Deep Sea Embers

Alive.

After realizing that what Alice had stepped on was not mud but a type of living organism, most people at the scene instantly felt a chilling sensation.

Duncan found the wriggling substance on the floor quite… repulsive.

Then, he heard Nina’s voice coming from nearby, “There’s some here too!”

“And over here!” Shirley immediately exclaimed, “There’s a large patch of it, and it’s still moving!”

In this mysterious and vast space, there were patches of that dark, mud-like, yet slowly wriggling strange “substance” everywhere.

“It’s all around us…” Vanna had already silently unsheathed the huge sword from her back, and while looking around the extremely spacious “cabin” with a slightly furrowed brow, she said in an exceptionally serious tone, “May the goddess protect us… what on earth is this?”

Morris suppressed his discomfort and squatted down beside a slightly wriggling “mud.” Then by unfolding the pocket knife he carried, the old scholar turned over the edge of the sticky substance and frowned deeply.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, nor have I seen any record of it in any book,” the knowledgeable old scholar’s tone was full of confusion and unease. “It looks like a living thing, but its texture is no different from mud, and… it seems to have no trace of intelligence.”

“It does somewhat resemble something described by Tyrian in one of the ‘Number Three Submersibles,'” Duncan casually said while looking deeper into the spacious cabin.

Nina approached the edge of the group, where under the dim light cast by Ai’s fire, there was a particularly “lively” mud undulating slowly in a depression in the floor. She stood by the pit, bending to watch the nauseating substance curiously.

She was a little nervous, but her curiosity was much stronger than her anxiety.

And then, the next second, the mud suddenly moved!

As if responding to Nina’s gaze or as if a blind, senseless creature had finally been disturbed by the large group of uninvited guests in the cabin, the mud’s surging speed suddenly increased. Next, a large amount of gas emerged from within, and bubbles rolled on the surface of the mud—Nina was startled, and before she could react, the mud suddenly… stood up!

It was as if a low-level soft-bodied creature suddenly had bones; the dark, viscous substance rose straight from the pit, its surface rapidly hardening, coagulating, and changing color. In just the blink of an eye, it took on an almost human silhouette, and in the next instant, its top differentiated into something resembling a skull, even revealing a human face.

It was a face that resembled Nina’s by about 60 or 70 percent!

“Ah!” Nina was instantly frightened and screamed—even if she wasn’t timid and cheerful and strong, she was still just a teenage girl. Faced with such a terrifying and bizarre scene, she was naturally hugely frightened, so much so that her mind went blank. Without thinking, she instinctively raised her hand and swung it, trying to push the horrible thing away from her sight.

The nearest one to react was Shirley, who heard Nina’s exclamation, followed by a deafening explosion before a flash of intense heat filled her and Dog’s entire field of vision. Accompanying the flash was a heat shockwave sweeping across, like standing near an erupting volcano.

Nina had only slapped it, a very brief slap. However, this slap created a fireball that nearly melted and evaporated the entire spherical space within a twelve-meter radius in front of her.

Duncan turned his head and saw the fiery ball quickly dissipate in mid-air in front of Nina, with bright molten metal flowing in front of her, and the girl seemed to be still stunned, standing motionless in front of the terrifying molten pit.

“What happened?” Duncan immediately came to Nina’s side, placing a hand on her shoulder as the residual heat waves rose around him.

“Just… just now, the mud suddenly stood up and turned into my appearance. I… I got startled…” Nina regained her senses at this moment, shrinking her neck, her face filled with shock, pointing in the direction of the strange object. “Then I hit it…”

“And then?”

“And then it was gone,” Nina said with a mournful face, seemingly still frightened, “I couldn’t control my strength, and this whole area turned into molten iron.”

Duncan expressionlessly glanced at the molten pit on the ground and the molten metal flowing down the nearby walls and then at the still nervous “Sun Fragment.”

No matter what had just popped up and startled Nina, there was no doubt that it was the most severely injured. A slap at 6000°C would leave even the evil gods of subspace with a lifelong psychological shadow.

But he still patted Nina’s hair, comforting the frightened girl: “Don’t be afraid, it’s okay, you’ve destroyed that thing…”

As he spoke, he turned his head to look at the other shaken people.

Shirley was holding Dog, trembling, Morris was quietly pounding his chest, Alice had just picked up her head, only Vanna was the calmest – she looked at Duncan and shrugged.

“I’ll never suddenly talk to Nina from behind again,” said the inquisitor who had once killed her way through an entire city-state with a serious face.

“It’s just a small accident,” Duncan helplessly rubbed Nina’s hair, and then his gaze fell back on the mud nearby that had not been affected by Nina’s “Solar Fist.” His expression changed slightly the next second, “Wait, something’s not right with these things.”

With Duncan’s reminder, the others finally noticed the changes in the “mud” spread all over the cabin.

All the mud had stopped moving.

These things, constantly squirming and changing shape like soft-bodied creatures not long ago, had all stopped at some unknown point, becoming dry lumps as if the mud had lost water. All the edges of the lumps extended small, branch-like protrusions as if something had tried to escape from the mud and left a trace indicating its escape direction during the process.

Vanna’s gaze quickly swept across the surroundings, and within a few seconds, she discovered that the traces extending from the edges of all the mud appeared to point in the same direction – in the depths of the dark and vast “cabin.”

“There’s something in that direction,” Vanna said immediately, tightening her grip on the huge sword in her hand.

Simultaneously, Duncan also cast his gaze towards the darkest depths.

A thin, faint green flame line quietly extended under his feet. When the flame line touched the dried and solidified “mud” on the floor, it instantly burned brightly, turning into one bonfire after another. These bonfires spread rapidly throughout the cabin, instantly illuminating many previously dark areas!

Duncan watched the spread of the “bonfires” and confirmed his initial guess in his heart – these mud-like substances were the condensation of supernatural powers.

And as the ghost flames gradually spread, this cabin, which was too wide to be illuminated by Ai’s flames, finally revealed more secrets to everyone.

They saw the pitted and terrifying cabin walls in the distance as if they had been gnawed on by some acidic substance or corrosive creature. They saw the ropes, pipes, and suspicious dark red fiber bundles hanging from the ceiling. They saw even more lifeless “mud lumps,” and in the deepest part of the cabin—a huge, indistinctly shaped object was lurking there in an unsettling posture, its edges seemingly still slowly squirming.

Duncan hesitated briefly before taking steps towards the large and strange “pile.”

He didn’t let his ghost flames invade and burn the pile. Although he knew it should also be burnable “firewood,” he didn’t intend to recklessly destroy any clues before figuring out what it was.

The others hesitated noticeably, but seeing Duncan stride forward, they quickly followed.

“Thump—”

Just as Duncan was halfway there, a sudden sound made everyone subconsciously stop in their tracks.

Morris looked up in the direction of the sound, realizing that the thumping sound, like a heartbeat, was coming from deep within the dark pile several meters high.

Duncan also stopped, carefully observing the strange object and sensing the fluctuations in the aura around it.

It didn’t give him any sense of danger.

So he took a few more steps forward.

“Thump… Thump…”

More distinct and powerful heartbeat sounds came from deep within the pile, its edges seemed to squirm even more noticeably than before, and even the entire surface began to slowly undulate.

Duncan furrowed his brows, and just then, he heard Shirley’s voice suddenly behind him: “Dog, what’s wrong with you?!”