinary routine. Bologue started his work as before.
"It’s truly been quiet lately."
Of course, in the usual work, the endless rumors still followed him like a shadow.
Palr, following behind Bologue, exclaid while looking at the surrounding ruins. Normally, under the fog’s shroud, people’s effective visibility within the Great Rift was only about ten ters, making it impossible to see the full picture of the Great Rift.
Now that Fuen had cleared all the fog, even those distant and hazy surroundings had beco vivid.
"What a disaster." They both sighed in unison.
Bologue and the others had successfully stopped the extraordinary disaster triggered by the decay epidemic, but the price was another, slightly smaller catastrophe.
The clash of the Seekers of Glory’s power caused a series of ripple impacts. On the already unstable geological structure of the Great Rift, the aftershocks of power manifested as the roaring of earthquakes.
After buildings collapsed, they left behind ruins filled with concrete walls, abandoned steel structures, and other building materials. They piled chaotically like a massive jigsaw puzzle.
So buildings stood precariously, but barely, with cracked walls exposing rebar intertwined with ground debris, resembling fallen giants’ corpses.
Amid the rubble, one could see the crisscrossing rebar that once served as the building’s supporting skeleton, now shattered without any structural cohesion. The remaining bricks and cent mix were unrecognizable for their forr function and offered no help in reconstruction. Cleaning this area will take a long ti.
"The reconstruction work will require a long ti," Palr said.
Due to the Field Operations Departnt’s intervention, they twisted this extraordinary conflict into a natural disaster. For a month, newspapers were filled with coverage of this event, with various charity donations and reconstruction efforts gradually launching.
Bologue continued upward along the Long Bridge, and after so ti, he reached the highest point of the Long Bridge, stopping at the broken bridge’s end.
This broken bridge was nad the Crossing Abyss Bridge, designed to span the Great Rift and connect two non-contiguous urban districts, holding a crucial role in transportation. But under the extraordinary conflict, out of three Crossing Abyss Bridges built over the Great Rift, two had collapsed into rubble, and the only surviving one was riddled with fissures, unable to support vehicles or trains.
Thus, the Great Rift, true to its na, beca a gigantic scar, splitting Oath City, Opus, in half.
"The fog had been covering everything, obscuring things. Now that I see it, having such a thing in the city is quite terrifying."
Bologue looked down, murmuring in awe.
"It’s normal; we all felt the sa way when we glimpsed the full scale of the Great Rift for the first ti."
Palr stepped to Bologue’s side, both of them standing at the edge of the rupture, gazing at the scarred earth below.
Without the fog’s cover, the Great Rift laid bare to the world’s eyes. A gigantic, black abyss centered in the city, with massive gorges cracking open at its edges, spreading outward.
The Great Rift has always been part of Oath City, Opus’s history, imnse and dark, its depths instilling terror at first sight.
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