"Hff... hff... hff..."
As he kept moving forward, Lin Yi's breathing grew slightly heavier, and his breaths through his nose began to turn somewhat irregular.
Sensing something, he abruptly looked toward a spot deep in the Dense Forest-he saw a tree in bloom.
Snow-white buds stood ready to blossom, gathered in clumps and clusters, yet they looked wrong no matter how he looked at them.
He took another careful look, and his hair instantly stood on end.
Those were no flower buds. They were countless miniature skulls gathered together and placed on the treetops, forming bizarre skull flowers!
Against the swirling bone-white fog, the bone-white skulls covering the tree seemed to come alive, murmuring some strange tune through the whimpering wind.
As the wind blew, the skulls covering the tree rattled and swayed.
Stranger still, after the first tree covered in big eyeballs and skulls appeared, more and more similar trees began to emerge in the Dense Forest. They flickered in and out of view in the mist, abstract and sinister, giving off an eerie air.
As they walked, ancient trees with gnarled branches filled the hills. Some seemed to have sprouted hands and feet, with one hand or foot after another replacing what should have been leaves. Their roots, however, remained in the soil, unable to pull free.
The plants along this path seemed to have broken free of the restrictions of ordinary "plants," changing from "plants" into some sort of hybrid life forms combining "animals" and "plants." Yet a closer examination revealed that all those changes defying the normal biological blueprint carried a tendency toward becoming sculpture-like.
Those things looked like organs molded from a milky-white gel, grafted onto old trees and growing continuously.
Whether eyeballs, hands and feet, or other torsos and organs, they all seemed independent