"Danger? Boss, there isn't even a bug in sight here! What danger are you talking about?" Xiao Hei asked. He wiped a smear of grease from his chin, his strength clearly returning as he stood a little taller on the rocky path.
"There's something watching us," Jing Shu said quietly.
Xiao Hei's brow furrowed. "Besides a few lonely dead trees, what else could there be on this mountain?"
Dead trees. That was it.
Every day, she had looked up at the slopes and noticed the same few withered trees. Their position and direction never changed, mirroring each other with a symmetry that defied nature. The more she looked, the more wrong it felt. And those trees bled. Red liquid seeped from their gray trunks like blood, thick and viscous.
"Chop them down. Every single one of them," Jing Shu ordered. She felt a growing unease as she hurried up the slope, her boots slipping on the loose shale. She cut down every dead tree she could see. Each time, the bright red liquid poured out, horrifyingly vivid against the gray, weathered bark.
In a place completely devoid of life, how could these trees even survive? And if not a single bug existed here, could it have something to do with these strange, silent trees? And the bees she had released earlier—why had they vanished so abruptly? Were the dead trees involved in that as well?
The trees didn't seem particularly tough. Despite her unease, Jing Shu and the others cut them down easily with their blades. Still, she collected the red fluid with great care, pouring it into clean glass jars. She didn't know what it was, but she planned to take it back for research. For safety, she sealed it inside a one-cubic-meter compartment in the Rubik's Cube Space. That space was completely isolated. Even if this substance turned out to be dangerous, it couldn't harm her.
They didn't just chop the trees down. They dug out the roots too. Tank shoved his spade into the dirt again and again, digging two or three meters deep, but the roots still didn't end. Exhausted, he waved a hand. "We will never reach the bottom."
Jing Shu crouched down and snapped off a small segment of the root. More red liquid oozed out. It was clear and scentless, disappearing into the dry dirt like water within seconds. It didn't seem poisonous or corrosive. Nobody dared test it on their pets, but when Jing Shu tried feeding it to a few Sulfuric Acid Ants, they didn't react at all.
Her sense of unease grew heavier by the minute. Even after cutting down all the dead trees on that mountain, when they reached the next ridge, the same number of trees stood there again. They were in the same exact spots.
That was when everyone realized something was wrong. Panic spread like a chill down their spines. No one knew if they were trapped in a looping illusion or if the mountain range was truly that massive. But Jing Shu knew. This wasn't some ghost wall. The forest really was enormous.
At this latitude, America should have had a Mediterranean climate. Even if Wu City back in China was already close to freezing, this region wasn't supposed to be so cold. Yet this mountain wasn't Mediterranean at all. The soil felt more like stone under her fingernails, and the terrain looked tropical—maybe even subtropical. There was another clue: Sulfuric Acid Ants were tropical insects. Everything suggested that this mountain range had been shifted here from somewhere very far away.
"Maybe this land doesn't even belong to Earth," Jing Shu thought. "Otherwise how do we explain so many invasive species? And we still don't know what caused Earth's Dark Days in the first place.
So these dead trees might not be native either. Maybe they were invaders too. But why didn't she ever hear about them in her previous life? Not once in ten years, not even during the great migrations."
She frowned, deep in thought. To figure out whether the trees were dangerous or not, she left a few maggots at every stump, letting them gnaw deeper into the roots. Then she dug further down, determined to see how far those roots really went. There was no way they stretched hundreds of meters.
She couldn't remember how many trees she had chopped or how much red fluid she had collected. Their food was running out, and even clean water was scarce. Yet they still hadn't escaped the mountains. There were no more black-water beasts between valleys, no bugs in the soil, nothing alive anywhere. The mountain range stretched on endlessly, perhaps hundreds of kilometers. No matter which way they walked, they couldn't get out.
Days passed. The maggots eating the roots began dying off one after another. Some dropped dead suddenly, and others tunneled deep enough to bump into maggots she had left in entirely different locations. That meant the underground roots were connected.
Jing Shu was debating whether to dig deeper herself when her teammates started falling apart. They looked like they hadn't slept for half a month. Dark circles hung heavy under their eyes, and their faces were as pale as ghosts. It was as if something had drained all their blood and energy during the night. Even Ah Huang looked older, his fur turning a dusty gray as he wheezed after walking just a short distance.
"I can feel my life force slipping away," Snake Spirit said. He stared at his wrinkled hands, the skin translucent and dry. "It's like water evaporating off hot sand."
Even Ling Ling's usually rosy face had turned waxy and old. Only Jing Shu and Xiao Dou were unaffected. But the Sulfuric Acid Ants began dying in droves. Yi Hou was fine, though, and that gave Jing Shu a clue. That evening, when she examined the dead ants, she found sulfuric acid leaking from their bodies.
Dead ants couldn't go to waste. Despite everyone's doubts about eating them, Jing Shu proved it could be done. She soaked and salted the tiny corpses, the shells crunching under her knife. She mixed them with diluted Spirit Spring water, minced pork, chopped scallions, and fresh garlic. She added a splash of soy sauce and other seasonings, then rolled the mix into round meatballs. She dropped them into hot oil, deep-frying them until they were golden and crisp.
The rest of the ants she beat into a thick batter with Xiao Dou's eggs and fried into golden ant-and-egg pancakes. The rich, savory aroma spread through the whole valley, masking the scent of the barren earth.
"We're having this for dinner," she said.
She tasted a few pieces herself. The flavor was surprisingly good—crisp and savory. Ants contained over seventy nutrients, making the meal extremely nutritious. This cursed mountain might be draining their life force, and only the Spirit Spring's energy seemed to counter it. Xiao Hei whistled, his voice weak.
"Boss, I swear you could make even a stinky shoe sole taste amazing."
Jing Shu rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the compliment."
The mass death of Sulfuric Acid Ants left her frustrated. The trump card she had planned to use against undead beasts was dying before it could even fight. The team's condition was also getting worse. Every extra day in this mountain made their life force fade faster. The Spirit Spring could only slow it down, not stop it. Only Jing Shu and Xiao Dou were still full of vitality, unaffected for now.
So she made a decision. If all of this was tied to those dead trees, then she would take the risk and find out where their roots led—to whatever horror was waiting at the other end.