Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Sliding down the slope, the first thing that welcomed Lin Sanjiu was the rush of a pungent smell. It smelled so ripe that Lin Sanjiu almost gagged, feeling as if a person was poking her throat with a thorn.
The hole was so terribly dark that Lin Sanjiu could hardly see her fingers. The occasional faint yelling of the duoluozhong wafted into her ears and only amplified the silence in the hole. She shielded her nose with her palm and went into the hypersensory state. She scanned the area for any living organisms with her hypersensory. Once she was confident that she was all alone, she took out the [Ability Polishing Agent].
With the silvery light, Lin Sanjiu finally saw the source of the bad smell.
All the holes seemed to be connected; countless of narrowed passages meandered out, forming some sort of network beneath the desert and partitioning the supposedly very spacious underground space into many narrow spaces. Here should have been the home of those Inhuman, the place where they worked, slept, ate, and did… their business (pee and poo). The foul smell that came from their excretion, remaining bugs, sweat, and idols was left here, in this space.
Holding her breath, Lin Sanjiu pinched a palm-sized idol with two fingers. The idol was made of sand, held together by some unknown gum. The idol was poorly crafted, looking nothing like an old man with an enlarged nose, but instead, more of a young maiden.
Lin Sanjiu’s brows creased into deep furrows as she threw the sand idol away. The idol crashed against the wall and shattered into multiple pieces. She shifted the Ability Polishing Agent and realized that there were more idols crafted in different materials underneath the remnants of the idol she laid to waste just now.
But none of them looked like the old man Jujube had described.
She kicked a few idols on top of the stack, sending them rolling down the heap and clattering against the ground. She then turned around, moving the silvery light in a circular motion over the pile of idols. Every one of the idols was carved into a red-dressed woman with an hourglass body. Lin Sanjiu found her rather pleasing to the eyes; however, that was if and only if she ignored the bean-sized head that was disproportionate with her body.
She picked up an arm-sized idol, which was braided using tree vines, from the ground and stored it in her card. Then, despite the noisome smell that sickened her, she continued to move deeper into the passage. After traveling in the underground space for some time, she found that there seemed to be no end to the passage and that she had seemingly been going round and round in the same place over and over again. Not only would she be unable to finish surveying the area in time, but she might also lose her way out.
The good thing was that no matter how deep she went, she knew she would never walk out of the desert. Thus, she was calm. She continued to advance deeper into the passage to see whether she could find anything useful to them. However, she found nothing but more idols and traces the Inhuman left behind along the way, much to her disappointment. Not wanting to spend another minute in this lair that stunk to high heaven, Lin Sanjiu activated the hypersensory to feel the airflow so that she could follow the flow to look for a way out. Then, using her hypersensory as a guide, she went towards the nearest exit where the wind had slipped in.
Just when she was about to reach the slope that would lead her outside, Lin Sanjiu stopped. She raised the [Ability Polishing Agent] over her head and squinted her eyes.
With the help of the light, she somehow managed to register a faint human figure lying amid the scattered broken idols. His legs were buried under the idols. He had a short, stocky body, and there was a gruesome, gaping hole, which Lin Sanjiu believed was the primary cause of his death, in the center of his chest. The hole was so large that even when he was lying face down, she could see the idol under him through the hole.
Lin Sanjiu walked up to the corpse and flipped it over. When the silver light passed over the body’s face, she was visibly stunned. A long, large nose laid limply on the face, and like any other parts on the body, it was wrinkled and full of greyish-white fine hair.
“Wait a sec,” she gasped and stood up. Unable to believe what she had seen, she looked again but closer this time.
The longer she stared at the corpse, the more she felt that he was Gizo, the geezer god Jujube had described.
“Could it be that the duoluozhong were telling the truth?”
Having all sorts of doubts and conjectures in her mind, she kicked the corpse aside and proceeded toward the slope.
According to Jujube, this desert was Gizo’s territory. After his death, his group of duoluozhong and Inhuman had all went out of control and escaped, and all his idols had changed into the appearance of the god that had slain him. Things could not have been more apparent now, and there was only one mystery left to be solved.
Whoever had slain Gizo, why had he or she not brought the idols, Inhuman, and duoluozhong along, but just abandoned them here instead?
As she moved up the slope, she kept thinking about this question. The fresh air and star-speckled sky welcomed her with open arms, prompting her to hasten her movements. And it was at this moment that she suddenly felt a tug. Then, before she knew it, the thing behind her slipped down her back.
It was not long before she realized what it was and turned around to grab the elder brother’s half torso. But due to the ill-lit surroundings, her hand missed its target, and she grabbed nothing but air.
She had strapped the elder brother to her body for so long that her body had adapted to the extra weight. Lin Sanjiu had almost forgotten about him. Perhaps the long and bumpy journey had loosened the knot, for the elder brother rolled down the slope and fell with a loud thud on the ground.
For a second, the thought of leaving him to rot in this cave flitter through Lin Sanjiu’s mind.
The elder brother could not die, and he seemed to hold a lot of secrets himself, but Lin Sanjiu had no idea what to do with a half body that couldn’t walk or talk.
However, her hesitance was brief. Lin Sanjiu sighed as she crawled down the slope and brought out the [Ability Polishing Agent] again.
“Well, it seems like you have to stick with me for a long while,” she picked up the rope and offered a smile to the elder brother, “I wonder, do you wish to stay here or—”
Lin Sanjiu swallowed the next words back into her stomach and stared fixedly at the elder brother’s face.
In the bright white light, she could see that the elder brother wasn’t paying attention to her. Since he couldn’t move his neck, he just shifted one of his eyeballs to the corner of his eye. Lin Sanjiu followed his gaze and looked at Gizo’s corpse.
With a heart full of misgivings, Lin Sanjiu stood up and once again went to Gizo’s corpse.
The dead body still looked the same as before. Nobody would be able to tell that he was a god when he was still alive. After she weighed the situation, she squatted down and placed her palm on the body.
The moment that [Planar World] activated, Gizo’s corpse disappeared. At the same time, she felt something scrape against her palm.
She did not have time to see the card, as Jujube’s roar came rolling in from the outside. “Posthuman! Posthuman! Where are you? Come out now!”
Following which, the ground above began to shake, as if Jujube had undone his camouflage and was pacing around. With the sand on the ceiling raining down on her head, Lin Sanjiu felt that she had to get out faster. She wiped her face with her hand and put the [Ability Polishing Agent] and the card containing Gizo away. Picking up the elder brother’s body, she moved to the slope.
Usually, quicksand would not form an underground space like this. This underground world was probably the work of Gizo using his ability. Now that the creator was dead, Lin Sanjiu had no idea how long the cave would stand under Jujube’s stomping. Fearing that she might get buried alive under the sand, she held the elder brother under her armpit and climbed up the slope.
With a few quick motions, Lin Sanjiu was able to get out of the cave before it crumbled. The yellow sand fell into the cave, and choking dust rose into the air. Just like dominoes, once a cave crumbled, all the other caves began to fall. For a moment, one could feel that a dust storm was coming from afar, and Lin Sanjiu could hardly see through anything.
Choked by the dust, she coughed violently before opening her eyes.
Once she opened her eyes, the first thing that greeted her were two columns of calves.
“What took you so long?” roared Jujube.
Lin Sanjiu didn’t dare to blame Jujube for destroying the cave. If she were to complain about every single thing he had done, Jujube might begin to question her abilities. As she gasped for air, she tied the elder brother to her back. “You have no idea how big it was down there. By the way, how about you? Why did you come out? Where are those duoluozhong ?”
“Dead,” Jujube answered calmly. When the dust finally settled down, only then did Lin Sanjiu see the sand stuck in between his toes. Like a person who had stepped in water and then walked on sand, beneath his feet was a swath of gooey red substance. “I thought they were bait set up by another false god. One of them sensed my location by sniffing around, so I trampled them all to death.”
Lin Sanjiu swallowed hard. Had she not taken so long, then perhaps she could have saved those Inhuman…
“You killed them too soon,” she said coldly. “The duoluozhong was telling the truth. The god here was indeed slain by another god.”
Jujube was stunned, his face turning grim. “Who did it? Then how about the idols—”
“Here, take a look at this,” Lin Sanjiu said as she took out the idol stored in her card.
Almost at the same time that the idol dropped to the ground, Jujube shot up. His loud, angry voice came rolling from the sky above. “It’s Sanduria! That bitch! Why does she get into my way every single time?”
Jujube seemed greatly enraged. He paced back and forth, trampling many shrubs and dead bodies. After a while, he lowered his body and hissed, “Why didn’t you come out earlier and tell me this? It’s all your fault! Now you have to find Sanduria for me. I don’t care what you think or how you are going to do it. I want her posthuman dead!”
Shocked, Lin Sanjiu hid her hand behind her back and avoided Jujube’s stare, stammering, “Okay—”
Inside her palm was the card of Gizo. It was just that there wasn’t one card, but two.
