I Forged the Myth of the Ancient Overlords
Chapter 222 - 222 221. Sanity-3_1

Chapter 222: 221. Sanity-3_1 Chapter 222: 221. Sanity-3_1 It was obvious that someone or some creature was on the second floor.

Cui Siter became alert and drew his trusty revolver, checking the bullets.

Lu Ban manifested “Testament,” ready to blast it at a moment’s notice.

Shia looked at the two, puzzled.

“What are you doing?”

She asked softly.

“We need to be careful as we approach…”

Cui Siter hadn’t finished speaking when he saw Shia raise her left hand.

Her small frame suddenly burst forth with immense force, and she leaped up, slamming the ceiling with her left hand with the swiftness of a thunderclap.

Thump thump thump—

Following the sound of something piercing the ceiling to reach the second floor, Lu Ban clearly saw several small holes, as thick as fingers, appear in the wooden ceiling.

Boom boom boom boom—

The next moment, a series of explosions went off, shaking loose a great deal of dust.

“Pah pah pah… What are you doing?”

Cui Siter spit the dust from his mouth and looked up at the second floor.

There was no longer any movement above.

“When encountering an unidentified entity, under the circumstance of walls being present, a piercing Explosion Spell can be used for a probing attack to investigate the enemy’s situation, as written in the Gray Tower Proxy Handbook,”

Shia promptly replied.

“Probing attack?”

Lu Ban felt that the probe seemed a bit extreme.

“…What if it was the Ancient Capital?”

Cui Siter hesitantly asked.

“Don’t worry, this time I prayed for a healing spell, as long as there is a breath left, we can revive it right away!”

Shia patted her chest, which made a sound like metal clashing, and she specifically glanced at Lu Ban.

“Shall we go upstairs to check?”

Lu Ban was sure it wasn’t the Ancient Capital; he stepped on the creaking stairs and ascended, finding a havoc-wreaked second floor.

This was a bedroom. One could see the cotton from the beds flying about, the Explosion Spell had turned the wooden bed into pieces, and among those pieces was a creature.

It looked like a Hunter, yet also like an octopus, lying on the ground, barely alive.

Lu Ban observed carefully and noticed it was a quadruped creature, the size of a large dog, with a body as slippery as an eel, limbs with reverse joints and sharp claws at the ends.

What caught attention was its head; several tentacles extended from its neck without any sign of eyes or ears, only a mouthpart surrounded by numerous sharp teeth at the center of those tentacles.

Merely seeing this creature was enough to make one question what the gods of this world had done; the slimy tentacles were still softly writhing and stretching, but the monster seemed unable to move anymore.

“See, this is not the Ancient Capital.”

Shia said, pointing at the creature.

“Is this a monster peculiar to the Abandoned Capital?”

Lu Ban was curious; after all, he was not from Abandoned Capital and had only seen Ratmen and flying fish in the city, unaware of any other strange creatures that lived there.

“I have never heard of such a monster in Abandoned Capital,”

Cui Siter pocketed his revolver and pulled out gloves. He initially intended to put them on but after a moment’s thought, handed them to Lu Ban instead.

“You have a look.”

Lu Ban took the gloves and quickly made his way to the creature’s side. He poked its body with his finger and felt a somewhat hard sensation, as if there were stones inside a balloon.

He pinched the tentacles on his face, pushing them aside, and Lu Ban fully exposed the monster’s mouthparts in the midst of Cui Siter’s ashen expression.

The instant Cui Siter saw that image, he felt an instinctual shudder, took two steps back, and leaned against the wall. A wave of dizziness nearly brought him to his knees, but luckily Shia supported him.

[You have witnessed an indescribable, evil monster.]

[Sanity -3]

Cui Siter couldn’t even bother to care about the notification that his sanity had decreased.

He gasped for air, took a moment to recover, and finally managed to stand upright.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t go and look for myself…”

Cui Siter felt a lingering fear, realizing that if the creature were still alive, he would have had to fight it and inspect the body himself, which probably would have resulted in an even greater loss of sanity.

“Are you alright?”

Shia seemed relatively unaffected, feeling merely disgusted at the sight. In the Black Forest, on the Proxy’s path, there were plenty of even stranger and more grotesque beasts; this monster was merely one of the uglier ones.

Lu Ban watched, contemplative.

It seemed that if one were to measure by the degree of pollution, the Night Country’s pollution was definitely deeper than that of the Abandoned Capital. The same monster could cause a strong impact on Cui Siter but have almost no effect on Shia.

As for Lu Ban, he had no more sanity to lose, so there was no point discussing his reaction.

Therefore, Lu Ban thought that perhaps the pollution level of the world could indeed enhance human resistance to some extent against these foreign monsters, indescribable entities.

At that moment, Lu Ban noticed that the monster’s abdomen seemed somewhat swollen, more distended than before.

“Strange, does this seem a bit swollen to you?”

He prodded it with his finger.

Immediately after, Lu Ban saw something moving inside the monster’s abdomen, like worms undulating beneath the skin. Simultaneously, the belly swelled as if afflicted by disease, gradually becoming intolerably distended.

“Move away quickly.”

After Lu Ban spoke, Shia immediately helped the still unsteady Cui Siter to leave the bedroom.

In the instant that Lu Ban closed the door, the monster’s corpse exploded.

The explosion lasted only a moment before silencing. When Lu Ban opened the door again, he saw an even more chaotic scene.

From the monster’s abdomen, countless writhing tentacles protruded, similar to its face. At the ends of these tentacles were what appeared to be cysts, and one could almost imagine this creature evolving step by step from these fingernail-sized octopuses into the grotesque monster, with hundreds more still squirming in the room, filling every corner.

Even Shia felt a bit dizzy at the sight, noticing her own sanity had dropped slightly; she then raised her hand and released a spell.

Hum—

All the writhing worms in the room were dragged and absorbed by some force, squashed into a ball.

Splat—

The compressed worms fell to the floor in a heap.

“So this is the magic of the Night Country…”

Cui Siter had visited the Night Country before but had not directly encountered the mages of the Gray Tower. Witnessing Shia’s sequence of spells, he couldn’t help but be amazed.

This was an extraordinary power far beyond the imagination of the people of the Abandoned Capital.

“Quite convenient, a shame I can’t learn it,” Lu Ban remarked.

It was then that he noticed, after Shia had cleared away the clutter of rubbish and worms, a pile of scattered manuscript pages on the bedroom floor.

The pages were soiled with unknown filth, but the text was still mostly discernible.

Lu Ban bent down, picked up the stack of manuscript pages, and saw that they contained fragments of a novel.

“… Before heading to Beihan Town, the detectives decided to first visit the residence of the novelist to see if they could find anything of value…”

*

Please recommend and vote for this with your monthly ticket!