novelraw Chapter 167: Digestion Space
Chapter 167: Digestion Space
That descent didn't bring the weightlessness of physics from gravitational acceleration.
It was a bizarre, nauseating sensation of being consumed, the body wrapped in viscous living fluid and dragged downward.
The air instantly became thin and oppressive, the surrounding darkness not a lack of light, but organic matter as thick as ink, slowly writhing.
Lin Jie could only hear the sound of his own violently pounding heartbeat, and the creaking of the climbing rope pulled taut to its limit by the weight of three people.
He couldn't hear the wind or friction;
he was like a pill dropped into a giant's throat, undergoing a long, silent journey to unknown internal organs.
It was impossible to tell how long this process lasted—a few seconds, or perhaps minutes.
When that downward pulling force dissipated, their feet made contact with a ground that was solid yet soft and pliable.
The sensation was bizarre, like stepping on aged leather that had been tanned and still retained a bit of warmth.
"Everyone, report your status!"
William's steady voice was the first to ring out in this darkness, his words dispelling the claustrophobia that could drive one mad."Julian! I'm alright! Just a bit nauseous!"
The scholar's voice followed immediately, carrying a physiological nausea born of environmental discomfort.
"Lin Jie... I'm fine too."
Lin Jie's voice was the deepest. As he answered, he had already swiftly retrieved the modified searchlight from the German branch from his pack.
This searchlight used high-purity calcium carbide as fuel. With a faint clicking sound and the hiss of gas combustion, a bright, pure white beam of light shot from Lin Jie's hand.
This light beam pierced the darkness, bringing the first illumination to this unknown space shrouded in darkness.
When this light illuminated the unfamiliar surroundings around them, everyone gasped in shock.
Even William, who was normally unflappable even if Mount Tai collapsed before him, was no exception.
The place they were in was not a solid underground cavern. This place was more like a massive organ of a living, slowly pulsating unknown behemoth.
The soft, pliable ground beneath their feet was a massive meat wall covered in dark red mucous membrane and full of folds.
The walls around them were composed of countless massive plant roots of varying sizes.
The color of these roots was somewhere between rotten tree roots and purplish-black blood vessels, slowly contracting and expanding.
These roots were intertwined and tangled, extending from the entrance they had fallen through—now sealed by darkness—all the way down into the unfathomable dark depths below.
Together, they wove a cage of pulsating life.
Countless stalactite-like fleshy pendulums hung from the ceiling, continuously dripping translucent, viscous liquid.
The liquid fell to the ground with a faint sizzling sound, raising white steam that carried an acidic, rotten smell.
The air was filled with an intense odor, a mixture of earthy fishiness, the smell of rotting plants, and the corrosive scent of digestive fluids similar to stomach acid, a hundred times more concentrated than the smell of the surface swamp.
"My God..."
Julian's face instantly turned paler than the paper of the map book in his hand.
As a widely-read scholar, he immediately understood their current predicament.
"This isn't underground, this is 'Negative Space'! A demi-plane existing in the crack between reality and the spiritual world!"
His eyes were filled with fear and disbelief, shocked by his own deduction.
Lin Jie picked up where Julian left off, "Karl's diary also had similar speculations."
"Certain powerful UMAs deeply bound to specific locations can use their own bodies as a foundation to forcibly tear open the skin of the real world, constructing their own exclusive hunting and digestion domains within the spiritual dimension!"
"Just like a Venus flytrap, except we are the flies."
His gaze slowly swept over the surrounding writhing root walls.
"We are currently inside that Swamp Tree Fiend's 'stomach'!"
They had been eaten.
In a direct and surreal way.
At that moment, the beam from Lin Jie's searchlight swept over a pile of ghastly white, incongruous objects nestled among the massive, intertwined roots not far away.
They were skeletons.
Countless cleanly-gnawed, bleached white bones of humans and other large beasts, piled haphazardly like garbage in the crevices between the roots.
The surfaces of many bones had grotesquely fused with the growing plant rootlets.
This was the Swamp Tree Fiend's dinner plate, and also its garbage dump.
And the three of them were the next main course about to be served on that plate.
"We must break out of here before we're digested!"
Lin Jie's voice was extremely calm. The more he found himself in this kind of despair-inducing environment that would break ordinary people, the clearer his mind became.
"Agreed!"
William's reply was concise and powerful;
the word 'waiting to die' wasn't in this old soldier's dictionary.
He directly aimed his loaded Winchester at the nearest wall composed of thick roots.
"Taste this, you damned rotten tree!"
With a roar, he pulled the trigger.
A high-explosive shell loaded with gunpowder and consecrated silver salt blasted against the writhing root wall.
The flash of the explosion bloomed in the darkness, instantly illuminating the claustrophobic stomach sac as bright as day.
A massive shockwave, carrying countless shredded, charcoal-like root fragments, swept outwards.
But when the explosion's light slowly faded, what was revealed before everyone was a scene of despair.
Although the root wall that had been directly hit by the explosive shell now had a charred, concave crater over two meters in diameter, it had not been breached.
At the bottom of the crater, the severed roots were visibly wriggling and regrowing.
In little more than ten seconds, the wound had completely healed. That earth-shattering explosion from moments ago had been nothing more than an insignificant itch.
"Damn it..."
A look of frustration appeared on William's face.
"My attack is ineffective against it."
"No, it's not just ineffective."
Julian, the theorist, after a brief moment of shock, immediately pointed out a deeper truth from another angle.
His gaze fell on the roots around the explosion's epicenter, which were absorbing the heat and shockwave generated by the blast.
"Look! Not only did our attack fail to cause substantial damage, it's actually being absorbed by it!"
"It's converting the energy from our attacks into nutrients to nourish its own growth!"
"The laws of space here are distorted! This isn't the physical world! This is its domain!"
"In this 'Negative Space,' it is a god!"
"All physical laws that are common sense to us, like the conservation of kinetic energy, like the second law of thermodynamics, likely no longer apply here!"
"Or rather..."
He adjusted his glasses, damp with cold sweat.
"The rules here are written by it itself!"
Julian's discovery was far more lethal than the ineffectiveness of the explosive shell.
It fundamentally negated the possibility of them breaking this cage through force.
If conventional attacks were ineffective, or worse, ended up aiding the enemy, what did they have left?
They were like three flies trapped in amber;
no matter how they struggled, they couldn't escape the fate of slowly suffocating and eventually turning into specimens.
Viscous despair began to spread through the Iron Triangle Team.
Even William lowered his gun;
at least for now, he couldn't think of any other means of attack.
A calm voice broke the atmosphere of helplessness;
it belonged to Lin Jie.
"No."
He said only one word.
Lin Jie didn't look at the rapidly healing root wall, nor did he ponder those spine-chilling "Negative Space" rules.
His gaze, from beginning to end, had been objectively scanning every corner of this massive stomach sac.
He was searching, looking for possible flaws in this seemingly unsolvable domain. He didn't believe anything could be absolutely perfect.
He slowly swept the beam of his searchlight across the writhing root walls.
From left to right, from top to bottom.
Once, twice, three times...
Finally, just before his patience ran out, his sharp black eyes fixed on a certain inconspicuous detail.
"Look."
His voice carried excitement.
He steadily fixed the searchlight's beam on the massive, intertwined network of roots in the distance.
"Look at the growth direction of these roots."
William and Julian immediately followed his beam with their eyes.
At first, they saw nothing unusual.
The roots seemed chaotic and patternless.
But with Lin Jie's prompting, when they forced themselves to ignore the small, chaotic branches and focus only on the thick, core root trunks—like main arteries—an astonishing yet biologically logical order emerged before their eyes.
All the thickest core roots, no matter how tangled or sinuously twisted they became during their growth, ultimately extended their ends towards the same common direction, located deeper in the dark space, like a hundred rivers flowing to the sea.
"All things that grow have their roots."
"This UMA might be able to distort space, it might be able to absorb energy, but it cannot defy one most fundamental law of life."
"That is, any living organism must have a core that sustains its life activities."
He raised his hand, using that pure white beam of light that pierced the darkness to point far into the unknown darkness where all the roots ultimately converged.
"As long as we can find it, and destroy it..."
"We can cleanly destroy this so-called master from the inside!"