They cut a round hole through the door and crawled inside. With no ventilation, the air was stale and foul. Su Ming seemed fine, but Aphra immediately put on an oxygen mask.
"This place is strange." She raised her lamp and swept its beam around the chamber. "I've never seen walls built like these, and there's no decoration at all. What kind of tomb is this?"
They stood in a vast hall. The gray walls were lumpy and uneven, made of something neither stone nor metal. Whatever it was, it was sturdy.
Unknown material was good material as far as Su Ming was concerned. He promptly carved a piece from the wall with his Lightsaber and stuffed it into Strangle's mouth.
"Good. The stranger, the better." Whether it would lead to another evolution was another matter. Strangle had to taste anything new. "Go on, eat. There's plenty more."
"Eep." Strangle said it tasted awful. It was organic, with the flavor of fish bones left baking in the sun for a hundred and eighty days.
Besides, to evolve through eating, Strangle only needed a small sample to copy its DNA or analyze its elemental structure. He did not have to gulp down this garbage. The material would do nothing for his evolution. Though it was reasonably strong and flexible, it was nowhere near as tough as Set's snakeskin. That bite had been a waste.
But Su Ming was less interested in how bad it tasted than in something else Strangle had told him. What he had just eaten was organic?
"What is it, Deathstroke? Did you find something?"
Holding her nose, Aphra pointed toward the pitch-black passage ahead. She was ready to go in and wanted to know why he had stopped.
"This is a giant creature. We're inside its mouth,