Breaking Through the Earth

Sun Hang exerted both arms and pulled the shovel from the soil.

This time, the blood-like liquid no longer seeped out slowly. It sprayed from the earth like a fountain.

The two women screamed again.

"That much bleeding?" Without hesitation, Sun Hang drove the shovel into the dirt again. Then, using his thigh as a fulcrum, he pried open the top layer of soil.

A mass of swollen, pale rotten flesh appeared before him.

There was a gash across its surface that matched the shape of the shovel. Inside the wound was a viscous, stringy substance like serum, along with tiny beads of blood constantly seeping from the severed tissue. Fine fungal threads emerged from deep within the flesh, pulling the cut portions together like needle and thread... In just five or six seconds, the wound had healed, leaving only a faintly raised scar on the rotten flesh.

Yet what surprised Sun Hang was that this "Tai Sui" had clearly been exposed to the air and was only a few dozen centimeters away from him, but he still could not sense any "aura" that belonged to "food."

Somewhere in his subconscious, this swollen mass of rotten flesh had already been labeled "inedible."

Why is that... Those "Tai Sui" parasitizing human bodies were edible, weren't they? Sun Hang was filled with confusion.

A little farther away, the two men and two women had fallen to their knees, repeatedly kowtowing to the rotten flesh in the soil. "Lord Tai Sui, please do not blame us! Lord Tai Sui, spare us! Lord Tai Sui..."

"What are you afraid of? It's just a lump of rotten meat that can't move..."

Before Sun Hang could finish speaking, all four of them began convulsing at once. They rolled back and forth on the ground with their mouths wide open, yet not a sound came from their throats. Their eyeballs bulged as though they were about to burst from their sockets... That kind of agony could never be faked.

Sun Hang immediately ran toward the nearest male believer, but before he reached him, a bloody mass suddenly burst through the man's chest with a wet splat, falling to the ground before quickly burrowing into the soil.

The man, whose chest had been pierced clean through, staggered to his feet. He lurched two steps toward Sun Hang, raised one hand before him, then toppled headfirst to the ground.

The other three were the same. Once those masses left their bodies, their life force drained away completely within seconds, turning them into corpses.

The sight inevitably reminded Sun Hang of the scene in the classic horror movie Alien, where a newly hatched alien larva burst out of its host...

"Huh... Strange. When did I watch that movie?" Sun Hang froze for a moment, but then a flood of memories that did not belong to him surged forth. He quickly stopped trying to recall them and focused all his attention on what was before him.

The rotten flesh aboveground showed no obvious movement, but more than ten seconds later, accompanied by a spine-chilling sound, hundreds of irregular chunks of flesh appeared along the edges of the apartment building's windows. The chunks wriggled and crawled, then, like lemmings reaching the end of their journey through life, leaped one after another from windows dozens of meters above the ground.

The instant they hit the ground, the flesh chunks were smashed into mangled pulp... Yet even so, they continued to wriggle...

"Looks like there aren't any survivors left in the entire Cult Organization." Sun Hang sighed softly. This had been their destined fate; his arrival had merely brought that day forward by quite a few days.

The mangled flesh pulp was also "absorbed" by the soil. Sun Hang slowly backed onto the tiled ground—he could vaguely guess that Tai Sui had recalled all the "seeds" parasitizing human bodies because it was ready for a decisive battle with him.

"Let me see just how strong an aberration that has lurked for seven years and devoured countless lives and masses of flesh can become." Sun Hang took a deep breath and murmured.

Hopefully, this would be a lavish feast.

The ground began to tremble. Moss-covered earth split apart, and a massive pale limb burst from beneath the soil—it was a human arm magnified hundreds of times over. Or, to be more precise, it was the enormous, grotesque arm of a humanoid creature.

The giant arm swept toward Sun Hang almost without hesitation. But Sun Hang had already retreated beyond its attack range several seconds earlier. The arm struck empty air, and its palm, larger than a door, slammed into a nearby apartment building with a deafening crash.

Countless ominous cracks instantly appeared across the already dilapidated building. After a brief delay, one corner of the apartment building suddenly collapsed... A few seconds later, the entire building became a heap of rubble, burying the giant arm beneath it.

Sun Hang covered his mouth and nose. The dust filling the sky prevented him from seeing what was happening around him, but a fierce premonition of danger made him drop to the ground as if possessed—just as he completed the motion, a powerful current of air swept past, barely skimming the top of his head!

That gust also tore apart the dust blocking his view. Only then did Sun Hang see clearly that the arm that had burst from the ground had become three arms. Besides them, there was also an enormous head nearly ten meters in size.

Of course, Sun Hang was not certain whether that oval-shaped thing... could truly be called a "head."

Its surface was completely hairless and as smooth as the egg of some gigantic creature. On its front were its only "facial features"—an irregular, nearly circular mouthpart packed with dense rows of teeth.

Even Sun Hang's scalp tingled at the sight. If someone with trypophobia had been standing here, they probably would have fainted on the spot.

Two completely different voices appeared in Sun Hang's mind. One, a somewhat cowardly voice, kept urging him, Run, run, run! I'm absolutely no match for this thing! I'll die, I'll die, I'll die...

The other voice was full of contempt. No matter how big it is, it's still only a low-level aberration... Don't forget, it is merely prey... and I am the hunter.

But as Sun Hang's breathing gradually steadied, the second voice grew louder and louder, slowly drowning out the first...

It is prey. I am the hunter.

It is prey. I am the hunter.

No, that was not right.

It is food... and I am the predator.

"Food this enormous... I'll need sufficiently large tableware..." Sun Hang muttered as he shifted his gaze and surveyed his surroundings.

A moment later, he raised his right arm and loosely clenched his five fingers.

The apartment building's rubble began to tremble. Then, countless broken and twisted steel rebars drilled out from the ruins. Like living worms, they entwined and compressed one another... By the time they reached Sun Hang's hand, they had become a fifteen-meter-long Aberrant Long Blade.

The steel rebars "forged" into this Aberrant Long Blade weighed several tons, yet Sun Hang felt no weight whatsoever while holding it... It handled as naturally as an extension of his arm. With a light swing, he carved a wound "deep enough to expose bone" across one of Tai Sui's giant arms.

At that instant, Sun Hang caught the distinctive "scent" of "food."

He finally understood why he had been unable to smell it before—Tai Sui had completely wrapped its true body in a layer of proliferated "rotten flesh" to protect itself. Like the epidermis of human skin, that layer of "rotten flesh" was "dead." Only by cutting through that epidermal layer made of dead cells could he reach Tai Sui's true body.