Dong Yao’s hands were finally free; he stepped on the topmost branch of the sacred tree, kicked away the crawling snake, and took out a match from his pants pocket.
With a hiss, the long fuse was lit.
With dexterous movements, he hung on to the branch and swung downward, soon coming to the middle part of the sacred tree.
“This is as far as it goes; don’t climb any higher; you’ll get caught in the explosion!” Dong Yao drew out his dagger and began to cut down the mottled snakes that were pouring in from all sides, reaching out to pull his fallen companions up.
However, many people had already been bitten, and the place where the snake had bitten only left two bleeding holes. Dong Yao was pulling a young man’s hand when suddenly he felt his hands full of stickiness.
The young man’s neck showed teeth marks, with the two blo-od holes as the centre of the horrifying red lines that spread in a short while. Soon, his skin began to dissolve, revealing his muscles, and tissue fluid dripped down. What Dong Yao felt was the team member’s clear yellow tissue fluid.
The young man was terrified to the extreme; even his pupils had shrunk to the size of pinpoints, but he didn’t even let out a scream; his body was shrinking at a rapid pace, his bones were breaking by inches, and his muscles kept falling off his body.
In a matter of seconds, a living man turned into a scarlet foetus.
This scene was too beyond common sense; everyone thought that snake bites would only poison them, but the snakes in this Mount Ming were completely different; they seem to have undergone modification as well.
[Monster Update: The Yearling Snake].
[Yearling Snakes: A sacred creature worshipped by the people of the Ming Kingdom, they are said to be the attendants of the Great Being and have the ability to rejuvenate people. Many old and powerful people have made huge sacrifices in order to enter the altar and obtain this honor. However, the yearling snake is only a product of the “Great Being’s” spur-of-the-moment tinkering. After being touched by the genes of the yearling snake, a human being will return to his or her foetal form, but that doesn’t mean that he or she will live life all over again. What will hatch out of that sacred tree fruit will only be a newborn yearling serpent.]
“Holy shit!!!” Dong Yao was taken aback; the shock of such a horrifying sight up close was too much for him, and while he wouldn’t be afraid of looking at a Yao, this red-skinned, slippery foetus in front of him as if it were born prematurely was more disgusting and frightening than any monster.
The birth of new life was sacred, but the disintegration of a grown man’s flesh into a not-yet-fully-formed hunk of meat in the womb was a sight he could not begin to describe in words how evil and revolting it was.
The foetus fell from the sacred tree and was carefully held in the mouth of a snake, which twisted its body to a crystal fruit and placed the foetus into it.
Dong Yao suddenly realised that the fruits of this Golden Sacred Tree Forest every one of them would come from this…
Zhuo Yu was on Long Ran’s back, and Long Ran climbed the fastest, so he naturally saw the scene above.
“Sacrifice ……”
Zhuo Yu murmured.
This entire forest was filled with sacrificed humans.
He had been wondering what that foetal fruit symbolised, and now that he recalled the shapes of those Yaos and the light at the end of that tunnel, Zhuo Yu suddenly remembered a saying.
It was said that humans who had had near-death experiences, after being revived by first aid, would say that they saw a long tunnel with light at the end. Some scholars believed that this originated from memories of infancy.
That tunnel was the tunnel of birth, and the light at the end was the light at which the infant first saw the world.
Zhuo Yu suddenly realised that the Yaos symbolised the competition to surpass your “spirit,” and under the combination of the Sacred Tree, the winner of the competition would become a “foetus.”.
The first level of this Mount Ming Pagoda symbolised “birth”!
“Hold on to me.” Long Ran tied himself and the tree branch together with a belt and turned to protect Zhuo Yu in his arms, and in the next moment, the fuse of that explo-sive finally burnt to the end.
With a loud bang, a powerful airflow rushed through the entire hall, and the snake swarm was thrown away in a large area. Zhuo Yu felt that his internal organs had shifted from the force, yet someone was still protecting him.
Broken bricks also splattered, and some unlucky people were hit by the fragments, with their abdominal cavities pierced. Others were smashed to the ground and drowned by the colourful snake swarm, quickly turning into thoughtless, red-skinned foetuses.
The first layer of this Mount Ming Pagoda had sifted half of the team.
Zhuo Yu caught his breath, then Long Ran moved; he undid the belt that held him in place; his right arm was cut by debris and dripping with bl-ood, but he didn’t even frown; he just continued to carry Zhuo Yu on his back and climbed towards the top of the sacred tree.
A large hole had been blown open there, and the second floor was waiting for them.
Dong Yao was the closest, and he reached out to touch the edge of the ceiling, utilising his upper body strength to bring himself into the second floor, as Luo Musheng shouted from below, “Hey, is there any danger on the second floor?”
However, no one responded…
But right now the situation was critical; the snakes survived the aftermath of the explosion and gathered together again to climb towards the sacred Tree, and the only dozen or so people left in the team couldn’t afford to stay on the radiation-filled first floor any longer.
If they stayed for another half an hour, even if they weren’t bitten to death by the snakes, they would die of ulceration due to the inability to regenerate the cells in their bodies.
Regardless of whether the second floor was dangerous or not, they had to go up!
Long Ran leaped and entered the hollow in the ceiling.
Just as they entered the second floor, screams of terror once again came from below; it turned out to be a mutated Yao flinging its serpentine tails and starting to climb up the sacred tree. And much faster than the humans!
Those yearlings couldn’t come up, but the Yao could.
After Zhuo Yu was let down, he laid on his back at the entrance of the cave and watched, and he saw that the Yao had already reached the man at the very end of the group, and the dozen or so flailing snake tails on its body wrapped around the other man at once, swallowed him whole, and crunched and chewed up the human flesh like a juicer.
But it wasn’t satisfied.
Having eaten a human, its size changed once again; that snaketail had faded its scales and turned into veritable tentacles, and each tentacle was full of barbed teeth and eyeballs of snakes; it looked almost like a torture device.
Liu Jingyun also climbed up to the second floor at this time, and she pulled Luo Musheng and Old Qin up, as well as the curator, Li Chuanning, who was at the end of the line and was just a little bit short of the tentacles wrapping around Li Chuanning’s ankles.
The huge Yao also tried to enter the second floor, but that hole was too small to hold its huge body; it could only force its tentacles in and then it just hit the hole with its body to try to expand it.
All the survivors were left with less than ten people.
Zhuo Yu breathed a sigh of relief. The bricks were very strong; even the explo-sive only blew a hole the size of a person; there was no way for that Yao to burst in anytime soon.
He stopped looking at the monster and looked around.
The second floor of the Mount Ming Pagoda was completely different from the first floor; there were no broken bones all over the place, not to mention the radium beads; it was calm to the point of being unbelievable; and it was quite ordinary; there were only black bricks, and even the interiors hadn’t been done, which was a huge contrast to the opulence below.
The second level was an empty level.
There was nothing inside.
Luo Musheng panted and held his thighs, gasping for air. “I can’t; it’s really too hard; I almost had to account for it here.”
[TN: meaning he almost died]
The audience let out the same exclamation as him.
[I say, isn’t the difficulty a bit off; it’s too evil.]
[If Lara Croft were to come to this relic, she would have to be accounted for here as well.]
[Those scholars are so miserable. Even if they survive, they are irradiated, the rest of their lives will be miserable.]
[What’s going to happen?]
[People who have been irradiated, their cells won’t regenerate, so they’ll rot bit by bit, and it’s an extremely painful death.]
[This… this is too horrible.]
[What are you thinking about? Those are just NPCs. They’ll come back to life in the next movie.]
[Why wasn’t Dong Yao so stupid this time? If he hadn’t touched the fruit, those snakes wouldn’t have woken up.]
[+1]
[Hey, can’t people miss once? If he didn’t miss, what would you guys watch?]
[Might as well curse Zhuo Yu together; have you seen what he’s contributed from start to finish? Dong Yao at least blew up the ceiling.]
[When does the betting board start? I’m going to bet on Zhuo Yu to die.]
The barrage began a new round of verbal battles. Unlike the bustling audience, the second floor of Mount Ming Pagoda was eerily quiet, with only the monster’s persistent thudding sound drifting in this vast space.
“After the newborn period has passed, it should be childhood, but why is this place empty?” Zhuo Yu was a bit puzzled; he tugged on Liu Jingyun’s clothes and said, “Explore the terrain.”
Before he could finish, Liu Jingyun’s brittle voice cut him off.
“Who are you?”
Zhuo Yu froze for a moment. He opened his eyes wide and realised that Liu Jingyun was still the same, but her eyes had changed, from an adult to clear eyes with some childishness, and her temperament was also very different from before.
“You ……”
“Where is this, ah? Did I transmigrate?!” She exaggeratedly retreated several steps in a row, with both excitement and trepidation in her eyes.
And she wasn’t the only one who was like this.
Luo Musheng quietly sat down and looked around flatly, seemingly having no particular thoughts about it, but he pushed his glasses up and hugged himself tighter.
Li Chuanning’s old face also overflowed with a childishness that didn’t match his body, curiously touching these bricks and murmuring, “Is it obsidian? Or is it granite? I want to collect a few pieces.”
It can’t be?
Zhuo Yu felt chills all over his body; he subconsciously looked at Long Ran and realised that Long Ran had also changed.
Long Ran’s eyes, they were no longer filled with protectiveness, but rather, it was wild and he alertly looked around; that kind of wolf cub-like eyes, it was as if he was going to attack whoever came close to him.
This was …
Dong Yao, who was the first to climb up to the second floor, finally spoke.
He walked over to Zhuo Yu’s side and scanned up and down, scrutinising him for a while before putting an arm around his shoulder to play it cool.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but, got any cigarettes?”
Dong Yao reached out toward Zhuo Yu and let out a roguish whistle. “Good looking, got a date?”
Zhuo Yu: Where did this junior high school punk come from?
He was extremely speechless now, but he didn’t have time to laugh at this actor with Wang Dazhi’s face because he realised the truth of the matter.
But he no longer had the ability to think; his brain was so foggy that he even saw Dong Yao’s hands as three. After a few moments, Zhuo Yu felt that his mind cleared up a lot, like it had calmed down.
“I’m still underage; I don’t fall in love.” Zhuo Yu smiled at him, “Also, I don’t like ugly men.”
Dong Yao:!!!
Dong Yao subconsciously touched his face and realised that there was a strange thing attached to his face; he tore the mask off along the gap and revealed his true face.
It was a handsome face, very manly, but unfortunately, with the contrast of Long Ran next to him, even the most handsome man would look dull.
“What the hell?” Dong Yao threw the mask on the ground and stomped on it a few times, “Fu-ck, where the hell is this place?”
Zhuo Yu was also a bit distressed. “Where’s my wheelchair?”
However, no one could give them an answer; the only response was the tentacles poking in from the cave entrance; the creature seemed to be stuck.
“What is that?” Liu Jingyun could barely hold back her screams as she stomped her feet hard a few times, picking up debris on the ground and throwing it at the half of the body that the Yao had burrowed in.
One of the archaeologists sat on the ground and wailed, “Mom, I want to go home!!!”
Zhuo Yu looked at these people in front of him with some suspicion; they were obviously all adults; how could they be more childish than him?
He also picked up the gravel and cut his finger with the sharp side.
It hurt, it bled; it wasn’t a dream.
He was obviously in a sanatorium in the US; how did he get to such a strange place in the blink of an eye? Had he watched too much horror and been approached by strange things as well?
Wait, his hands, did they get bigger?
Not only his hands, even his clothes were not right, his body wasn’t so strong, and there wasn’t much muscle on his arms, but now it seemed to be a pair of adult bodies that had undergone exercise.
Zhuo Yu somewhat boyishly held his cheeks as he tried to solve the current trouble.
“Everyone, stop arguing; look at yourselves; have you gotten bigger?”
“Wow, really, eh, I’ve become an adult!” Liu Jingyun looked at her arms and dark-coloured power suit in amazement and exclaimed, “I’ve become so cool.”
“How old are you?” Zhuo Yu asked her.
“I’m fifteen.”
“Me too.” Zhuo Yu looked to the others and said, “What about you guys?”
“Fifteen.”
“I’m fifteen.”
…… Sure enough, it seemed like something strange was happening.
Zhuo Yu looked at these children with adult faces and said, “Whatever happened, please calm down; you’d better worry about your lives.”
He sighed like a small adult, “That monster over there is going to burrow in. Is there a way to fix it?”
Luo Musheng, who had always been very self-absorbed, seemed to have extraordinary trust in Zhuo Yu, and he took the initiative to open up to Zhuo Yu in a way that surprised even him.
“I have a way.”
“Go ahead?”
Luo Musheng’s tone was a bit deadpan, and he said, “You see, we all suddenly came here, and we also became adult-like; it may be very much like transmigrating from our perspective, but I think that it’s the adult us that encountered some events that caused our minds to regress back to fifteen years old.”
Zhuo Yu nodded. “That’s what I think too.”
“So since we can be in this dangerous place, it means we are somewhat capable.” Luo Musheng pointed at Dong Yao and Long Ran, “The two of them have high muscle mass; it looks like they’ve gone through a lot of workouts, and their hands with knives are very steady. Our brain memory is unreliable, but muscle memory isn’t necessarily the same.”
He picked up the stone and threw it towards Long Ran.
Long Ran subconsciously raised his knife and flicked the stone away, his movements flowing with great precision.
“I understand what you mean.” Zhuo Yu looked like he had finally met a kindred spirit that he could talk to.
Luo Musheng also revealed a smile, but there was a hint of stiffness, as if he wasn’t very used to it. He removed all the props from his body and pushed his weapons and anything he could use to Long Ran and Dong Yao: “Main force, I’m relying on you guys.”
However, Long Ran, who had been protecting Zhuo Yu, seemed to have changed into a different person.
He gazed at the knife Luo Musheng handed him with his narrow phoenix eyes and only spat out a few words coldly, “Why should I save you guys?”
Indeed, the fifteen-year-old Long Ran had received a great deal of training, and one second he was at the border of Burma being used as a test gu-n target, only able to survive at gu-npoint by exhaustively running away in the jungle.
The next second he was in this place; he didn’t trust anyone.
This was troublesome; it seemed that this little friend wasn’t very cooperative.
Zhuo Yu blinked his big, pretty eyes and decided to play his little trick. Any adult that he stared at wouldn’t say no, right?
“But we really don’t know how to fight; we can only rely on you.” Zhuo Yu’s voice was very nice; he looked at Long Ran with wet eyes; his gaze had supplication and also implied some expectation, completely unlike the murderous Daemon King in the last copy.
Long Ran looked at Zhuo Yu and was instantly caught by the other party’s gaze.
“Bride…” Long Ran frowned and actually muttered somewhat at a loss for words.
“What did you say?” Zhuo Yu didn’t hear.
Long Ran oddly looked at Zhuo Yu for a few moments; he took a few deep breaths, then inclined his head and gritted his teeth. “Okay, stop looking at me; I agree.”
Zhuo Yu was surprised to find that this handsome man blushed.
And the blushing look was really nice, wasn’t it? It was the first time he’d seen someone with such an exquisite appearance; he was almost like a movie star. After solving this problem, should he leave contact information?
Zhuo Yu inexplicably felt that this person was very attractive to him, and he became curious.
On the other side, Dong Yao was unusually upset, feeling that he was ignored by these people; obviously he was part of the main force.
Although he didn’t know why, he still felt unhappy!
He spat out the match in his mouth and agreed with Luo Musheng’s words, ”Come on, who’s afraid of who? Isn’t it just a monster?” I haven’t lost a fight yet!”
Although the fifteen-year-old still panicked a little inside when he saw that horrible monster, the one with the glasses was right; they’d all die if they didn’t get rid of it…
He had a final exam tomorrow!
If he delayed the exam, he would be scolded again by his mom with his ears pulled, although he may also never see his mom again.
Luo Musheng nodded. “That’s good; let’s designate a plan.”
He seemed to see that Zhuo Yu couldn’t walk, so he took the initiative to sit next to Zhuo Yu. “What do you think?”
As for Liu Jingyun, who was watching from the sidelines, inexplicable words popped up in her heart.
What a Zhuo Daji!
She shook her head, shaking the strange thoughts out of her brain, but she couldn’t help but want to sit next to Zhuo Yu, as if she were clearly with Zhuo Yu. How could these people behave so intimately when she was here?
It felt like the lively Chinese cabbage at home had caught the attention of the pig, causing a great sensation.
[TN: This comes from patriarchal notions of a father-daughter relationship. The metaphor is that the father is a farmer who has lovingly raised his daughter/son, the cabbage. Then a pig (man/woman) comes along and eats (dates/marries) the beloved cabbage.]
Eh, did she know that pretty boy?
Zhuo ……
Liu Jingyun had a bit of a headache.
“That monster looks like a snake; what are snakes afraid of?” Luo Musheng was a bit distressed. “It seems like it doesn’t have any weaknesses.”
“No.” Zhuo Yu shook his head. “The weakness of snakes is the distance of attack. It’s fast, but its attacking stance is a catapult, so it’s also its body length. We should not be attacked as long as we stand outside the range of its body length.”
“Makes sense.”
Long Ran’s execution was strong, and when he heard the two of them say that, he directly picked up his sword and walked towards the monster.
He observed for a moment.
The monster was stuck in the hole and could only fling around with the tentacles of its upper body, with a range of about three meters. He approached the other party with certainty, scaring the others into telling him to stop.
But Long Ran didn’t stop.
He stood in a more extreme position, the monster just barely able to touch the tips of his shoes.
Long Ran’s hand rose and fell. With a poof, a tentacle covered in barbed teeth was chopped off by him, and he was also surprised to find out that after many years, his strength had become so great.
Zhuo Yu’s eyes lit up. “There, I see that the clothes on you guys are either cross-country or archaeological; quickly rummage around to see if there is any parachute rope.”
The crowd was unsure but still rummaged through the clothes and really found quite a few.
Zhuo Yu was grateful that he had read so many books; he knew that generally camping people or survivalist groups of maniacs would have parachute ropes, daggers, and other tools on their bodies. He took what Luo Musheng handed to him and tied the rope firmly to the hilt of his knife.
Zhuo Yu felt the power filling his upper limbs as he whipped the rope around like a cowboy before a dagger flew at what looked like the monster’s eyeball.
With a poof, the sharp dagger burst the monster’s eyeball, and it screeched in agony, its expression seeming to flinch.
Zhuo Yu yanked hard, and the knife flew back into his hand.
“This is really interesting, so this is what it feels like to have your eyeball shattered?” Zhuo Yu opened those almond eyes wide, as if he were enjoying this rare moment immensely.
“It’s a rare opportunity; let’s play something else.” He wrapped his fingers around the rope. “I just happen to want to write horror lately; let’s see if powerful monsters also cry out in pain before they die.”
The crowd looked at Zhuo Yu in horror, but Luo Musheng nodded his head at Zhuo Yu, “What a great statistic.”
Liu Jingyun seemed to have been infected by the two as well; she was no longer afraid of the monster because she knew that if she didn’t take this opportunity to ki-ll it, when it burrowed its way in, everyone wouldn’t be able to survive.
Following his example, she also threw up her knife at the Yao, who was being lynched and kept screaming and wailing as bl-ood splattered everywhere.
Long Ran, on the other hand, stood next to the Yao, trying to look for the thing’s fatal weakness, such as the heart and brain. But it was really too twisted; he was completely unable to see its full form and didn’t know where all the vital organs were hidden; he could only chop it down one by one.
Poor Yao, it had wanted to drill in and eat people, but now, it was being cut up by a group of children with knives, so miserable.
Long Ran was a little lost in thought, and the movements in his hands were mechanised.
He was thinking about that youth with beautiful almond eyes.
Ever since he was a child, Long Ran had been having a dream in which he didn’t seem to be a human being, but a creature that seemed like a dragon but not a dragon and a snake but not a snake, which was also the source of his name; his real name was Long Fen.
He lurked in the shadows, looking at the ancient altar with a coffin on it.
But its purpose wasn’t to contain the dead; he knew in his heart that lying in that coffin was the highest standard of treatment a human could enjoy.
A young man dressed in archaeological clothing kept moving forward under the lure of his voice and finally lay down in the coffin and closed his eyes.
It was his bride.
He had come to this world to find his bride.
He had waited for 130,000 years.
Long Ran felt like his mind was on the verge of assimilating with the serpent-like creature, but whenever he tried to look at the face in the coffin, his dreams would dissipate, awakening him in a long-lasting obsession.
Yet.
The current Long Ran was certain that he had found that person.
TN:
It’s heating uppppp
Tomorrow, I see ya ✌️
Thanks for the update
Thank you for the update~