Chapter 28: A New Crisis
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Su Liu’s reactions were astonishingly fast!
The instant the moss bulged and her footing became unstable, she had no time even to think. Her intent to store the iron fragment in her spatial vault erupted in perfect unison with the movement of her body.
She sprang backward, pushing off with the tips of her toes against the raised moss. At the same time, her right hand shot out like lightning, drawing the severed piece of refined iron dragon bone into her spatial storage.
She had barely retreated three steps when the patch of raised moss at the place she had been cutting split open. Beneath it, the dark, sodden earth churned like a rising tide.
Luke and Mo Yu had already closed ranks, the three of them quickly forming a makeshift defensive formation with their backs pressed together.
From underground came a slow, ponderous scraping, accompanied by the deep rumble of rolling stones. The sound grew steadily clearer as it approached the surface...
The mossy ground burst apart!
Three gray-brown, jointed limbs coated in slime tore through the earth, their pincers at the tips twisting toward the three of them amid a foul, corrosive stench.
“It’s a Vein Guardian!”
Mo Yu’s black crow shrieked a warning. He thrust his black sword forward, striking precisely at the joint of one pincer, but the blow rang out like metal against stone, leaving only a shallow mark.
“Carapace strength: S-rank!” Luke’s Analyzer cried. “The weakness is in the soft tissue at the joints!”
Su Liu instantly activated the Hourglass of the Chen Hour—slowing the closing pincers while accelerating Mo Yu’s thrust.
The black sword’s trajectory blurred abruptly as it plunged through a gap in the carapace.
Foul bodily fluid sprayed through the air, and the guardian released a piercing, high-frequency shriek.
“Fall back!” Mo Yu withdrew his sword and retreated sharply.
The wounded limb began savagely pounding the ground, sending violent tremors through the entire island.
More cracks spread across the surrounding earth, and more scraping sounds echoed from below!
“We can’t fight it head-on!” Su Liu spotted holes in the exposed rock wall through the cracks. “The crow is pointing that way! Into the cave!”
The three of them charged toward the jagged rock wall.
The holes, each roughly the size of a bowl, looked like countless dark eye sockets in the dim light, radiating menace and the unknown.
Mo Yu’s black crow let out a sharp cry and darted first into one of the larger openings like a javelin hurled into ink.
Mo Yu followed close behind, his figure flashing once at the entrance before vanishing inside.
“Go!” Su Liu barked, shoving Luke forward when he hesitated at the warning from his Analyzer.
Luke stumbled and plunged into a nearby opening.
Su Liu herself ducked and rolled. A third barbed limb, freshly erupted from the earth and dripping with corrosive slime, swept toward her lower back. At the very last instant, she slipped into the same opening Mo Yu had entered.
“Rumble—!”
The barbed limb smashed into the rock wall outside the entrance, sending fragments of stone flying.
The dull impact reverberated through the narrow passage, making Su Liu’s eardrums hum.
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The cave instantly fell into total darkness. Only the frantic beating of wings deep within the passage and Mo Yu’s low warning reached them.
“Watch your step. The slope leads downward!”
The three of them crowded into the narrow, downward-sloping tunnel. The smell of soil and damp stone mingled with something stranger and more intense—
Something like an aged medicinal herb mixed with fermented earth and... insects.
The ground was uneven, covered in loose stones and slick moss.
Outside the cave, the shrieks and heavy digging of the enraged Vein Guardian sounded like a death summons, drawing nearer and nearer.
The grinding noise of rock being torn apart was deafening. The entire passage shook as debris pattered down around them.
The enormous jointed creature seemed determined to dig them out and crush them beneath its body.
“We can’t stay here! We’ll be buried alive!”
Luke’s Analyzer flashed an urgent red, displaying the rapidly accumulating stress in the rock above them.
“Let the crow scout ahead! Stay close!” Mo Yu commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument.
Without the slightest hesitation, he followed the black crow as it flew off once more, rushing deeper into the darkness below.
Su Liu and Luke could only grit their teeth and follow.
The darkness swallowed almost everything. They could only judge their direction by the deeper shadow of Mo Yu’s black robes whenever it flickered ahead and by the faint sound of his footsteps.
Every tremor made their hearts pound, as though the passage overhead might collapse completely at any moment.
Elsewhere, at the stern of the Symbiotic Vessel.
“Aah! What bit me?”
Aya jerked her hand back, dragging up a clump of wet moss.
She had been struggling to clear the mud from the breach, trying to find more usable wreckage, when a small swarm of thumb-sized insects suddenly poured out from beneath the overturned, damp moss. Their shells were black and glossy, and their mouthparts resembled miniature digging shovels.
They moved with astonishing speed, crawling purposefully toward the exposed wooden hull that Aya had cleared and the metal support point that Squeak had just barely stabilized with energy.
“Hiss, hiss, hiss—!”
A scalp-crawling sound of corrosion filled the air.
The insects’ mouthparts secreted pale green slime. Wherever it touched the wooden hull, the wood blackened, softened, and decomposed at a visible rate.
When it reached the metal supports, bubbles and rust spots rapidly spread across the surface.
“Corrosion beetles! They’ve built nests beneath the damaged moss!”
Chen Wu roared. He slapped several beetles off his arm, but the center of his palm burned fiercely where the corrosive fluid had touched it.
“Damn it! Keep them away from the wood! Protect the repair points!”
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Lorin screamed and stumbled backward, nearly knocking over the vital kerosene lamp at the stern.
The moonlight rabbit, Little Moon, was startled by the swarm as well. Its pure white fur stood on end, and it let out threatening croaks. A milky-white radiance brighter than usual spread around its body, driving back a small cluster of beetles approaching it and Lorin, but it was nowhere near enough to stem the surging tide of insects.
“Squeak!”
Aya’s eyes nearly bulged with panic. Her repair hamster, Squeak, was being attacked by several beetles as it tried to protect the critical support point.
Though the little hamster leaped nimbly about, striking with its hardened forepaws, corrosive liquid still splashed across its body in several places. It squealed in pain.
The light of the kerosene lamp seemed to inhibit the beetles to some degree, but only faintly.
The swarm continued to pour forth without end, as though the moss layer covering the entire island were their nest.
The protected area and its temporary peace had been utterly shattered. The fragile repair work was abruptly interrupted and now faced total collapse.
Beside the helm, the fuel gauge on the kerosene lamp quietly dropped another fraction amid the chaos.
Deep within the cavern.
No one knew how long they had been running downward when Mo Yu suddenly stopped and raised a hand.
“Quiet.”
The tremors from the surface and the guardian’s furious digging seemed to have been muffled by the thick layers of rock, becoming distant and indistinct.
Yet all three of them clearly sensed that they were no longer in a single downward passage.
The space before them opened up—not into a broad cavern, but into an immense underground chamber of extraordinary complexity.
Countless holes of varying sizes spread across the rock walls around them and overhead, branching in every direction like the capillaries of some monstrous creature and extending deep into the darkness beyond sight.
The strange mixture of medicinal herbs, fermented earth, and insects had grown overwhelmingly strong.
Astonishingly, the enormous space was not completely dark.
A faint glow rose from below.
The three of them lightened their steps and carefully approached the edge of the ledge where they stood, peering downward.
Below lay an even vaster subterranean vault.
Its floor was covered by a strange carpet of fungi that emitted a dim, ghostly blue light.
The fungal carpet writhed faintly as though alive, blanketing the ground and climbing over a colossal three-dimensional structure built from an unknown substance.
The structure was so huge and intricate that it took their breath away. Layer upon layer, it was riddled with holes and passageways, resembling a vast and grotesque...
anthill.
Within the holes and tunnels illuminated by the fungal glow, and across the fungal carpet itself, vague shapes could be seen moving.
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