Chapter 1170: 157. Shattered Sea

Ugly.

Too fucking ugly.

The instant he saw the monster’s true appearance, almost only this one word appeared in Muen’s mind.

There was fundamentally no way to distinguish what kind of creature it was.

Its appearance could hardly be connected to the appearance of any living thing Muen knew. It was as if a pile of festering flesh and blood had continuously accumulated, and only in the end had it formed its current posture.

Sticky, foul-smelling liquid sprayed everywhere. The barely fused remnants seemed to possess their own consciousness and were still tearing and gnawing at each other. Even those tentacles looked as if they had been left out for several days in damp, sweltering weather, with great patches of rotting marks that made one nauseous.

Very sorry...

Muen secretly apologized in his heart.

He should not have said this was some “Cthulhu,” because compared with this lump of rotten meat, those indescribable monsters in the legends were so good-looking they were practically dolls that had been carefully dressed up.

He had slandered them.

“Disgusting.”

The Dragon of Calamity’s disgust was equally plain to see. And unlike a certain yellow-haired one, who only said it in his heart, when these two words were lightly uttered like a declaration of judgment, destruction also gathered its momentum at the same time!

Boom!

In an instant, scarlet thunder directly pierced through that enormous body!

“Gurgle...”

The flesh and blood all over the monster’s body trembled. Its entire body wriggled in a disgusting, indescribable way. The lightning pierced through its chest, causing countless filthy things to splatter, only for them to be quickly burned into ash by the lightning.

That strange roar echoed again, carrying with it the ability to make its huge body begin moving as it retreated in the direction from which it had come—the turbid ocean at the edge of that land.

Its movements were unreasonably fast. Such an enormous body, and yet at the same moment the thought “it wants to flee” had just arisen in Muen’s mind, part of its ulcerated flesh had already soaked into the seawater.

However, its speed was ultimately no match for destruction and lightning.

The scarlet thunder that had struck it just now had only been one tiny beam, that was all. Even more enormous lightning had long since constructed a terrifying prison the moment it fell.

Between the dense fog that had not yet closed again, flashing scarlet thunder was everywhere. Every single bolt emitted a terrifying aura that made Muen’s heart pound with alarm. They interwove with one another into an inescapable net of heaven and earth. There was no escape.

The monster charged left and right inside it, but the moment its flesh touched the lightning, it was instantly turned into charcoal. The strange filth, along with the vitality attached to it, was completely annihilated.

“Disappear.”

As if she were dealing with trash, Hamreign placed the final period on this small accident.

Boom!

The thunder prison suddenly closed, strangling everything filthy inside it into nothingness!

And thus, all things fell into extinction.

......

......

Only after several full minutes did the dense fog blasted open by the scarlet thunder slowly gather again, covering the barren earth that had completely turned scorched black.

Hamreign circled several more times high above this region, confirming that no other blind monster would launch another sneak attack on her, and only then did she bring Muen along and continue on their way.

And Muen... was still in the shock from just now.

It was not only because of the dominance and strength Miss Dragon had displayed.

It was also because the appearance of that monster, as well as the corner of the land that had appeared before him after the dense fog scattered, made a very terrifying conjecture vaguely arise in his mind.

About this vast fog-covered region.

“Miss Dragon...”

Muen had just wanted to verify his own conjecture when he felt the weightlessness of falling in his body again.

He quickly held tightly to the dragon claw and looked forward.

After flying above this vast dense fog for so long, there was finally a different scenery. Just ahead of them now, the heavy dense fog seemed to have suddenly been cut by a blade, sinking downward in a drop of over a thousand meters.

At the bottom of the drop was a deep green like spilled thick ink. For Muen, who had already nearly grown tired of looking at boring white, seeing a different color at this moment brought a joy no less than seeing an oasis in the desert.

“This place... is somewhere like Annabawei?”

What that deep green symbolized was undoubtedly true vitality. As their altitude lowered, Muen discovered that it was actually a lush forest. A broad river ran through the forest, then split into countless tributaries within the sea of trees.

Surrounded by dense fog, it was like a lone island. In this respect, it was very similar to Annabawei.

But this rich vitality was completely different from Annabawei.

Muen raised his eyes and looked all around. For the time being, he did not discover any traces of human life. The forest was dense, the river water was clear, and there were wild beasts startled by the dragon descending from the sky, fleeing in terror. It gave one an extremely primitive feeling.

Hamreign placed Muen by the river, and she herself transformed back into human form as well. Her fair little feet stepped into the river water. From time to time, small fish swam over and lightly touched them, looking especially interesting... These brainless fish were not afraid at all, completely unaware what kind of terrifying existence they were approaching.

“So clean. It seems our luck is not bad. Before reaching the destination, there is a place where we can temporarily land and rest.”

Hamreign nodded slightly. High in the sky, her perception had already swept over this entire region, confirming that there were no troublesome filthy things here, nor any Pollution. It was an extremely pure and natural place.

“Are there many places like this?”

Muen crouched down by the river. Seeing that the river water was clear, he had originally wanted to scoop some up to quench his thirst, but from the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Miss Dragon’s feet soaking in the river. After thinking about it, he decided to forget it.

He was not a pervert who liked drinking other people’s foot-washing water, and he did not want to be mistaken for a pervert either. It would damage his reputation as Belrand’s number-one good man.

“Not many. Of the ones I know, I can count them on two hands.”

“Why is this place not covered by the dense fog? Annabawei as well. In such a vast region, the dense fog seems to exist selectively. It has its own laws.”

“If the land has not been eroded by Pollution, naturally there is no dense fog.”

“Is that so...”

Hearing this explanation, Muen inwardly said, as expected.

He thought again of just now, when the dense fog had been blasted open by thunder. In truth, what had left the deepest impression on him was not that monster twisted into a mountain of flesh, but the land “beneath its feet”... land even more barren and poor than Annabawei, and between the cracks in the earth, black liquid had been flowing.

That also included the sea on the other side of the land... Muen temporarily did not know whether that was truly a sea, but that sea was incomparably turbid as well, giving Muen a sense of filth and foul stench.

Land, rivers, ocean... Everything beneath the dense fog looked like a scene of complete environmental imbalance, a ruined mess that had suffered severe Pollution.

But in this world, industry had not yet developed, and magic, in a certain sense, could also be considered a kind of “clean energy.” So the thing that had polluted it... could only be something else.

Something countless times more terrifying than industrial residue.

“So, the essence of that fog-covered land is...”

“A wound.”

Hamreign said faintly, “A wound of the world.”

She was still like that, speaking the cruelest reality in the calmest words.

“A wound...”

Muen chewed over this word. “I had thought that the Abyss where the demons once stayed already counted as some kind of terrifying ‘wound’...”

“Heh. That was merely the trace left by the final great battle against the Demon God. It can indeed be called a ‘wound,’ but compared with the region we are currently in, it is still far from enough.”

Hamreign slowly walked forward along the river’s shallow bank. The adorable fish were finally frightened away by her. She casually picked a fresh flower from nearby, crushed the petals one by one, then threw them onto the surface of the river, letting them flow into the distance in an instant.

“A thousand years ago, the Demon God descended and plunged the entire world into the chaos of doomsday. In that disaster, living beings were plunged into misery, civilization was severed, and you humans lost at least more than ninety percent of your population. Many races were even completely annihilated. The cruelty of that scene can no longer be described with words.”

“But compared with something like ‘population,’ which will gradually recover as long as it is not completely destroyed, there are some things that, even after an exceedingly long time, are still very difficult to return to their original state.”

“Just like those things you saw earlier—half the land, one third of the ocean. This is the shelter the Evil Gods permanently stole from humanity a thousand years ago.”

“And it is also the festering sore this world has been unable to recover from even now.”

“Its name is—Shattered Sea.”