Chapter 169: A Bitter Journey Through Culture
Translator: Pluto Editor: Vermillion
[Green Melon and Bai Xiaoke must be anxious and angry now...] Lin Sanjiu thought to herself. The only sound she could hear from within the tree roots was a constant gurgling sound. When Lin Sanjiu opened her eyes, she realized that it wasn't pitch-dark like she imagined. Instead, everything was foggy white. Occasionally, a large mass of thin roots would pass by quickly.
Although she felt a little guilty for making her companions worried, Lin Sanjiu couldn’t resist her hunger and started searching for the half-eaten cup noodles from her card inventory. The items which she converted into cards would be preserved in the very state before they were converted. As a result, when she converted the cup noodles back to its original steaming hot form, the fragrance of seafood wafted into her nose. Before she left, Lin Sanjiu hung a backpack full of food, enough for half a month, on the waist of the robot doll so she wasn’t worried that the three people outside would starve.
Judging from her body condition, another day had passed since she entered the network of tree roots. When she was first sucked into the root, Lin Sanjiu had the same awful experiences that the others described. Sticky, viscous slime mixed with numerous uncuttable tiny roots assaulted her face, like thick sheets of wet paper. She felt a slight itchy feeling in her ears, eyes, and nose and knew that the roots were trying to burrow into her body.
By then, she had been cut off from the air outside. To get oxygen, she had to inhale deeply to snatch the pockets of oxygen within the slime. Inadvertently, this action also created an unimpeded path for the thin roots. Soon, she felt an intense, burning pain in her lungs. She wondered if something had already burrowed into them.
Thankfully, those things lost interest in her immediately.
As the uncomfortable sensations—the suffocation, burning pain, dampness and odd itchiness— gradually ebbed, she moved her eyes and watched as a thin, long white root peeked out from her nostril. This was accompanied by an unbearable itch before the white root finally swam out from her nose and disappeared into the surrounding white slime.
Noting her ability to suck hot noodles into her mouth calmly after personally witnessing her body on that condition, Lin Sanjiu felt that she grew psychologically stronger once again.
The reason she could eat her noodles leisurely was all thanks to the capsule she kept during the Lunar New Year Tournament.
She converted her capsule into a card to escape from the match back then. As the various events unfolded, she stored more and more items, so she nearly forgot that she had the capsule with her.
If it wasn’t for that thought—"It’d be nice if I could place myself in a box"—that drifted into her hazy mind when she was having difficulties breathing, Lin Sanjiu would still be suffering right now.
It was a pleasant surprise for her to discover that the slight corrosive nature of the slime wasn’t quite effective against the capsule. After drifting along for quite a long time, the walls of the capsules looked alright with only a few tiny scratches.
Maybe, the roots felt that this capsule with Lin Sanjiu had no nutritional value. As she drifted through the slime, Lin Sanjiu noticed that the slime attempted to push her capsule outward two to three times.
It wasn’t easy getting inside, so she wasn’t about to let the tree roots ‘vomit’ her out. Once she realized that her capsule was shaking, she would store her capsule back in her body before taking out her saber. Each time, she would stab her saber into the thick white epidermis to secure her position. After doing that for a few times, perhaps being able to sense pain, the roots seemed to acknowledge that it could not remove that foreign object so it had no choice but to accept it into the slime again and transport it with the other ‘nutrients’ toward an unknown direction.
Putting down the empty noodle cup, Lin Sanjiu looked at the rope she tied outside through the capsule’s walls. She got that idea not long ago. Observing the movement of the rope, she could judge the direction she was heading. At that moment, the rope was swaying in the slime. Lin Sanjiu looked at it for a while before she caught a hint of its upward movement.
[Does this mean I’m heading downward?]
She looked up with uncertainty. Waves of viscous slime swept past her eyes like a white fog. Although the flow speed wasn’t that fast, Lin Sanjiu had already been in the root for an entire day. If the flow speed was 2 kilometers per hour, she was probably 50 to 60 kilometers deep.
However, the white interior of the roots remained unchanged. The slime kept moving downward as if it was heading to the very core of the planet.
In such depths, Lin Sanjiu could do nothing but wait in her capsule. The tree root that accommodated her had become her lifeline: if this tree root was suddenly disappeared, or accidentally pushed her out, Lin Sanjiu would be trapped under the deep dark layers of soil and would be killed by the surrounding pressure before she died of suffocation.
Once she was reminded about that, the little bit of leisure she had while eating that cup noodle disappeared completely. Lin Sanjiu fixated her gaze on the bottom of the capsule and gradually grew neurotic that she might suddenly be pushed outward by the roots if she missed even a slight abnormal movement.
As the fluid flowed, she could only hear the monotonous and repetitive rustling sound outside the capsule. It was as if the view in front of her was the only thing left in this world. The capsule swayed gently and rhythmically along with the flow. If it wasn’t for the strange situation she found herself in, it would be a considerably quiet time for her.
The rustling sound surrounding her seemed to stir the fatigue she had accumulated over the few days. She felt exhausted. Her eyelids were growing heavier by the minute. Lin Sanjiu blinked hard, taking a deep breath. A vague thought began to surface in her mind: [If I sleep, I will still be able to sense the movements from the capsule, right?]
With that, she fell asleep unknowingly.
Didn’t she warn herself not to sleep just a second ago? Yet, Lin Sanjiu woke up abruptly when the capsule started shaking. She did not know how long she had been asleep. The capsule quickly stabilized. Apparently, it was just a bit of ‘turbulence’. She looked at the empty noodle cup and found that the leftover soup had dried up. Due to her bad sleeping posture, her legs had also gone numb.
"It seems that six or seven hours have passed. Why isn’t there any change at all?" she mumbled before turning her head. She was caught off guard when she found herself staring at a deadly white face smiling back at her. Though she had been through a lot, Lin Sanjiu found her hairs standing on end. She suppressed the involuntary scream that nearly escaped from her mouth and stepped backward, only realizing after a second that the human’s face was outside her capsule.
Lin Sanjiu stared at it for over ten seconds before she felt her heart calming down. She looked at that face carefully and felt her heart contract. There was only a few pieces of intact skin on the body of this unfamiliar man who was floating beside her capsule. He must have tried to protect his head, so his face was the only part of his body that retained some semblance of its original form. His thoracic and abdominal cavity had been ripped open. The edge of the wounds had been densely covered with tiny semicircles. Clearly, his skin split open after it had been perforated by many tiny holes. Meanwhile, a few fascia-like objects floated around the body.
The space where his organs should originally be was empty. Lin Sanjiu could even see his backbone. His empty abdominal cavity was only filled with a white substance. She realized that she had mistaken his ‘smile’ on his face because of the blurred surface of her capsule. Upon closer inspection, the man had a twisted expression before he died.
If B.Rabbit and the others were floating in the root’s fluid unprotected, they were probably in the same state as this man. The shock she received had driven away her drowsiness. Lin Sanjiu sat down worriedly, gazing down at her feet in a daze. She tried her best to recall if her companions had any abilities or special items that could serve as protection.
[Huh?] Her train of thoughts stopped as she turned her head. The pale male corpse was still floating leisurely outside her capsule.
[Something isn’t right...] Lin Sanjiu tilted her head trying to grasp the fleeting thought in her head. It wasn’t all that surprising to see a dead person floating in the roots. After all, these roots had sucked in many organisms. However, she couldn’t help noticing a fact...
The dead man wasn’t here before.
If it was an object that the same root absorbed, Lin Sanjiu would have seen it earlier. For example, that fat ‘free-range chicken’ had accompanied her throughout her journey in the roots. As the flow speed of the fluid in the roots was constant throughout the roots, it wasn’t possible that an object would slow down or that something would catch up from behind.
She inched forward and looked at the mutilated face once more. Her heart raced as she made a daring assumption. She forced herself to calm down. After waiting for a while, the capsule shook a few times in succession, as expected.
It wasn’t caused by tree roots pushing her out. The jolts continued for quite some time. Sometimes, the jolt only lasted for a second. Lin Sanjiu discovered that the surroundings outside her capsule changed with each jolt. The ‘free-range chicken’ above her had already been washed away by the random waves to an unknown location. The number of organisms around her capsule began to increase rapidly. The faces that surrounded her capsules belonged to people she did not know. Some of the posthumans seemed alive as they used various methods to protect themselves. One of them had wrapped him or herself with a thick gold ribbon and was now like a mummy. Another person’s body was glowing with a black light, so she couldn’t see the person’s face. Despite that, their current circumstances were only slightly better than the corpses.
Lin Sanjiu contemplated for a while and finally decided not to rescue or bring them into her capsule. The capsule could only hold two people at most, even if they stood together. She had no choice but to prioritize her companions.
"Sorry, please persevere a bit longer." She murmured, it was almost as if she was comforting herself. "The organisms within the roots are converging… I am sure there is a way to get out."