AnalogHorror: Rule Kaidan 4016
Chapter 745 - 344 "Corpse Bone Forest" and "Star Moon Night

Chapter 745: Chapter 344 "Corpse Bone Forest" and "Star Moon Night

"Hiss... Hiss... Hiss..."

As he continued to advance, Lin Yi’s breathing became subtly heavier, and his breaths began to show some signs of disarray.

Sensing something, he abruptly turned his gaze towards a certain spot deep in the dense forest—he saw a flowering tree.

The snow-white skeletal buds were about to bloom, clustered together in bunches, but no matter how he looked at them, something felt off.

He took another careful look and instantaneously felt a chill down his spine.

Those were not flower buds at all, but numerous small skulls gathered together at the treetops, forming a sinister skeleton flower tree!

Amidst the enveloping pale mist, these tree-full of pale skulls seemed to come alive, murmuring an eerie tune through the sobbing wind.

When the wind blew, the skulls rattled and jostled on the tree.

What was even more bizarre, with the first appearance of a tree laden with big eyeballs and skulls, more and more similar trees started to emerge in the dense forest, faintly visible within the fog, abstract and demonic, emanating a peculiar breath.

Walking on, the sight of these twisting ancient trees covered the entire mountainside; some trees seemed to have grown limbs, where leaves should have been, turning into hands and feet, yet their roots were still entrenched in the soil, completely immovable.

The vegetation along the path seemed to have shed the constraints of conventional "plants," morphing into some kind of "animal" and "plant" hybrid life forms, yet a closer observation reveals that these transformations, deviating from the normal biological map, all carry a tendency toward sculptural stasis.

Those things, like organs sculpted out of milky gelatinous material, kept growing on the ancient trees.

Whether it was eyeballs, limbs, or other body parts, organs, they all seemed independent of each other.

"How about that, isn’t this ’scenery’ pleasing to the eyes?" Old Mo said calmly.

Lin Yi shifted his gaze back, asking somewhat alarmed, "What are all those...?"

Old Mo replied, "These things are called ’Corpse Bone Forest’... They are one of the research outcomes of by the Zealots."

"What you see, all of them are ’spare parts,’ they can be used to assemble the juvenile form of Rage Angels, or to repair injuries sustained by their own bodies... Of course, there’s also some that directly replace a part of themselves."

"Like swapping an eye, or other parts of the body..."

Lin Yi’s eyes widened: "Damn, what cyber ascension?"

Old Mo seemed not to grasp the meaning of "cyber," nor did he intend to delve into it, and continued, "The growth of these things is also influenced by ’it,’ carrying ’its’ breath, similar to the passive effects of scales, that’s why those Zealots have the chance to pick up scales in its territory."

"I thought they were plucked..." Lin Yi said weakly.

Old Mo spoke, "’It’ has long transcended the life form of ’man-made creation,’ it grows and molts like a snake, its scales are what it has shed, and they contain supernatural powers far exceeding the Matrix."

"The reason ’it’ has such a massive size is that with each molting, it grows larger, if this weren’t a crack between Layers but an area in reality, it would have been observed long ago."

Lin Yi’s mind immediately conjured up an image of a mountain-sized serpent showing up at the Gymnasium of S City...

In front of "it," the size of whole mountains seemed insignificant, the size of the Gymnasium might just be comparable to the size of an "egg" perhaps...

At this moment, Old Mo asked, "What time is it now?"

Lin Yi diverted his gaze back and glanced at his watch: "22:34."

Old Mo nodded: "About time, brace yourself, something is about to go wrong with this road."

Lin Yi quickly focused his attention.

Indeed, right at 22:35, Lin Yi started to feel some illogical changes under his feet, the originally loose sand began to feel mushy like fatty meat, causing a sensation of lost balance when stepping on it.

After just a few steps, he felt his center of gravity shift to varying degrees, swaying left with one step, lunging forward with another, as if treading on some kind of overly stretchable waterbed.

The trees around him also started to manifest the distorted sensation that previously only appeared in Phantom Vision.

Patches of large trees, as if losing their natural tenacity, started swaying like seaweed, the whole world seemed printed onto a hyperbolic surface that defies geometrical laws, undergoing a type of distortion that simply could not be perceived with naked eyes.

Looking at Old Mo, Lin Yi was startled to find that Old Mo seemed to have merged with his environment, becoming distorted as well!

"You’re going with the flow," said Old Mo, his voice reaching Lin Yi’s ears. He didn’t help Lin Yi but started to teach him instead.

"Keep your eyes on the path at your feet."

"Do not observe its distorted form... Look for the invariant point in its motion, reduce the sense of distortion in your eyes, and try to perceive it in a relatively ’normal’ way."

Old Mo’s words made Lin Yi utterly confused, even completely unable to comprehend.

"It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand, just follow my lead for now." With that, Old Mo slowed down his pace as if waiting for him.

Nonetheless, this act of stopping was still depicted in Lin Yi’s vision as a grotesquely twisted form.