Chapter 41: Dimensional Demon City
As his toes landed on the shadow of the corpse, Li Jiahong felt a softness, like soft jelly, rotting flesh paste, and as he applied force, his sole began to sink, as if stepping into a giant’s corpse, being adsorbed by greasy fat.
That feeling of being devoured by the unknown made Li Jiahong uneasy, causing his movements to become hesitant and indecisive.
The Ushi-Oni suddenly let out a cry, spread its wings, and embraced him, dragging him down into the deep sea of this shadow.
The Ushi-Oni’s action surprised Li Jiahong, and at the same time, it further convinced him that his wife was definitely controlling the monster’s body at this moment. With his beloved by his side, facing life and death together, Li Jiahong only felt that on this cold, muddy, otherworld, his heart still had room for warmth.
Li Jiahong felt himself continuously sinking, as if passing through the esophagus of an unknown creature, the soft walls around him exerting an incredible force that repeatedly squeezed his body, not enough to injure him, but the intermittent suffocation was very uncomfortable.
It was the Ushi-Oni that shielded him with its wings, blocking most of the force and creating space for him to breathe, which made him feel much better.
Fortunately, this discomfort did not last long. Li Jiahong soon felt his feet lose their grip, finally feeling the sensation of breaking through soft membranes.
Li Jiahong exclaimed, finally piercing a faint light below his feet. Red light spread before his eyes, and his vision cleared as he and the Ushi-Oni fell into this world filled with crimson.
Rising before his eyes were giant stone tablets piercing the sky, and meticulously arranged buildings stood bizarrely and magnificently on the ground beneath his feet. Unseen hieroglyphs were engraved on the black stones and walls all around. That slippery green liquid permeated every corner of this eerie city… Li Jiahong found himself in such an ancient and magnificent black stone city, yet he couldn’t help but feel mocked by these buildings that defied human aesthetics and three-dimensional logic.
The intense visual impact of the dimensional city environment made Li Jiahong dizzy, his feet cold, and unknown fear pierced his fragile human brain like the cold wind flowing through the city.
Also pervading the giant black stone city were waves of soul-stirring whispers, various incomprehensible strange syllables and sounds, as if from the most malevolent poisonous curses of the Netherworld, unexplainable yet conveying deep malice.
In such a city, Li Jiahong could still retain a sliver of reason. He constantly reminded himself that he had come here to find his child.
This barely functioning thought caused him to forget good and evil, to forget love and affection. Only the obsession, long buried in his subconscious, drove him forward.
Find my child… find my child… find my child…
Li Jiahong stopped thinking about everything, unable to think of anything else. Even though his wife, who had transformed into the Ushi-Oni, stayed by his side, he seemed not to notice, walking on a path indistinguishable between flat ground and uphill, like a walking dead in this city filled with deathly silence and crisis.
Gradually, slowly, Li Jiahong walked into the center of the city, where countless hideous crouching monsters awaited his arrival. It had been countless years since an intruder like him had entered their world. Perhaps to the beings living in this eerie city, he was like an ant that had strayed into a famine zone, and in the eyes of every predator, he was such novel and delicious prey, and a toy.
“Wake up!” Just as Li Jiahong was about to fall into the tiger’s mouth, a human hand forcefully slapped his flushed face, which had begun to exhibit strange deformities.
The intense pain and the deafening slap momentarily brought Li Jiahong to his senses. He looked blankly at the three figures suddenly appearing before him, “Mr. He, Miss Yu, Miss Li?”
“Don’t listen, and don’t look around randomly,” Li Yingqi said, while taking a metal sphere from Li Jiahong’s tactical vest. After squeezing and turning the knob, the sphere became flattened and split in half from the middle. She then placed the two halves of the flattened sphere into Li Jiahong’s left and right ears respectively.
A piercing sound wave seemed to penetrate his eardrums. After Li Jiahong let out a cry of pain, the whispering that had been piercing his eardrums and tormenting his brain largely disappeared. His head was pressed down, forcing him to only look at the ground. The bizarre and magnificent sights vanished from his sight, and the eerie messages from this Netherworld Otherworld were temporarily expelled from his brain, which also allowed him to gradually regain his reason.
Li Jiahong gasped heavily. He realized what he had just done. He had walked through this city for two hours non-stop, without eating, drinking, or resting, with no energy supply. He had almost died at the hands of potential monsters ahead, or from respiratory failure caused by exhaustion.
“Wife!” Li Jiahong suddenly remembered the Ushi-Oni that had descended into this world with him. He couldn’t help but look back, but was almost overwhelmed by the city’s unnamable spectacle again. He quickly turned his head back.
The Ushi-Oni that had always accompanied him was gone. His wife had disappeared.
“When we saw you, she was no longer by your side. I don’t know where she went, but the corpses of evil beasts we saw on our way here are likely the work of your wife,” He Jia’an said comfortingly.
“Where are we now?” Li Jiahong inquired.
Yu Lianyun had Li Jiahong put on the night vision goggles from another pocket. After adjusting the focus and mode, everything except living things appeared as cold, blurry outlines in Li Jiahong’s eyes, rendering the environment, which inexplicably caused strong rational shock, ineffective.
Yu Lianyun then said, “We don’t know where this is either. There’s almost nothing here that can be used as a reference… we can only use cold machines to record our spatial orientation. We’ve tested the retreat path, and we can still get out from where we came in.”
Li Jiahong felt a little relieved. Although he was very worried about his wife’s safety now, and didn’t know if he could find his child who had been missing for fifteen years, or Xue Hanlei’s three-year-old daughter, he knew he couldn’t act alone anymore: “What should we do now?”
“Find the Ushi-Oni, your wife,” He Jia’an said, patting Li Jiahong’s shoulder.
“Ushi-Oni?” Li Jiahong was stunned for a moment, and then he learned the origin of the monster his wife had transformed into from He Jia’an and the others.
He Jia’an explained, “Here, only your wife can contend with the mutated creatures here. We tried to fight one of them before and almost didn’t make it out.” He said with a bitter smile, looking down at his left arm. After an attack from a mutated creature, his left arm seemed to have a hairline fracture. Although he could still move it with difficulty, every movement caused piercing pain.
He, Yu Lianyun, and Li Yingqi had used almost all their skills, even using taboo weapons, to barely kill a mutated creature, which might or might not have been a modified human. And there were countless such perversely powerful mutated creatures living in this strangely rocky otherworldly city.
Human strength was still too insignificant. Compared to Huo Gu and the creatures they mutated, they were as fragile as tissue paper, easily torn and grasped.
Hearing that the three members of the Mysterious Group wanted to rely on his wife, who had transformed into a monster girl, as their fighter and bodyguard, Li Jiahong felt an indescribable strangeness. However, he was not in the mood for joking at the moment and couldn’t even smile. He could only say, “Then how should we look for her?”
“Follow the route of the monster corpses, and you’ll find her eventually,” He Jia’an said with a smile, then added, “And I’m sure she’s probably within your vicinity. She must have been protecting you all along, otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to reach here safely.”
Li Jiahong agreed with He Jia’an’s statement. Thus, Li Jiahong and the three members of the Mysterious Group temporarily formed a small team and began to search along the battle scenes left by his wife, who had killed mutated creatures.
Finally, after a while, Li Jiahong and his companions heard the Ushi-Oni’s distinctive cry, as well as the sounds of its battle with those mutated creatures.
The group quickened their pace. Along the way, Yu Lianyun said to Li Jiahong, “Mr. Li, our primary objective in coming here this time is to rescue Xue Hanlei’s stepdaughter, the three-year-old girl, who was just captured.”
“I know,” Li Jiahong replied without hesitation, gritting his teeth. “Having seen the mutated creatures lying dead everywhere, and after reading that escapee’s will, I’ve already considered the worst possibility: my child has been mutated, and may have become one of the mutated creatures that wants to kill us. Perhaps he has even already died at your hands, or my wife’s.”
“So, you don’t need to remind me, really. If I save that little girl first, then from now on, I will no longer search for my child. I will be like Huang Qitao and believe that he is dead…”
Listening to Li Jiahong’s reasonable words, the three Mystic Investigators present deeply understood his pain.
Nothing in this world is more cruel than giving up the life of one’s own loved one, let alone Li Jiahong, a father who had spent fifteen years of his life searching for his child.
But in reality, Li Jiahong’s feelings were even more painful and sad than anyone could imagine, because after this night, he might lose not only his child but also his wife.
His wife had far exceeded the usage limit of the Ushi-Oni feathers. As the shopkeeper who had given him the feathers had said, he would suffer the pain of “a wife and child scattered,” a curse unique to his betrayal of the contract.
A moment later, everyone arrived at the scene where the sounds were coming from.
A fully feathered Ushi-Oni moved as lightly as a swallow, its attacks as fierce as an eagle’s. Its claws and the feather-hardened edges of its wings were its weapons.
With a grasp of its claws and a sweep of its wings, as if creating invisible wind blades, those flesh and blood evil beasts, modified by unknown means, were torn apart and fell screaming into blood amber without even touching a single feather of the Ushi-Oni.
“The legends only record the anecdotal rumors of the Ushi-Oni’s might, but not its actual power… Seeing it now, it’s truly formidable and not to be underestimated,” Li Yingqi remarked, seeing how the Ushi-Oni could easily kill mutated creatures that were incredibly difficult for humans to deal with.
While everyone was engrossed in the violent aesthetic of the Ushi-Oni’s battle with the mutated creatures, Yu Lianyun noticed something unusual about the location.
The place where the Ushi-Oni and the mutated creatures were fiercely clashing was a huge platform. The platform was densely covered with inscriptions forming a bizarre magic array. In the center of the array were several carved slits, vaguely resembling a large door. As the mutated creatures died or were injured, their blood dripped onto the ground and flowed into the slits on the platform, gradually filling every incomprehensible hieroglyph.
Each time a hieroglyph was filled with blood, it would emit a strange flash of light. Gradually, more and more illuminated hieroglyphs appeared. Yu Lianyun noticed that the door, whether it was lying flat or standing upright, seemed to have loosened its seam and showed signs of opening again.
Yu Lianyun suddenly had a bad premonition and shouted, “Wait, there’s a strange magic array here, there’s a problem, no more killing!”
Upon Yu Lianyun’s reminder, everyone quickly noticed the abnormality of the place.
However, the Ushi-Oni, which seemed to have completely lost its reason, had already gained pleasure from the slaughter and could not stop its actions, killing each and every one of those crouching, hideous mutated evil beasts on the spot.
As more and more hieroglyphs on the ground were illuminated by blood, and the seam of the door loosened more and more, the fear in everyone’s hearts plunged to the bottom.
“Wow! Mommy!” However, at this very moment, a clear cry of a little girl seemed to echo throughout the entire city. Li Jiahong and the others were stunned for a moment, and even the Ushi-Oni paused its slaughter, as if hearing the child’s voice it loved most.
In that moment of stunned silence, a thick, enormous arm grabbed one of the Ushi-Oni’s long legs.
The Ushi-Oni suddenly awoke and retaliated fiercely, breaking free from the hand that had grabbed its leg.
However, the Ushi-Oni had underestimated the strength of those mutated creatures. Even though it possessed greater strength and speed than these mutated creatures, its defense was not much stronger than theirs. In the short time it was grabbed by the giant hand, its long leg had been crushed.
Having lost one leg used for offense, the Ushi-Oni’s attack was not only weakened, but its flying balance also seemed difficult to maintain.
“Let’s go save the child first,” He Jia’an said. He looked at Li Jiahong, not immediately leaving, as if waiting for his choice.
Li Jiahong looked at his wife struggling in battle, then at the little girl being held high above the head of a deformed creature. His heart was filled with immense conflict.
After a long pause, he decided to step forward, making the choice to save the child.
No one spoke, maintaining silence as they rushed towards the little girl who had been grabbed above the head of a mutated creature.
Approaching the mutated creature that deliberately used the child to distract and interfere with the Ushi-Oni’s battle, the mutated creature, to everyone’s surprise, opened its mouth and spoke human language: “Insects, die.”
As soon as the words fell, the high-fat creature, whose head resembled a mealworm’s head, swung its soft, heavy fist and smashed down.
“Don’t hurt my child!” As the fat creature launched its attack, everyone was surprised to discover that on the finger of the suddenly attacking mutated creature, there was a human woman’s head embedded! Xue Hanlei’s head, with a frenzied face and a shrill, desperate voice, screamed at them.
Writing this chapter was a bit difficult. The cosmic horror environmental atmosphere description is quite abstract. After all, I’m not Lovecraft; it’s not easy for me to grasp that abstraction. Please collect, vote, etc. For those who haven’t invested, hurry up and invest~~~~~
