He noticed what seemed to be a red-and-white substance flowing through the gaps between the pebbles. To get a closer look, he slowly crouched down and brought his face closer to them.
At that moment, the pebbles were undergoing some indescribable distortion as the Layer shifted, like gummy candy. But it happened slowly enough that a glance did not produce that mind-shattering feeling of his cognition failing to keep up.
He discovered that the gaps between the pebbles had actually widened as each pebble distorted to a different degree.
In those empty spaces, something like lava seemed to be flowing.
"Huh... what's this?"
The question had barely occurred to him when a faint smell drifted into his nostrils.
"...?!" Lin Yi's pupils abruptly contracted, and he sprang up from the ground on reflex.
"The smell of blood!"
He smelled blood hidden beneath the earthy scent of soil and the fragrance of vegetation!
But this particular smell had not smelled like blood at first. It had smelled like freshly sliced tomatoes.
And precisely because it smelled like tomatoes, Lin Yi had initially noticed nothing. He had simply taken it for a natural scent mingling with the air and found nothing strange about it.
But as Lin Yi's sense of smell gradually separated the bloody odor from the tomato scent, that slightly nauseating smell slowly enveloped him like fine raindrops seeping into every opening.
He felt nothing at first, but by the time he noticed, it meant the storm had already engulfed him.
Just then, he discovered that as the Pebble Road distorted, the lava-like blood did not turn into a white, plaster-like substance beneath the Sun. Instead, it continued flowing, as though coated in a golden glow.
In Lin Yi's current "vision," that golden glow gradually began revealing another color-
"Blue...