Although the crushing pressure had squeezed his hands and face together and welded his head and legs in place, fortunately, the slime cocooning him wasn't as sticky as spider silk. Instead, it hardened like glue, forming a shell around him.
He spat out a fragment of his axe and held it between his fingers, rubbing it lightly against the shell. Before long, he'd carved out a tiny bit of room to move his wrist.
Once he could move his wrist, he took out a tool dagger and chipped a hole in front of him.
When the force dragging him pulled him out of the ventilation duct and flung him upward, Xu Huo had already broken through the shell. He reached back to grab what remained of it and slid toward the ground.
He and the shell around him arced through the air and plunged downward, stopping a meter or two above the ground.
After cutting through the shell of slime wrapped around his legs, Xu Huo jumped down. He looked back as the remaining half of the shell sprang upward and swayed in midair. Only then did he realize that he'd been wrapped in a huge plant leaf.
It hung in the air about ten meters above the ground, curving downward. The shell dangled from its tip, connected by a stalk to the white vein at the center of the leaf. That vein, in turn, connected to the main body of the enormous plant.
Xu Huo walked through the overgrown ground and out from beneath the leaf's shadow. From the side, he could see that the enormous plant had a huge pitcher-shaped flower at its center, much like the man-eating flower in the Elevator Shaft, but more than ten times larger.
Several huge, flesh-colored corollas opened in the middle of