Chapter 296 Retreat, Sulfur, and Boundless Darkness

An agonized, bloodcurdling scream instantly put the two of them on high alert.

Sunlight flashed off the blade of his Custom Greatsword. Xia Nan stared toward the sound, his dark eyes seeming to pierce the dense shrubbery to see whatever lay beyond.

Judging the sound came from near the lizard's nest, he suspected another Petrification Lizard was to blame. He looked at Adeline. "Is there more than one?"

"Impossible!" the disheveled woman replied. Despite the mud and grass splattering her clothes, her tone was absolutely certain.

"These creatures are solitary by nature. Outside of their brief mating seasons, they rarely interact with their own kind."

"Furthermore, we staked out the nest for days. There wasn't a single sign of another adult Petrification Lizard."

"The only other possibility..." Adeline hesitated. "...is that it was raising hatchlings in the cave."

At this thought, her absolute certainty wavered.

Over their days of observation, they had indeed noticed this Petrification Lizard's unusual appetite. It hunted frequently and spent very little time dormant.

She had assumed it was just a natural variation between individuals, but thinking about it now, the creature might really have been rearing young.

Xia Nan remained noncommittal.

He carefully weighed the possibilities before giving a slight nod. "Stay alert. Let's go take a look."

Their current location wasn't far from the Petrification Lizard's nest.

They didn't even need to navigate; they simply followed the trail crushed into the ground by the behemoth. Deliberately slowing their pace to stay vigilant, they returned to the clearing in just a few minutes.

Deathly silence filled the air.

The ground bore only the drag marks left by the lizard's bloated belly. There were no signs of a struggle.

His upgraded Perception attribute silently took effect.

His limited academic knowledge might not have been enough to extract precise intelligence from these clues.

However, he could still judge the most basic details.

"Someone's been here." Carrying his Custom Greatsword, Xia Nan pointed to a set of intermittent footprints stretching from the deep forest into the cave.

"I'll take the lead. You cover my flanks," Adeline offered without hesitation.

She knew perfectly well that, given their relationship, Xia Nan would never make her clear the path ahead.

But they were in the middle of a quest, and his strength far exceeded hers. If they ran into danger, her taking the vanguard would buy him plenty of time to react.

Furthermore, he had just saved her life. If she cowered in the back even when entering a cave... well, that simply wasn't Adeline.

Xia Nan didn't reply. Instead, he sheathed his two-handed sword and swapped it for his wooden sword, which was far more suited to the narrow environment. Glancing at the twin One-Handed Hammers in Adeline's grip, he said, "You take the rear."

Compared to Adeline, whose hands were both occupied and who lacked extra defensive gear, his wooden sword could be wielded with one hand, leaving his left hand free to maneuver the [Darkscale Coiled Guard].

From an efficiency standpoint, he—with his superior physical attributes, faster reflexes, and a comprehensive edge in both equipment and combat techniques—was best suited to take the lead.

Adeline didn't argue. Her expression paused for a moment before she gave a heavy nod and fell in behind him.

The two entered the cave.

It was deathly silent.

The only sounds were the scrape of their leather boots against the rocky ground and the faint clinking of their armor.

Shield in one hand and sword in the other, Xia Nan advanced with caution.

Adeline followed closely. While leaving enough room for her teammate to maneuver, she diligently fulfilled her role at the rear, watching for any potential danger.

The cave was much shallower than they had imagined.

Even at their cautious, snail-like pace, they reached the end in just a few minutes.

The narrow passage abruptly opened into a massive cavern reeking of blood and rot.

Thanks to the luminescent moss clinging to the stone walls, the cavern wasn't pitch black; the fungus provided a faint, passable light.

For Xia Nan, it was enough to see clearly.

The first things to catch his eye were the grayish-white stones of various shapes practically blanketing the floor.

At first glance, they looked no different from the stones in Ash Valley, but a closer look revealed the truth:

These shattered rocks, large and small, all possessed bizarre shapes distinct from natural formations.

An arm still bearing a sleeve, a foot wearing a shoe, half a face with widened eyes, and even a one-handed axe made entirely of stone...

Clearly, these were the unlucky prey who had failed to withstand the "Petrification Gaze."

They were as dead as could be.

He was about to take a closer look when an unexpected voice sounded beside him. "Morrison!?"

Surprise written across her face, Adeline stared at a motionless figure sitting quietly in the shadows of a corner.

As they carefully approached, the full appearance of the figure entered Xia Nan's line of sight.

It was a burly, middle-aged man with a shiny bald head.

Judging by his attire, he was an adventurer.

He was also dead. But compared to the shattered, petrified remains scattered throughout the cave, this man's corpse was relatively intact, bearing no signs of petrification.

The fatal wound... was on the left side of his chest—a penetrating hole that had completely destroyed his heart, so thoroughly that the stone wall behind him could faintly be seen through it.

Faint scorch marks lined the edges of the wound.

Beneath the overwhelmingly thick stench of blood, a strange, charred smell of sulfur permeated the air.

His brows furrowing, Xia Nan asked, "Do you... know this person?"

"He was my former teammate," Adeline said. Her eyes were glued to the corpse. There was no grief on her face, only a hint of tension.

"To complete my Advancement Quest, the Association temporarily assigned me two veteran adventurers who had also recently obtained their Class Levels. He was one of them."

"When the Petrification Lizard went berserk and attacked us, the other teammate likely died, while he and I scattered in different directions."

"But the Petrification Lizard chose to go after me, so he should have gotten away."

"Yet here he is..."

Halfway through her sentence, Adeline suddenly spotted a few clusters of bizarre mushrooms growing in the corner of the wall behind the corpse. They were grayish-white like rock, their surfaces covered in a fish-scale grid pattern.

"Gray-Paste Scaled Fungus?" she blurted out.

"It seems this guy took advantage of the Petrification Lizard chasing me to circle all the way back, intending to harvest the mushrooms for the quest."

"But it looks like he ran into some other danger and ended up dying in the cave."

Xia Nan looked thoughtful as he crouched to carefully inspect the corpse.

Residual warmth still lingered on the skin, the muscles were slack without rigor mortis, and the blood hadn't fully coagulated, still slowly oozing from the wound.

Clearly, the burly bald man had died very recently.

"In that case, this matches the scream we heard earlier. It's just..." Xia Nan murmured.

He stared intently at the massive wound on the left side of the burly man's chest, a sense of vigilance welling up inside him.

Although he had only been an office worker in his previous life and hadn't studied human anatomy...

...since his transmigration, he had hacked apart so many creatures—especially humanoids like Goblins. Having slaughtered thousands of them, he had essentially achieved mastery through practice, self-teaching himself a fair bit about anatomy.

The scorch marks around the wound clearly corresponded to the foul stench of sulfur in the air, yet the cross-section inside the wound was incredibly smooth, leaving not even the toughest tendons intact.

The sheer force behind this attack... was extraordinary.

Moreover, judging by the seated posture of the corpse, this wasn't a sneak attack, but a clean, decisive strike from the front.

It had reduced a Class Holder to a corpse without giving him the slightest chance to resist.

His spiritual perception thrummed, and Xia Nan instinctively smelled the scent of danger.

Continuing forward along the wall, at the very deepest part of the nest, the two discovered the thoroughly destroyed remains of several lizard eggs.

Adeline's guess had been correct; this Petrification Lizard was indeed rearing young.

However, the hatchlings it had been incubating were slaughtered in their shells by some uninvited guest before they could even break out.

The smell of sulfur grew even thicker. Obvious scorch marks marred the surfaces of the shattered eggshells and the unformed lizard embryos wrapped in slime.

Beyond that, Xia Nan acutely sensed the magic particles in the air, which were only just beginning to calm down from a state of agitation.

They were corrosive, chaotic, and brimming with negative energy.

Feeling them carefully, even the skin exposed to the air felt a slight, tingling prickle, like static electricity.

Coupled with the smell of sulfur...

...the assailant's characteristics were already abundantly clear.

It was highly likely to be an evil creature from the Bottomless Abyss, or perhaps the Baator Nine Hells.

Making a prompt decision, Xia Nan turned to Adeline, who was also helping search the cave, and said in a low voice, "There might be danger here. We need to leave."

Adeline froze slightly upon hearing this. She didn't ask why, simply nodding as she replied, "Understood."

At the same time, she pointed toward a dip in the terrain to the southwest of the cave.

Xia Nan followed the direction of her finger.

A pitch-black opening, over two meters tall, sat quietly among the gray stones, seemingly leading even deeper into the earth.

It looked like a ravenous beast waiting to devour anyone who entered. Xia Nan's heart suddenly skipped a beat, and his sense of danger spiked.

"Ignore it. There's something weird about this place," Xia Nan said. "Rushing in blindly without any preparation is likely to lead to unnecessary danger."

Both of their quests were already completed. There was no need to complicate matters and put themselves in extreme peril.

If a demon or something similar really popped out, his current strength wouldn't be enough to handle it.

It was best to leave immediately.

Of course, considering that the descent of such evil entities from outside the Material Plane was often accompanied by conspiracies and disasters...

...Xia Nan, who was more or less settled in Rivervale Town and living a stable life, felt it necessary to report his findings to the Adventurers' Association upon returning.

Setting aside any potential rewards, he at least needed to give the higher-ups of the Association branch some warning.

Adeline had climbed her way up from the bottom to become a Class Holder; she naturally knew when to be greedy and when to retreat.

She and Xia Nan quickly swept the cave once more. After confirming they hadn't missed any valuable loot, she casually plucked a few stalks of Gray-Paste Scaled Fungus, and the two left the Petrification Lizard's nest together.

...

...

Meanwhile, in a passage even narrower and deeper beneath the nest, one that seemed to connect directly to the center of the earth...

Abi was panting heavily. His wildly pounding heart still hadn't fully calmed down.

"Lord Saloyan, is it t-really okay? That was a true Class Holder in every sense of the word. Won't someone track us..."

"Relax." A deep, magnetic male voice echoed leisurely within his skull. "No one will ever know it was you."

"Besides, it's just a rookie who only recently gained a Class Level. Who would even care?"

"Rather than worrying about that, you should properly savor the beautiful memory of what just happened."

"You see... the way these Class Holders normally act so high and mighty, as if they were born superior to everyone else."

"But in truth, they get scared, and they die just like anyone else."

"If you had their advantages, you would definitely perform much better than they do."

"Wouldn't you say... I'm right?"

The seductive voice flowed into the deepest recesses of the young man's heart, like clear water trickling through cracks in a stone.

It was true... Class Holders didn't seem like such a big deal after all.

Abi used to think that all adventurers who obtained a Class Level were big shots on the level of "Greenblood" and "Greysword."

But just now, Lord Saloyan had only lent him a tiny sliver of power, and that exceptionally ferocious and unreasonable Class Holder—someone who had seemed impossible to defeat—had suddenly moved as slowly as a snail in his eyes.

He merely had to reach his hand forward...

By the time Abi realized what was happening, he had already crushed the man's heart.

It was even easier than catching that wild pheasant in his childhood, which had taken him half the day to finally pin down and bleed dry.

At this thought, Abi's heart burned with feverish excitement.

Lord Saloyan really hadn't lied to him!

Whether it was the gold coins he had won at the casino, or that bald adventurer who was now nothing but a corpse.

As long as he—as long as he did exactly as Lord Saloyan commanded, he absolutely couldn't go wrong!

At this thought, Abi's lips felt dry, and an inexplicable fire surged from the depths of his heart.

"My lord, you said... will I also have a chance to become a Class Holder in the future?" he asked.

"Of course!" The normally gentle male voice sounded incredibly decisive in that moment.

"Believe me, Abi. You're no worse than anyone else."

"As long as you do what I say, all your dreams... will come true."

Upon hearing this, Abi nodded vigorously.

Propped up by these illusory promises, an unprecedented hope and resolve flickered deep within his eyes.

Ahead in the passage lay increasingly dense patches of luminescent moss, the distant sound of flowing water, unrecognizable rustling echoes drifting up from the depths of the earth, and what felt like a path straight into the abyssal hells—

Boundless darkness.