Chapter 570

Chapter 570: corruption and the Uninvited Guest

Shirley did not know if it was just her imagination, but ever since they entered this twisted, bizarre “forest”, Dog had seemed a bit sentimental. It sighed over many things and kept recalling old stories it had not mentioned in a long time. There were things even Shirley herself no longer remembered, yet Dog still remembered them clearly.

After hesitating for a moment, Shirley decided to say what she felt.

“Sentimental? Me?” Dog froze for a moment when it heard her, then grew puzzled. “Really? I’ve been sighing and reminiscing the whole time?”

“Yeah,” Shirley nodded again and again. “Normally you only bring up old stories once in a while, like some nagging old aunt, or lecture me with a string of reasons. But you’ve never been this… sentimental. It makes me feel weird and uncomfortable when I hear it.”

Dog slowly came to a stop. It finally faintly sensed the weak influence it was under. After thinking for a moment, it tilted its head. Its hollow, frightening eye sockets swept across the gloomy woods, the bloody glow within them slowly flickering.

“The forest is affecting us… it’s some kind of emotion,” it said in a deep voice. “A heavy, oppressive ‘mood’ lingers over the whole forest. It makes me brood and drift into wild thoughts, as if… as if I were submerged in a vast mind and being constantly disturbed by it…”

Shirley widened her eyes in alarm. “Huh… huh? You mean this forest is… thinking?! You’ve already been affected by it? Is it serious?”

Dog shook its head from side to side. “No, it isn’t really the forest. It’s this dream… Don’t forget its name, the Nameless One’s Dream. A dream is something made by a mind in the first place… But don’t worry, it’s not serious. The influence doesn’t seem targeted. It’s just passive interference from the environment. Shirley, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Shirley said, pointing at herself, though her face looked a little confused. “Yeah, if even you got affected, how come nothing happened to me… Maybe it’s because I don’t think too much about things?”

“If only it were that simple,” Dog muttered under its breath. “Don’t let your guard down. The subtle changes are the most dangerous. The more you feel fine, the easier it is for something to go wrong. If you suddenly feel low, or nervous and panicky, you must tell me at once.”

“Mm,” Shirley nodded quickly. Then she frowned, looking uneasily at the forest that seemed to stretch on forever. She spoke in a low voice. “Say… when do you think the Captain will find us? We can’t be unlucky enough to stay trapped here forever, right?”

“No, that won’t happen. Don’t overthink it,” Dog said at once. “Didn’t you already feel that faint call in your heart just now? That means the Captain already knows what’s going on. He must be trying to find a way. We just have to keep ourselves safe for now.”

“Oh.”

Shirley answered honestly, but just then, a strange sound came from not far away. It was a thick, sticky noise, like something was slowly melting and oozing down, and it cut off her talk with Dog.

The chilling sound made Shirley’s hair stand on end at once. She yanked hard on the black chain beside her. “Dog! This time you heard—”

“I heard it. It’s close. Something is—”

Dog spoke quickly and had already turned its head toward the direction of the strange noise. Almost at the same time, a scene beyond understanding appeared in its and Shirley’s sight—

A patch of shrubs suddenly began to grow wildly. Large masses of pitch-black matter gushed out from between the thick leaves, and in the blink of an eye they formed countless limbs that flailed and writhed in the air. At the ends of those limbs, fine cracks opened up, like dense rows of eyes.

The towering giant tree beside them, on the other hand, seemed to “melt” as it toppled with a string of strange noises. Its thick trunk flowed down like sludge. The canopy that had once blocked out the sky lost its support, yet instead of falling, it slowly grew toward the heavens. In a twisted shimmer like unreal flames, it was stretched and warped into countless pale, drifting flakes.

The ground heaved, as if it had suddenly turned into a layer of soft, sticky skin, as if something terrible was crawling through the soil and about to break out…

The next second, all kinds of terrifying sounds burst out. Illusory crackling, the wet squelch of things writhing, and hissing full of noise filled every direction in an instant. The mutated trees spread in the blink of an eye to every place they could see. Everything before their eyes seemed to suddenly come alive, and in its mad, twisted growth it took on the shape of the deep layers of a nightmare!

Everything was mutating. Everything was warping. Everything was pushing against the edge of sense and reason. Right before Shirley and Dog, the dream surged. Dark, malicious things finally crawled out of the earth.

They were flowing shadows, and in those shadows lay shapes and things that could not be described in words. It was as if countless eyes and rows of fangs were piled up in that writhing, surging sludge. Shirley only took one look at them, and at once realized there was only one thing she should do.

“Run!”

She only had time to shout this once. Before the words even fell, she had already turned and darted off, running toward a direction that still looked relatively “stable”. The rough forest ground rolled and bucked under her feet. Every step she took felt as if she were stepping on cotton, or on the skin of some soft-bodied creature. The touch that came back was disgusting and terrifying.

The body strengthened by her symbiotic pact with the Abyssal demons burst out its full power at that moment. She felt she had never run this fast in her life!

The fierce black chain went taut in an instant. Shirley yanked Dog straight up into the air, and it bobbed up and down above the ground as she ran.

Shirley kept dragging Dog as she sprinted through the forest, trying to escape. But after she had run for a while, she found the time to look back and saw that the surging nightmare was still chasing them. So she raised her voice and shouted again: “Switch!”

Before the word even finished, she swung the chain in her hand forward with all her strength and flung Dog straight ahead—

Before it landed, Dog had already adjusted its posture. It hit the ground on all four paws, steady and firm, and without any pause it used the force of that throw to keep on sprinting forward.

Now it was Shirley’s turn to fly through the air.

Even after several relays like this, the ever-mutating, twisted, nightmare “forest” still chased behind them, like a nightmare shadow they could never shake off.

It even gave Shirley a terrifying illusion, as if the whole forest had come alive with raging malice and had decided to swallow her and Dog whole, hunting them from every direction.

But luckily, just when she felt she really could not escape, the “nightmare” that had been chasing and spreading behind them suddenly slowed down.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the forest’s twisted corruption stopped without any warning—

Still dragging Dog, Shirley ran on for dozens more meters before she finally realized it. She skidded to a stop in a mess beside a fallen giant tree, then turned her head. She stared wide-eyed at the distant dark corruption that had stopped spreading, panting hard as she said: “Dog… huh… it stopped over there…”

Dog’s huge body, driven by inertia, whistled past her and crashed headfirst into a nearby pile of boulders.

After a thunderous boom, Dog struggled out of the rocks, shaking its head as it shouted: “What?!”

“Ah…” Shirley glanced at Dog in embarrassment, then pointed at the dark, twisted area in the distance that had stopped spreading. “It suddenly stopped over there.”

“Hold on a second…” Dog muttered. It ran to the side of the rocks, opened its mouth, and retched: “Bleh—”

With the sound of foul, corrosive stuff eating into dirt and stone, the dizzy Abyssal Hound finally finished throwing up. Then it shook its head, slowly walked back to Shirley’s side, and looked up at the place where the horrible corruption had stopped.

A sharp “boundary” now lay across the forest. On this side of the line, the plants were still lush and full of life. On the other side, however, everything had become a chilling, unspeakable place filled with strange, twisted shadows and writhing matter.

Countless living vines and flowing shadows that had crawled out of the soil still writhed slowly within that dark region. Even though they no longer spread this way, just looking at them filled one with a deep, gut-level dread.

Shirley did not even dare look that way for long. She barely managed to steady her breathing, and her voice still trembled. “What… what the hell is that?”

“I don’t know… I’m no expert on dreams,” Dog said, coming to stand beside her and staring at the distance with extreme caution. “But this might be what the Nameless One’s Dream truly looks like. Some deadly thing is spreading in the depths of this dream. It’s just that the dream is so large that last time the Captain and the others never ran into it—but we did.”

“Why am I always the unlucky one…” Shirley muttered, frowning. But she soon shut her mouth and turned a wary gaze toward a certain direction.

Dog also drew back its gaze from the corrupted area at once. A low growl came from its throat as it stared hard at a patch of open ground a few meters away.

A strange presence was approaching.

They did not know how that unfamiliar presence had appeared, but clearly… someone was entering this dream.

Was it a friend or an enemy?

From that presence, Shirley and Dog both felt a certain… familiar yet troubling sense that made them wary and annoyed.

The next second, under their gaze, a hazy image suddenly appeared on that empty patch of ground. It was like a dream bubble slowly coming into focus, and within the illusion a human shape gradually took form.

A young man in a dark blue coat appeared on the open ground. He was tall and lean, with a harsh, gloomy face.

The instant the young man’s figure appeared, both Shirley and Dog noticed a phantom of a black chain flash into view near his shoulder blades. At the end of the chain, the vague outline of some ominous bird-like shape showed for a moment.

Shirley’s eyes changed slightly. She tightened her grip on the chain linking her to Dog without thinking.

The “uninvited guest” not far away reacted at once as well. Sensing the unfamiliar presence on the scene, he suddenly turned his gaze.

A girl in a black dress, standing beside a Abyssal Hound, came into his view.

He was startled for a moment, then frowned:

“…This area already has people in it?”