"Over there!"
Someone with sharp eyes spotted faint flickering light and rustling sounds coming from deep within an especially twisted crevice.
The group crowded closer and saw that, in a space only two or three fingers wide deep within the crack, something seemed to be hunching and wriggling its way inward.
Judging from the corner of clothing exposed beneath the light, it was the missing search-and-rescue worker!
But how was that possible?
The thing wriggling before their eyes had already been squeezed by the rock crevice until it was incredibly flat and thin.
Though Transcendents could manipulate their flesh at will, compressing or expanding it.
Such control ultimately had its limits.
A gap two or three fingers wide simply could not accommodate incompressible parts like a skull and pelvis being forced through.
Moreover, even as his body flattened and thinned, the search-and-rescue worker's body was being stretched to an unbelievable extent.
There were at least ten or twenty meters between his head, whose features had been crushed completely out of shape, and his booted feet.
At first glance, he looked as though he had turned into some bizarre python.
No, even pythons had vertebrae and could not pass through spaces narrower than their spines.
Yet this search-and-rescue worker was like a fusion of an arthropod and a mollusk, like an enormous, slimy worm that could further alter its shape at will.
"Zhao Liwei!"
A companion who knew him well hurriedly shouted, "What are you doing? Come back, now!"
The rescue worker named Zhao Liwei turned a deaf ear, instead emitting wheezing sounds from his chest, compressed to its absolute limit.
They sounded both like agonized groans from flesh twisting and bones being reforged.
And like ecstatic cheers from a soul wandering freely amid the radiance of ancient civilization, cleansed and