Xiao Tangqiu: "Fuck!"
Tang Mianmian: "Fuck!"
They actually watched a living person turn into a tree right in front of them!
Almost in the blink of an eye, the middle-aged man had completely turned into a tree, and there was no trace of his former human form.
Bai Yushan sneered, "As expected! Everyone in this village will turn into trees!"
Tang Mianmian hesitated a little: "But he didn't seem to be lying just now."
Xiao Tangqiu frowned. "Maybe this guy really didn't know he would turn into a tree. Didn't he say before that every time he ate the bark of the sacred tree, he would fall asleep until the next morning... Maybe he turned into a tree without knowing it and didn't regain consciousness until the next morning."
"That's certainly possible. Maybe he himself doesn't even know he's a tree," Xue Junli nodded. "But... why did he turn into a tree? He should have been a normal person at first. After all, he came from outside the island. So what caused his transformation?"
Xiao Tangqiu and Tang Mianmian looked at each other and said in unison: "The bark of the sacred tree!"
"There's no food on the island, and everyone can only survive by consuming the bark of the sacred tree. He must have gradually mutated because he ate the bark!" Tang Mianmian quickly realized. "He said before that everyone on the island would gather under the sacred tree at dusk to pray for food. This means everyone should receive food at about the same time, then return to their own houses to eat. Therefore, they would all turn into trees at about the same time. If this guy ate with the others, he would have turned into a tree along with them, and he wouldn't have realized it... But if he didn't eat with the others, by the time he secretly fed his wife and returned, everyone else would have already turned into trees. That's why he found the village empty and everyone else disappeared."
Duan Hongzhen sneered, "So those trees around the village were actually transformed by the people on the island?"
"That's probably true..." Xiao Tangqiu frowned slightly. "Actually, there's another question: where does the water come from? If there's no food on this island, there shouldn't be any water either. Perhaps the water is also provided by the sacred tree."
"The sacred tree gave them everything, just to turn them all into trees?" Tang Mianmian stroked her chin. "This kind of thing is really... hard to explain, but what should we do next?"
Xiao Tangqiu stared at the crater left by the disappearance of the sacred tree, seemingly asking Tang Mianmian or muttering to himself, "Where on earth did the sacred tree go?" But most importantly—what did the sacred tree have to do with their dungeon quest? And what did it have to do with resurrecting Shen Yuan?
"Let's search this area, and then... wait for daybreak," Xue Junli looked up at the dark night. "Didn't that man say he would wake up after daybreak? It seems these trees will turn into humans again after daybreak."
"A human during the day and a tree at night? That's quite interesting..." Tang Mianmian touched his chin.
Next, they began to search the area around the giant pit. Since Bai Yushan had already gone down to the bottom of the pit, they only searched the area nearby. However, apart from those strange black thorn trees that were suspected to be transformed by the people on the island, they found nothing, let alone the whereabouts of the sacred tree.
"Forget it, let's wait until daybreak." Xue Junli said calmly. Since they had searched for a long time and found nothing useful, it either meant that the time was not right or that there was nothing there in the first place.
Everyone turned around and returned to the village. Although the conditions in the village were not much better than in the wilderness, at least there was a place to sleep.
When the newcomers saw them coming back, they all breathed a sigh of relief, as if they were worried that they would abandon them and run away.
The village was completely silent, without a sound at all. Everyone spent a quiet but sleepless night like this.
Xiao Tangqiu recalled what was written in the Book of Light and tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep. He even felt that he had just closed his eyes when dawn came.
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