bookbashuk Chapter 3 Block the Bridge, Come On!
Chapter 3 Block the Bridge, Come On!
Driven by his vision of the infinite possibilities of the future, Luo Lan was full of energy.
He fell back from in front of the vertical mirror, braced himself against the ground with his five fingers, and resumed his crawling posture, continuing to explore deeper into the underground palace without stopping.
But the size of this underground palace is ridiculously large for a left hand that can only crawl with its five fingers.
Luo Lan continued forward along the corridor. She was certain that she hadn't gone the wrong way or backtracked; there was no sign of her going in circles.
But the stone path in front of us stretched on and on in the dim light and shadow, as if it would never end.
Finally, after another brief activation of the [Thermal Vision lv.1] vision sensor, the single eye on the back of my hand caught a familiar wisp of purplish-black light.
Luo Lan quickly crawled over. A fresh trail of blood appeared in the middle of the road.
Following the purplish-black bloodstains, one crawls forward until the end of the bloodstains reveals a heavy iron gate lying askew on the ground.
The iron gate was clearly destroyed by a tremendous force from the outside in, and the cuts along the edge of the fence were as smooth as a mirror.
Based on my intuition, the cut looked like the mark left by an extremely sharp weapon that had cleanly severed the skin in one strike.
After bypassing the collapsed iron gate, Luo Lan discovered a second body.
This time, with the aid of vision, Luo Lan was finally able to properly observe his "food".
The corpse on the ground barely retained a human-like shape, and its body was more than two meters long.
It was cleaved in two diagonally upwards from the waist, the break clean, clearly suffering the same fate as the iron gate, killed by the same sharp weapon.
However, the degree of decomposition of the corpse far exceeded Luo Lan's expectations.
Although the blood flowing on the ground still radiated a warm, lingering life force in thermal vision, the surface of the corpse was already highly decomposed, with the skin and flesh mushy, making it impossible to tell what it looked like before it died.
[Perhaps this monster's blood has the inherent property of never drying out?]
Without dwelling on the unanswerable question, Luo Lan impatiently manipulated the white bone fingers, pounced on the pile of rotting flesh, and began to tear and devour it.
No matter how rotten it is, as long as you can extract the source material, it's good meat.
This time, with his sight, Luo Lan could see clearly how he "ate": the chunks of meat were crushed in his hands, vanished into thin air, and turned into wisps of blackish-purple mist, which were then absorbed by his bone hand.
[Chaos Essence +1]...
It's unclear how the rotting corpse moved when it was still alive. In any case, Luo Lan searched for a long time but couldn't find any bones or dig out a second eye.
Before long, the huge pile of rotting flesh was completely devoured by Luo Lan's bone claws, leaving only a faint ring of blood stains on the floor tiles.
[Current Chaotic Essence: 17]
With the source material reserves as a foundation, the next core task is to find monster materials that can be used to consume source material and assemble parts.
Can't you just crawl around with a bare bone claw all the time? That would be too inefficient.
……
……
After crawling through the underground palace for an unknown amount of time, the familiar heat source reaction reappeared in the [thermal vision] in the underground palace corridor.
With her fingers flying and her knuckles slapping the floor tiles, Luo Lan quickly crawled towards the source of heat.
But just as they were about to reach their target, Luo Lan suddenly stopped.
[Something's not right.]
Other orange-red objects appeared in the thermal vision, moving around.
With her five fingers gripping the edge of the stone bricks in the corner, Luo Lan half-hanged in the shadows, regaining her normal vision, and began to observe.
The area around the rotting corpse was quite lively. Several small black monsters were crawling around the lump of rotten flesh.
These monsters weren't very large. Each one was about forty centimeters long and twenty centimeters wide.
They are covered with hard, thick, dark brown shells on their backs, resembling enlarged sea turtles. But protruding from beneath the shells are slender, multi-segmented appendages similar to those of a spider.
At the front of each monster's head, four pairs of murky compound eyes were densely packed together.
They gathered in groups of three or five around the rotting flesh, their serrated mouthparts protruding from their hard shells, tearing at the corpse's flesh.
[Where did this bug come from? Why is it stealing my things?]
Despite feeling indignant, Luo Lan dared not make a move.
Even a single bone hand might not be able to defeat a bug this big in a head-on confrontation. Let alone so many gathered here.
There was nothing else Luo Lan could do but patiently continue observing.
Compared to Luo Lan, the feeding speed of this group of beetles was ridiculously slow.
They extended their mouthparts and grazed the rotting flesh several times before laboriously tearing off a small strip of meat to swallow.
After almost half a day, the pile of rotting corpse on the ground visibly deflated, and the group of beetles finally stopped moving.
They retracted their mouthparts into their shells, dragged their heavy bodies, and slowly left the corridor in a line.
[Finally gone...]
Once the last beetle disappeared from sight, Luo Lan immediately prepared to take over the remaining scraps.
Before he could get close, several identical beetles lined up and crawled in from the other end of the corridor, taking over the positions of the previous group and forming a circle to start eating.
[Depend on!]
Luo Lan clenched her fingers and retreated back into the shadows. She cursed under her breath.
For the next few days, Luo Lan simply lay low in this area.
He watched the rotting corpse on the ground shrink little by little, while secretly figuring out the activity patterns of these insects.
All the beetles came out from a large gap at the end of the underground palace.
Looking through the gap, one sees a vast space resembling an underground cavern.
Above them were cold, upside-down stalactites, and below them was a bottomless pool of black water.
Above the pool, an extremely narrow natural stone bridge spans the water, connecting the exit of the underground palace to the opposite bank deeper into the cave.
The bridge's surface was covered in moisture and lichen, making it slippery and gritty.
Because of the poor and extremely narrow road conditions, these gregarious beetles have to obediently spread out in a one-way line every time they pass through here.
[This terrain...blocks the bridge!]
After finalizing the plan, Luo Lan immediately darted out from his hiding place as another wave of feeding beetles disappeared at the end of the cave.
After searching around the entrance to the stone bridge, I found a horizontal crack in the rock wall above the bridge, deep enough to fit my first two knuckles completely.
Luo Lan tugged on the railing to make sure it was secure, and then her entire hand was suspended on the vertical rock wall about half a meter above the stone bridge, perfectly concealed by the shadow cast by the protruding rock wall.
Remain still and wait patiently.
Not long after, another group of insects arrived. Four beetles lined up and stepped onto the narrow stone bridge.
Luo Lan hovered in mid-air, his single eye fixed on the movements below.
[One, two, three...]
The first three beetles tapped their segments rapidly on the lichen-covered stone bridge, moving quite steadily, and soon passed directly below Luo Lan.
The fourth beetle, however, was noticeably behind. It had slipped after crushing a patch of lichen, and after regaining its footing, it was already more than two meters behind the main group.
[Chance!]
Luo Lan suddenly released his grip on the crevice in the rock. His entire skeletal left hand slammed straight down towards the fourth, lagging beetle.
It will arrive in an instant!