"Danger? Boss, there isn't even a bug in sight here! What danger are you talking about?" Xiao Hei said after eating some meat, his strength clearly returning.
"There's something watching us," Jing Shu said quietly.
Xiao Hei frowned. "Besides a few lonely dead trees, what else could there be on this mountain?"
Dead trees! That was it!
Every day, she'd look up at the mountain and notice the same few withered trees. Their position and direction never changed, and the more she looked, the more wrong it felt.
And those trees bled. Red liquid seeped from their trunks like blood.
"Chop them down. Every single one of them," Jing Shu ordered, uneasy as she hurried up the slope. She cut down every dead tree she could see, and each time, blood-like liquid poured out, horrifyingly bright against the gray 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 trees?
And the bees she'd released earlier—why had they vanished? Were the dead trees involved in that too?
The trees didn't seem particularly tough though. Despite her unease, Jing Shu and the others cut them down easily. Still, she collected the red fluid with great care. 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, so even if this stuff 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 shoveled again and again, two or three meters deep, but the roots still didn't end. Exhausted, he waved a hand. "These roots go too deep, we'll never reach the bottom."
Jing Shu crouched down and snapped off a root segment. More red liquid oozed out, clear and scentless, disappearing into the 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 one, the same number of trees stood there again, in the same exact spots.
That's when everyone realized something was wrong. Panic spread like a chill down the spine. No one knew if they were trapped in a looping illusion or if the mountain was truly that massive.
But Jing Shu knew. This wasn't some "ghost wall." The forest really was enormous.
At this latitude, America should've 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, and the terrain looked tropical—maybe even subtropical.
And 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're invaders too. But why didn't I ever hear about them in my previous life? Not once in ten years, not even during 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, right?
She couldn't remember how many trees she'd chopped or how much red fluid she'd 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, maybe 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'd 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 heavy under their eyes, faces pale as ghosts. It was as if something had drained all their blood and energy.
Even Ah Huang looked older, wheezing after walking just a short distance.
"I can feel my life force slipping away," Snake Spirit said, staring at his wrinkled hands. "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 corpses, mixed them with diluted Spirit Spring water, minced pork, scallions, and garlic, added soy sauce and other seasonings, then rolled the mix into meatballs and deep-fried them until golden.
The rest of the ants she beat into a batter with Xiao Dou's eggs and fried into golden ant-and-egg pancakes. The rich aroma spread through the whole valley.
"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. "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'd 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'd take the risk and find out where their roots led—to whatever horror was waiting at the other end.