Everly checked the posting tis of 256F to 258F—they were all from this morning.
After finishing those insider revelations, the original poster stopped replying. It was unclear whether they had gone off to deal with sothing or simply didn’t want to continue the discussion. All that remained was a group of curious onlookers in the forum, jumping up and down in the comnts and debating endlessly.
[262F: What do you all think? The person above sounds pretty convincing…]
[263F: I won’t comnt on anything else, but I’ll just say what I found—according to the official website of the US Geological Survey, there was indeed a small-scale earthquake near the “mysterious sea area” at the end of June.]
…
[279F: Speaking of which, I also have another “non-discovery” discovery. Have you all seen Herbert’s diving video? Before he reached 100 ters underwater, there wasn’t a single fish in the sea. Only below 100 ters did those strange dead fish start to appear.
I found it odd, so I did so digging. It turns out the ocean currents in that mysterious region are wind-driven surface currents, and their influence generally only extends to about 100 ters below the surface.
According to the person above, at the end of June an earthquake occurred, the seal was damaged, and the invisible barrier disappeared. The surface current then swept away all the dead fish within the 100-ter depth range… it actually lines up perfectly!]
[280F: Wow, respect, respect!]
…
The netizens from Sleiteo Manor were remarkably capable. Building on what the original poster had said, they kept digging—one shovel after another—and actually managed to reconstruct most of the situation.
Everly finished reading the thread. Her mouse cursor hovered over the flight booking page, then finally moved away. In the end, she gave up on purchasing the ticket.
If what the poster said was true, then Gilosha wasn’t safe either.
Although the city’s radiation sickness had now been resolved and the lockdown had been lifted, the statues retrieved from the underwater ruins still had to be landed at the port of Gilosha!
Just a few dead fish had been enough to bring an entire city to a standstill—so no one knew what kind of disaster those statues from the ruins might bring.
In addition, the whaling harpoons Everly had seen in Herbert’s video also made her uneasy.
Although neither the forum poster nor the other users had ntioned those harpoons at all, the old saying still held true: in horror stories, coincidences don’t exist. Both sides involved ocean-related elents, and both featured similar totem-like decorations. That cult was very likely connected to the underwater ruins. It was even possible that once those totems reached the shore, they would attract those cultists.
Everly definitely did not want to run into those lunatics again.
Now, the problem was this:
From Dwight State to New Osebuch State, there were only two available flight routes, and the transfer cities involved both carried risks. In a situation like this, which route should she take to get to school?
It was already ti for her junior year. Everly and Misha had finished all their required courses and general education classes and had already earned enough credits. After entering their third year, they would officially begin studying wilderness survival.
After two years of struggling through it all, with so much already invested, Everly naturally didn’t want to drop out and end up with nothing more than a high school diploma.
In truth, if she abandoned flying altogether and switched to a mixed travel thod—sea, land, and air—there were actually many possible options. However, each of those travel thods ca with its own risks.
For example, overland travel: the United States was vast and sparsely populated, with large stretches of wilderness between cities, and road-based horror stories involving highway robberies were almost endless. If she drove herself, the probability of encountering criminals was extrely high.
If she took long-distance buses like the Greyhound, safety would certainly be better than driving. But the distance she needed to travel was too great; during the journey, the bus would have to continuously transfer through multiple cities.
Every ti she entered a new city, it felt like opening a surprise blind box filled with who knew how many horror movies—she had to stay constantly prepared for new dangers. Overall, it didn’t make travel any safer than driving herself.
As for trains… Everly had to admit she had seen plenty of horror films involving trains as well.
Once a train got moving, its high speed effectively turned the entire carriage into a kind of distorted “isolated island.” If a virus broke out onboard, or if criminals like robbers or murderers appeared, not jumping off could an danger, but jumping off could easily result in injury.
So she felt that trains were fine for short distances, but for long trips, it was better to avoid them.
Compared to land routes, Everly leaned more toward sea travel.
Before her Lamia mother’s spirit dissipated, she had given Everly a blessing. Near the ocean, she could concentrate her ntal power to control the sea and raise massive waves. In the sea itself, she could even dive for a certain distance without equipnt by forming air bubbles with the water, or manipulate currents to keep herself afloat and let the ocean carry her forward automatically.
Under those circumstances, taking a long-distance cruise ship seed like a good option.
Everly spent a long ti researching various ticketing websites and carefully filtering possible layover cities. In the end, after more than an hour of analysis, she finalized a travel route:
First, drive to the state capital, Sunken City. Then take a flight from Sunken City directly to the southern port city of Fridt.
The “Coastal Travel Plan” launched two years ago by the Arican Holland Cruises was now officially available. The East Coast cruise ship under this program would pass through the port of Fridt. She would book a ticket in advance, board the ship at Fridt Port, and travel while enjoying the journey. After about seven days at sea, the ship would arrive at Yamin State.
After arriving in Yamin State, it would only take another half-day ride on a Greyhound bus to reach the university’s city, Dalami.
In fact, Everly had originally planned to travel from Savannah City by boat. There was a direct flight from Sunken City to Savannah, and Savannah Port was even closer to Yamin State. Boarding a ship there would shorten the voyage to just six days.
Moreover, two years earlier, after Everly and Misha survived the zombie siege, they had also bought cruise tickets from Savannah City. Compared to the unfamiliar Fridt City, Savannah—where they had already been once—naturally felt more reassuring.
However, unfortunately, sothing had recently happened in Savannah as well.
Everly searched for news about the city and found an article from five days earlier:
In the outskirts of Savannah, there was a relatively obscure public RV campsite. That night, four RVs were parked there, and a total of 29 people of all ages were camping in the area.
The next morning, another RV arrived, planning to camp there as well. But when the occupants got out, what they saw was an eerie silence.
The four RVs were still in place, their doors open and their lights on. Outside them, grills, picnic mats, foldable tables and chairs, as well as fresh vegetables and at, were all left out in the open. It looked as though a large group of people had just been in the middle of a barbecue party and suddenly left halfway through.
But the owners of the RVs had not simply stepped away for a short ti.
The newly arrived campers stayed at the site for most of the day, but no one ever returned.
Seeing that the raw at by the grill had started to rot in the heat and attracted flies, they finally realized sothing was wrong.
They called the police. When officers arrived at the scene, they quickly identified the owners of the four RVs through IDs and other docunts left inside the vehicles.
All of them, without exception, could no longer be contacted. When their relatives and friends were asked, no one had seen them either.
There were no surveillance caras near the campsite, so the police could not determine where those people had gone. Based on the level of at decay, they could only estimate that the disappearance had occurred the previous night.
Nearly thirty people had vanished at once. This was not a small case that could be easily wrapped up. The investigation was still ongoing, and as an outsider, Everly did not know many details of the case. There was only one thing she was certain of—Savannah City was not a place she could go.
So she had no choice but to settle for the next best option: Fridt, another port city not far from Savannah.
There were also direct flights between Sunken City and Fridt. However, if she boarded a ship from Fridt, the journey would take one day longer than departing from Savannah. As a result, Everly would also need to leave earlier.
Counting the days, she would likely have to set off the day after tomorrow.
Thinking of this, a hint of resentnt surfaced in Everly’s mind—if not for the military greedily attempting to excavate that strange ruin, she could have departed from Gilosha instead. That place had already been unsealed; flying to Gilosha and transferring there would only take three or four days in total, and she could have stayed ho a few more days.
…
No matter how much she complained inwardly, when the day of departure arrived, Everly still obediently packed her luggage and went with Misha to Sunken City Airport, where they boarded a direct flight to Fridt City.
The plane flew smoothly for over five hours and landed on schedule at Fridt Airport in the early evening.
Their cruise tickets had already been purchased, with boarding scheduled for 3:00 PM the next day.
The two of them stayed at a star-rated hotel near the airport. The hotel was about twenty kiloters from the port, but fortunately, most guests were heading there as well. As a result, the hotel provided a free shuttle service to and from the port twice a day. There was no need to register in advance—guests who needed it simply had to arrive at the designated pickup area outside the hotel on ti and board the shuttle when it arrived with their luggage.
The security at the star-rated hotel was fairly good, and the night passed peacefully as usual.
Early the next morning, after breakfast, Everly and Misha checked out imdiately, brought their luggage down to the lobby, and sat on the sofa waiting for the morning shuttle to the port.
They both agreed that taking the afternoon shuttle would be too rushed—if anything went wrong on the way, they might miss the boat entirely. Compared to that, it was better to leave earlier.
The hotel’s transfer vehicle was a mid-sized 30-seat bus. It would stop at the pickup point outside the hotel for 20 minutes, then take the passengers directly from the suburban road to Fridt Port.
When the bus arrived, Everly and Misha boarded first. They chose seats near the ergency exit, placed their luggage, fastened their seatbelts, and quietly waited for departure.
During the wait, more passengers gradually boarded the bus.
There were elderly “sunset red” tourists wearing Hawaiian shirts, young couples with children, affectionate couples clinging to each other, punk youths with a solitary aura and covered in tattoos, noisy college students, and even a young man in a black three-piece suit in the middle of sumr who looked like he had no idea what heat was…
As she observed the passengers boarding, Everly was suddenly tickled at her waist—Misha poked her stomach with a finger.
She turned her head, and Misha imdiately shoved a phone into her hands.
“Everly, look! Sothing happened in Gilosha!”
Misha lowered her voice and said.
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