Dew still clung to the grass waves in the early morning.
Ryan had completely cleared away the traces of last night's bloody battle with light, and the seven disemboweled corpses had all turned into dark black humus amidst white smoke and foul stench.
The girl, carrying the tightly wrapped dry wood, followed three paces behind Ryan. She didn't dare get too close, her eyes occasionally sweeping over Ryan's clean, slender hands, which had just fastened his trench coat cuffs.
Last night, he had used these very hands to pierce the throats and brainstems of seven living people without even a blink.
Ryan sensed the girl's hesitation behind him. He didn't turn around, nor did he use gentle words to comfort the fear appropriate for her age.
“Let's go.”
The two brief words cut through the morning mist. Ryan stepped on the semi-dry weeds and walked directly northwest. Lucia shivered, then quickly trotted to catch up.
On the afternoon of the third day, the long, silent grassland finally showed something unusual.
As they walked, Ryan suddenly raised his hand silently, signaling them to stop.
The rapid calculations of 【Lantern】 laid out clear data tracks deep within his pupils: the wind's direction, the broken edges of grass blades, and an extremely faint physical disturbance in a low-lying thicket ahead.
Those weren't signs of natural wind erosion.
Ryan pulled down the hem of his trench coat and quietly moved along the slope. Lucia followed closely, crouching low.
Pushing aside the half-yellowed bushes, what appeared before them was a long-abandoned temporary camp.
The camp wasn't large; a few linen tents, torn to shreds by wind and rain, lay slumped in the mud. There were no corpses, no residual bloodstains, but the air was filled with a pungent chemical smell, like a mixture of strong acid and rotting organs.
“Teacher… there's a smell here…” Lucia whispered.
Ryan ignored her and walked directly to a makeshift stone platform.
Scattered on the platform were several broken glass test tubes, their walls coated with a layer of dark green, dried sediment. In the mud beside the platform, several plant remains, their cores hollowed out, were half-buried—their form identical to the plants they had seen deep within the secret realm.
Ryan put on his leather gloves and used the tip of his scalpel to pick up a strand of dark green sediment, bringing it close to his eye.
Someone had once set up a makeshift laboratory here, specifically to study the unique plants that had emerged from the secret realm!
“Not natives of the secret realm,” Ryan's voice was low and steady, “but external extraordinary beings… who conducted experiments here.”
Lucia leaned against a dead tree, her small face instantly drained of color.
“Teacher…” The girl pressed her temples, her eyes uncontrollably flushing with a sickly red, her breathing ragged as if enduring some immense tearing sensation. “There's… a sound here. Not the sound of living people… it's a kind of… a kind of severed pain.”
“They were stitching living people's organs… together with these flowers…” Lucia's voice took on a faint whimper, and she even felt a slight nausea, “Many people were crying… they were looking for an exit…”
Ryan looked at the trembling Lucia, not allowing her to wallow in the negative emotions.
He scraped a small bottle of dark green sediment with the tip of his steel scalpel, neatly sealed it with a glass stopper, and put it into his coat.
“That's enough information.” Ryan turned and slapped Lucia lightly on the back of her head, breaking her sensory resonance with the residual pain. “Let's leave.”
“Aren't we going to investigate further?” Lucia rubbed her neck, still a bit shaken.
“The experimental traces are at least three years old. Staying here would only expose our position and is worthless.” Ryan stepped out of the abandoned camp without looking back.
The two returned to the vast grassland.
That night, the cold wind howled.
Ryan lit some smokeless dry branches in a rock crevice. Lucia huddled by the fire, wrapping her blanket tightly around herself.
Just as Lucia was dozing off, Ryan, sitting in the shadows, suddenly poked the fire. The golden light deep within his pupils subtly dimmed.
In 【Lantern】's long-range perception net, a faint but extremely viscous reaction appeared behind a small hill about two kilometers away.
The other party didn't approach, nor did they erupt with killing intent; they merely hovered in the depths of the night like a sinister vulture, fixated on the bonfire from afar.
Someone was tracking them.
Ryan's fingers traced the cold hilt of the scalpel at his waist.
He didn't get up to hunt, nor did he extinguish the bonfire. Before the situation was clear, it would be foolish to rashly abandon defensive terrain to attack a tracker with unknown intentions.
He simply sat quietly in the shadows, wiping his metal water bottle.
The eyes in the dark watched for a long time, seemingly wary of something, before quietly disappearing before dawn.
Suspense hung like a venomous snake on the branches of their long journey.
The morning sun dispelled the night's chill.
The tracker's disappearance didn't disrupt Ryan's rhythm. The two packed their belongings and continued their journey northwest.
Perhaps having adapted to days of bloodshed and travel, Lucia's tense demeanor finally relaxed. She no longer stiffly maintained a three-pace distance as she had the previous two days, but tried to walk beside Ryan again.
“Teacher.”
“Speak.”
“How much longer do we have to walk through this grassland?” Lucia kicked a small pebble with her foot.
“I don't know,” Ryan replied calmly.
Lucia pouted, “Then why are we constantly heading northwest? There's nothing on the map here.”
“Because we haven't walked here before,” Ryan said, his gaze fixed straight ahead. “Unmarked places are where research value lies.”
“…That's like saying nothing at all,” Lucia mumbled softly.
Ryan turned his head and gave her a cold glance. Lucia recoiled, but unexpectedly, this time she didn't tremble with fear as before; instead, she subtly lifted her chin with a hint of smugness.
From absolute fear to rigid dependence, and now daring to talk back in small ways—Lucia was developing her own backbone during this harsh journey at a speed she didn't even realize.
However, this ease was abruptly cut short in the afternoon.
The sky was clear, not a single cloud in sight.
However, Lucia, who had been walking, suddenly stopped without warning. She instinctively tugged at the back hem of Ryan's trench coat, her breathing somewhat hurried.
“Teacher… something's wrong.” Lucia lowered her voice, her bright black eyes cautiously scanning their surroundings. “The bird calls… they're gone.”
Deep within Ryan's pupils, an extremely faint golden shimmer quietly lit up.
【Lantern】's rational vision opened.
“Stay behind me.”
Ryan's voice was as steady as iron, his right hand already resting naturally on the cold hilt of the scalpel at his waist.
The tall grass directly ahead began to shake violently.
The lower halves of the grass stalks were forcibly snapped by brute force, making dull crackling sounds. Then, an extremely disheveled figure stumbled out of the grass.
It was an adult man in a tattered suit.
The suit's fabric had been corroded beyond recognition by mud and some acidic liquid, hanging on him like rags. His arms and legs were unnaturally twisted, his body covered in dried black-purple mud-blood, and his face was pale.
Seeing Ryan and Lucia standing not far away, the man's originally turbid, hollow eyes suddenly flickered!
A near-insane ecstasy erupted on his face; his facial muscles twitched so violently that they tore the dried wound at the corner of his mouth, and blood trickled down his chin.
“Save… save me! Please! Save me!!”
The man let out a hoarse, tearing cry, scrambling and crawling towards the two. He stretched out his withered arms, his fingers clawing spasmodically at the air, his fingernails already torn and packed with black dirt.
“This grassland is haunted! It's biting my stomach! Save me!!”
Lucia instinctively took half a step forward, a hint of compassion flashing across her small face. “He's injured—”
“Stop.”
“Teacher…?” Lucia, held back by Ryan, looked up in confusion.
In the thousandth of a second after she spoke.
The man, who had been full of pleas and weeping, suddenly rolled his eyes upwards, revealing turbid whites shot with red veins! The desperate, wretched smile on his lips instantly froze, replaced by an utterly hollow numbness.
“Riiip—!!”
A stomach-churning sound of fabric and flesh tearing suddenly erupted!
The man's suit abdomen violently burst open!
His abdominal skin peeled back like a blossoming, foul-smelling flower bud, revealing dense, tooth-like suckers on the crimson inner cavity walls!
The next moment, four blood-red tentacles, each as thick as a baby's arm, covered in barbs and mucus, shot out like crossbow bolts, accompanied by sharp, ear-splitting whooshing sounds!
The four tentacles formed precise encircling arcs in the air: two stabbed directly at Ryan's throat and eyes, while the other two eerily curved around his side, slamming viciously towards Lucia behind him!
The attack was extremely fast, and the air filled with a high concentration of strong acid and the stench of rotting organs!
“Stay put.”
Whoosh—!
The two blood-red tentacles aimed at his throat and eyes whistled past his nose and trench coat collar; the violent wind pressure even stirred the black hair on his forehead, yet failed to touch an inch of his skin!
At the same time, Ryan's right hand became a blur.
The moment the steel scalpel was drawn from his waist, its blade was imbued with a faint but extremely sharp shearing spirituality of 【Moth】!
A cold flash of light appeared!
The gleaming silver blade arced through the air, carving a smooth trajectory that precisely severed the other two tentacles attempting to bypass him and attack Lucia!
Splurch! Splurch!
The two barbed tentacles were cleanly sliced into two in mid-air! Viscous black-purple corrosive blood spurted out from the severed ends like a high-pressure water jet, splashing onto the wet, soft mud, immediately producing hissing white smoke and countless corrosive pits!
“Ah—!!”
The man's throat emitted a monstrous shriek, unlike anything human, as if the cold pump inside his abdominal cavity had been violently stimulated.
The remaining two tentacles bent eerily in mid-air, all the barbs on their surfaces flaring open like tiny bone saws, sweeping low towards Ryan's lower body!
At the same time, the man's upper body violently pitched forward, and he lunged at Ryan with his momentum. From his mouth, stretched to its limit, his jaw audibly dislocated, and a fleshy proboscis lined with tiny teeth extended!
Utterly disgusting, utterly vicious, a desperate attack aimed at trading lives!
Faced with the ground-sweeping bone-saw tentacles and the charging fleshy proboscis, Ryan's eyes remained as cold as ice.
He stomped his left foot down hard, his boot sole firmly stepping on the severed half-tentacle on his left. Immense physical prowess and precise rational control allowed him to forcibly leverage himself, making him leap half a foot forward!
The bone-saw tentacles sweeping low missed his boot sole, violently tearing a deep trench in the ground's turf.
In that instant in mid-air, Ryan and the lunging monster closed the distance to a mere ten-centimeter blind spot!
The monster's fleshy proboscis was already right in front of Ryan's face, and its foul, acidic liquid was almost dripping onto Ryan's shirt collar.
Ryan's expression remained utterly unchanged.
【Moth】's authority of shedding and dislocation activated once more.
In the monster's perception, the Ryan in front seemed to transform into layers of illusions in an instant; meanwhile, the real Ryan's body, in a manner defying human anatomy, turned forty-five degrees sideways with extreme lightness in the air.
The fleshy proboscis bit into the lingering air illusion, producing a loud, hollow biting sound.
In the fleeting moment of passing by, Ryan's left hand, like an iron clamp, precisely gripped the protruding spinal bone at the monster's nape, pressing it down hard!
At the same time, his steel scalpel, held in a reverse grip in his right hand, plunged vertically into the monster's brain through the dislocated and cracked jawbone gap!
Thwack!
The blade sank into its brainstem!
All the tentacles instantly lost their vitality, slumping to the ground like dead, rotten eels.
Ryan released his left hand with the momentum, lightly tapped the monster's chest with his toe, and gracefully and lightly slid two meters backward, landing steadily.
Thud.
The corpse heavily hit the muddy ground. The exploded flesh in its abdomen rapidly lost moisture, visibly shriveling and decaying, eventually transforming into a pool of foul-smelling black slime.
Ryan withdrew his blade, wiped it clean and shiny with a clean linen cloth he carried, then slid it back into the leather sheath at his waist:
“He was just a puppet, a tactile decoy released from a distance.”
Lucia stood a few paces away, her small face somewhat pale, but this time she didn't cry out or retreat.
The girl took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the momentary panic, and skillfully pulled out her hardcover notebook and pencil from her bag.
She squatted at a safe distance of two meters from the black slime, her small hands trembling but meticulously sketching the form of the tentacles that had burst out, their barbed structure, and the faint acidic smell she had perceived.
“Record complete, Teacher,” Lucia looked up, her voice carrying a trace of deliberately maintained composure.
Ryan turned his head and glanced at her.
“Good.”
Just as Ryan was about to lead Lucia away, the wooden box tucked deep inside his trench coat suddenly began to vibrate violently without warning.
The dark gold seed, at this moment, was scalding hot like lava; its heat even penetrated the wooden box and thick trench coat, pressing against Ryan's chest.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Almost simultaneously, Lucia's chest also tightened abruptly!
“Teacher…! The seed… it's moving!!” Lucia pressed her rapidly rising and falling chest, crying out.
Ryan deftly pulled out the wooden box and unlatched it.
On the dark yellow velvet cloth, the dark gold seed was pulsing at a steady frequency, radiating a scorching heat.
Ryan placed the wooden box flat on a protruding dry stone. Then, holding the corners of the box with both hands, he slowly rotated it with extreme precision towards the east, south, west, and north.
【Lantern】 instantly recorded the subtle changes in the seed's vibration frequency with each rotation.
Rotating ninety degrees clockwise—the vibration weakened.
Rotating one hundred eighty degrees counter-clockwise—the vibration became smooth.
When Ryan precisely aligned the box's opening with a narrow angular region approximately fifteen degrees west of north—
Buzz!
The seed's vibration frequency suddenly doubled! A faint, crisp ringing sound, like metal cracking, even emanated from within!
“Change course.”
Ryan closed the wooden box.
Lucia pressed her gradually calming chest, looked at Ryan, and couldn't help but swallow.
“Teacher… what exactly is the seed pointing to?”
“I don't know.”
“You don't know… so are we still going?”
“That's precisely why we must go.”
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