Overwheld with a toxic mixture of pure anger and emotion, I recklessly rushed towards Liangyu’s unmoving form in the hope to see if he was sohow miraculously alive.
Before I could even reach him, a cold palm pressed down hard against my shoulder, stopping dead in my tracks.
"It’s no use," Aunt Hua’s voice reached into my ear. "He’s gone. They all are."
I roared, spinning around and striking out with a fist aid at her smug face.
Her physical body vanished into mist, dissolving like clouds pushed away by the wind.
She reappeared a second later, floating safely midair several feet away, bearing a highly satisfied smirk on her face.
I tightly clenched both my fists in blinding anger, abandoning all rational combat tactics, and started blindly running towards her to attack her with my bare hands.
She swiftly began dodging my attacks with insulting ease. Each and every single ti she dodged a punch or sidestepped a kick, she chuckled harder, her laughter actively adding explosive fuel to my burning fire.
When I entirely lost control of myself, my vision tunnelled and I started attacking with no rhythm, strategy or form whatsoever. That is precisely when she decided it was her turn to play.
She would instantly appear right beside , drive a punch into my ribs, and then instantly disappear before I could react. Then she would appear behind , deliver a kick to the back of my knees, and disappear again.
This completely one-sided, humiliating torture went on for a frustratingly long period of ti.
I was nothing but a punching bag. Eventually, I started hitting my physical limit. My legs gave out, and I fell heavily to the dirt ground, trying to suck air into my screaming lungs.
She appeared once again, hovering directly over . But the arrogant smirk was gone this ti. Her eyes were devoid of rcy.
"This isn’t enough," she stated flatly. "I want to have more fun with you."
She made a few intricate gestures with her arms. The earth rumbled beneath and a terrifying bunch of thick roots erupted from the ground. They wrapped around my limbs, pinning to the floor and rendering immovable.
I thrashed screaming as I struggled to escape the wooden bindings.
Aunt Hua rely flicked her wrist. One of the massive roots clenched my left arm, breaking it in half.
As I scread out in pain, Aunt Hua threw her head back and exclaid, "Yes! That’s right! That is exactly the music I wanted to hear!"
With my face drenched in a mixture of cold sweat and warm blood, I glared up at her with a blurry vision and spat, "I’ll fucking kill you!!"
With a deadpan expression, she simply flicked her finger once more.
Another thick, sharpened root shot up from the dirt and stabbed right into the center of my chest.
The wind left my body in a wet gasp.
"It’s so beautifully poetic to see you go out in the exact sa manner as your beloved best friend," she whispered mockingly, floating down so her face was inches from mine. "Liangyu, wasn’t it?"
My vision was rapidly darkening around the edges. But with the last shred of remaining strength I possessed, just as I was about to finally pass out, I used my remaining breath to scream a single word at the top of my lungs, "LONGWEI!!"
In a fraction of a split second, Aunt Hua’s triumphant and sadistic smile dropped. Her face turned pale.
"What?" she breathed, looking around frantically.
My scream seed to severely loosen her iron grip on whatever twisted magic she was controlling. The tension in the thick roots imdiately slackened, and they let go of my bleeding body.
For a brief mont, I sohow snapped back to my senses. My primal instinct, overriding the pain and the blood loss, was to get the hell out of there and run away.
Despite a broken arm and a literal hole in my chest, my adrenaline flooded legs seed to gain just enough explosive strength to launch upward. I sprinted at full speed, ignoring the branches whipping my face.
I ran deep into the heart of the forest for quite a while, trying to put as much distance between us as possible, until my unnatural surge of adrenaline finally began to run out.
I dropped heavily to the ground, dragging my body to hide behind the thick base of a massive tree.
I wiped my sweaty face with my shivering, blood-stained palms, trying to forcefully collect my spiraling thoughts. I actively couldn’t believe what had just happened.
I had quite possibly, right in front of my own eyes, lost every single one of my closest friends. It was way too much horrific trauma for my brain to process or bear.
But, I reminded myself of one of the many vital lessons I had learned growing up. When sothing insanely chaotic like this happens, you must try and forcibly use your logical brain to calm down and objectively make sense of things.
So, closing my eyes, I forced myself to take a long breath, and ntally tried to recollect exactly what had sequentially happened, right from the very beginning of the ambush.
I inhaled sharply.
’Wait,’ I thought to myself, my eyes suddenly snapping open. ’How did I just take a deep breath? Wasn’t my chest literally just stabbed straight through by a tree root?’
Panic briefly flared, but logic quickly suppressed it. I looked down at my chest and used my hand to cautiously feel the fabric of my shirt.
Nothing.
What should have been a gaping hole positioned right between my ribs was... gone. My chest was intact.
As my mind began looking for logical answers, it instead guided to ask all the right questions.
I looked around and first took careful notice of the dirt right before . There was a colony of ants marching in a perfectly straight line. Unless there is a specific bunch of physical obstructions forcing them into a straight path, ants always move like a river with a lot of curves.
I then noticed the fallen green leaves scattered on the ground, right beside my leg. I picked one up. None of the webbing across the leaf’s surface were what you would ever consider natural. They looked as if they were ticulously drawn by a deranged architect obsessed with symtry.
Then ca the sunlight. As I looked up above, the physical orb of the sun was clearly located far to my right. Yet, defying every known law of physics, the sunrays piercing through the trees were hitting the ground at a sharp angle directly from the left.
At long last, my brain processed the sound. Or, rather, the total lack of it, if I’m being accurate. In all this long ti spent in the forest, I had not heard even a single chirp from any living bird.
The final nail in the coffin was my own mory.
I asked myself a very simple question. ’How the hell did I possess the first-person mories of looking at my friends dying when I wasn’t even present in those locations to witness them?’
I was wandering alone, calling out their nas, and then, completely out of nowhere, I was standing over Qinyue’s body. Then, I started running into the forest, and suddenly, I was standing in a clearing with Liangyu, Jian, and i in a re mont.
I even pushed myself to deeply rember the details of the horrifying things I saw.
Qinyue was heavily bleeding, yes, but the sheer physical damage dealt to her abdon should’ve produced a bigger puddle of blood.
Jian’s crushed arm was visibly sticking out from under the boulder, but in my mory, there seed to have been more than just five fingers attached to his hand.
i was undeniably dead, lying on the ground, but I did not rember her wearing the specific set of clothes I saw her dressed in that exact morning.
Everything had happened so quickly, devoid of any logical, spatial, or chronological connections with each other. It flowed exactly like... a dream.
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