Chapter 220
Chapter 220: Skeleton Bones Can Hurt People—You’re Even Better at Absurdity Than I Am
Jiang Tea Tea raised her hand. “Report! I have a question!”
The Leader looked at her. “Go ahead.”
“Is this lab connected to Lang Yin Feng?”
“No direct connection,” the Leader said. “It’s related to Li Ao, the former director of the Ability Institute.”
Jiang Tea Tea nodded once. “Copy that.”
The Leader’s gaze swept the group. “Any other questions?”
Sui Xuan Chu and the others answered in unison, “No, Leader!”
“Then stay sharp,” the Leader ordered. “Move out.”
With his words, the hatch of the small craft slid open.
The ship hovered about three meters above the ground—low enough for ability users to jump without injury. None of the eight hesitated. With their gear secured, they dropped down one by one.
The instant their boots hit the earth, an artificial moon rose overhead, bright as daylight. Its cold glow spilled across more than a hundred kilometers.
The lab they’d been sent to investigate sat dead center under that false moonlight—a facility abandoned for three months, stripped of every trace of its former prestige.
Weeds swallowed the grounds. The air reeked. Insects shrieked in the dark. Rotting leaves and snapped branches littered the path, and shallow puddles gleamed between them.
Huang Da Zhuang and Cheng Xiao Ting—one dog, one wolf—took point. Their senses were the sharpest. With headlamps blazing, they cut a route through the overgrowth.
Ju Que, Yan Yu, Zhang Ting Zhou, and Sui Xuan Chu fanned out along the flanks. Cheng Lin Yue, the weakest fighter and their healer, stayed protected in the center.
Jiang Tea Tea, the strongest among them, brought up the rear. Each of them wore a headlamp, and above them floated flexible hanging lights that locked onto their movement, trailing like obedient fireflies.
If a headlamp died, the hanging lights would switch on instantly, flooding a wide area with illumination.
Jiang Tea Tea gripped the seemingly ordinary Flame Staff, sealed by magic power, and followed the team into the lab.
The surface structure covered roughly five thousand square meters. According to the map, the facility extended downward ten levels—around thirty to fifty meters carved into the earth.
They started on the ground floor. Glass shards glittered everywhere, mixed with rubble, dust, and dead leaves.
For safety—and to make sure nothing was missed—they swept the entire floor anyway. Every corner got a monitor.
Only after that did they head down.
The lab’s power system had been destroyed. The lift was dead. There were no stairs and no ladder. They had to rely on ropes, lowering themselves one at a time.
The first basement level was as empty as the ground floor—just wreckage and that same strange, nauseating stench.
They went lower. Third basement. Fourth. Fifth.
Then, by the time they reached the sixth, the structure changed abruptly. It no longer matched what the fifth level above should have been.
Basement six was worse—more ruined, more rotten, more rank. Somewhere in the darkness came intermittent sounds: a long, complaining creak, then the metallic crash of something shifting.
Jiang Tea Tea listened, eyes narrowing. “Be careful. I’m going to check where that sound is coming from.”
“I’ll go with you,” Sui Xuan Chu said immediately.
She glanced at him, gave a short nod, and started to say, “Huang Big Dog, Cheng Xiao Ting—watch Cheng Lin Yue—” when Cheng Lin Yue’s scream ripped through the stale air.
“Ah! Something grabbed my foot—danger!”
Jiang Tea Tea snapped toward her, moving fast.
She hadn’t even reached Cheng Lin Yue when the floor beneath the healer collapsed.
A pair of rotting hands shot up from below and yanked Cheng Lin Yue down. Her scream turned sharp and raw.
Jiang Tea Tea whipped her Flame Staff forward. It shot out like a living whip, stretching impossibly. The tip softened into flexible branches that looped around Cheng Lin Yue’s waist and arrested her fall, leaving her suspended in open space instead of vanishing into the dark.
Cheng Lin Yue thrashed and tried to kick free. Her heel slammed into the hand clamped around her ankle again and again, but the grip didn’t budge. It felt like iron—like it meant to tear her leg off.
Sui Xuan Chu and the others rushed in. Someone dropped a hanging light, and the hole below flared bright as day.
The thing that had grabbed Cheng Lin Yue recoiled at the sudden glare. It released her, hit the ground, and bolted.
Six of them jumped down after it at once, splitting instinctively—one group in pursuit, one group staying to protect Cheng Lin Yue.
Jiang Tea Tea extended the Flame Staff farther, lowering Cheng Lin Yue until her boots touched solid ground. Jiang crouched, checked the ankle, and pulled out medical spray, coating the area in a quick mist.
Then she dropped down beside her. “How is it? Can you walk?”
Cheng Lin Yue’s voice shook. “I’m fine, but… that thing didn’t feel human.”
Jiang Tea Tea’s brow pinched. “Wasn’t it supposed to be a new type of mutated human? Now it’s not even human?”
“It didn’t feel like a hand,” Cheng Lin Yue said, swallowing hard. “It felt like bone. Like a hand bone with no flesh.”
Before Jiang Tea Tea could press further, Sui Xuan Chu’s voice rang out from deeper ahead. “Roommate! Hurry—get over here!”
Jiang Tea Tea looked to the ones who’d stayed behind. “Take care of her. Treat the wound. I’ll leave you markers.”
Zhang Ting Zhou nodded without hesitation. “Understood. Sister Tea, go.”
Jiang Tea Tea took off, Flame Staff in hand, following the trail left by Sui Xuan Chu, Huang Da Zhuang, and Ju Que. The hanging lights made the route unnaturally bright.
To keep the path lit even if their lights were sabotaged, Jiang Tea Tea left small tufts of flame from her Flame Staff at intervals. With her magic power reinforcing them, those flames would burn for five to ten hours unless someone with stronger magic power extinguished them.
Behind her, Cheng Lin Yue refused to be dead weight. Once the medical spray dulled the pain and stopped the bleeding, she forced herself upright.
“Let’s go,” she said, voice unsteady but determined. “We need to catch up to Sister Tea.”
“Do you want it bandaged?” Zhang Ting Zhou asked.
“I used medical spray. It’s not bleeding.” She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
“All right,” Zhang Ting Zhou said. “Move.”
They kept her boxed in between them and followed Jiang Tea Tea’s trail.
Jiang Tea Tea ran for nearly half an hour, spiraling downward through corridors that felt like they shouldn’t exist. Only when the light ahead suddenly opened up did she catch sight of them.
Sui Xuan Chu, Huang Da Zhuang, and Ju Que stood on a platform suspended over a void, peering down into it.
Jiang Tea Tea strode up. “What’s going on?”
“We chased it here,” Sui Xuan Chu said. “That thing was crawling on all fours—no idea what it was. It jumped down, and then it vanished.”
Ju Que pointed into the darkness. “The hanging lights and our headlamps are useless here. The light doesn’t reach down. It just… stops.”
Huang Da Zhuang’s nose wrinkled. “The smell is worse, too. Rotting corpses. Fresh blood. Maggots. Nutrient solution.”
He inhaled again, grimacing. “All mixed together—at least thirty different scents. And since we can’t see what’s below, we didn’t push forward.”
Jiang Tea Tea stepped to the edge and leaned out, eyes narrowing as she stared into the void. “Even you can’t see down there?”
Beastfolk usually had night vision. If even that failed, someone had deliberately built this place to swallow light.
“Visibility’s terrible,” Huang Da Zhuang said. “Past about one and a half—maybe two meters—it’s just nothing.”
“It was designed,” Ju Que added. “Whoever was in charge didn’t want anything seeing what’s under there.”
Jiang Tea Tea flicked her Flame Staff. Five palm-sized flame orbs broke away and dropped, falling like beads of fire.
For a moment, the darkness relented. The orbs widened the visible range as they sank… and then the void swallowed them whole. Their glow vanished as if it had never existed.
“That’s deep,” Jiang Tea Tea murmured.
Sui Xuan Chu’s jaw tightened. “How deep? Two hundred meters? Three?”
Huang Da Zhuang frowned. “The Leader didn’t say anything about a pit like this.”
Ju Que’s voice turned sharp. “We can’t contact the Leader.”
Sui Xuan Chu and Huang Da Zhuang both snapped toward him. “What do you mean, can’t contact?”
“No signal,” Ju Que said. “We’re cut off from the outside.”
Huang Da Zhuang cursed under his breath. “Damn it. The last team came here and didn’t report anything like this. Why do we get the weird shit?”
Sui Xuan Chu forced his voice steady. “Don’t panic. We’re here. We finish the mission, we get signal back—and we get military merit.”
At the words “military merit,” Huang Da Zhuang and Ju Que straightened like they’d been jolted.
“If we can’t see the bottom, then we go down,” Huang Da Zhuang said. “Once we’re down there, we’ll—”
“Don’t,” Jiang Tea Tea cut in flatly.
All three stared at her.
“From here to the bottom is about four hundred and twenty meters,” she said. “There’s a pool down there. And there’s something in it.”
Their faces went stiff.
“Sister Tea…” Huang Da Zhuang’s voice wobbled. “Don’t tell me you can see four hundred twenty meters down.”
“Do you even understand what four hundred twenty meters means?” Ju Que blurted. “Roommate, your eyes are that good?”
Jiang Tea Tea blinked. “It’s not my eyesight. I dropped the fireballs. They fed information back.”
The three of them stared at her Flame Staff like it had betrayed the laws of reality.
Jiang Tea Tea didn’t waste time arguing. She tossed the Flame Staff down into the void and jumped after it.
A gasp tore out of the others.
The staff moved like something alive. It surged beneath her feet, forming a step mid-fall.
As she dropped, that step thickened from finger-width to something massive—so thick a person couldn’t wrap their arms around it. Multicolored fire flared, flooding the entire space with light and revealing walls stained black-red-black.
Sui Xuan Chu and the others snapped into motion. They pulled out ropes from a storage button, anchored them to fixed points, and secured the knots. By the time they finished, Cheng Lin Yue and the others arrived—just in time to hold the lines while the three men descended.
Jiang Tea Tea landed first.
Her boots hit the pool with a splash that sent dark, blood-colored water sloshing outward. The stench was so thick it coated the back of her throat.
Then a roar thundered up from below—like a bull bellowing and a tiger howling at once. The sound shook the air.
Jiang Tea Tea lowered her gaze—
And a black shape clinging to the wall shot toward her, jaws opening wide, snapping for the back of her neck.