Lu Yuan made a split-second judgment.
His left hand snatched an Exorcism grenade from his waist.
Complete-type exorcism gunpowder.
He pulled the pin, swung his arm back, and twisted his waist.
The grenade left his hand.
The dark red sphere spun slowly in his accelerated vision, flying toward the thickest part of the vine tide ahead.
At the same instant the grenade left his hand, Lu Yuan deactivated Timekeeper.
【Timekeeper · Acceleration (Deactivated)】
【Sanity: -3... 82/120】
The world snapped back to normal speed.
The tide of vines surged from slow motion to a sudden blur, crushing inward from all directions.
Lu Yuan did not charge forward.
He retreated several steps, curling his body into a recessed cross-section he had just sliced open. He held the copper sword across his chest, his back pressed against the carbonized, charred wall.
He covered his ears.
First came a violent, blinding light.
The moment the exorcism gunpowder came into contact with the eerie aura in the tunnel—which was so dense it had practically solidified—the entire charge was triggered instantly.
A piercingly bright light erupted from the detonation point, illuminating the pitch-black pipe several times brighter than high noon sun.
Immediately following, a cloud of exorcism light powder and silver powder diffused frantically with the blast wave.
In the confined space of the tunnel, the powder had nowhere to go but to spread along the passage in both directions.
Vines withered and crumbled within the silver powder.
Hyphae turned to flying ash within the exorcism light powder.
The high-concentration silver powder acted like a highly corrosive strong acid.
Upon contact with any greyish-green tissue surface, it emitted a sizzling sound and clouds of black smoke.
Only then did the flames arrive.
Unlike the common type, the flames of the complete-type lasted for a long time.
Silver-white fire rolled through the pipe, completely incinerating the vine remains that had been riddled with holes by the silver powder.
The hyphae layer on the copper walls was left as nothing but a charred, thin shell that shattered at a touch after the fire passed.
A rain of greyish-green debris and vine remains mixed with silver powder embers poured down from the ceiling.
Lu Yuan remained curled in the recess, the debris clattering against the flat of his copper sword.
Greyish-green sap splashed onto his trench coat, carrying a scent so sweet it was nauseating.
The rain of debris lasted for five or six seconds.
Then, silence fell.
Within a range of over twenty meters ahead, the vines had been cleared away completely.
The walls and floor were fully exposed, revealing their original copper state.
The 'tide' had been blown to pieces.
But deeper in the tunnel, new vines were slowly poking out from the crevices.
Regeneration had already begun, though the speed was much slower than before.
The residual exorcism properties of the silver powder were still present, suppressing the activity of the hyphae.
Outside.
Everyone in the catchment basin heard that muffled boom.
The inscription light curtain on the other side of the passage trembled slightly from the aftershock of the explosion.
Bo Er gripped his copper sword tightly.
Wolf looked toward the passage entrance.
“Good luck to him.”
Bolen leaned against Kail, the old man’s lips twitching slightly.
No one spoke.
The veteran missing a pinky stood by the left passage entrance, back against the wall. His gaze shifted from the entrance to the direction of the inscription seal and back again.
He was waiting for an order.
An order from Bo Er.
But Bo Er did not say to retreat.
No one said it.
They were waiting.
【Sanity: -2... 73/120】
Lu Yuan stood up from the recess and brushed off the debris.
He took a perfect quality Sanity potion from his coat, uncorked it, and downed it in one go.
【Sanity: +15... 88/120】
His consciousness sank into his chest.
Click.
【Timekeeper · Acceleration (Activated)】
【Sanity: -1... -1...】
The world slowed down once more.
He stepped over the vine remains, passing through the hollowed-out area created by the explosion as he continued downward.
The furnace fire on the copper sword was now very faint.
The dark red patterns were reduced to a final glimmer, like a candle wick about to burn out.
The tunnel grew dark again beyond the area cleared by the Exorcism grenade, and the density of vines and hyphae quickly recovered.
But there was no second vine tide.
It had compressed all the vines it could mobilize into that one wave, attempting to block the path once and for all.
Unfortunately for it, it had failed again.
The more things were like this inside the pipe network layer, the more certain Lu Yuan became that the thing inside was currently in a terrible state. Now was the best time to eliminate it.
Most importantly.
Lu Yuan really wanted to know what he would gain by clearing out something that hadn't yet become a forbidden existence.
Lu Yuan’s figure flickered rapidly.
About fifteen seconds later.
The tunnel began to slope downward, the incline growing steeper and steeper.
The sweet scent in the air reappeared, heavier than it had been in the catchment basin. Then, Lu Yuan saw the first body.
A body suspended in mid-air.
It was a human wearing civilian clothes, his face completely unrecognizable.
He was hoisted about two meters below the tunnel ceiling by three thick vines wrapped around his shoulders and waist.
His limbs hung limp, like a fly caught in a spider’s web.
The most striking thing was his head.
A vine as thick as a thumb was inserted into the back of his head, piercing through the skull.
Liquid was flowing along the surface of the vine.
A greyish-green fluid welled up from inside the cranial cavity, being transported upward along the vine.
Simultaneously, another darker liquid was being pumped from the vine into the skull.
In and out, in a continuous cycle.
This person’s brain was being flushed.
【Detection Target: Bronze City resident (host-in-the-making... nourishment supply in progress...)】
【Note: This individual's nervous tissue is being extracted... it seems something is using this to form...】
Lu Yuan did not stop, continuing deeper.
A second body.
A third... a tenth.
The bodies became more numerous.
Workers in coarse cloth shirts, City Hall staff in uniforms, men in miner’s clothes.
In his accelerated vision, every face was magnified and stretched, taking on a waxy yellow texture under the white light of the sandworm oil lamp.
The density of the suspended bodies went from sparse at the entrance to increasingly crowded; by the middle section, they were almost shoulder to shoulder.
Lu Yuan counted silently in his head.
One hundred and twenty-seven.
All humans.
As he ran past each body, he would glance at the face.
Not to identify them.
It was an instinct.
In Gelimu Port, he had witnessed an entire city sink into the sea.
Those who had once fought alongside him had turned into deep sea kin at the final moment.
He remembered every face.
Just then, the vine at the crown of the nearest body’s head moved.
With a sudden jerk, half of it pulled out from the skull, trailing a string of greyish-white mucus as it lashed out toward Lu Yuan like a snake.
In his accelerated state, this lash was as slow as a rope drifting in water.
Lu Yuan leaned to the side, and the vine swept past his shoulder.
Then came a second, a third, a dozen more.
The cluster of bodies overhead was like a disturbed hornet’s nest as vines pulled out from skulls one after another, flailing blindly in his direction.
But before Timekeeper, it was all in slow motion.
Lu Yuan wove between the vines.
His copper sword only swung when necessary, slicing through any vine that blocked his path.
The burning heat of the copper caused white smoke to billow from the severed ends, and the remaining segments spasmed back into the skulls.
Then he saw the one wearing a Nightwatchers uniform.
The badge on the chest was still there—the moon and firearms emblem—but the face was completely unrecognizable.
The vine at the crown of the head was thicker than the others, inserted deeper.
【Detection Target: Nightwatchers (Majority of brain tissue has been extracted...)】
It had been almost completely hollowed out.
Lu Yuan did not stop his pace.
But he memorized the location.
Passing through the canopy of vines, Lu Yuan discovered that it wasn't just humans being suspended.
Ghouls began to appear in the latter half.
Greater ghouls.
Their greyish-red bodies were suspended in the same manner, with even thicker vines inserted into their skulls.
They were larger than any he had seen on the surface, their keratinous layers completely shed to reveal greyish-green nascent tissue.
【Detection Target: Greater ghoul (Dormant... deep parasite... undergoing modification...)】
Further in, things Lu Yuan had never seen before appeared.
A slender type of creature with extremely short limbs and a torso coiled like a snake.
Their skin was dark grey and smooth as wax.
They had no faces on their heads, only an oval protrusion pointing forward, covered in tiny holes.
【Detection Target: unknown eerie (Deceased · Parasitized)... does not belong to known classifications...】
Humans, ghouls, and unknown eerie—all were being suspended without distinction.
All turned into nourishment.
The thing hidden in these depths hadn't evolved its own intelligence; it had stolen it.
【Forbidden Lore: Knowledge Seeker: +0.8... 18.3/100】
The furnace fire on the copper sword went out.
The dark red patterns dissipated, and the copper surface returned to its original color.
As he continued deeper, the darkness pressed in, and those vines that had previously covered everything gradually receded.
Evidently, it had realized that these vines were insufficient to stop Lu Yuan’s advance.
Lu Yuan took out his sandworm oil lamp and turned it on.
The white light illuminated a small area.
The end of the suspension zone.
The space suddenly expanded.
Lu Yuan deactivated Timekeeper.
【Timekeeper · Acceleration (Deactivated)】
【Sanity: -3... 64/120】
He stood at the edge of a massive vertical space.
It was as if a convergence node of the pipe network had been forced open from the inside; the copper vault arched upward at least fifteen meters, and the surrounding walls expanded outward to form an elliptical cave roughly forty meters in diameter.
Lu Yuan stood at a high vantage point, looking down.
There was a tree there.
Not a real tree.
But its form was exactly like a tree growing upside down.
The roots were at the top.
Countless vines of varying thickness hung from the cave ceiling like the root system of a giant tree hanging upside down, extending downward and intertwining to finally converge into a main trunk nearly two meters in diameter.
The main trunk stretched from the ceiling all the way to the bottom of the cave.
Along the way, it was covered in hosts.
Humans.
Ghouls.
Crawlers.
Unknown eerie.
They hung from the trunk and branches like fruit, dense and layered.
At least hundreds, if not thousands of them.
Every single one was pierced through the skull by a vine, with greyish-green liquid circulating throughout the entire system.
The brain tissue extracted from the cranial cavities of every host suspended above was all being transported below.
At the bottom of the main trunk.
It had swelled into a massive spherical structure.
At least ten meters in diameter.
All the main trunk vines radiated from here in all directions, stabbing into the cave walls and spreading through the pipe network to the entire city.
It was the hub of the entire hyphae network.
The sphere was semi-transparent.
The interior was visible.
Countless fragments of brain tissue were suspended in a greyish-green liquid matrix, woven into a complex three-dimensional network by extremely fine hyphae threads.
The brain tissue fragments came from various sources.
Some were human—greyish-white leaning toward pink.
Some were from ghouls—greyish-red.
Some were from those unknown eerie—dark grey bordering on black.
They were being transmitted to each other as faint points of light within the network, the light jumping and flowing along the hyphae threads like fireflies moving through the night sky.
Countless brain fragments, forcibly pieced together, formed a massive, deformed consciousness.
There were no eyeballs on the surface of the sphere.
Unlike the sub-core, the outer layer of the main core consisted of rings of semi-transparent membranes, with greyish-green liquid undergoing complex cycles beneath each layer.
The sphere was still pulsing.
The frequency was much slower than that of the sub-core.
But it was heavy and powerful.
Like a sleeping heart.
With every pulse, the vines throughout the cave trembled, and the mouths of the suspended hosts opened and closed in unison. Silent, rhythmic, like puppets pulled by the same string.
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