The Fifth Layer of the Scarecrow Abyss
The Scarecrow Abyss, fourth-layer overlapping space: the Forgotten Manor.
A long corridor stretched ahead, dim and decayed under the flickering candlelight.
The space was saturated with an invisible yet extrely concentrated corrosive curse. An ordinary person without protection wouldn’t last even half a minute here before being corroded into a pile of rotten flesh.
Even more frightening were the scarecrow guards dressed in tailcoats within the manor, along with their attendant servant monsters—not to ntion the most terrifying existence in the manor, the scarecrow butler.
Even true experts had to proceed with extre caution. Once entangled by the guards and drawing the butler’s attention, there had been precedents of sanctum-level powerhouses dying here.
Yet at this mont, those scarecrow guards—wearing black tailcoats utterly mismatched with their straw bodies—had lost all threat.
They lay slumped crookedly along the corridor and against the walls in various incomplete, mangled states.
The dreadful corrosive curse still lingered in the air, but to the victor now standing within the manor, it seed little more than a seasoning that added flavor.
Pop… pop pop…
Red and green slis bounced cheerfully along the corridor.
They completely ignored the curse, instead gathering beside the remains of the scarecrows, digesting the evil grass that made up their bodies.
These slis had originally been confined to the third layer, the Lost Estate, serving as sothing akin to watchdogs. Now they had turned on their masters—and even erged victorious.
A Hollow Ooze Walker strode rhythmically through the corridor.
His body was composed of constantly circulating gelatinous liquid, maintaining a humanoid outline. He even wore clothes, though his interior was completely hollow, with magical glows occasionally flowing through him.
In one liquid-ford hand, he casually held the shattered remains of the scarecrow butler. The lower half of the corpse was already gone, its edges slowly being digested by the ooze hand and converted into pure energy.
Perched on his shoulder was a red-and-green bicolored sli. All the slis currently feasting in the corridor had split off from it.
As the ooze walker passed by, the slis feeding along both sides of the corridor abandoned the partially digested scarecrow remains beneath them and hopped after him.
Then, a certain magical resonance rippled among them, and the slis gradually rged together.
By the ti the ooze walker reached the study door at the deepest part of the manor, the slis behind him had fused into a massive python-like form that nearly filled most of the corridor.
Inside the room, the shelves held no books—only bundles of evil grass. It seed that within the entire Forgotten Manor, there was nothing else left worth exploring.
For the vast majority of adventurers who entered this place, that was indeed the case.
But the visitor knew that this dungeon still possessed a fifth overlapping layer.
A glow of magic spread from the ooze walker’s forehead, revealing a hidden magical lock on the bookshelf.
Just as he raised an arm to touch and undo this intricate lock, his movent stopped without warning.
After a mont, he slowly lowered his arm, temporarily casting aside the matter of unlocking it. He turned and sat down on the only chair in the study, sinking into silent contemplation.
The sli python obediently coiled itself and remained motionless. Only the bicolored sli seed a little impatient, hopping back and forth between the ooze walker’s shoulder and head.
After a long while, the ooze walker—or rather, the Demon King—ca back to himself.
Just monts ago, a sli he was remotely controlling had been surrounded by three puji and stomped to death in an extrely humiliating manner.
The malice contained within that act had been transmitted back without any attempt at concealnt, leaving him sowhat puzzled—what kind of grudge was this?
That sli had originally been tasked with gathering intelligence and monitoring the movents of the Hand of Passing Death.
That organization, backed by a true god, might not be large in scale, but the priority of its intelligence even surpassed that of information related to the Empire.
And yet, that sli had suffered an undeserved calamity, running straight into…
“Puji…”
He had, of course, secretly observed these things before, but he had never been able to figure out the form of their existence.
He possessed a level of understanding of this world far beyond that of ordinary people. As a result, puji—already accepted by most and even regarded as commonplace—appeared to him as almost incomprehensible beings.
These puji clearly shared sothing like a unified will. It might be the mushroom folk, or perhaps there was an existence even above them.
But that still didn’t explain how their numbers could be so vast, and their structure so… homogeneous.
Even the closest comparable entity in his mories—the Qiss['Chiss, 奇斯']—only possessed its astonishing numbers because of the eyeworms acting as core control nodes.
For the Qiss, the eyeworms were the true extensions of its will, extrely limited in number. Ordinary Qiss individuals detached from the eyeworms, no matter how powerful, were nothing more than mindless, instinct-less husks—hardly complete lifeforms.
But puji were different. Every single one was complete.
What puzzled him even more was that what they carried within them was not pseudo-souls, but genuine souls.
Such a phenonon wouldn’t be strange in independent lifeforms with self-awareness—but puji were clearly a collective species…
It was as if all puji were actually a single individual, sharing one enormous soul.
The conclusion was too absurd.
Its level of absurdity was comparable to calculating a running speed and ending up with a value exceeding the speed of light.
The Demon King had a vague premonition that these puji might very well beco stumbling blocks in his plans in the future.
Therefore, when the ti was right, he intended to investigate the secrets behind them.
Of course, for now, the top priority was still to recover his strength as quickly as possible—at the very least, to a level sufficient for self-preservation.
A pseudopod extended from his body and touched the magical lock.
Just two seconds.
The complex magical lock was effortlessly undone.
The surrounding space blurred, and he and the slis descended once more, arriving at the true core of the Scarecrow Abyss.
There was no light here—only pure darkness that devoured all sight.
“You… should not have co here yet,” a hoarse, desiccated voice echoed from the depths of the darkness. “The term of three hundred and thirty-three years has not yet elapsed.”
“Plans are always overtaken by changes,” the Demon King’s voice erged from his flowing ooze body, calm and rational. “Due to certain accidents, I ca out early.”
“An agreent is an agreent! The ti has not yet co. Even if you are the one who made the pact, you have no right to set foot here now! Leave!”
In the darkness, countless dark-purple points of light lit up one by one—eyes, densely packed, layer upon layer, each brimming with malice.
Illuminated by those dark-purple eyes, the massive body of a monster composed of evil grass appeared indistinctly.
“I know,” the Demon King was not surprised by this turn of events—otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered creating that sli python. “How tragic. No matter how perfectly thought and reaction are simulated, a pseudo-soul is still a pseudo-soul. It can never give birth to a true self.”
The sli python lunged forward, magical radiance converging within the Demon King’s translucent body.
The core space of darkness was soon filled with surging magic and horrifying, piercing shrieks.
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