"Is this Earth?" Adrian's voice softly asked next to my ear.
After crossing the "bridge" connecting two whole worlds, when I opened my eyes again, the scene in front of me felt very familiar.
"That's right! Once we walk out of this room, we can see what's outside!" I nodded and pointed to the open door not far away.
The reason it felt familiar was because the other end of the passage was actually in a huge room exactly the same as this one. Both were made of steel, mainly to hide the portal behind them.
Even though the portal took up a lot of space, there were still piles of supplies in the corners of the room. Some seemed ready to be sent from Earth to the other world, while others had just arrived and hadn't been moved yet.
Since it was a busy time, transport vehicles kept coming and going through the door, which made it easy for Adrian and me to leave. Only after we fully walked out did we see clearly where we were.
We were in a very big open area, but since they just started fixing it up not long ago, there were still signs of ruins around. Further down the street, a row of buildings I knew very well suddenly appeared.
It was Aurora Entertainment!
Of course, it should be called the "former" Aurora Entertainment now. Even though the scenery nearby had changed a lot, I could still make out that we were standing near the KTV where we had our class reunion before.
Aurora Entertainment used to be an entertainment center in the suburbs of my city, with food, fun, and shopping all in one place. KTVs were of course part of it.
I couldn't quite remember the name of that KTV anymore. But one thing was clear - it had been completely destroyed by the portal behind us, with not even a bit left!
The ruins we saw earlier were probably from when the Earth army moved in and tore down the buildings around here too. Looking around, we could see lots of new military facilities built on the open ground, with soldiers and all kinds of weapons and equipment everywhere.
Many things showed that there were probably no more civilian living in the whole Aurora Entertainment area anymore. Maybe even the area for a few kilometers around had become a military zone!
Could it be that the government never told the public about this? I suddenly thought of a possibility when I saw this.
No matter what, "discovering a brand new world outside Earth" was totally big news that could shock the whole world! Not to mention other things, just the portal alone could help many experts win Nobel Prizes!
But at the same time, the benefits that could be gained from such a huge new world were no doubt very big too. Maybe even so big that it had to be kept secret, so other countries wouldn't know...
Looking at it this way, except for those people working on the project, it would be hard for public to know what really happened here, not to mention the situation on the other side of the portal in the other world.
"Forget it, let's leave this place!" Not wanting to think more about it, since we didn't come all the way to Earth to make trouble anyway, I took Adrian and flew straight towards the city center after looking around a bit.
Being new here, Adrian didn't have any special thoughts yet, since this world was probably still strange to him. But I soon found another problem -
As we got further from the portal, I could feel the amount of light and water elements in the air dropping rapidly!
It looks like there weren't any elements on Earth to begin with. The elements I felt near the portal earlier were probably all "leaked" over from the other world! Once we got far away, we'd enter an area with no elements at all. I had never experienced this before and didn't know if it would cause any bad effects later.
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Of course, Adrian and I didn't have any big problems in the short term. Losing the support of outside elements didn't mean I couldn't use magic! Maybe it would just be more troublesome if we ran into some emergency in the future.
"But my Battle Qi isn't affected at all. I even feel like the power inside my body is fuller!" Adrian's experience seemed totally different from what I described. Too bad I didn't know Battle Qi, so I couldn't confirm what he said.
The sun was setting. It was evening time on Earth now.
After leaving the military zone, as more and more vehicles appeared on the roads, the complex road network and tall buildings slowly started showing up in our view.
The lights were just coming on. Flying at nearly a thousand meters high, we could look down on the whole land! The world below stretched out along rows of bright streetlights as far as the eye could see, all at once -
It was an extremely busy and prosperous scene! This was clearly unimaginable for humans who purely came from another world.
"It's unbelievable. I never thought the cities in another world could develop to such a huge scale!" The holy capital and royal capital were nothing compared to this! Adrian couldn't help but sigh, then suddenly asked me, "So what's the situation now? Do you know where to find them?"
"Uh..." When he brought this up, I suddenly realized how serious the problem was.
If Cyra and Nicola knew they were on Earth, they might go back to their old homes. But the trouble was, everyone's home address seemed to have changed since high school graduation. I had no idea!
"Let's find a place to stay first!" After thinking it over, I suddenly realized that trying to find those two in this huge Earth city would be like looking for a needle in the ocean! We needed to make other plans.
The city we were in now was the capital of the southwest province of H-country. It was also the largest city in the whole country - Shine Metropolitan!
As for the former number one "Coastal Metropolitan", since it was on the east coast of the central continent, it had been completely flooded after a climate warming disaster a few years ago. Now it was basically a no-man's land...
It's worth mentioning that this climate warming disaster wasn't caused by natural events, but could be traced back to the nuclear war between several big Western countries and the Northern Red Bear country at the end of last century!
Very luckily, this nuclear war didn't develop to the point of no return. Both sides quickly realized that if they kept fighting, it would destroy the whole Earth. So they turned to negotiations to solve the problem! It was because of this war that the Red Bear country fell apart and turned into the White Bear Empire later.
But even though they stopped the damage in time, the effects of the nuclear war were still huge! It not only spread deadly radiation, but also indirectly caused the big climate warming disaster years later. It also brought huge changes to the whole world's situation in the 20th century! Many small countries on the central continent later joined the H-country family for various reasons. So now H-country is far ahead of the northern White Bear Empire and has become the country with the biggest land area in the world, no doubt!
...
Flying from the suburbs to the city center wasn't too far. We landed in an area near where I used to live. After finding a quiet place to become visible again, I realized there were many more problems we needed to deal with.
"We need to change our looks first!"
First was appearance and clothes! Since Adrian's face was totally different from locals, we'd let him be a foreigner. My hair was the main problem - blue was too eye-catching. To keep a low profile, I had to change it to a color people were used to!
As for clothes, we could use disguise magic for a while. But since magic power would keep being used up and couldn't be refilled from outside, we needed to change into real local clothes as soon as possible.
"Then there's food and housing..."
We obviously couldn't go back to my old rented place. And since Earth didn't have enough light elements, even angels had to eat regularly! If we wanted to survive in this city for a while, we needed to get money first.
"The Continental common currency probably can't be used here, right?" Adrian quickly found the key problem. But I had already thought of a way to deal with this.
"Who says Continental common currency can't be used? Of course you can't use it directly!"
Walking straight out of the empty alley, we came to a private gold shop I remembered on the street. I couldn't help but smile.
This kind of private gold shop was actually all over city. Most didn't even have official signs, only some locals knew what they did.
Of course some shops just put up signs directly saying "Pawn Shop", making their purpose very clear! Private gold shops usually bought all kinds of valuable jewelry. As long as it was real gold or silver, they would buy it. But the price was another matter.
"Do you buy Eastern Spain commemorative gold coins?" I obviously didn't have H-country currency, but I had plenty of gold! I still hadn't used up all the Continental gold coins I got from Cyra back then! So I walked into the shop and put five coins in front of the owner.
"Eastern Spain commemorative gold coins? Never heard of those..." The shop owner took the coins and looked them over carefully with a magnifying glass several times. Of course he couldn't recognize the writing from another world. Then he looked Adrian and me up and down and couldn't help asking, "Young lady, you're very pretty. You two look like foreigners? Your H-country language is very good. Are you from Spain?"