Caroline and Jason kept their promise and let the rideshare driver drop them off a few blocks before they reached the cemetery. The road was not only chilly, dark and creepy, the city smell somehow started getting worse as they walked down the road.
There were not many people along the way, aside from some apparently homeless guys and some homeless looking but still drunk or drugged out of their minds people passed out on the road. Some stray cats startled Caroline and Jason when they emerged from the darkness, but all of them turned out to be just normal cats.
With their current abilities, it did not take them long to get to the cemetery from where they were dropped off. And at this time of night, there were only a few street lights providing a very limited amount of light for the area. And right beside the entrance of the Blessed Light Cemetery, was a tall, ugly and creepy looking tree. Under the dim lighting, one might even mistake some of the patterns on the tree bark as crying or yelling human faces.
"There." Caroline pointed forward, at a grave that was dug open and its tombstone tossed to the side, and whose surrounding areas were enclosed by police tapes. The police tapes would have marked the off-premise areas clearly, if not for the fact that some of the tapes were broken and left flailing in the early evening wind.
"This is pretty bad." Jason circled outside the police tapes, "But I don't really sense anything here… yet. "
"Let me try the true sight spell first." Caroline raised her hand and joked: "Give me a chance to play detective."
"Sure." Jason knelt down by a piece of broken police tape and lowered his body while using his phone as a flashlight to closely observe the patterns on the ground: "Holy crap… these are ..."
"Claw marks." Caroline's eyes glowed in faint orange and red light: "Looks like from human hand - what the fuck?!"
"This is definitely not normal." Jason stood up and looked at the pieces of broken coffin tossed to the side: "I'd expect shovels or at least some other tools."
"Jason, look to your right." Caroline pointed at a bigger piece of broken coffin beside Jason: "The big board by your side."
Jason looked where Caroline was pointing at, and he sensed that something was not right with the broken wooden board - it was as if it was touched by something grim, dark and… unclean.
In Caroline's sight, the trace was very clear: it was a partial hand mark, with traces of dark green energy residue. What was also almost clear as day, was the dark green and black smoke rising from the hole that once held the coffin.
"Something unclean dug the grave up." Caroline told Jason: "Can you build me something so I can look over the inside? I don't wanna leave my shoe marks inside the grave."
"On it." Jason extended his right hand towards the ground right in front of Caroline, a silver ladder with a platform on top appeared right in front of her.
Caroline jumped on the ladder and climbed to the platform, then from the top she looked down on the insides of the grave.
At the root of the dark green and black smoke, there were also something like worms and bugs that were crawling all over the root of the grave. And through the effect of the true sight spell, Caroline felt like she could "hear" the crackling and squishy sounds from their movements.
"Jason?"
"What?"
"I'm gonna burn this grave down. You might wanna help me with it."
"What!? Why?" Jason cast a true sight spell on himself, built himself a similar ladder and climbed on top of it to look down on the grave. After a short hesitation, Jason nodded, took out his wooden pen from the backpack and said: "Yeah do it. I'll keep an eye out for you."
"Thanks. " Caroline's both hands formed a circle with her fingers, a small and bright fireball emerged from within the circle, then Caroline tilted her hands and let the fireball roll into her right palm. She closed her right palm into a fist and within seconds her entire fist was on fire. With a swift jab in the direction of the grave, an orange and red shadow of a fist shot down into the bottom of the grave.
A loud boom exploded from within the empty grave, a fireball rose to the sky and fiery energy tore through the surrounding ground. And at the same time, hundreds or even thousands of voices from all around them let out ear-piercing screams.
"Go! Go!" now realizing that they practically poked a hornet's nest, both Caroline and Jason started rushing towards the entrance through from which they came in.
The creepy tree, though once tall and firm, was now shaking and moving like a moving creature and its branches were flailing like the arms of a pissed off mad man. Since they both had their true sight spells active, they saw the true appearance of the tree - it was no longer covered in simple tree bark, but dark red and green flesh of some kind; the tree branches were made of bones and sinew; and from all of the tree branches, countless shrunken and wrinkled human heads were hanging down with their long hair tied on the branches. Not only that, there were also three huge pale faces with different facial expressions on the trunk of the tree - one face looked angry, one face looked terrified and sad, and the final one had a creepy smile.
Countless moving roots, made of bloody flesh, skin and sinew burst out from the ground, just like dozens of tentacles trying to surround Caroline and Jason. At the same time, a lot of the heads hanging from the tree branches started shouting, crying, moaning and being shot towards Caroline and Jason through the air.
Caroline lit up her wooden axe and unleashed a full force swing against the roots in front of them. Jason swung his wooden pen in the air, writing a complicated symbol in the air with his Xuanli.
The fiery energy blade released from Caroline's swing cut through half a dozen branches of tree roots and exploded midair, damaging some more roots and flying human heads. On the other side, Jason took a jab at the symbol with his wooden pen, causing the symbol to explode unleashing tens of silver energy shards onto the roots and incoming flying human heads.