At the Bottom of the Lake

When William and the others were placed directly on the village's highest level by the Lung Dragon, the sight before them made them uncomfortable.

Large numbers of villagers sat against the walls or squatted on the ground.

Their Breathing Patterns seemed to have turned into coughing. After every inhalation, they expelled bacteria-laden mist through their coughs, while also using the coughing to train and strengthen their lungs.

All the villagers shared one feature: their ribs had been completely pried open, or holes had been cut directly into their chests, exposing their lungs.

This gave their lungs more room to move, while also allowing the purple mist filling the Hidden Village—especially the lake mist drifting up from the lake—to nourish them.

After coughing for so long, the villagers' lungs had more or less undergone various pathological changes, or rather, had merged with the illnesses they had suffered from before entering the village.

Some had grown muscle-like patterns across the surfaces of their lungs.

Some had integrated the function of the heart, allowing them to pump blood as kinetic energy while breathing.

Some villagers had directly connected their brains to the area around their tracheas.

Besides coughing daily, they often had pipes or tobacco stems clenched between their teeth, stuffed with a kind of purple herb gathered from cracks in the cliffs.

Watching this scene, William and the others gradually began coughing as well. Only Lorien kept his eyes closed and remained silent, not uttering a single cough.

Snail Woman coughed the most violently in the group. She had not even completed Open Source Diseased. After breathing in the high-concentration mist of the Hidden Village, she began coughing violently, with blood constantly flowing from between her snail shell plates.

She even curled up on the ground, coughing madly as her entire body