Task 6
After going about a hundred meters deep, some obviously aggressive plants began to appear.
"Swish--" Fren used the tip of his feather to break the vines that were attacking him, wondering, "Why are these things only coming towards me? It's so strange." As he spoke, another thick branch came over from not far away.
Shi Youchen walked straight forward without even moving his head, but the branch seemed to have eyes. It turned halfway, bypassed Shi Youchen, and rushed towards Furen behind him.
"He's deliberately avoiding me, maybe he thinks I'm his companion." Shi Youchen guessed.
Furen couldn't understand the reason, but since Shi Youchen continued to move forward, he couldn't stop. He could only patiently knock down the things that attacked him again and again, and even broke a few of them in his hand for comparison.
The two of them didn't walk very fast. Shi Youchen observed his surroundings as he walked and found that all he saw along the way were plants, and he didn't see any living animals.
And those that attacked Furen since just now were basically all arrow poison trees, and occasionally a few of them were even wrapped with sea mango.
"This isn't something that can grow naturally in one place." He thought about it and came up with a possibility - starting from a certain range, most of the things inside are probably poisonous.
In other words, the deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes.
After walking forward for an unknown amount of time, they arrived at a distance of about a thousand meters from the edge. Shi Youchen confirmed the source of the fog above the tiankeng and stopped in front of a bush.
It was a plant he had never seen before, and at first glance it looked quite bizarre. Its trunk was as slender as a two or three-year-old child, but its branches grew straight up, like the spikes on a hedgehog's back.
Even more disturbing was the dense mass of finger-sized holes in the trunk, rising and falling as if breathing. A thin, almost transparent gas drifted out of those holes and gathered upwards.
Looking around from the place where Shi Youchen stopped, trees like this were everywhere he looked.
After observing the area for a while, he didn't sense the same obvious killing intent as the surrounding plants. It seemed these things didn't possess direct attack capabilities. Furthermore, Fren hadn't made any moves to fight back for quite some time.
Shi Youchen turned around to look at Furen as if to confirm, but this one glance made him realize something was wrong - Furen's dark wings did not retract, and when he saw him turn around, he actually reached out to take off the mask on his face.
"What are you doing?!" he snapped.
Fren's hand froze in mid-air, and as if suddenly coming to his senses, he uttered an "Ah," "I... heard your voice... telling me to pick it off."
Shi Youchen tiptoed, about to walk over, when he suddenly heard the sound of a sharp blade piercing the air. With two swishing sounds, Furen's wings barely moved when they were pierced by the vines, sending him stumbling backwards.
Before Shi Youchen could draw his sword to cut them, the vines had already been pulled back quickly, leaving several bowl-sized penetrating wounds on Furen's wings.
"I'm fine, Mr. Sasa." In order to prove that he was really fine, he shook the wings on his back vigorously a few times. A few black feathers fell off from near the wound and floated to Shi Youchen's feet.
"Let's go back to the Mirage Abyss." Shi Youchen said. Furen hurriedly said, "I'm really fine! This little injury is nothing, and there's no poison on it. Look, there's nothing wrong with my wings!"
"Shut up, go back just because I told you to." Shi Youchen didn't listen to his wishes at all, and raised his hand to open the space channel to let him leave.
"..." But there was no space crack between the two of them as usual. Shi Youchen put down his hand and narrowed his eyes.
He couldn't mobilize even a fraction of the spatial energy in his body, and he hadn't noticed this the entire time.
"What is that?!" Furen suddenly shouted behind him, his expression tense. Shi Youchen turned around and saw a long figure flash by.
He walked in that direction, but didn't see anyone.
"Mr. Sasa, is that... a person up there?" Fren stood further away and heard some movement on the branches.
Youchen looked up and saw a corpse hanging deep in the branches not far above him.
A shriveled corpse.
"Let's go." Following the direction where the body was hanging, the two men walked in for dozens of steps and found more similar debris hanging on the trees.
Most of them looked human, but a small part of the bones were twisted or seemed to be spliced together with something.
"It's an experimental subject," Fren said, pointing to one of the corpses whose lower limbs consisted of only a piece of thick bone. "That's the aftereffect of a failed gene fusion with a shark."
His fingertips trembled slightly as he moved to another nearby corpse. "That's... someone's limbs were cut off and a poisonous spider was attached to them."
"That's the bone that was taken out of the chest cavity and stuffed into a mollusk as a petri dish."
He recognized the bodies.
These were all his former "companions" at the same experimental base. A cloud of black feathers fell to the ground at Furen's feet, quickly drifting away.
"Are they all from the Philer clan?" Shi Youchen asked.
"Yes." Furen lowered his head. "I had a friend before. After the transformation experiment failed, he suffered a backlash and turned from a human... into a ball of meat, and then was thrown into the 'garden'." He seemed to be talking to Shi Youchen, but also seemed to be muttering to himself.
Shi Youchen glanced at him and said, "They weren't killed by these things." Furen looked up suddenly and said, "What?!"
Shi Youchen gestured for him to look at the branches: "Such thin branches can hardly hang a person, let alone a test subject whose weight is more than twice that of a normal person." There were obviously large fractures on them, and judging by the cross-section, it was the result of load-bearing failure.
"If they died slowly after being hung there, the branches that came into contact with their skin would have experienced varying degrees of decay, and their remains would have detached." But there was nothing on these corpses and the thin branches; they could be clearly distinguished.
"And they're evenly distributed, even heading in the same direction." Shi Youchen said, hinting, "It seems more like they were put there by someone later."
Fren bit his lip and said nothing.
He seemed to see the experimental subjects struggling for death, unable to endure the environment and their own extreme pain.
It was also like seeing the careful look on the face of the next person exiled here as he wrapped and tied up the shriveled corpse of his predecessor.
Blood oozed from the corners of Fren's mouth.
"You know why I brought you here." Shi Youchen didn't use any extra words to comfort him. "Look carefully, remember their final appearance, and then move on."
“…”
"yes."
As they continued to go deeper, the vegetation grew denser and denser, and the remains of the experimental subjects piled up. Furen didn't look up again, but Shi Youchen noticed that these trees were obviously much thicker than the ones before, and it was obvious that most of them were actively wrapped around the corpses' vital parts.
"These people didn't seek death on their own, but were strangled." Shi Youchen quickly made this judgment, but seeing that Furen was still depressed, he didn't say it out loud.
He discovered that the more bodies hung from the trees, the larger the space the trees themselves took up. As far as the eye could see, the largest tree was already covered in layers upon layers of hundreds of mummified corpses, while a clear-cut human face had already emerged from a trunk so thick that ten men could hug it.
Contorted, howling faces, like those on the walls of Nigra's auction house.
Furen followed behind in a daze, not noticing that the penetrating wounds on his wings were tearing and expanding, and all the black feathers near the wounds fell off, revealing the withered cartilage.
Sticky blood dripped all over the ground. The dormant poisonous tree was awakened by the smell of blood. Its branches began to sway, and the corpse hanging on it began to float left and right.
Shi Youchen noticed this and remembered that he could not use the power of space. He was also worried that using the ability to accelerate time would lead to uncontrollable situations in the future, so he decided to use the safest method of time reversal, intending to reverse the poisonous tree back to the past when it had not yet grown.
But this poisonous tree, like the previous ones, bypassed Shi Youchen in all its attacks, targeting only Furen behind him. He tutted softly, losing his patience and saying to Furen, "Stand still."
Furen, who was dodging the attack limply, was stunned for a moment, and then he really stood still. Shi Youchen arrived behind Furen before the branch and said, "I'm here, don't worry."
Furen closed his eyes lightly and relaxed his whole body, allowing dozens of dark red branches to wrap around his limbs and neck. Suddenly, his face turned red and his eyeballs bulged due to the sudden lack of oxygen.
Just when he thought he was going to be dragged over and hung with the corpses, Shi Youchen's hand supported his shoulder.
In the blink of an eye, the branches holding Furen grew limp, withering and letting go of him as if fleeing. Shi Youchen helped him steady himself and looked ahead. The largest poisonous tree had quickly shrunk to the size of a tiny seedling. The bodies that had been hanging from it fell to the ground, and some that had fallen far away were pulled away by other branches and found new homes.
However, among the corpses still left on the ground, there were a few that moved rustlingly, as if heading towards the two of them.
Looking at this strange scene of corpses coming back to life, Shi Youchen lowered his eyes and said to Furen: "They are not really dead, but are trapped here forever in the state of the living dead." That's why there is a glimmer of hope as time goes back.
Furen choked and said, "Can you help them get rid of it? This is too painful." Before Shi Youchen could answer, he saw a kind of purple vines covered with thorns sprang out from the depths, swarming out, binding up the scattered corpses, and then hiding back in the darkness.
But in the blink of an eye, the area was empty again. Furen finally reacted and tried to rush in the direction where the vines disappeared, but Shi Youchen stopped him.
"Going to die? Do you know what's in there?" he scolded Fren. "Stay here and don't force me to do it."
He glanced at Fren's wings, which had already begun to fester, and frowned. Unlike normal psychics, the reckless use of time-related abilities could easily lead to irreversible consequences. He didn't want to take a gamble at this moment.
Shi Youchen immediately decided to stop going deeper and wait for He Xian and Pei Chanbai to meet up.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
