Chapter 350 - 346: Monster

"How did it change back?"

Hu Maomao stared at the scene before her, her expression frozen in incredulous shock.

Just a few hours ago, those colossal pillars had nearly torn the entire ground apart. The plain, which should have been pockmarked like the surface of the Moon, was now as smooth as if it had never been ravaged.

"Hmph. When has this damn place ever made sense?" Zhang Wenda was the first to leap down from the edge of the crevice, his boots hitting the ground hard. He stomped his foot a few times to confirm the ground wasn’t an illusion, then turned and waved to Hu Maomao in the crevice. "Come on down, it’s fine."

With a flutter of her blue school uniform, Hu Maomao jumped down.

Zhang Wenda looked at her and said, "Which way did the people who left the assembly marks go?"

"This way." Hu Maomao pointed southeast.

"Let’s go."

The two of them set off across the empty plain.

After running for a few kilometers, Zhang Wenda suddenly spoke up. "Oh, right, stop broadcasting that brainwave signal to find people. There are creatures in this place that can detect it."

"?" Hu Maomao looked at him hesitantly. "There are other creatures in this damn place?"

"Yeah, of course there are." Zhang Wenda pulled the square-headed stickman from the Youth Palace’s back. Its concrete-cast head gleamed with a grayish-white luster. "Forgot to mention this earlier. This thing here, it can freely control concrete."

He quickly recounted his encounter with the square-headed creature. "I don’t know how it does it, but it can sense the presence of the 1999 fragments and actively seeks them out. And it seems to have a different understanding of 1999."

At this point, Zhang Wenda suddenly looked up. "Oh! I almost forgot, don’t you have Mind Reading? Hurry up and see what this thing is thinking right now."

He really couldn’t get anything out of the creature himself, but Hu Maomao was good at this. Any information about 1999 was crucial. If they were going to have to deal with that thing in the future, they couldn’t afford to miss a single clue.

Hu Maomao placed her hands lightly on either side of the square concrete head and closed her eyes. A few seconds later, she looked up hesitantly. "Are you sure it spoke? I’m not detecting any thought activity."

"Of course I’m sure. It didn’t just try to snatch things, it was cunning, too."

"Then did you see any red inside its body?"

Zhang Wenda froze. Ever since he mastered the Red, any living thing would show the red within its body to his eyes—it was the sign of life, something he could perceive and interfere with. But this square-headed creature... He searched his memory and realized he had indeed never seen any red inside it.

"Is it not alive?" Zhang Wenda muttered to himself. ’But if it’s not alive, it can’t think. So what was it that was communicating with me before?’

Faced with this situation, Zhang Wenda was completely baffled.

"Forget it." He tossed the square-headed creature back into the Youth Palace’s mouth to be confined. "We’ll study this guy later when we have time. The most important thing now is to catch up with our people who left the marks."

"Right." Hu Maomao said no more, her speed suddenly increasing.

Zhang Wenda’s Red excelled in speed, and Hu Maomao’s levitation was no slower. The two became a pair of blurs on the plain.

But in this vast expanse with no points of reference, their sense of distance became blurry, as if they were running through a landscape painting that never changed.

They ran like this for several hours. When they finally stopped again, a magnificent circular building stood before them. Its concrete surface was rough and heavy, its curved walls tapering upward to form a domed structure somewhat like an observatory. On the front of the building, three large characters were clearly visible: 507.

Below it was that familiar secret code, the scratches newer than any they had seen before.

Zhang Wenda reached out and touched the carved numbers. "It’s been updated. This must have been carved just a few hours ago."

"Mhm," Hu Maomao nodded. "They wouldn’t have had time for this during the blizzard, which means it was carved after the snow stopped. They might be nearby—"

Before she could finish, Hu Maomao’s expression changed drastically. She spun around, her body shooting like an arrow loosed from a bow toward the back of the building. Zhang Wenda hurried to follow.

After rounding the massive concrete base, the two stopped in the shaded area behind the building.

In the next instant, both of their pupils contracted.

A corpse had "bloomed" upon the ground.

Zhang Wenda saw that all of the corpse’s ribs had been pulled out of its chest cavity, splayed outward in a radial pattern, and driven deep into the earth, forming a perfect circle.

The rest of the body—muscles, fat, bones, and organs—was spread out around the circle, creating a grotesque tableau of flesh and blood.

’This wasn’t the work of the blizzard or the square-headed creature.’ They had encountered both, and their methods of attack weren’t like this.

"Is it one of ours?" Zhang Wenda rushed into the bloody mess, searching quickly. Finally, at the edge of the carnage, he found a tattered bracer. On its red surface, written in black paint, were three characters: 702.

Zhang Wenda looked around the corpse and saw chaotic footprints on the ground nearby. A fight had happened here, but it wasn’t intense. It seemed more like a one-sided slaughter.

Zhang Wenda slammed the bracer onto the ground and said to Hu Maomao, "We have to go, now! They’ve been attacked by something!"

To move faster, he hoisted Hu Maomao directly onto his back.

His entire body became a bolt of crimson lightning, streaking a long, thin trail across the plain.

The wind roared in their ears, and the scenery blurred into bands of color. Hu Maomao lay flat on his back, her long hair pulled straight by the gale.

In just twenty minutes, the distance shrank dramatically. At that moment, a distressing high-frequency vibration suddenly washed over them from all directions. It was like countless fine needles stabbing into their eardrums, or a hand squeezing their hearts from within their chests, making it difficult to even breathe.

"I can feel their thoughts!" Hu Maomao shouted over the wind. "They’re right ahead! There’s something near them—"

She didn’t finish, because Zhang Wenda had already seen it.

At the far end of the plain, three modified off-road vehicles were fleeing frantically, their tires kicking up clouds of grayish dust. Floating above the vehicles was an indescribable creature.

It was pure white, its body perpetually on the verge of coalescing and dispersing.

One moment it was a humanoid shadow covered in tentacles; the next, it stretched into a gigantic, serpentine dragon like a centipede. Its form changed every second, the only constant being its massive, several-hundred-meter-long body, which radiated an immense pressure.

That sound—that vibration that set one’s teeth on edge—was coming from it.

’That bizarre death back there was its doing. It’s hunting our people from the Third Line!’

"It’s too big. I can’t do this alone," he said through gritted teeth. "Everyone, out!"

A rift to the Inner World tore open beside him.

The Youth Palace charged out, carrying all the creatures of the Inner World. Zhang Wenda leaped directly onto the Youth Palace’s head and pulled a nearly ten-meter-long, slender scar from the rift.

Now, like a dragon rider standing atop a great beast, he faced the howling wind and charged toward the atmospheric creature.