Blood-Red Mist! A Bizarre Calamity Descends, and NGL Falls

In this world, there was an extraordinarily isolated nation: the NGL Autonomous Nation.

It lay in a remote corner of the Balsa Islands, and the entire country followed an almost obsessive philosophy of "returning to nature." Modern machinery, electronics, even synthetic-fiber clothing and manufactured medicines were forbidden. Its people worked from sunrise to sunset, surviving with primitive tools and whatever nature provided. To outsiders, it looked like a Pure Land untouched by industrial pollution, a paradise far removed from worldly strife.

But nature had more than a tranquil, beautiful face. It also concealed cruelty, bloodshed, and unpredictable horrors.

Now, an eerie, chilling silence hung over the ancient forest deep within the NGL Autonomous Nation.

Ordinarily, a tropical rainforest never subjected to large-scale logging should have been filled with deafening insects, birdsong, and the rustle of wild animals moving through the undergrowth. It should have been a symphony of life.

But now, all of it was gone.

For hundreds of miles, the forest seemed to have been seized by an invisible hand of death. Thick gray-green miasma wound through the crowns of towering trees like venomous snakes. The air held no fresh scent of plants, only an overpowering, nauseating stench of blood and rotting flesh.

No birds perched on the branches. No beasts ran between the trees. Even the smallest carrion insects seemed to have sensed the arrival of an ultimate predator beyond anything they knew. They had either fled the area or become food themselves.

The entire forest was so quiet that only a dreadful chewing sound could be heard.

"Crunch... crunch... gulp..."

At the forest's heart, a vast structure built against the sheer cliffs of a treacherous gorge housed an evil unlike anything else on the continent.

It was a colossal anthill more than a hundred meters tall!

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