Published: February 5, 2025
Every desolate land has its own color, and each color represents a certain characteristic of that desolate land.
In the past life, humans would classify desolate lands using various methods—some used numbers, others used star ratings or words. However, Ye Zhongming preferred to use colors.
Just like the overall tone of each desolate land, many who shared Ye Zhongming's views felt that colors could better reflect the intuitive impressions these lands left on survivors.
Some lands were red with bloodiness, some black with brutality, some green with eeriness, some yellow with intensity, some blue with bone-chilling cold, and so on...
Regardless of the classification method, the horror of desolate lands remained present, instilling a profound sense of awe in everyone living in the apocalypse.
Desolate lands resembled eggs, standing tall on the human planet, shrouded in a thick mist, whose color represented the dominant hue within the desolate land.
People referred to this dense fog as the Chaos Barrier.
The Chaos Barrier was opaque and impenetrable, yet humans could easily pass through it. For the creatures inside the desolate lands, however, these lands served both as their hunting grounds and their prisons. Unless a creature was exceptionally powerful or a rift appeared in the Chaos Barrier for some reason, they could only stay within the desolate land.
In his previous life, Ye Zhongming had also come to this desolate land, even shedding blood here in a struggle for resources.
However, when he arrived, it was already five years into the apocalypse.
At that time, the resources at the outer edge of this desolate land, which was tinted with a slight red color, had been almost completely plundered. In terms of color grading, this desolate land was classified as white, indicating mild danger.
Things changed when a hunting group came here and suffered consecutive losses of several small teams. The elite members of that group came to investigate the reasons and discovered a hidden gem mine in a certain secluded area of the desolate land.
A group of newly emerged desolate beasts, having absorbed the energy contained in the gem mine, experienced a significant upgrade in their levels, becoming highly evolved and wiping out several teams from that hunting group.
Gems were incredibly valuable in the apocalypse, essential for certain professions such as craftsmen, alchemists, pharmacists, elementalists, and mages. Even some evolvers with battle pets needed a certain quantity of gems to feed their companions.
This made gems an expensive resource, one that people fought for fiercely.
Ye Zhongming's previous hunting group's base was near Ying City, making them part of the forces vying for control over this area.
After the white-level desolate land turned into a deep blue, representing extreme danger due to the beasts that had consumed the gems, the competing groups managed to eliminate those beasts with an average evolution level of five, followed by a round of human conflict, eventually dividing the gems among themselves.
Desolate lands were not static; they were places where various miraculous phenomena occurred that couldn’t be explained by science, such as the breeding, evolution, and feeding of monsters. Humans did not understand much about these lands, as it seemed that as long as beasts stayed within them, they could grow, evolve, and reproduce merely by breathing.
Ye Zhongming chose to venture into the desolate land to see if the rumored Gem Mountain really existed. Was it something that appeared later, or had it always been there, just undiscovered?
It turned out that the Gem Mountain had always existed; it was just that due to being occupied by beasts or other reasons, people had failed to notice it until five years later.
However, Ye Zhongming couldn't understand why there were no beasts here consuming and absorbing the energy from these gems now.
This was also the reason why he and his team members cautiously approached the azure Gem Mountain without getting too close.