Chapter 1 A Glimmer of Light

A glimmer of light appeared at the bottom of the seemingly endless cave. After descending for so long, they had finally reached their destination.

Hao Ren looked up in the direction they had come from. The cave entrance was long gone from sight, with only a hazy darkness above. The cave was so deep that a layer of accumulated dust, like a cloud layer, had even formed in the middle. He clicked his tongue at the depth of the cave. "Good heavens, it's so deep… Did that Baptiste really have a way to get down here alive?"

Vivian nodded. "Wizards have many tricks. Perhaps he knew a flying spell, assuming he wasn't torn to shreds by a pack of monsters before then."

The car continued to descend, and Hao Ren noticed that the light outside wasn't directly emanating from below, but rather shining in from the dark cave walls on all sides. After descending to a certain depth, many huge cracks appeared on the distant cave walls, and these cracks seemed to lead directly to the outside world.

After descending several hundred more meters, they finally reached the ground.

"The surroundings are safe," Duncan observed the environment outside. "Just pick a direction and drive forward. Those cracks around us should lead to the outside world."

The bottom of the cave was a place of shifting light and shadows. It was still mostly dark here, but light shone in from some triangular cracks in the distance. Hao Ren had originally thought that after coming down from the cave, he would arrive directly at an open space. However, it now seemed that this passage was like a pipe that led directly into the earth. After reaching the end, they needed to crawl out of the cracks in the "pipe" to see the true landscape of the second layer of Purgatory. He started the car and drove towards the largest source of light. Along the way, everyone subconsciously held their breath: this strange place made everyone nervous.

The ground at the bottom of the cave was rugged and uneven, with many strange rocks scattered on the ground, and occasionally some other things could be seen.

Hao Ren saw a pile of debris that had completely lost its shape spread out in front of him. A large area around it was splattered with a cracked, dark red substance, and clear impact cracks could be seen on the ground. Without a doubt, this was a monster that had carelessly fallen from the surface above.

He wondered how many creatures had fallen from that terrifying cave in the past ten thousand years, but it was conceivable that a large amount of wreckage fragments must have accumulated on the ground under the wheels. These unlucky creatures, who had fallen from the surface world, had turned into dust here, far away from the place where they lived.

The wheels rolled over the debris, and the team continued to explore forward. The light in the distance had become closer and closer. In the shifting light and shadows, Hao Ren saw some thick, pillar-like things hanging down from above, and the cracks from which the light came showed a clear angle, inclining inward the higher they went. This strange structure stunned him. Because everything in this place was too huge, his common-sense spatial imagination was challenged. It took him a long time to realize what shape this was: the bottom of the cave gradually expanded outward, becoming wider and wider as it went down.

He accelerated and drove the car into the light outside.

An incredibly vast world appeared before everyone's eyes.

The sudden expansion of their field of vision was almost overwhelming, and the sight of the second layer of Purgatory left everyone speechless. They saw an endless expanse of land spreading out outside the car window, with rolling hills and low slopes covered in a breathtaking, verdant green. The entire land was covered with lush grass, flowers, and trees. This wide land extended all the way into the distance, until it reached the horizon, where there was only a clear line, and no sign of the cave edges that they had imagined.

In an almost bewildered state, Hao Ren opened the car door and came outside. He felt his feet firmly planted on a soft meadow, and the pure scent of soil and plants filled his nostrils. He looked up at the "sky," which should have been a thick, dark rock dome, but instead he saw large patches of white clouds. This underground world was so vast that its dome was even higher than the limit of cumulus clouds, so water vapor and dust formed clouds in the middle of this "cave," blocking the rocks above. The clouds emitted a soft white light like the cloud dome on the outermost layer of Purgatory, and their light was even brighter, illuminating the entire underground world as if it were daytime.

Hao Ren's gaze wandered between the clouds. The clouds here weren't as dense as the clouds above, so he finally saw what he should have seen in the gap between two clouds: a deep darkness, extremely far away. With his eyesight, he could only make out some rough gullies and textures, which was the earth's crust.

Or something like the earth's crust.

The others got out of the car at this time. Hesperiana maintained a staring-upward posture for several minutes, stunned, before finally taking a deep breath. "Hiss… this… is a cave?"

"I told you, although the second layer of Purgatory is underground, its scale is beyond words," Vivian said, but the expression on her face wasn't much calmer than the others. "I didn't expect it to be like this… I thought it would be a more horrible place."

"After all, the surface is already like hell," Lily frowned, looking at this vibrant world in disbelief. "This is 'Purgatory'? Purgatory doesn't live up to its name looking like this."

Nangong Wuyue felt that the surrounding water element environment had finally returned to being friendly. The inexplicable sense of crisis and hostility seemed to be limited to the surface above, so she transformed into her normal sea serpent form, with a contented expression on her face. "The water here is very peaceful, almost like a different world from the surface."

Hao Ren didn't say anything, because he only had one question in his mind: how vast is this place?

Thinking of this question, he couldn't help but turn his head to look at the "passage" from which they had come.

A towering mountain appeared before his eyes. Unsurprisingly, its shape was completely indistinguishable at this distance.

He only saw some huge black mountain ridges pouring down from above, extending into the distance and merging into the verdant land. The upper part of the mountain gradually narrowed, turning into a giant wall almost perpendicular to the ground, and disappearing into the depths of the endless clouds. The entire mountain was dark in color, with a rock-like texture, but after careful identification, he found that the rock had an unusual shape.

A lightning-like thought suddenly popped up, and he immediately called everyone back to the car. "Get in quickly, let's go somewhere further away to take a look!"

The group returned to the car, and Hao Ren immediately drove away into the distance. The towering "mountain" from which they had come was soon left behind. Lily sat in the last row, clinging to the car window and looking out. Her eyes widened, and she finally couldn't help but shout, "A tree! It's a tree trunk!"

Hao Ren stopped on a grassy highland. He and the others looked in the direction of the "mountain." From here, they could finally see the full picture of the behemoth. Just as Lily had said, it was a giant tree, and a kind of tree with developed roots and aerial roots bulging out of the ground. The trunk of the giant tree penetrated the clouds and connected to the bottom of the upper crust, as if supporting the entire land above, while its lower part was firmly grasping the earth. The slanting mountain ridges and conical mountains that Hao Ren had seen before were none other than the giant tree's furiously growing roots.

And the place where they had come down from was self-evident: the hollow tube inside the trunk.

At this time, the data terminal suddenly spoke, "Other probes have sent back new images. Some probes have found other Purgatory entrances, and the situation there is the same as here."

As the terminal spoke, it switched over the images from several probes. All the images depicted roughly the same scene: giant trees supporting the entire land (or rather, the sky), and the vast, green land around the giant trees.

"Some other high-speed probes have reached the other end of the planet, and they have also found entrances to the second layer of Purgatory there."

"The second layer of Purgatory is not one or a series of caves, but another layer of the earth's crust," Hao Ren said slowly. "This planet is layered—not an exaggeration, but a factual description."

The world's speculation about the structure of Purgatory was completely wrong. The aliens once believed that there was a series of deep, giant caves under this world, and that those giant caves were another dangerous hell. But in fact, all the caves were connected together, and they were essentially one space. Moreover, this space was not dangerous, but rather like a paradise.

This planet had a double crust. Purgatory was just its skin.

Or perhaps there was a third layer of crust. Who could say for sure?

作者：远瞳
Yuan Tong