Chapter 305

Chapter 305: 6000°C and a Heartbeat

Alive.

Once they realized that what Alice had stepped on was not sludge at all, but some kind of living tissue, most of the people present felt their skin crawl.

Duncan simply thought the things writhing on the floor were… disgusting.

Right after that, he heard Nina’s voice from not far away: “There’s some here too!”

“And over here!” Shirley cried out next. “A huge patch, and it’s still moving!”

All over this mysterious, empty space lay those black, sludge-like “substances” that could slowly squirm.

“They’re all over the place…” Vanna had silently drawn the greatsword from her back. She frowned as she surveyed the vast “hold” and spoke in a very serious tone. “Goddess preserve us… what are these things?”

Morris forced himself to ignore his disgust. He squatted by a patch of slowly moving “sludge” and used his folding knife to lift the edge of the sticky “mud.”

“I have never seen anything like this, nor read of anything like it in any book,” the learned old scholar said, full of unease and confusion. “It looks like something living, but it feels just like mud, and… I do not sense any trace of a mind in it.”

“It is somewhat similar to something Tyrian described from one of the ‘No. 3 Submersibles’,” Duncan said casually. At the same time, he raised his head and looked toward the deeper part of the hold.

Nina had walked to the edge of the group. In the dim light cast by AI’s ghostly flames, a patch of sludge that looked especially “lively” was slowly rising and falling in a hollow in the floor. Nina stood beside the hollow, bent down, and watched the disgusting substance with curiosity.

She felt a little nervous, but her curiosity was even stronger than her nerves.

In the next second, the sludge suddenly stirred!

It was as if it was answering Nina’s gaze, or like some blind, stupid creature that had finally been disturbed by this group of uninvited guests. The flow of the mud sped up all at once. A great amount of gas surged out from inside it, and bubbles rolled across its surface. Nina jumped in fright. Before she could react, the sludge suddenly… stood up!

Like a lowly soft-bodied creature that suddenly grew bones, the black, sticky mass straightened up out of the hollow. Its surface hardened, set, and changed color at high speed. In the blink of an eye, it took on a shape almost like a human. In the next instant, its top split and formed something like a head, and even grew a face.

It was a face that looked seventy or eighty percent like Nina’s!

“Wah!” Nina cried out in fear. Even though she was brave, cheerful, and strong, she was still only a teenage girl. Faced with such a terrifying and bizarre sight, she was badly shaken. Her mind went blank on the spot. Without even thinking, she raised her hand on instinct to slap that awful thing away from her.

That slap had a temperature of 6000°C.

Shirley was the closest. She only heard Nina’s startled cry, then a deafening boom. A blinding flash of searing light filled her and Dog’s vision. With that flash came a shockwave of heat, like standing at the rim of an erupting volcano.

Nina had only slapped once, and it had been a very short slap.

But the fireball from that slap almost melted and vaporized a whole spherical space with a twelve-meter radius in front of her.

Duncan turned his head just in time to see the blazing ball of fire in front of Nina vanish quickly in midair. In front of her, glowing streams of molten metal were flowing where the metal had melted. The girl still seemed dazed. She was standing there, rooted to the edge of that terrifying molten pit.

“What happened?” Duncan hurried to Nina’s side and put a hand on her shoulder. The leftover heat still rolled and shimmered around him.

“Just… just now that sludge suddenly stood up, and it turned into me, and I… I got scared…” Nina finally came back to herself. She hunched her shoulders, still pale with shock, and pointed toward where the strange thing had been. “So I hit it…”

“And then?”

“And then it was gone,” Nina said with a miserable face, still a little frightened. “I didn’t hold back. This whole area turned into molten iron.”

Duncan looked blankly at the molten pit in the floor and the streams of metal running down the nearby wall. Then he looked at the still-nervous “fragment of the Sun.”

Whatever that thing was that had jumped out to scare Nina, it was clearly the one that got hurt the worst. A 6000°C slap like that… even an eldritch god from Subspace would be left with lifelong shadows from it…

Still, he reached out and ruffled Nina’s hair, comforting the young lady who had just been badly frightened: “Don’t be scared. It’s fine. You already slapped it out of existence…”

As he spoke, he turned and looked at the others, who were all shaken.

Shirley was hugging Dog and shaking like a leaf. Morris was quietly thumping his own chest. Alice had just picked up her head. Only Vanna stayed the calmest. She looked at Duncan and shrugged.

“I will never again walk up behind Nina and start talking to her suddenly,” said the Inquisitor who had once slaughtered her way through an entire city-state, in a very solemn tone.

“It was just a small accident,” Duncan said helplessly as he rubbed Nina’s hair. Then his gaze went back to the patches of sludge that Nina’s “Sun punch” had not reached. A second later, his expression changed slightly. “Wait, something is wrong with these things.”

At Duncan’s warning, everyone finally noticed the changes in the sludge all over the hold.

All the sludge had stopped moving.

These things that had been twisting and shifting like soft-bodied creatures only moments ago had all frozen. They had become dry clumps, like mud that had lost its water. At the edges of every clump, tiny branch-like protrusions stretched outward, as if something had tried to escape from inside the mud and left marks pointing in the direction it had fled.

Vanna’s eyes swept around the hold at once. In only a few seconds, she noticed that the marks reaching out from the edges of the sludge all seemed to point the same way.

Toward the deepest part of the dark hold.

“There is something in that direction.” Vanna spoke at once and gripped her greatsword tighter.

At the same time, Duncan also turned his gaze toward the deepest darkness.

A thin line of ghostly green flame stretched quietly out from under his feet. When it touched the dry clumps of “sludge” on the floor, it flared up bright at once, turning into one bonfire after another. The “campfires” spread across the hold in moments, lighting many places that had been in darkness.

Duncan watched the spreading fires and confirmed his first guess in his heart – these sludge-like things were condensed from extraordinary power.

As the spirit form flames spread, this wide hold that had been too large for AI’s firelight to brighten fully finally revealed more of its secrets.

They saw distant bulkheads scarred and pitted as if burned by acid or gnawed by some corrupt creature. They saw ropes, pipes, and suspicious dark red bundles of fibers hanging from above. They saw even more sludge clumps that had already lost all life. And at the very deepest point of the hold, they saw—

A huge, blurred mass crouched there in an unsettling posture. Its edges still seemed to be slowly writhing.

Duncan paused for a moment, then strode toward that giant, twisted heap.

He did not let his spirit form flames corrupt and burn the mass. He knew it was also “extraordinary firewood” that he could burn, but before he understood what it was, he did not want to destroy any clues.

The others hesitated for a moment, but when they saw Duncan already walking forward with big strides, they quickly followed behind him.

“Thump—”

Just as Duncan had gone halfway, a sudden sound made everyone stop without thinking.

Morris looked up toward the source of the sound and realized that the dull thump, like a heartbeat, was coming from deep inside that several-meter-high dark heap.

Duncan stopped as well. He stared at the strange mass and felt the flow of its aura.

It did not give him any sense of danger.

So he took a few more steps forward.

“Thump… thump…”

The heartbeat-like sound became clearer and stronger than before. The edges of the mass writhed more obviously, and even its whole surface began to rise and fall.

Duncan frowned. At that moment, he suddenly heard Shirley’s voice behind him:

“Dog, Dog, what’s wrong with you?!”