After the battle ended, the water was still filled with unsettled murk and faint blue streaks of blood.
Norris and Ming each held onto a mycelial tendril from an oxygen-supply puji, replenishing the oxygen they had consud. The oxygen puji visibly shrank, its body slimming down before their eyes.
Ming’s clothes had practically been reduced to rags during his all-offense, no-defense fighting style, yet his exposed skin bore almost no wounds at all.
Norris had several shallow cuts on his body, but under his powerful self-healing ability, they had already mostly recovered.
He didn’t possess Ming’s absurd 【Physical Immunity】, but he did have 【Physical Resistance LV10】, making it difficult for ordinary attacks to cause him any real harm.
The most seriously injured was the fishman guide.
When Norris had gone all out earlier to rescue Ming, the fishman had been surrounded by three enemies at once.
By the ti Norris remotely directed Jida to co to its aid, one of the fishman’s arms had already been severed. Now it was pressing a dark green ointnt with a strong scent of seaweed and minerals tightly against the stump to stop the bleeding.
Norris swam over and, under the fishman’s puzzled gaze, picked up the severed arm that was floating nearby.
He planned to bring it back and see if he could try helping the fishman reattach it through mycelial symbiosis.
But judging from the look in the fishman’s eyes, it probably thought this human wanted to collect its limb—or sothing even worse.
The language barrier was, in the end, a real obstacle.
The Mushroom Garden really is better… Norris couldn’t help sighing inwardly.
There, even different races could communicate freely through the fungal network.
After hastily treating its wound, the fishman imdiately struggled over to the base of the statue. With its remaining hand, it tremulously stroked the stone pedestal, now pitted and scarred by the monsters’ destruction. Low, mournful “gurgle” sounds ca from its throat, as if lanting, or perhaps repenting its failure as a guardian.
Ming looked up at the female statue towering over twenty ters tall, with tentacles for hair and indistinct facial features, and asked curiously, “Who’s this carved to look like?”
“The God of Death, Nephrila, I guess,” Norris also looked up, his tone uncertain. “Aren’t these fishn supposed to worship her? But… this is my first ti seeing a statue of the God of Death. So this is what she looks like.”
“What are these gods even good for?” Ming asked, confused. “Back in the deathmatch arena, I’d sotis et people who prayed to so God of Light right before dying. The God of Light never ca to save anyone. This God of Death probably won’t either, right?”
Norris shrugged. He more or less shared the sa view.
Before eting the boss, he had barely counted as a casual believer of the God of Light himself, but that deity had clearly never spared a glance for soone as insignificant as him.
“Don’t say things like that in front of the fishn,” Norris reminded him. “Before we ca, the boss specifically told us not to provoke them over matters of faith.”
Ming imdiately nodded solemnly.
The boss’s instructions had to be followed to the letter!
Neither Norris nor Ming knew that the puji supplying them with oxygen at this very mont was a specially modified unit with knight-level combat strength.
Facing enemies of unknown power, how could Lin Jun possibly just throw Ming into the field and completely wash his hands of it?
The knight puji had been observing the battle the entire ti. Only after confirming that the threat level was within a controllable range did it refrain from intervening directly, treating it as a live combat exercise for the two of them.
At this mont, Lin Jun’s attention was also focused on the statue of the God of Death—but what he was seeing was completely different from Norris and Ming.
【Inspiration LV8】
That statue… was flickering!
This was the first ti he had ever seen sothing like this.
Not only was it the first ti he had encountered a soul that appeared and disappeared intermittently, it was also the first ti he had seen any trace of a soul inside a purely inanimate object like a stone statue!
Appearing inside a statue of the God of Death… could this be the soul of the God of Death herself?
But Lin Jun had also observed statues inside human churches of the God of Light before. Aside from being exquisitely and solemnly carved, those stone statues were just stone, with no special traces whatsoever.
Lin Jun tried touching the statue with a tendril, but nothing happened.
Below, Norris and Ming hadn’t forgotten Lin Jun’s task.
Jida was holding the last surviving seafood monster tightly in its arms.
It was extrely fresh, and its struggling was still fierce, but under Jida’s absolute strength, all resistance was futile.
The three of them escorted the captive cautiously back along the original route, bringing it to the rift entrance chamber that led to the puji dungeon.
By now, this space had completely changed.
In the water, clusters of broad, flexible mycelial kelp swayed gently, forming an underwater forest. Along their edges grew glowing mushrooms that emitted faint blue, pale green, and light violet light.
Above them, near the water’s surface that had once been empty, floated a continuous layer of mycelial seaweed, like an inverted glowing grassland, also dotted with countless points of luminescence.
Each individual light was dim, but with hundreds upon thousands gathered together, it was as if an entire starry sky had been transplanted into the water. A galaxy hung upside down in the depths, creating a scene that was both strange and breathtakingly beautiful.
If not for the fact that the seafood monster, tightly bound by several strands of mycelial kelp and being dragged toward the depths of this “sea of stars,” was screaming in such agonizing misery, Norris might have had more leisure to appreciate the view.
Beneath the monster’s blue-gray carapace, mycelium writhed.
Plump, glowing mushrooms tore through flesh, forcing their way out from the gaps in the shell.
Pale blue blood and shredded muscle fibers were rcilessly squeezed out by the newborn fungal bodies, mixing into the surrounding water.
The monster howled in agony, but the mycelium did not slow in the slightest.
Its four compound eyes, which had once glead with blue light, were replaced one by one. Swollen mushroom bodies burst out from within, shattering the crystalline lenses. In the end, four differently colored glowing mushrooms slowly blood within the hollow eye sockets.
When the monster’s final distorted, warped scream finally cut off, dissolving into a trail of weakly rising bubbles, a lifeless mushroom puppet quietly floated within the beautiful “galaxy.”
Norris silently withdrew from the room, his stomach feeling unsettled.
Ming, on the other hand, watched with great interest, his eyes filled with pure curiosity, as if he were watching an unusual magic show.
Lin Jun paid no attention to their reactions.
Because at this mont, he was completely imrsed in a strange scene that had suddenly appeared.
…
The instant the mycelium successfully parasitized the monster and established a connection, this vision crashed into Lin Jun’s consciousness.
On a pitch-black, barren, perfectly flat land, countless coffins were arranged in neat rows.
Row after row, line after line, perfectly orderly, stretching toward the end of his vision until they vanished into the hazy darkness in the distance.
At an unimaginably far point, where the land seed to et an even deeper darkness, an incomparably massive shadow lood, like a strangely shaped mountain.
Lin Jun subconsciously raised his head, looking up at the sky of this space.
There was nothing there.
No sun. No moon. No stars.
Only pure, absolute blackness.
What the hell is this?
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