Chapter 50: Love Me

Before Li Rui crossed over into this world, he would occasionally see news reports about people trapped in elevator shafts.

Back then, sitting in his office cubicle, he would cast a fleeting glance at the screen, click his tongue in a superficial display of sympathy, and lament the plight of the trapped and the terror of such an ordeal.

Those strangers trapped in dark, cramped metal cages were nothing more than specks of dust in the vast ocean of internet information to him, so distant they lacked any real sense of existence, easily forgotten the moment he turned his head.

When this violent earthquake finally subsided, and when he and Millie were buried deep within this natural underground cage, those long-blurred fragments of news resurfaced in his mind with a biting, bone-chilling cold.

The experience of being swallowed alive by the earth turned out to be so concrete and despair-inducing.

Right here, right now, the space resembled a huge, distorted triangular cage, trapping them tightly within its grasp.

Li Rui equipped the [Soul Fire] trait, using its accompanying [Necrotic Vision] to sweep up and down.

Within a massive spherical area two hundred meters in diameter, there were neither the souls of any living creatures nor the soul fires of any undead.

It was as if the entire world had abandoned the two of them.

Unequipping [Soul Fire], he suddenly felt a weakness in his legs—not because there was anything wrong with his body; the physique that had used [Qi Recovery] just minutes before was clearly in fine shape.

"Millie..." he said heavily, "It looks like the shaking won't start again anytime soon... Let's sit down and rest."

Millie had no objections, so the two of them, bound back-to-back with a rope, sat down and rested by leaning their heads against each other's shoulders.

"Millie..."

Amidst the dead silence, Li Rui spoke, "It's my fault, entirely my fault... I shouldn't have brought everyone to this ghost of a place to clear out some undead..."

Millie gazed into the pitch-black darkness before her and gently shook her head. "It's not your fault, Li Rui... We just had terrible luck."

She fell silent for a few seconds, her voice dropping lower. "...I wonder how Paul, Garron, Brook, and the others are doing?"

Paul and the others?

Li Rui closed his eyes and sighed silently.

The reason the two of them had survived the earthquake until now was because they had fled into a sturdier karst cave, and the triangular corner Millie found was stable enough.

But what about Paul and the others?

The place where they were stationed was an artificially excavated main mining tunnel.

Every direction—up and down, left and right, on every single plane—was pockmarked and riddled with pickaxe strikes.

These planes were not even straight; they curved slightly at regular intervals.

And the supports within the tunnel were simple wooden beams... wooden beams that had a chance of snapping on their own even without an earthquake.

In an environment like this, faced with an earthquake, Li Rui wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if everything twisted into a pretzel within a single second.

In this dark, subterranean triangular cage, time seemed to stand still.

There was no light, no sound, only each other's suppressed breathing heavily intertwining in the cramped space.

In the deathly silence, Millie shifted her numb legs. The prolonged tension of her nerves made her yearn to say something.

Finally, she broke the silence. "Li Rui, what was your life like before?"

When chatting with the team, Li Rui hadn't told the others that he was a transmigrator, only mentioning that he came from a very distant place, one he might never be able to return to in this lifetime.

He did this to avoid stirring up a melancholy longing for his hometown.

His teammates assumed he was just an unlucky soul who had fallen victim to a [Territorial Distortion], and thus did not probe any further.

In a sense, the teammates hadn't guessed wrong.

Yet in this dark, lightless triangular cage, a little bit of homesickness no longer mattered.

"I come from a place called Earth," Li Rui slowly began, "There is no magic there, no monsters, only a concrete jungle and running iron boxes called cars..."

"I grew up there, went to school, finished university... and then... my parents were killed in an iron box collision accident. After that, it was just work, day in and day out, like a donkey turning a millstone, a fixed routine from my dwelling place to where I labored, living numbly..."

"Later on, I got into a fierce, knock-down, drag-out argument with a 'big shot' online," he chuckled suddenly. "I won, and that guy couldn't take the loss, so he threw me into this world."

His tone was exceptionally calm as he recounted this, as if describing the story of another stranger.

"So, you must be pretty good at arguing?" Millie smiled lightly.

"Not anymore," Li Rui shook his head. "That guy also wiped my memory; I can't recall the details of any of those arguments now."

As he spoke, he shifted the topic. "I answered one of your questions, shouldn't you answer one of mine?"

"Alright."

"Then... have you ever liked any man?"

"I used to like an older brother in the guard squad, but before I turned sixteen, he was heavily wounded during an operation into the forest to wipe out goblins, and he died not long after returning..."

"Uh, sorry."

"It's fine, it was all several years ago... Since you're done asking, it's my turn. Um... have you ever liked any woman?"

"Well, about that..."

This exchange seemed to last for a very long time, or perhaps just a few dozen minutes.

Once the words were exhausted, nothing was left for them but boundless silence and endless waiting.

Hunger arrived on schedule at first, but eventually even that sensation grew numb.

Fatigue, like a rising tide, dragged them down time and again into intermittent, poor-quality light sleep.

They did not lack air in the triangular cage because a fresh current of air would periodically seep through the crack at the very bottom of the rock wall on their only open side.

Nor did they lack water, because Li Rui possessed [Pseudo-Spell: Icicle Spear]. He only needed to freeze the stalactite wall and scrape off the ice with a dagger to obtain enough moisture for the two of them to barely cling to life.

However, they were desperately short of light and food.

Light was actually solvable; Li Rui possessed a druid skill called [Ignite]... but casting this spell would cause the temperature inside the triangular cage to rise rapidly, making them both sweat profusely within seconds.

The rising temperature could only be lowered by [Pseudo-Spell: Icicle Spear], but Li Rui could only use that spell once every twelve hours.

As for food, there was truly no way to resolve that.

They only had a single backpack, and the food inside was only enough for three days.

Even though they slept until their heads hurt, minimizing food consumption by reducing activity, when they cast [Pseudo-Spell: Icicle Spear] for the twentieth time—around the tenth day—their food supply finally hit rock bottom.

With a gloomy expression, Li Rui scraped up the snow generated by the spell. As a certain extreme thought regarding food churned repeatedly in his mind, he was suddenly embraced from behind by Millie.

"Li Rui," she whispered softly, the warm breath from her lips brushing against his earlobe, "Let's make love."