Ashes Of Deep Sea-Chapter 301 - 305: 6000°C and the Sound of a Heartbeat (Thanks to the Silver League)

Chapter 301 -305: 6000°C and the Sound of a Heartbeat (Thanks to the Silver League)

Alive.

Realizing that the substance Alice had stepped on was not mud, but some kind of living organism, most of the people on the scene instantly felt a chill run down their spines.

Duncan thought the creeping matter on the floor was quite… disgusting.

Then he heard Nina’s voice not far away, “It’s here too!”

“And over here!” Sherry also exclaimed in shock, “There’s a large patch over here, and it’s moving!”

In this mysterious and empty space, everywhere lay that dark, mud-like, slowly creeping bizarre “substance.”

“This is everywhere…” Fenna had silently taken the huge sword from her back into her hands, and as she frowned and looked around the extremely spacious “cabin,” she said in an especially serious tone, “May the Goddess protect us… What in the world is this?”

Morris, fighting against the discomfort in his heart, crouched next to a patch of slightly wriggling “mud” and poked at the edges of the sticky “mixture” with the folding knife he carried, his brow furrowing deeply.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, nor have I come across it in any book,” the well-learned scholar said with a voice filled with confusion and unease, “This looks like a biological entity, but its texture is no different from mud, and moreover… It seems devoid of any traces of Spiritual Intelligence.”

“It does bear some resemblance to something described by Tirian about one of the ‘Submersible Number Three,'” Duncan casually mentioned, while he lifted his head to look deeper into the vast cabin.

Nina approached the edge of the group, and under the faint glow emitted by Ai Yi, a blob of mud that looked particularly “vigorous” was slowly undulating in a depression on the floor. She stood next to this indentation, bending down with curiosity to look at the revolting material.

She was a little apprehensive, but her curiosity was far stronger than her nervousness.

And in the next second, the mud suddenly stirred!

As if responding to Nina’s gaze, or as if some blindly wriggling creature had finally been startled by the sudden intrusion of the group into the cabin, the pace of the muddy flow suddenly quickened. Following that, a large amount of gas burst forth from inside it, and the surface of the mud roiled with bubbles—Nina was startled before she could even react, and before she knew it, that lump of mud… abruptly stood upright!

Just like a lower organism sprouting bones, the pitch-black, viscous matter rose up from the depression, its surface rapidly hardening, solidifying, changing color, and in the blink of an eye, it assumed an outline nearly human. In the next moment, its top structure split into what resembled a head, and even a human face began to form.

It was a face that bore a striking resemblance to Nina’s!

“Ah!” Nina let out a loud scream in shock—no matter how brave or strong-willed she was, after all, she was just a teenage girl. Naturally, she was greatly frightened by such a horrifying and strange sight, so much so that her mind went blank and she instinctively threw her hand up in a gesture to push the dreadful thing away from her sight.

That was a Fireball with a temperature of 6000°C.

Sherry was the closest to Nina, hearing only her cry of alarm followed immediately by a deafening boom, then a blinding flash of light containing intense heat filled her and Ah Dog’s entire field of vision—accompanied by a heat wave that swept through like standing at the mouth of an erupting volcano.

Nina had merely swung her hand, a very brief slap.

However, the fireball she sent out had nearly melted and evaporated everything within a twelve-meter radius in front of her.

Duncan turned his head just in time to see the blazing fireball dissipate quickly in the air before Nina, and the bright magma from melted metal flowed down, while the girl herself seemed still stunned, standing motionless in front of the terrifying molten crater.

“What happened?” Duncan immediately came beside Nina, his hand resting on her shoulder, while the residual heat waves rose and fluttered around him.

“Just now… that mud suddenly stood up, and it turned into my likeness, I… I got startled…” Only then did Nina come to her senses, shrinking her neck, looking unsettled, and pointing in the direction where the eerie substance had been, “And then I hit it…”

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“And then what?”

“And then it was gone,” Nina said, her face downcast, looking a bit scared, “I couldn’t control my strength, and this whole area turned into molten iron.”

Duncan looked woodenly at the molten crater on the floor and the dripping metal magma on the adjacent wall, then at the still tense “Sun Shard.”

No matter what that thing that scared Nina was, there’s no doubt it took the worst hit—a 6000°C slap, even an Evil God from the Subspace would have been left with a lifetime’s psychological scar…

But he still patted Nina’s hair, comforting the girl who had been greatly shocked, “Don’t be afraid, it’s over now, whatever that was, you’ve already smashed it…”

While he was talking, he turned his head to look at the other people who were still unsettled.

Sherry was hugging the dog, shaking all over; Maurice was silently thumping his chest; Alice had just picked up her own head; only Fenna was the most composed—she looked at Duncan and shrugged.

“I will definitely never suddenly talk to Nina from behind her again,” declared the Judge, who once had killed his way through an entire City-State, with a grave expression on his face.

“It’s just a minor accident,” Duncan said helplessly as he ruffled Nina’s hair; then his gaze fell back on the muck nearby that hadn’t been affected by Nina’s “Sun Fist,” and in the next second, his expression slightly changed, “Wait, there’s something not quite right about this stuff.”

Following Duncan’s warning, the others finally noticed the change in the “mud” that covered the entire cabin—

All the muck had stopped wriggling.

These things that only moments ago had been moving and reshaping like soft-bodied creatures had all of a sudden come to a halt and dried up into clumps like dehydrated mud, while the edges of all the clumps had sprouted tiny branch-like protrusions, as if something had tried to escape from the muck, leaving a trail indicating the direction of its flight.

Fenna’s gaze swept quickly around the room, and in a matter of seconds, she found that the trails extending from the edges of all the clumps of muck seemed to point in the same direction.

To the deepest part of this dark, vast “cabin.”

“There’s something in that direction,” Fenna said immediately, and at the same time, she gripped her greatsword tightly.

Duncan, too, cast his gaze into that deepest part of the darkness.

A fine line of ghostly green fire quietly extended from beneath his feet. As soon as this fireline touched the dried, solidified “muck” on the floor, it lit up brightly, bursting into fire, forming numerous “bonfires” that spread swiftly throughout the entire cabin, lighting up many areas that had been shrouded in darkness!

Duncan watched the spread of the “bonfires” and confirmed his initial suspicion—the muck-like substance was a condensation of Transcendent power.

And in the spreading Spectral Flames, the cabin, too vast to be fully illuminated by the light from Ai Yi’s body, finally revealed more of its secrets to everyone.

They saw the far-off cabin walls, pitted and horrifying as if they had been gnawed by some kind of acidic substance or Corrosive creature, saw the ropes, pipes, and suspicious dark-red fibers hanging from above. They saw even more lifeless “mud clumps” and, at the very back of the cabin—

A massive, vaguely outlined shape loomed ominously, its edges seeming to twitch slowly.

Duncan pondered for a moment before stepping toward that massive and bizarre “accumulation.”

He didn’t let his Spectral Flames Corrode and burn through that pile—even though he knew it should be burnable “Transcendent kindling,” he didn’t want to hastily destroy any clues before figuring out precisely what the pile was.

The others were clearly hesitant, but seeing Duncan stride forward, they quickly followed suit.

“Thump—”

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

Maurice looked up toward the direction of the sound, realizing that the heartbeat-like ‘thump’ was coming from the depths of the towering dark mass.

Duncan also stopped, his focused gaze observing the strange pile, sensing the fluctuating aura around it.

It didn’t give him any sense of danger.

So, he took a few more steps forward.

“Thump… thump…”

The heartbeat was louder and stronger than before, pulsing from the depths of the pile. Its edges seemed to be moving more noticeably than before, and even the surface began to slowly undulate.

Duncan frowned, and just then, he heard Sherry’s voice suddenly rise from behind:

“A-dog, A-dog, what’s wrong with you?!”

(Thanks to Charlie Doesn’t Eat Meat for the silver sponsorship; I finally squeezed out this chapter~)