Tsk, this was way too horrifying. Luo Chong hurriedly forbade everyone from eating those tree roots and stopped the Elder from continuing to beat her.
There was no such thing as a free lunch under heaven. Even stealing honey came with the risk of being stung to death by venomous bees, let alone such sweet tree roots. Luo Chong did not believe harvesting this stuff would be easy, so he planned to go take a look himself tomorrow.
Luo Chong did not believe in man-eating tree demons. Ever since he had crossed over into this bizarre world, he had yet to encounter a single thing he could not explain with science.
The real reason he forbade them to eat it was that he was worried the thing might contain poison, or some unusual ingredient that caused hallucinations or addiction.
One had to know that nature was infinitely wondrous. Things like poppies and poisonous mushrooms that caused hallucinations were hardly rare. After all, this was not a mythological story, and no one here had Shennong's glorious experience of tasting every herb. In this realistic yet cruel world, every edible species humanity acquired from nature came at the cost of a bloody price.
Putting those matters aside for the moment, Luo Chong had the exhausted tribespeople begin preparing dinner. Dinner was sumptuous: Dragon-Phoenix Soup—that was, wild chicken stewed with snake—along with roasted groundhog, wild boar meat, and dried fish, using up all their stored provisions.
That was how food storage worked. Only when the day's harvest exceeded what they consumed could the surplus be kept in storage.
That night, Luo Chong could not fall asleep. He was highly alert as well, sitting cross-legged beside the fire pit, adding firewood while carefully sensing the changes in his body.
There was nothing he could do. Who had told him to run his mouth and eat that sweet tree root at dusk? The tribespeople had all slept soundly, without a care in the world, but Luo Chong was still here waiting for Heaven's judgment: would he "die from the poison" or be "completely fine"? Neither outcome was something he could control.
He sat there in a daze until the latter half of the night. When the moon reached the middle of the sky, the bored Luo Chong was not only perfectly fine but grew more energetic the longer he sat. He had no choice but to quietly slip out of the cave, grab a wooden staff, and practice the Armed Police Emergency Staff Technique he had learned in the military.
This emergency staff technique was a variation of the Shaolin Staff Technique. Its power was on par with the original Shaolin Little Yaksha Staff Technique, but its moves had been simplified, making it easier to learn and more focused on efficiency. The entire set had been altered to carry greater killing intent, losing the Buddhist nature of compassion. Of course, that was also what the military required.
The Shaolin Staff Technique was the ancestor of all staff techniques, and the several minor staff techniques it encompassed were also quite famous. The Little Yaksha Staff was especially distinctive. Though this was a staff technique, it contained even more of the essence of spearplay. It was thirty percent staff and seventy percent spear. Though it had no spearhead, its various spear techniques—lifting, stabbing, thrusting, and deflecting—were all steeped in chilling killing intent.
Thus, the Armed Police Emergency Staff Technique that evolved from it carried this vicious style even further. Its moves were broad and forceful, looking incomparably fierce.
Luo Chong had no choice but to pick up again the cold-weapon techniques he had learned in his previous life. This blasted place had none of the modern firearms he knew, so he could only arm himself with these half-ancient, half-modern cold-weapon techniques.
Just as dawn was breaking and Luo Chong was flourishing his staff with tiger-like force, a pair of bright black eyes reflected two beams of light from a gap at the cave entrance, like two ink-colored pearls. Luo Chong leaped high into the air and delivered a downward diagonal thrust. The wooden staff, lacking a spearhead, plunged more than a foot into the ground and stood firmly embedded there.
"Qu Bing? Why aren't you asleep?"
Luo Chong walked to the gap at the cave entrance and picked up little Qu Bing, who had been lying on the ground peeking outside. The child had been a little frightened of Luo Chong after seeing him slaughter a pig yesterday. He did not say anything now, merely burying his cold little face in the hollow of Luo Chong's neck and blowing bubbles for fun.
It was not until the sky was fully bright and the tribespeople came out that the child began making a fuss about going to play.
Today's work arrangements were the same as yesterday's. The only difference was that Qu Bing and his mother had gone to the Fishing Team, while Luo Chong took four younger brothers to the Gathering Team. He wanted to see exactly how the Demon Tree in the Elder's story ate people.
Qu Bing's maternal aunt had cried the entire night yesterday. She had suffered an injustice right after arriving at the new tribe. Fortunately, the Chieftain had saved her yesterday; otherwise, she surely would have died horribly.
The group went around behind the cave and headed into the jungle. Only then did Luo Chong learn that the tree was located deep in the rear mountain behind the cave.
There were not many towering trees on this mountain, but the undergrowth was extremely lush. There were also quite a few fruit trees. During their journey, Luo Chong discovered something he had longed for day and night: chili peppers.
Hahaha! Luo Chong could not help throwing his head back and laughing after finding the chili peppers. There were many half-dried peppers that had already turned completely red. He did not know what variety they were. In any case, they were quite thin, about the length of a finger, and a brilliant red mass hidden in the undergrowth.
But the tribespeople had never eaten them. The things could not fill their stomachs, and their spicy taste made them believe they were poisonous. It seemed he really had to come out himself; otherwise, they would not even know about good things right under their noses. Following Luo Chong's instructions, the four younger brothers spent the day picking chili peppers here and did nothing else.
Luo Chong continued forward with the Gathering Team. After crossing a mountain ridge, a basin came into view. The soil here was extremely fertile, and what nourished this basin were the greenish animal skeletons scattered everywhere.
Tsk, this place was truly creepy. It looked just like a mass grave—a pit of ten thousand corpses.
In the center of the basin, where white bones covered the ground, stood a strange tree roughly sixty meters tall. From a distance, it was rather beautiful, resembling a golden mushroom. Its enormous canopy covered a radius of two hundred meters, while the ground beneath it was covered in the tangled growth of those sweet floating roots, spreading across an area five hundred meters wide.
However, the closer one got to the edge, the fewer those root nodules became. The closer one got to the center, the more root nodules there were. There was natural syrup inside them. This pattern seemed to be luring animals toward the trunk. Could it be that the closer one got to the trunk, the faster one died? Otherwise, why would it grow like this?
Luo Chong wanted to approach for a closer look, but several women grabbed him and said that anyone who got close would die.
Tsk, these people had stirred up his curiosity. Now that they would not let him look, his heart itched like a cat scratching and a dog clawing.
Ignoring the tribespeople's objections, Luo Chong insisted on investigating for himself. If there was danger, he would simply be more careful. With his current skills, he was confident he could escape alive.
Luo Chong moved like a blind man, prodding the ground ahead with his spear before taking every step. Surely there would be no danger that way, right? Each step landed on ground he had tested, and he slowly edged toward the center.
Just like that, Luo Chong drew closer and closer to the trunk. When his spear poked into the area covered by the canopy, the instinct honed through his many years as a special-forces soldier immediately warned him that danger was coming.
Without another word, he hurriedly withdrew his spear and retreated along the path he had come. At that moment, the sudden whoosh of objects tearing through the air descended from above. More than ten spikes, each nearly 1.2 meters long, stabbed straight into the ground, targeting precisely the spot his spear had touched moments earlier.
Fuck, damn it, that was vicious! It had launched a whole barrage attack right from the start. If he had walked straight over just now, he would probably have been turned into a pincushion.
The more than ten spikes were extremely bizarre. Each was nearly a centimeter in diameter, with even the shortest measuring over a meter. Their surfaces were light brown, smooth, and lustrous, each one straight and rounded, as though it had been turned out on a CNC machine.
At the tail end was a white flower as large as a bowl. Each flower had four petals, which stabilized its trajectory as the spike fell. This was practically a natural arrow. Weren't those petals natural fletching?
After careful observation and repeated suicidal experiments, Luo Chong finally came up with a scientific explanation for this so-called Demon Tree.
"Demon Tree" was too exaggerated a name, so Luo Chong gave it a new one: Spiked Man-eating Tree. Although it was called a man-eating tree, it did not only eat people. Any other creature that walked beneath the canopy would be attacked indiscriminately as well.
Those spikes grew on the canopy, while the floating roots below were like a spiderweb scattered with bait. As long as prey touched an area covered by the canopy, the spikes would launch an indiscriminate barrage attack at that location.
Dead animals became fertilizer for the great tree. If some lucky creature that had not yet died managed to crawl outside, the spikes in its body would be carried elsewhere, where they would take root and sprout into a new man-eating tree. The saplings growing from the skeletons outside proved this.
Put simply, this tree had no brain either. It was merely a plant like a sensitive plant or a pitcher plant. Killing other animals and parasitizing them was simply a means of spreading its seeds and reproducing. It was nothing miraculous.
That said, the speed of the reaction from the moment the roots were touched to the spikes falling from above was truly impressive.
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Ahem, thanks to
'Fighting Across the Heavens with Gun Gun'
'Ice Cloud Speaking Moon'
'Strolling in the Night'
and 'Blood Fiend' from the QQ Reading app
for the support of your rewards, my bow to the four of you. Thank you for your support, and thanks as well to everyone who voted for recommendations. I hope all you book friends will keep sending me your recommendation votes, bookmarks, comments, rewards, and character-heart likes. Don't stop—keep hurling them at me.
How does that saying go? As long as you can't smash me to death, smash me to death with all you've got. As long as you leave Qing Shu enough breath to keep writing for you, that'll do.
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