Chapter 270: 266 The White Path and the Door

In extreme terror, Fang Mu followed his instinct and made a choice, standing up to continue running into the depths of the darkness ahead.

The dark void ahead was not the light he pursued, but it was absolutely not the desperate hell he loathed and hated behind him.

The roaring sound suddenly stopped, followed immediately by radiant, flowing colors that radiated from behind Fang Mu, directed toward the front of Fang Mu.

Amidst that brilliant and ever-changing light, red was the main tone of the shifting colors; before each color switch, it would first transform into a blood-red light before changing into other colors.

The moment he was illuminated by the light, Fang Mu felt the temperature on his back drop slightly. When his gaze swept over the light projected from behind him, he felt somewhat dizzy. Behind that light, there seemed to be some kind of special power hidden that could cause a hypnotic effect. Even though Fang Mu was in a state of extreme terror at that moment, he was still affected by the light, feeling uncontrollably sleepy.

Fang Mu tried hard to pull himself together and resist the power of the light, but gradually, he discovered with horror the Abnormal nature of those lights.

These lights... could not cast his shadow at all...

They were not light at all! They were some kind of tiny creatures that behaved like light!

Fang Mu subconsciously looked back, and the scene behind him once again slashed at his strained sanity like a sharp axe. He saw that those seemingly colorful lights were being emitted from a massive, toad-shaped shadow like the spores of a mushroom.

That giant toad shadow was manifesting a bright light, slowly revealing its true face hidden in the dark space.

The first sight that pierced into Fang Mu's field of vision was the red light covering the giant toad's body. As the dazzling red slowly receded, those squirming, rotating living eyes were revealed, dense and numerous like barnacles covering a turtle's back.

When stared at by those eerie eyes, Fang Mu only felt that he had fallen into a deep, freezing ice cave. His whole body itched, as if those eyes were about to crawl out from inside his body. He was terrified and wanted to scratch his own body, wanting to preserve the illusion of his normalcy before he became Abnormal.

Must not look anymore!

Fang Mu exhausted his last bit of sanity to reclaim sovereignty over his body, twisting his body back so that his attention would no longer be occupied by those terrifying things.

Thump!

However, human eyes that cannot see in the dark have their limits after all. Fang Mu failed to discover that he had inadvertently stepped into a puddle of water in the cave. Perhaps ten thousand toads had once lingered there; the body fluids they left behind were slick and foul-smelling, accumulating and blending into the water. When Fang Mu stepped on it, a strong sense of loss of control came from under his feet. His soles slipped violently, and he fell backward in an exaggerated manner.

Crack!

Fang Mu fell heavily to the ground. At this instant, he seemed to hear some kind of shattering sound in his mind.

He did not know what that sound was, nor did he want to guess what that chilling shattering sound actually was. His consciousness was slowly blurring, and his vision was gradually being soaked in red, becoming thicker and thicker...

In a trance, Fang Mu saw a door. He stood naked on a White Path. The White Path had a Heavenly Ladder leading all the way to a tightly shut door. To his left and right were terrifying things that were unclear but were whispering sneakily at every moment; those existences were vaguely even greater than the Toad God he had just seen.

He felt something heavy in his hand; it turned out he was holding the Nail Hammer he had purchased from the Forest Cabin.

Just as Fang Mu was at a loss and standing still, a large mass of abrupt, flesh-colored blisters slowly appeared behind that ancient, heavy door. They divided and multiplied crazily around the door, squeezing away those existences that were distributed along the White Path and casting evil, dark peeks at him.

Not long after, above that door—which perhaps led to the ultimate of reason, the limit of dimensions, and the transcendence of realms—a flesh blister swelled and split into three slits, dividing the surface of the blister into three unequal parts. The skin retracted, peeling open to reveal a giant eyeball. That eye was full of anger and intimidation, and its focus locked onto Fang Mu, who was standing on the White Path, in almost an instant.

The moment Fang Mu was stared at, obscure and incomprehensible languages darted into his brain. It was a great existence expressing endless anger toward him, wanting to punish him.

"No!" Before Fang Mu could say anything, he had just turned to run when he saw a blood-red maw coming toward him, and a huge, extremely long tongue shot toward him.

Facing such a crisis, Fang Mu could only throw himself to the side. However, among the flesh-colored blisters distributed along the White Path, a black creature shaped like a mantis squeezed out from the gaps in the flesh mass, flew out at an extremely fast speed, and swung its sickle-like hand blades down at his head.

With a shudder of his whole body, Fang Mu completely lost consciousness.

He did not know how long the feeling of losing all consciousness lasted, but to Fang Mu, it was just a fleeting moment. When his senses revived, he found himself lying in a foul-smelling alley full of vomited acid and fermentation. The ground was covered with sewage seeping out from trash, and he was lying on it.

Familiar and lively sounds came from all sides. Those sounds of language and social activity were like sweet rain after a long drought, instantly moistening Fang Mu's eyes and making him miss and love them immensely.

"Where... is this?" Fang Mu crawled up from the ground, dirty all over, his body shivering from the cold.

The wind blew past the back of his head, feeling chilly and with a faint stinging pain. There was also something flowing out from the stinging spot on the back of his head. He gasped and lightly groped the edge of the pain on the back of his head, touching a liquid that did not have the texture of the sewage on the ground. He put it in front of his eyes to see and only then realized it was blood.

Once an overly emotional human realizes their own fragility, their body and mind will instantly collapse as if their defenses were broken. Fang Mu was no exception, sitting down on the ground with a thud, his consciousness wanting to withdraw from reality and enter that dark dreamland.

Having fallen to the ground once again, Fang Mu's eyes moved listlessly. As his closing eyelids saw something lying nearby, he suddenly erupted with a burst of strength like a dying fish, supporting himself to crawl toward the Nail Hammer that had fallen next to the trash can.

When his hands finally grasped the object, Fang Mu felt as if a child had grabbed their favorite sleeping toy. His heart settled down instantly, as if all difficulties and fears were no longer problems.

When Fang Mu woke up again, he found that the surrounding environment had changed drastically once more. He was lying in an unfamiliar room, on an unfamiliar hospital bed, and there was a busy figure beside him.

Perhaps he had slept for too long, and his eyes had not yet adapted to the light, so his vision was somewhat blurry. He only felt that the shadow watching over him had a refreshing, faint fragrance that made his mind feel at peace.

That figure seemed to have noticed him and moved closer to him bit by bit. An unfamiliar yet moving face that made him unable to help but shed tears came into view.

"You're awake." The woman was very pleasantly surprised.

This was the protagonist of the photo that Fang Lin had hidden in his diary; it was his wife.