Chapter 115: 113. Bronze Statue (Two-in-One)

113. Bronze Statue (Two-in-One)

"Hmm? I recall there being an island near Liuhua Port, and one could even see it across the sea from the cape. I estimate the distance shouldn't be too far. How is it that after driving for about an hour, we still haven't reached the shore?" Li Nuowei felt deeply puzzled. As a citizen who grew up in Liuhua Port, he had an impression of the island Drake mentioned. Although he had never had the chance to step onto that small island, based on his estimation of the distance and the horsepower of this speedboat—even accounting for a slower speed for safe navigation—it should have reached the shore in half an hour.

"Check the radar and other reconnaissance instruments?" Drake also felt the strangeness of this fog.

Li Nuowei frowned and said, "I've checked. The radar is currently completely calm, and the other reconnaissance instruments have no reaction either. Although this level of thick fog would cause some interference with the instruments, it shouldn't be to the point of having no reaction at all... It's as if we have deviated from our course and sailed into an ocean where there is nothing for several kilometers around; there isn't even a single fish in the sea."

No sooner had he finished speaking than the two heard a sound from the reconnaissance instrument; a signal source had appeared within the detection range of their boat.

"It seems to be the signal of another boat," Li Nuowei said.

"Let's move closer and take a look," Drake said. As he spoke, he turned to prepare weapons. There were still some fishing and trawling equipment on the boat, and even strange, prohibited items like machetes and harpoon guns.

The owner of this speedboat was likely a veteran angler.

Li Nuowei and Drake were already fully armed. Seeing the speedboat getting closer and closer to the signal source, they only felt the temperature of the air on the sea drop by a few degrees, sending a chill to the soles of their feet.

However, when the speedboat was about to reach the location near the signal source, Li Nuowei and Drake did not see an intact boat. They only saw the wreckage of a yacht torn to pieces by some terrifying force, and two corpses, bitten beyond recognition, floating up and down on the sea with the boat's debris.

Drake mustered his courage to go to the gunwale to look, and he recognized the identities of the two floating corpses. They were dressed in black, and their clothes bore the unique organizational mark of the Mysterious Investigator. They were the Mysterious Investigators who had arrived on the island first to investigate, but poor things, they had died here.

At this moment, there were no wind or waves on the sea, yet Drake still felt the chill of a cold wind blowing past, rising from the bottom of his heart and spreading throughout his entire body, freezing his body that was in the midst of being transformed by the Curse.

Although he did not know what those two dead Mysterious Investigators had experienced before they died, their rotten faces, bitten by unknown creatures, still revealed their expressions of terror.

Drake thought of that group of damned fish-men that had appeared in his nightmares. Only those sluggish, blind, and terrifying guys could cause such destructive power. Those two unlucky fellows who fell into the sea were surrounded and entangled by that group of fish-men, bitten and chewed to pieces by their sharp serrated teeth, stripped to the bone, and gutted, letting fresh blood dye the sea red...

He gritted his teeth, and saliva and blood seeped from between his teeth.

"Drake! Look ahead!" Just as Drake was somewhat lost in that bloody fantasy, Li Nuowei's voice startled him awake. He broke out in a cold sweat, feeling annoyed at what he was thinking, but his gaze subconsciously followed Li Nuowei's prompt and looked over.

Only to see that in the vast fog on the sea, a huge black shadow was hiding behind the white mist. It was as if a terrifying crouching giant beast was lurking on the sea, but its towering and massive body could not even be completely covered by the ocean; that was just a part of its body exposed on the sea surface.

Drake couldn't help but think of the giant fish-man that appeared in his nightmares, the extraterrestrial giant beast that was considered the "God of the Sea" by her fanatics.

He gripped the harpoon gun in his hand tightly, his yellow eyes staring fixedly ahead, feeling as if the black shadow was moving and yet also as if it were not.

The speedboat moved forward, parting the fog. Drake slowly let out a breath, because he saw a beach. It turned out that the black shadow he saw earlier was an island, and that was the island he and Li Nuowei were going to land on.

The speedboat reached the shore. Drake and Li Nuowei got off the boat with their weapons. Standing at the pier on the island and looking at the dead-silent small island, the feeling of unease in their hearts rose and fell once again, as if they had heard the final ten-second countdown of a game of hide-and-seek, making their hearts pound.

Stepping onto the island, Drake saw several sets of human footprints on the road, as well as the footprints of an unknown reptile. Judging from the footprints left on the beach, the "animal" also had a webbed structure. It was not hard to infer that it was that group of fish-men.

Li Nuowei and Drake looked at each other in silence. They could already feel the mood of the Mysterious Investigators who had come to the island for investigation from the messy and dense footprints on the beach. When facing such a dense siege and attack by a group of alien monsters, presumably even veteran investigators who had experienced great storms would have their minds thrown into chaos.

There was another reason they dared not speak: they were afraid that the group of fish-men that had come ashore were still wandering and lingering on the island. Those seemingly dull and obsessed fish-men might be quite cunning and treacherous. They might still be hiding in the dark corners of the island, looking for traces of living people. If they were unfortunately discovered, they would also end up with the same fate as the two floating corpses they saw at sea.

But after they had walked on the island somewhat recklessly for more than ten minutes without encountering any fish-men, their tense hearts also relaxed.

The island seemed to have experienced an earthquake of unknown cause. Many of the buildings on the island had collapsed, and there were broken tiles and bricks everywhere. The dilapidated walls stood on the ruins like Straw Men in a withered field.

"Did an earthquake happen here?" Li Nuowei picked up a damp wall brick; it was heavy and quite hard.

Drake had a different opinion on this and said, "It might not be an earthquake. It looks more like it was stepped on by something."

"Stepped on?" Li Nuowei scratched his scalp, which had suddenly started to itch. "So, did that God of the Sea wake up?"

"I'm afraid not," Drake said with a heavy expression. "Although this one is very big, it feels like it's not enough. And I still remember what that taxi driver said. The nursery rhyme says... when the stars are right, it will awaken from its slumber and break the seal. Now, it is clearly not yet that time."

Upon hearing this, Li Nuowei was silent for a while and said, "What you say is not without reason. If everything here was really crushed by being stepped on, then according to my previous experience, the shadow I saw in the fog should indeed be larger. After all, that is a guy who can stir up the seawater and create tsunamis just by moving on the sea surface.

This giant beast that can crush houses, although also huge enough, might be much inferior compared to that thing."

Drake let out a dry laugh and said somewhat powerlessly, "This is truly a fact that leaves one at a loss. I remember you said you wanted to 'slay a god.' Is this really something we can deal with by human power?"

"We have to find a way to try," Li Nuowei did not struggle much with this. He looked at the other person with some amusement and said, "I, who have died thousands of times, have not thought of giving up, yet you are already thinking about it being impossible?"

"I just can't think of a way," Drake shook his head.

Li Nuowei smiled and said, "I'll think of the way; you just need to live on with hope."

Drake looked at Li Nuowei, who could always show a natural and confident demeanor, and felt inexplicably convinced and at ease in his heart. But he didn't say anything, just continued walking in the ruins with Li Nuowei.

Not long after, Li Nuowei and Drake discovered a dilapidated ancestral hall.

The statue of the Dragon King enshrined in the ancestral hall had shattered after experiencing an incident. However, strangely, the inside of the shattered statue was not empty; instead, it was another bronze statue of a fish-man. From its form, it looked more like the God of the Sea in Drake's memory.

If it were just a bronze statue of the God of the Sea, neither Drake nor Li Nuowei would have felt so surprised. However, what made their pores tremble was that the bronze statue seemed to be alive. Its body was covered with countless dense black meat eggs, watching them like the eyes of crabs.

Some of the meat eggs had already ruptured, and unknown soft-bodied worms crawled out from the thick liquid flowing out from the inside, wriggling outward.

"So disgusting." Drake's entire face wrinkled in disgust, and he felt uncomfortable all over.

Although Li Nuowei was also disgusted, his expression was more of calm observation. He then said, "Many of those things are crab leeches, a type of parasite that lives on marine life such as fish and crabs."

"I know those are parasites, but what's going on with them parasitizing a bronze statue? Isn't a parasite parasitizing a dead object a waste of time? And they are actually still alive and have hatched," Drake asked curiously.

Li Nuowei: "I don't know. The bronze statue might have some special power."

"Is it possible that the bronze statue is alive?" Drake guessed. Having encountered too many weird things, he was now trying to put aside his inherent worldview to think and reason.

Li Nuowei: "It's possible. Should we burn it and see?"

Drake glanced at him and agreed, "Then let's try."

Immediately after, the two found dry cloth from other parts of the ancestral hall and found oil lamps, matches, candles, and so on from under the Shrine. They used them to make simple torches. Drake poured kerosene onto the bronze statue and piled dry wood around it, then set them on fire.

Boom!

The raging fire instantly engulfed the bronze statue. The bronze statue was bathed in fire, and the crab leeches covering its body were silently burned, shriveled, and curled up in the intense fire, finally turning into charcoal.

The strong smell of kerosene rushed into Li Nuowei and Drake's noses. Suddenly, a strong wind blew from the west. The surrounding trees were blown and swayed, the leaves made a rustling sound, and the gaps in the ruins emitted eerie, strange sounds, like the wailing of some creature dying in agony. The fire on the bronze statue was also gradually blown away by the wind.

The wind dissipated, and the fire vanished, but Li Nuowei and Drake saw a scene that made their scalps tingle.

Only to see that the already hideous fish-man bronze statue now presented a completely different posture. It had fangs and a ferocious look, its whole body was scorched black, and its posture was curled and strange, with half of its body having crawled out from the Dragon King statue.

They had been watching the fish-man bronze statue being burned by the fire, but they had never seen the fish-man bronze statue make any other movements. Moreover, they were also certain that their memory was not wrong; the fish-man bronze statue indeed had a different change after being scorched by the fire. This confirmed the fact that the "bronze statue" might be alive, because if it were a real bronze statue, this level of fire could never have burned the statue into a deformed state.

Based on the instinctive reaction to terrifying things, in order to confirm that the creature disguised as a bronze statue was truly dead, Drake picked up a brick and smashed it at the bronze statue with great precision.

Hearing a crisp "click" sound, the bronze statue was smashed into several pieces and scattered. Each piece emitted the smell of scorched gelatinous material, as well as the faint smell of toxic plastic.

The unpleasant smell made the two cover their noses and mouths. Seeing the internal structure of the bronze statue, they finally confirmed that the bronze statue was a living creature.

They couldn't help but feel fortunate. Perhaps the bronze statue had been sleeping all along, so it didn't notice their actions of harming it, which was why they didn't suffer any harm when they set it on fire to kill it.

"What a bizarre and insidious thing," Drake wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.

Afterwards, the two carefully investigated the ancestral hall and discovered a tunnel entrance in the woodshed behind it, but after opening the entrance, they found the tunnel had been sealed off by collapsed stones; they then quickly guessed that someone had deliberately blown up this tunnel, and this was very likely the handiwork of the Mysterious Investigators who had landed on the island.

The Mysterious Investigators had clearly already investigated the houses here, so there was not much value in continuing to investigate them.

"Do you think there is anyone still alive among those Mysterious Investigators who came to investigate?" Li Nuowei looked at Drake and asked.

Drake thought for a moment and said, "There is a chance they survived; finding them might allow us to learn more useful information from them."

If any Mysterious Investigators were still alive, and they had indeed investigated something else on this island, then it would be more efficient to ask them for information than for them to spend time here picking up scraps and scavenging for things.

The two then left the ruins of the small town and searched for traces of the Mysterious Investigators' activities in the mountain forests outside the town.

In the process of searching for the Mysterious Investigators' tracks in the mountain forest, Drake suddenly felt a wave of dizziness, and immediately after, the world before his eyes suddenly turned into a cold, gray-blue tone; he also felt a parched heat in his throat, followed by a surge of heat and the scent of blood, and he violently spat out a mouthful of black blood and unidentified bodily tissue.

His heartbeat was accelerating, the flow of blood throughout his body had sped up, and even his metabolism seemed to have changed along with it; Drake felt a kind of chill that one only experiences when running a fever.

Li Nuowei saw this scene from the side and was not panicked; instead, he said as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, "Has the Jiaoren Disease progressed to the next stage?"

"Haa-da... haa-da..." Drake raised his head, wanting to say something to Li Nuowei, when he suddenly discovered with some terror that his vocal cords could no longer produce human sounds.

Li Nuowei reached out and touched the Scale structure appearing on Drake's face, placed his finger in front of the other's nose, and calmly asked, "How is it, do you have the urge to take a bite?"