Chapter 269: 265 The Shadow of the Toad God

Finally having struggled out of the cave, Fang Mu collapsed in exhaustion outside the entrance; before his eyes, it remained pitch black.

Although his body did not move, his ears were constantly listening carefully to the movements around him, noting whether any Abnormal occurrences were happening in the vicinity.

The world outside the cave was still chaotic and complex, fraught with danger, while the world inside the cave was infinitely closer to a dark hell.

If one does not remain vigilant and maintain one's sanity, one will inevitably face a terrifying madness, a process even more painful than death.

He had been resting for a while, yet Fang Mu still had not heard the sound of anything approaching; the sounds coming from the cave he had crawled out of seemed to have remained at that source without changing, with no intention of chasing after him at all.

This was very wrong!

Fang Mu suddenly sat up in alarm, his eyes scanning the darkness before him, his ears straining to listen to his surroundings, yet he still heard nothing; it seemed as if nothing truly existed nearby.

Supporting himself against the wall, he slowly stood up again; the wounds on his forearms and elbows stung in waves as he moved, and the stones and dust attached to the wounds were either shaken off or squeezed out by the flexing flesh.

Fang Mu suppressed the urge to scream, ultimately only letting out a few muffled groans.

With cold sweat on his brow, Fang Mu felt that somewhere in this cave, the space was very large—so vast that it did not seem like a passage, but rather more like a natural stone chamber?

A vague, ominous premonition arose, and he stopped resting, continuing forward while leaning against the wall, but he had only taken a few steps when he felt himself kick a hard object.

It was somewhat like wood, but the texture was perhaps harder and smoother; this was likely not any kind of plant, because such plants could not exist in this cave.

It also could not be any kind of stone, because it was too hard and brittle, and the shape was more regular.

Fang Mu squatted down and reached out to grope, suddenly touching something hard and smooth that carried a strange, rotten smell; he immediately realized what it was, retreated several steps in succession, and his face showed his distress.

This was a corpse that had been dead for who knows how long; the organs and flesh had long since ceased to exist, leaving only a pile of dry bones leaning against the wall.

Based on the feeling of what he had touched—which seemed to be a skull—these dry bones should belong to a human, a normal human, not the violent frog-men with well-developed limbs from before, but a real person.

"Could it be someone from a long time ago?" Fang Mu also wanted to use his lighter to take a look, but in this dark and deep space, even a tiny bit of light would be as conspicuous as the sun, and it would be no different from sending a "come eat me" signal to those monsters hiding in the dark. Having had the experience of being surrounded by toads and frog-men before, he no longer dared to use lighting equipment casually, so for now, he could only feel the things on the skeleton through touch.

He was not a professional archaeologist or a forensic pathologist; he could only infer and analyze based on his own broad but messy and shallow knowledge.

The clothing on the corpse had not been destroyed or disappeared along with the flesh; the tattered fabric felt somewhat rough, like the coarse cloth used for the clothing of commoners in ancient times, a quality that, in the present day, would be considered too poor even for a tablecloth.

For a corpse to air-dry to this state, and in such an environment, it was truly not something that could be achieved within a few months.

Unless... was there something special that caused it to accelerate into this state?

Fang Mu did not linger by the corpse for long; to him, the research value of the corpse was not deep, as he did not possess professional knowledge and could not analyze much of anything.

Stepping over the bones, not long after, Fang Mu felt himself kick another bone, and immediately discovered another skeleton.

Then came the third, the fourth, the fifth... there were too many to count, so many that they were piled up like a mountain, with the bones of different biological species pieced together in a deformed, chaotic mess.

"How could it be like this?" Fang Mu could not help but feel his liver tremble; he finally could not withstand his curiosity and pulled out his lighter, illuminating a part of this dark space.

Just a part was enough to be shocking, nearly causing Fang Mu's soul to depart from his body.

He saw a mountain of piled-up bones; some were human, some were animal, and others were the bones of large creatures that absolutely did not belong to any known species. Those large bones were not only huge in size but also very peculiar in shape, making one unable to help but imagine the bizarre forms those grotesque creatures had in life.

Just as Fang Mu had not yet managed to recover from the shock, he was terrified and his face twisted in fear due to the scene he saw next in the darkness.

He saw that beyond the range illuminated by the lighter's flame, a pair of dark red, asymmetrical lights appeared in the darkness, of varying sizes; before he could react, even more red light spots appeared in the darkness.

The light emitted by those spots was very faint, but they were dense; gradually, they illuminated the vague outline of the giant thing hidden in the darkness.

Huge and bloated, perhaps taller than four or five stories, the outline of its body connected into what was roughly the shape of a toad, only more unreal and deformed.

Seeing it, Fang Mu felt as if his soul wanted to break free from this frail Vessel; perhaps only then could he barely survive for a while longer.

He had already realized the identity of this massive giant in the darkness; it was the sleeper in the dark underground, the bane that brought despair and panic, and also the ancient totem deity of the Guinan region—the Toad God.

At this moment, Fang Mu finally understood why the old village chief had repeatedly emphasized and warned him in his diary that after entering the cave, he must never open his eyes to look or prick up his ears to listen, and that after putting down the black box used for offerings, he should leave without looking back.

Because the local people of the past were truly believing in and serving a living god; they used their own bodies, the bodies of others, and the bodies of beasts from who knows where as sacrifices, paying them as tribute once a year for it to taste and enjoy.

This Toad God was not a figment of imagination, but a real existence.

Fang Mu fled in a panic without looking back, running straight in the direction opposite to where the outline was facing, his brain empty, his body exerting the instinct to survive from deep within his genes to the extreme.

The giant toad, covered in flashing red spots in the darkness, let out an earth-shattering roar; the sound waves hit Fang Mu's back like a mortar shell, and he was uncontrollably sent flying a long distance, slamming onto the ground.

Fang Mu did not dare to look back, and even less dared to believe it.

His enhanced ears clearly heard the sound, yet he could not hear at all where the sound-producing object came from; except for seeing it with his eyes, he could not hear the substance of the sound source at all. It was as if it had appeared out of thin air; that outline was something more unreal and uncapturable than light.

The form of existence of this deity had already far exceeded the scope of what humans could understand.