Chapter 222 The True Shadow
After hearing the two words spoken by the hunter, Yu Sheng was a little stunned for a moment, but the emotion that emerged in his mind immediately afterwards was not doubt, vigilance, or eagerness to try, but a memory of something -
In a previous dream, he had seen the "hunter" appear in front of him silently. At that time, out of curiosity, he touched the empty hunting suit, but saw his arms directly penetrated into the sleeves of the hunting suit - if he had not been shocked later, he would have already put on the hunter's clothes at that time.
...So, that strange dream was the hunter's first "attempt"?! Was he trying to put on this "hunting suit" at that time? Yu Sheng frowned, but out of caution he did not take any further action. Instead, he asked in a deep voice, "Reason?"
"We know what you're looking for," the hollow and vague voice sounded again in my mind, "The road to the 'deep' is blocked by an illusion. Only by becoming a part of 'it' can we bypass this forest - we successfully found this method, but we can't fight against its will, so we can only act according to the 'script' of the stage. But you... seem to be able to. Put on this outfit and become a hunter in the Black Forest - then you will see the real path in the forest.
"If you really have the courage and determination to fight it, then go ahead and face it."
Yu Sheng keenly noticed that the hunter used a very special word when referring to himself: we.
"You are the deep dive team from back then—you have merged into one entity?!"
"Yes, just as you thought - 'it' couldn't distinguish between us as individuals and as a group, so after the 'break' occurred, we merged during the fall," the hunter replied. He didn't seem to have much emotion when talking about this matter, but with a hint of nostalgia, "but we still remember many things, such as the photo you brought..."
However, at this moment, a suddenly high-pitched buzzing sound abruptly resounded through the forest, interrupting the words in his mind. A huge sense of oppression stimulated all his senses as if it was rolling over from the end of every nerve. Yu Sheng felt his spiritual intuition trembling wildly, and the illusion of being watched by an infinite existence made his heart skip a beat - in the hallucination, he seemed to see a black shadow sweeping across the black forest, and that black shadow was made up of countless huge, weird eyes, with an intimidating and cold pressure that made his scalp tingle.
The illusion was fleeting, and Yu Sheng discovered that the forest had calmed down briefly again. The hunter's voice sounded again, but this time with a hint of anxiety: "Hurry! We don't have much time - it has realized that the actors on the stage are acting without permission, and the 'hunter' must retreat to the state before the wolf grandmother appeared - you have to believe us, we have been waiting for this opportunity, 'it' is going to..."
Yu Sheng suddenly took a step forward and reached out directly to the hunting suit.
He knew he was a little reckless this time.
The information revealed by the "hunter" was not sufficient, and the communication between him and "them" was far from enough to establish any mutual trust. What would happen after "putting on" the hunting suit, what should be done, what the so-called "real path" was, how to pass through the Black Forest through that road, and what would happen when facing Ankaela... The other party did not have time to explain these clearly. At this time, reaching out based on an impulse was really a bit of a lack of respect for life.
But he didn't have time to think about it.
Because at this moment, he felt Ankaela again - the shadow composed of countless "eyes" swept across the sky above the Black Forest again, like some kind of mechanized scanning program searching all the storage space. He could almost "hear" that everything in the Black Forest was responding and resonating to this "search" instruction. The mixed noise in the baby's crying was getting louder and louder. Yu Sheng vaguely realized that the dark angel trapped deep in the "fairy tale" had discovered him, discovered himself, the "invader" in the Black Forest.
He could open the door and leave, but if he did so at this time, he would probably expose his coordinates in the real world directly to the dark angel.
Yu Sheng’s hand once again penetrated the hunting suit - just like what he had experienced in his previous dream, the "hunter" was like a hollow phantom, and he could not feel his entity at all when he touched it.
But Yu Sheng could feel that as he pounced on the empty clothes, the "connection" between him and the hunting suit suddenly strengthened.
Ankaela's gaze suddenly turned over, just like a puppet on the stage that suddenly moved and aroused the vigilance of the person pulling the strings.
Yu Sheng felt the clothes covering him, as if he was hiding in an extra "body". He felt his mind suddenly become a little dull, and many emotions and memories that did not belong to him briefly surged in, but flowed away silently the next moment. However, even in this brief contact, he still captured many messy pictures -
He saw twelve men in heavy protective gear standing together, with himself between them.
He heard instructions coming to his ears and the sound of water being filled in the "deep diving pool".
He heard a chaotic roar, the voices of countless people - the voices mixed together, gradually distorted, and in between were the humming echoes of many devices running at the same time.
He saw himself moving through darkness and his "shell" falling apart.
The violent and uncontrolled energy flow licked the protective layer. The alarm signal of the internal structure disintegration was as hot as the magma rushing through the nerves. Countless wrong information flooded the mind, and a voice screamed -
Warning, the umbilical cord is broken. Warning, the umbilical cord is broken…
Losing core connection...
Yu Sheng felt as if his mind was jumping back and forth between different perspectives, and these perspectives did not only belong to the group of deep-sea divers from seventy years ago - he saw many "memories" that could not possibly come from human senses, and the last scene he saw was that he was falling from a chaotic and crazy light and shadow.
At the end of the fall was an open space, surrounded by several low and old buildings.
The light went out.
Yu Sheng opened his eyes and stood in the center of the dark hut wearing hunter's clothes.
His vision swayed, and the numerous red cloaks in the swaying were like burning flames, and the silence lit up the night.
Ankaela's eyes swept over the cabin.
Yu Sheng raised his eyes and through the edge of the hunter's hood, he saw that the roof of the hut seemed to have disappeared briefly, and the shadow with countless eyes was moving slowly in the sky, gradually "falling" towards the edge of the black forest.
It did not notice the "intruder" hiding inside the hunter's costume.
Yu Sheng calmed down and asked tentatively in his heart: "Are 'you' still there?"
He got no response.
But he vaguely heard some hollow whistling, which seemed to be consciously sending him a "signal".
It seems that "they" are still there, but in order to avoid further irritating Ankaela, "they" are hiding.
Yu Sheng stood there and thought quietly for a moment, then lowered his head to look at his body and tentatively raised his arm.
He saw that he was wearing hunting clothes, but when he tried to move his arms, he felt nothing unusual.
It seemed that the worst case scenario did not happen - his only worry before was that the process of "putting on" the hunting suit was a trap, which would cause him to be controlled by the clothes and become the next "hunter" who had to act according to the rules of the Black Forest. That would be a more troublesome development than death - but now it seems that all this did not happen.
Yu Sheng blinked. He felt vaguely that there seemed to be some changes in himself, but he couldn't tell what the change was for a moment. At the same time, he felt a gaze again.
Following his feeling, he saw the squirrel squatting next to him - the little guy stayed there nervously, his body visibly shaking, but he did not escape from the room after all.
"So..." the squirrel said in a very soft voice, "You are also a 'hunter' now?"
"Maybe?" Yu Sheng thought for a moment, stepped forward and picked up the squirrel, "But it seems nothing has changed..."
He suddenly stopped in the middle of his speech.
Seeing this, the squirrel was a little worried and scratched Yu Sheng's finger with his claws: "What's wrong?"
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Yu Sheng did not respond, he just stared blankly at the wall in front of him.
The wall was "flashing" in his vision.
The wall was flickering irregularly, disappearing and appearing from time to time. When the wall disappeared, he could even see the scenery of the Black Forest outside - and the entire Black Forest was also flickering in his field of vision.
Every tree, every flower, every bush was flickering irregularly, like a poorly projected image. Everything in the Black Forest turned into a flickering illusion that lacked reality, and as time went on, this sense of lack of reality became stronger.
Yu Sheng walked forward in a daze. He took the squirrel directly through the gleaming wooden wall and walked out of the cabin.
"Wow!" The squirrel exclaimed. She had no time to react just now and was shocked. "We just passed through the wall! How did you do that?!"
Yu Sheng didn't have time to respond to the squirrel's doubts because he saw something else.
A huge crack, just like the one that was torn open when Ankaela's tentacles pierced into the real world in Lao Zheng's room, stood quietly in the center of the Black Forest.
It was there, had been there from the beginning – the path leading to the back of the stage, hidden in the Black Forest.
It's just that no one has been able to observe it until now.
"Do you see that?" Yu Sheng raised his hand, picked up the squirrel, and pointed in the direction of the crack with his other hand.
The squirrel was a little stunned: "Ah? What?"
"...It's okay," Yu Sheng shook his head, "It seems that only the 'Hunter' can see it."
He took a deep breath, took a step forward and walked towards the crack.
However, the next second, when he took the first step towards the rift, endless wolf howls and a terrible roar suddenly made him stop.
The squirrel screamed: "The wolf is coming!!!"
The wolf is coming——
Countless wolves appeared in Yu Sheng's sight.
Yu Sheng was sure that even when he led Hu Li to blast a path through the Black Forest and went to fight the wolf grandma, there were not so many wolves rushing out from the surroundings!
Dense swarms of wolf shadows emerged directly from the air, filling every inch of space in the field of vision against the flickering forest backdrop, as if all the wolves in the history of this forest had suddenly crowded onto the stage - there was a tangible malice and desire to kill condensed in the air, it was almost smelling of blood.
Yu Sheng sucked in a breath of cold air instantly, but still gritted his teeth, reached out from behind to take the shotgun, and held it in his hand very unskillfully.
“Come on—”
He said through gritted teeth.
Then the wolf pounced on him and tore him to pieces.
Very fragmented.
(End of this chapter)
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