The column, resembling a tree in appearance, exuded a silver radiance that was detested by the denizens of darkness.
In theory, no residents of the inverse world should approach this place, but the inverse world was inherently a realm filled with uncertainties.
The so-called common knowledge was merely a theoretical system established by scholars within the fortresses after decades of exploration.
However, the history of the inverse world extended far beyond those few decades. Therefore, deviations and even errors in common knowledge were not cause for great surprise.
Facing the passage, Tianyang stepped back toward the Star Marrow Pillar. The sacred silver radiance provided him with the courage to resist the darkness.
Finally, it appeared.
Black hair floated like seaweed in the water, supported by some nameless force, allowing it to drift in mid-air, exuding an intangible malice.
Beneath the black hair was a young and beautiful female face. She possessed delicate, snow-white skin and softly attractive features.
Her neck was long and straight, but unfortunately, everything below her neck was concealed by the deep gray cloak that enveloped her entire body.
The black fingertips scraped gently against the walls of the passage, emitting the same sound that Tianyang had heard earlier.
So close.
Just a little bit, and Tianyang almost believed he had encountered another human.
But when she appeared in the silver radiance of the Star Marrow Pillar, her beautiful and smooth face suddenly emitted a sizzling sound of smoke.
Then a small strip of skin-like substance fell to the ground and began to wriggle, looking like a white maggot!
Tianyang suddenly felt nauseous.
If that woman was composed of the same substance, then when her form disintegrated, the scene must have been beyond what mere revulsion could describe.
The being, resembling a woman, cautiously took a step back, its burnt face. White liquid resembling milk flowed from the wound, filling it, and the woman quickly returned to her original state.
She, no, it!
It gazed at the Star Marrow Pillar, its eyes filled with hatred, then extended its hand from the cloak.
A slender and graceful hand.
However, in the next moment, this hand turned grotesque.
The arm swelled, and then the muscles beneath the skin writhed, changing from white to red.
Finally, the skin burst open, and the hand looked like an angry blossom. But what bloomed wasn't delicate petals, but rather tendrils of flesh and blood, twisted and gnarled. They pierced the wall, tearing off a piece of concrete about a meter long and wide.
It hurtled toward the Star Marrow Pillar!
The stone chunk roared like a cannonball. Instinctively, Tianyang dropped to the ground, hearing the muffled impact and the sound of the debris falling to the ground.
Anxiously, he looked back at the Star Marrow Pillar. The crystalline tree had a small piece of "bark" chipped away.
Seeing that the pillar was undamaged, the woman let out a piercing scream that was maddening. The scream was filled with hatred, as if she and the pillar were mortal enemies.
Suddenly, she lifted her cloak, and the body beneath it was the complete opposite of her beautiful face.
It was a nightmarish entity that existed only in nightmares, something so terrifying that words like "ugly" or "hideous" seemed utterly inadequate in its presence.
Tianyang quickly averted his gaze, unable to bear looking for even a second longer. The fear was like a cold python tightly coiling around his heart. Even after he tried desperately to recall, all he could remember were the hundreds of mandibles on the body beneath the cloak.
In the corner of his eye, he vaguely saw fine black mist emanating from those mandibles like venomous snakes.
The black mist competed with the silvery radiance of the Star Marrow Pillar for dominance in the tunnel.
When they met, the black mist shimmered with silvery light, like lightning in a summer storm cloud.
Then, the black mist disappeared, and the silvery radiance receded, neutralizing each other.
Tianyang was gasping inside his helmet. He knew what he had stumbled upon.
The Hundred-Mouthed Woman!
Or, one could also call it the Black Mist Spreader!
It had been mentioned in the "Inverse World Safety Manual." This dark denizen was considered a mobile plague, a human-shaped nightmare, an enemy of light.
The Spreaders disseminated highly concentrated black mist and were among the few dark denizens unafraid of the Star Marrow Pillar. In fact, once they discovered the Star Marrow Pillar, they would go to great lengths to destroy it as if it were their enemy.
Its danger rating was Level Three, with the evaluation criteria based on the rank of Ascenders.
In other words, only Ascenders of Level III rank can confront the Spreaders.
As for regular people, the handbook's advice was to run, if you could run away.
So, when he regained his senses, Tianyang immediately turned and ran, but the nightmare had no intention of letting him go.
Just before he could bypass the Star Marrow Pillar, Tianyang's heel suddenly tightened, and a force pulled him down to the ground.
He looked back.
From beneath the Spreaders' cloak, a bunch of tendrils extended. These things, covered with nerves and blood vessels, tightly entangled his left foot.
"No, no, no!"
Tianyang sat up and tried to cut them with his alloy knife, corroded by the bodily fluids of the Wanderers, which had lost its sharpness.
However, the tendrils of the Spreader, although looking soft, had an incredibly hard outer layer.
The blade scraped across it, emitting a disturbing sound.
Suddenly, the tendrils contracted, pulling Tianyang closer. That abhorrent body kept growing in front of the young man, and even with all his might, he couldn't stop himself from being dragged into the nightmare.
Tianyang dangled in mid-air, his line of sight level with the Spreaders' attractive face.
The woman opened her delicate lips, but instead of an enticing red tongue, she had thousands of times enlarged mosquito-like mouthparts.
That needle-like thing, like a black syringe, lightly touched Tianyang's helmet visor. The strong polycarbonate material that could withstand tons of pressure had developed fine cracks.
Tianyang's pupils slightly dilated due to fear, and with a soft click, the needle, intended to be lethal, finally pierced through the visor.
Now, nothing stood between it and the young man.
Tianyang's left eye was rapidly taken over by darkness. With a sharp pain and a cold, mucus-covered needle, it pierced his soft eyeball!
"Ah!"
The young man let out a heart-wrenching scream. In the midst of excruciating pain, the fear in his remaining eye was replaced by determination. Tianyang clenched his knife tightly and thrust it into one of the Spreaders' eyeballs.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!
Surprisingly, the Spreaders' eyeball was just as soft, and the blade sank in for the most part.
The woman's mouthparts retracted sharply. Tianyang then saw that from the tip of the syringe, black mist was seeping out, dispersing.
The young man's heart suddenly sank. When the needle pierced his eye earlier, what had the Spreader injected into him during that moment?
Before he could come up with an answer, the young man's body was sent flying. It was the result of the Spreader's intense pain, causing its tendrils to whip Tianyang and throw him away.
He crashed into the Star Marrow Pillar, rolled down to the base of the giant tree, and lay prostrate among the undulating, knotted roots.
It hurt!
It hurt severely!
His head felt like it had been filled with scorching lava, which spread and flowed through the grooves and folds of his brain, burning through it.
The face inside his helmet turned a deep shade of red, and the eye pierced by the Spreader's needle began oozing black, sticky fluid.
Tianyang removed his helmet regardless of everything, exposing himself to the air of the Inverse World. He clutched both sides of his temples and writhed on the ground, letting out agonizing screams.
Black veins gradually swelled on his face, forming some kind of pattern that emitted a malevolent aura and spread over Tianyang's face.
The one good eye left began to be contaminated by blackness, shrouding his view of the world in a dense, impenetrable darkness.
Tianyang felt himself sinking further and further. The seventeen years of his short life flashed before his consciousness like a fast-forwarded movie in the vast wilderness of his mind.
Just before his consciousness was about to plunge into darkness, his mother's sorrowful eyes and Qin Wu's sinister grin kept alternating in Tianyang's mind.
One side was the cherished family bond he couldn't let go of, and the other was the bone-deep hatred. These two emotions interwove.
He felt a heavy, final tug at his nerves.
2 / 2
Then a thought emerged from the depths of his heart.
"I don't want to die...
I don't want to die.
I don't want to die!
I... want revenge!"
A second thought surfaced, intensely powerful, effortlessly overshadowing the previous one.
The intense determination, like a sharp blade, sliced through the darkness, and the young man saw light.
Silver, holy, brimming with hope.
He reached out and grasped it with all his might!
Clang.
The Spreader used its tendrils to pull the knife out of its eye, ignoring the blood flowing freely from the socket. With its remaining eye, it stared at the Star Marrow Pillar.
It intended to continue its attack, never giving up until the crystalline tree was destroyed.
Unbeknownst to it, beneath the Star Marrow Pillar, the young man lying prostrate had one hand tightly clutching a tree root.
The silver radiance emanating from that tree root slowly seeped through the gloves of Tianyang's protective suit and onto his fingers.
Then...
It entered him.
The young man's fingers gradually lit up as if the cosmos was contained within his very flesh!