Chapter 305: Seeing Hell
Fang Mu wandered around Mo Longwei’s home, found a concealed back door, listened closely by pressing his ear to the gap, and after discovering no demented villagers nearby, immediately opened the door and slipped out the back door.
Relying on his keen super senses, Fang Mu could detect danger at the first moment and evade it, thus smoothly escaping the village’s range and once again stepping onto the mountain path leading into Nong Mountain.
Cold winds whistled through the mountains, chilling to the bone marrow. Fang Mu couldn’t help but hug his shoulders, shrinking his body as he jogged along.
When Fang Mu saw the thick mist enveloping the forest depths again, his heart was still shocked.
“Has it become thicker, and spread outward a bit?” Fang Mu thought uncertainly. It had been too long, and he couldn’t remember the details from his last visit here, only judging based on sensory feelings and vague impressions.
Stepping into the mist, Fang Mu further unleashed his eye ability. All the layers of mist vanished from his sight as if they no longer obscured anything, leaving all things exposed with nowhere to hide.
Fang Mu had guessed that endless dangers and death were hidden here, but he never imagined it would be such a terrifying hellish scene.
Countless corpses and bones lay scattered in the jungle, strewn across the wilderness—flying insects, crawling beasts, men, women, elderly, and children. Their bones could be seen every few steps. He even saw a villager’s corpse that had died just a few days ago, its stiff, pale face etched with the utmost despair from before death. He must have exhausted all efforts to find a way out, yet until death, he never realized he had collapsed near the exit.
However, Fang Mu didn’t find the man particularly pitiful. The eye that could see scenes across time dimensions revealed that this man, to survive, had directly betrayed his friend, kicked him down to let the friend block a group of frog people’s pursuit with his life.
In such an adverse and cruel environment, Fang Mu felt no sense of security, so he took out a cleaver he had swiped from Mo Longwei’s kitchen earlier. Only when gripping the handle did he feel a slight sense of security.
Croak! Croak…
In the thick fog, sound transmission was extremely difficult. It was only due to his superhuman hearing that Fang Mu barely caught the toad croaks. They must be patrolling nearby, searching for intruders like him.
Fang Mu gripped the cleaver handle tighter and slowed his steps forward, trying not to make any noise with each step.
Gulp croak…
A low toad croak came from a blind spot in Fang Mu’s vision that he hadn’t noticed for a moment. He turned his head to look and was startled by a pair of frog eyes hidden in the shadows.
This was also the first time Fang Mu had seen such a scene. Those strange toads that should have lived in Nong Mountain caves had actually burrowed out from the stone ground—not in the physical manner of a mole digging, but more like a magical phase-through ability, emerging directly from underground onto the ground.
That pair of frog eyes was enormous, like two glowing light bulbs. As they gazed at Fang Mu, he imagined how massive their owner must be—a size no less than the flesh and blood giant toad he had encountered underground in his third life.
Croak!
The huge strange toad emerged onto the ground like a majestic small mountain. It stared at Fang Mu coldly, as if seeing barely edible food that could barely fill its stomach.
Looking at that milky white belly inflating and deflating like a balloon nonstop, Fang Mu vaguely saw a familiar yet strange face, making his scalp tingle instantly.
He saw a human face half-corroded by acid, and that face belonged to Mo Guangning, the tour guide from his first life who had brought him into the mountain. This unlucky Mr. Tour Guide ultimately failed to luckily escape the misty woods and instead became a meal for the monster.
The enormous size difference, plus the piles of corpses visible in the opponent’s bulging semi-transparent abdomen, made Fang Mu realize the monster before him was not something his small frame could handle. He immediately turned and ran, deliberately weaving around tree after tree so the pursuing giant toad couldn’t catch up right away.
The giant toad could also spit its tongue, and those stone-like projectiles launched like rocket launcher rounds—splitting mountains and rocks when hitting the ground, snapping trees when striking them.
If that landed on a human body, Fang Mu didn’t even dare imagine it; it would probably be terrifying torture.
In this way, Fang Mu shuttled through the woods, evading the monster’s pursuit.
When exhaustion nearly made him collapse again, Fang Mu spotted a small cave barely wide enough for one person to enter. He immediately jumped in impatiently, ran five or six meters, and then the relentlessly pursuing giant toad finally had to give up.
Fang Mu retreated hurriedly against the stone wall, thus narrowly and barely dodging the giant toad’s tongue attack.
Croak!
The giant toad let out a somewhat unwilling roar. The roar traveled along the direction extending deeper into the cave. Moments later, Fang Mu heard an unbelievable echoing roar from the cave depths toward the entrance, followed by patches of complex, dense toad frog strange calls, and bursts of footsteps.
“This beast can call for help, huh.” Fang Mu felt deep hatred, but he was powerless to stop it and could only continue downward, trying to use sound to determine their positions.
After advancing about fifty meters deeper into the narrow cave, Fang Mu’s view suddenly opened up. Before him was a vast hollow zone inside Nong Mountain’s mountain body. The group that brought huge sense of oppression and threat to all entering the sacred place was a massive ghost spirit. That enormous amorphous black liquid mass was now fully helping four humanoid flesh eggs accelerate their hatching. It enveloped them, slowly infiltrating parts of its body into the flesh eggs’ interiors, allowing Fang Mu to finally see the scenes inside the flesh eggs.
It wasn’t that the flesh eggs were gestating humanoid creatures; rather, the creatures inside the flesh eggs were parasitizing humans who hadn’t yet died, continuously digesting and extracting vitality from their hosts to nourish the lives hatching in the flesh eggs.
The ghost spirit enveloped the four flesh eggs, absorbing and fusing them into its own body, using its massive form and dark shadows to temporarily cover the grotesque flesh eggs.
As Fang Mu walked downward, he constantly watched the ghost spirit’s changes. Soon he saw the four flesh eggs squeezing together.
After a period of rapid digestion and deformity, the four flesh eggs completely disappeared, becoming part of the ghost spirit’s body.
The ghost spirit’s body underwent deformity again, transforming into a new form like a long-skirted creature. The human faces from those four flesh eggs became components of the ghost spirit’s externally visible skirt patterns.
Four living human faces right before his eyes, endlessly groaning in pain.
