living.
After realizing that what Alice was stepping on was not mud at all, but some kind of living biological tissue, most people at the scene suddenly felt a creepy feeling.
Duncan found the matter wriggling on the floor rather... disgusting.
Then, he heard Nina's voice coming from not far away: "Here" and over here!" Shirley also exclaimed, "There's a large area here, and it's still moving!
In this mysterious and empty space, there is a strange "substance" everywhere that is dark and looks like mud, but can slowly crawl.
"It's everywhere here..." Vanna had silently taken the giant sword behind her, frowned slightly, looked around the extremely open "cabin" and said in an extremely serious tone, "Goddess, bless you... What on earth is this?"
Morris suppressed the discomfort in his heart, squatted down next to a slightly moving "mud", and used the folding knife he carried with him to turn the edge of the sticky "mud", frowning tightly.
"I have never seen anything like it, nor have I seen anything like it in any book," the learned old scholar said, now confused and uneasy. "This thing looks like a living creature, but its texture is no different from mud, and... it doesn't seem to have any trace of intelligence."
"It is somewhat similar to the contents of the 'Submersible No. 3' described by Tirian." Duncan said casually, while raising his head and looking deeper into the open cabin.
Nina came to the edge of the crowd. Under the dim light emitted by Ai, there was a ball of mud that looked particularly "alive" and was slowly rising and falling in the depression of the floor. She stood beside the pit, bent down and looked at the disgusting substance curiously.
She was a little nervous, but more than that, she was curious.
And in the next second, the mud suddenly moved!
As if responding to Nina's gaze, or as if some blindly moving creature was finally attracted by the large group of people in the cabin.
The uninvited guest disturbed the mud, and the speed of its flow suddenly increased. Then, a large amount of gas gushed out from its interior, and bubbles rolled on the surface of the mud. Nina was immediately startled, and before she could react, the mud suddenly... stood up!
Just like a low-level soft-bodied creature suddenly had bones, the mass of dark, viscous substance stood up from the pit, and its surface quickly hardened, solidified, and changed color. In just a blink of an eye, it had an almost human outline, and in the next moment, something like a head differentiated from its top, and even a human face emerged.
It was a face that was about 60% similar to Nina!
"Wow!" Nina was frightened and screamed loudly. Even though she was brave, cheerful and strong, she was just a teenage girl. She was of course greatly frightened by such a horrible and weird scene. Her mind went blank and she instinctively raised her hand without thinking, trying to push the scary thing away from her.
This is a large monster with a temperature of up to 6000°C.
Shirley was the closest. She only heard Nina's scream, followed by a deafening explosion.
A blinding flash of high heat immediately filled her and Agou's vision - along with this flash, a high-temperature shock wave swept over as if standing in the crater of an erupting volcano.
Nina actually only slapped him once, a very brief slap.
However, the fireball created by this slap almost melted and evaporated the entire spherical space in front of her with a radius of twelve meters.
Duncan turned his head and saw the blazing fireball quickly dissipating in the air in front of Nina, while in front of her was bright molten lava flowing down after the molten metal. The girl seemed to be still in a daze, standing in front of the terrible molten pit without moving.
"What happened?" Duncan immediately came to Nina's side, put one hand on her shoulder, and the residual heat waves rose and surged around him.
「Just now...
The ball of mud suddenly stood up and turned into my appearance. I... I was shocked..." Nina came to her senses at this time. She shrank her neck, her face still in shock, and pointed in the direction of the strange thing just now, "Then I hit it..."
"Then what?"
"And then it was gone," Nina said with a sad face, seeming a little scared. "I lost control of my strength, and the whole place turned into iron liquid."
Duncan looked blankly at the molten pit on the ground and the molten metal flowing down the wall next to it, then looked at the "Sun Fragment" who still had a nervous look on his face.
No matter what the thing that just appeared and scared Nina was, it was undoubtedly the one that was hurt the most - a 6000° slap would leave a psychological trauma that would be remembered for a lifetime even if the evil god of the subspace came...
But he still stroked Nina's hair and comforted the frightened girl: "Don't be afraid, it's okay, you have already beaten that thing away..."
As he said this, he turned his head.
He glanced at the others who were still in shock.
Shirley was trembling while holding Agou, Maurice was silently beating his chest, Alice had just picked up her head, and only Vanna was the calmest - she looked at Duncan and shrugged.
"I will never speak to Nina suddenly behind her again." The Inquisitor, who once killed his way through the entire city-state, said solemnly.
"It's just a small accident," Duncan rubbed Nina's hair helplessly, and then his eyes fell on the nearby mud that was not affected by Nina's "Sun Fist". The next second, his expression changed slightly, "Wait, these things don't seem right."
Following Duncan's reminder, the others finally noticed the changes in the "mud" that spread throughout the cabin. All the mud stopped moving.
These things, which were constantly wriggling and deforming like soft-bodied creatures not long ago, suddenly all stopped at some point, as if mud had been dehydrated and turned into dry lumps. Tiny, branch-like protrusions extended from the edges of all the lumps, as if something had tried to escape from the mud and left behind a trace indicating the direction of its escape in the process.
Vanna's eyes quickly swept around, and in just a few seconds, she found that all the traces extending from the edges of the mud seemed to point in the same direction.
In the deepest part of this dark and vast "cabin".
"There is something in that direction." Vanna said immediately, while tightening the giant sword in her hand.
At the same time, Duncan also turned his gaze to the deepest part of the darkness.
A thin, dark green line of fire quietly extended out from under his feet. When it touched the dry and solidified "mud" on the floor, it instantly burned brightly and turned into piles of "bonfires" that quickly spread throughout the cabin, instantly lighting up many originally dark areas!
Duncan looked at the spreading "bonfire" and confirmed his initial guess in his heart—these mud-like substances were the condensation of supernatural power.
In the gradually spreading spiritual flames, this cabin that was too wide to be illuminated by the fire on Ai's body finally revealed more secrets to everyone.
They saw the pitted and horrible bulkhead in the distance, which looked as if it had been eaten by some acid or corrosive organisms. They saw the ropes, pipes and suspicious dark red fiber bundles hanging from the top of their heads. They saw the more numerous "mud balls" that had lost their vitality. They also saw the deepest part of the cabin -
A huge, vaguely outlined mass squatted there in an unsettling posture, and its edges seemed to be slowly crawling.
Duncan pondered for a moment, then walked towards the huge and strange "pile".
He did not let his spiritual flames corrode and burn the pile of things - even though he knew that it should be "supernatural firewood" that could be burned, he did not intend to rashly destroy any clues before figuring out what it was.
The others hesitated, but when they saw Duncan
He was already striding forward, and they soon followed behind him.
“Plop—”
Just when Duncan was halfway there, a sudden voice made everyone stop subconsciously.
Morris looked up in the direction where the sound came from and realized that the thumping sound like a heartbeat was coming from deep within the dark pile several meters high.
Duncan also stopped. He concentrated on observing the pile of strange things and sensed the aura floating around them.
It didn't give me any sense of danger.
So he took a few steps forward.
"Plop... plop..."
A heartbeat that was more obvious and stronger than before came from deep within the pile of things. Its edges seemed to be wriggling more obviously than before, and even the entire surface began to slowly undulate.
Duncan frowned, and at this moment, he heard Shirley's voice suddenly sounded behind him:
"Agou, Agou, what's wrong with you?!"