Chapter 41: Forty: Otherworldly Demon City (Two-in-One)

Forty: Otherworldly Demon City (Two-in-One)

As his toes landed on the shadow of a corpse, Li Jiahong felt a softness, like mushy jelly or putrid meat paste. When he applied force, his soles began to sink, as if stepping into a giant's carcass, being sucked in by greasy fat.

That sensation of being swallowed by the unknown made Li Jiahong feel uneasy, causing his movements to become hesitant and indecisive.

The Guhuoniao suddenly let out a cry, spread its wings to embrace him, and took him down into the deep sea of this shadow together.

The Guhuoniao's action surprised Li Jiahong, while also making him more certain that the one driving the monster's body at this moment must be his wife. With his beloved by his side, facing life and death together, Li Jiahong felt that even on this cold, muddy alien soil, there was still room for warmth in his heart.

Li Jiahong felt himself sinking continuously, as if passing through the esophagus of an unknown creature. The soft, surrounding barriers possessed an incredible power, squeezing his body back and forth. Although it was not enough to crush his flesh, the intermittent feeling of suffocation was extremely uncomfortable.

It was the Guhuoniao that shielded him with its wings, helping him block the vast majority of the force and carving out a space for him to breathe, which made him feel significantly better.

Fortunately, this discomfort did not last long; Li Jiahong soon felt his feet lose their footing, finally experiencing the sensation of breaking through a soft mucous membrane.

With a gasp, Li Jiahong finally passed through a glimmer of light beneath his feet. Red light spread before his eyes, his vision cleared, and he and the Guhuoniao fell into this world filled with bright red.

Rising before his eyes were giant stone steles piercing the sky, and buildings standing in rows, weird and magnificent, upon the earth beneath his feet. Unseen hieroglyphs were engraved all over the surrounding black stone and walls, and that slimy green liquid covered every corner of this eerie city... Placed within such an ancient and grand black stone city, Li Jiahong could not help but feel mocked by these buildings that defied human aesthetics and the logic of three-dimensional space.

The intense visual impact of the Otherworldly Demon City environment made Li Jiahong dizzy and his soles cold. The fear of the unknown, like a sinister wind coursing through the city, pierced back and forth in his fragile human brain.

Permeating the giant black stone city were bursts of whispers that disturbed the inner demons. Various incomprehensible, bizarre syllables and sounds seemed like the most sinister curses from the Underworld, which, though unintelligible, conveyed a deep malice.

Being in such a city, Li Jiahong still managed to retain a shred of sanity; he kept reminding himself that he had come here to find his child.

This barely functioning train of thought made him forget good and evil, forget emotion and love, leaving only the obsession long buried in his subconscious to drive him forward.

Find the child... find the child... find the child...

Li Jiahong thought of nothing else, could think of nothing else. Even though his wife, who had become the Avatar of the Guhuoniao, remained by his side, he seemed not to notice, walking forward on a path where he could not distinguish between flat ground and slopes, a walking corpse in this city filled with deathly silence and crisis.

Gradually, slowly, Li Jiahong walked into the center of the city, where countless hideous, crouching monsters were waiting for his arrival. It had been unknown how many years since an intruder like him had come to their world. Perhaps to those lives living in this eerie city, he was like an ant that had wandered into a famine zone; in the eyes of every predator, he was such a novel delicacy and toy.

"Wake up!" Just as Li Jiahong was about to walk into the lion's den, a human palm slapped hard against his flushed face, which had already begun to show signs of bizarre distortion.

The intense pain and the deafening sound of the slap brought Li Jiahong to a brief moment of clarity. He looked blankly at the three figures who had suddenly appeared before him: "Mr. He, Ms. Yu, Ms. Li?"

"Don't listen, and don't look around," Li Yingqi said, while taking a Metal Sphere from Li Jiahong's tactical vest. After she squeezed and twisted the knob, the sphere became flat and round, splitting into two halves from the middle. She then attached the two halves to Li Jiahong's left and right ears respectively.

A piercing sound wave seemed to want to puncture his eardrums. After Li Jiahong let out a painful, voiceless scream, the whispering that had been piercing his eardrums and torturing his brain basically vanished. His head was held down, forcing him to look at the ground. The bizarre, kaleidoscopic sights disappeared from his view, and the eerie information occurring in this Netherworld Alien Realm was temporarily purged from his brain, which allowed him to slowly regain his sanity.

Li Jiahong panted heavily. He realized what he had just done: he had actually spent two hours walking through this city without stopping, without eating, drinking, or resting, and with no energy supply. He had almost died at the hands of the monsters that might have appeared ahead, or from respiratory failure caused by exhaustion.

"Wife!" Li Jiahong suddenly remembered the Guhuoniao that had come down to this world with him and couldn't help but look back, but he was almost crushed again by the indescribable wonders of the city and hurriedly turned his head back.

The Guhuoniao that had been by his side had disappeared; his wife was gone.

"When we found you, she was no longer by your side. I don't know where she went, but judging by the corpses of the Evil Beasts we saw on our way here, it must be your wife's handiwork," He Jia'an comforted him.

"Where exactly are we now?" Li Jiahong asked.

Yu Lianyun had Li Jiahong put on the Night Vision Device from his other pocket. After adjusting the viewing distance and mode, everything in Li Jiahong's eyes, except for living things, became cold, blurry outlines. The environment that had inexplicably caused a strong rational shock to people thus became ineffective.

Yu Lianyun then said: "We don't know where this is either; there is almost nothing here that can serve as a reference point... We can only record the spatial orientation of our arrival through cold machines. We have already tested the retreat route; we can still get out from where we came in."

Li Jiahong felt slightly relieved. Although he was very worried about his wife's safety and didn't know if he could find his child who had been missing for fifteen years or Xue Hanlei's three-year-old daughter, he knew he couldn't act alone recklessly anymore: "Then what should we do now?"

"Find the Guhuoniao, your wife," He Jia'an said, patting Li Jiahong on the shoulder.

"Guhuoniao?" Li Jiahong was stunned for a moment, then learned from He Jia'an and the others about the origin of the monster his wife had transformed into.

He Jia'an explained: "Here, only your wife can fight the modified creatures. We tried to engage one of the modified creatures here before and almost didn't make it out." He said with a bitter smile, looking down at his left arm. After being attacked by a modified creature, his arm seemed to have a hairline fracture. Although he could still barely move it, every movement was excruciatingly painful.

He, Yu Lianyun, and Li Yingqi had used almost all their strength, even resorting to a Forbidden Weapon, to finally kill one modified creature—and they didn't even know if it had been modified from a human. There were unknown numbers of such perversely powerful modified creatures living in this craggy, alien city.

Human power was still too insignificant. Compared to the Huogu and the creatures they modified, they were as fragile as toilet paper, easily torn and manipulated.

Hearing that the three members of the Xuanmi Group wanted to rely on his wife, who had become an Avatar monster, as a bodyguard, Li Jiahong felt an indescribable strangeness. But he was in no mood to play around and couldn't laugh at all, so he could only say: "Then how should we find her?"

"Follow the path of those monster corpses and keep looking; we'll find her eventually," He Jia'an said with a smile, then added, "And I am certain she must be in your vicinity. She must have been protecting you all along; otherwise, you couldn't have walked here safe and sound."

Li Jiahong agreed with He Jia'an's assessment, so Li Jiahong and the three members of the Xuanmi Group formed a temporary squad and began to search along the battle scenes left by his wife's slaughter of the modified creatures.

Finally, after a short while, Li Jiahong and the others heard the special cry of the Guhuoniao, as well as the sounds of the Guhuoniao fighting those modified creatures.

The group quickened their pace. On the way, Yu Lianyun said to Li Jiahong: "Mr. Li, our primary goal in coming here this time is to rescue Xue Hanlei's stepdaughter, the three-year-old girl who was just taken."

"I know," Li Jiahong replied without hesitation. He gritted his teeth and said, "After seeing the fields of dead modified creatures and reading the suicide note left by the escapee, I had already thought of the worst possibility: my child has been modified. He might have become one of the modified creatures that want to kill us, and he might even have already died at the hands of you and my wife.

So, you don't need to remind me, really. If I save that little girl first, then from now on, I will not look for my child again. I will be like Huang Qitao and believe that he is already dead..."

Listening to Li Jiahong's reasonable words, the three Mysterious Investigators present all deeply felt the other's painful feelings.

There is nothing in this world more cruel than giving up the life of one's own kin, especially since Li Jiahong was a father who had spent fifteen years of his life trying to find his child.

But in fact, Li Jiahong's mood was even sadder and more sorrowful than anyone imagined, because after this night, what he would lose forever might not just be his child, but also his wife.

His wife had far exceeded the usage limit of the Guhuoniao Feather. As the shopkeeper who gave him the feather said, he would bear the pain of "family separation," which was the Curse unique to his breach of contract.

A moment later, the group arrived at the scene where the sounds were coming from.

A Guhuoniao with full plumage was as light as a swallow and attacked like an eagle. Its sharp claws and the feathers on the edges of its wings, hardened like blades, were its weapons.

With a swipe of its claws and a wave of its wings, invisible wind blades seemed to be generated. Those blood-flesh Evil Beasts that had undergone unknown modifications didn't even touch a single feather of the Guhuoniao before their bodies were torn apart, falling into pools of blood while screaming.

"Legends only recorded the story-like rumors of the Guhuo Bird, but didn't record its prowess... Seeing it now, it really is powerfully beyond underestimation," Li Yingqi couldn't help but exclaim as she saw the Guhuo Bird easily killing the modified creatures that were extremely troublesome for humans.

The group was still immersed in the violent aesthetics of the battle between the Guhuo Bird and the modified creatures, but Yu Lianyun noticed an abnormal situation at the site.

The place where the Guhuo Bird and the modified creatures were fiercely clashing was a huge platform. On the platform, a weird magic array was densely engraved with text. In the center of the array were several carved gaps that vaguely looked like a gate. The blood shed by the modified creatures after they were killed or injured dripped all over the ground, flowing into the gaps on the platform and gradually filling every hieroglyph that no one could understand.

Whenever a hieroglyph was filled with blood, the character would emit an unusual flash. Gradually, more and more characters flashed. Yu Lianyun noticed that the gate, which she didn't know if it was lying flat or standing upright, seemed to have its seams loosening, with signs that it was about to open again.

Yu Lianyun suddenly had a bad premonition and shouted: "Wait, there is a strange Strange Array here, there is a problem here, we can't kill anymore!"

Reminded by Yu Lianyun, the others soon noticed the something wrong with this place.

However, the Guhuo Bird, which seemed to have completely lost its sanity, had long since gained pleasure from the slaughter. She could no longer stop her movements, killing those crouching, hideous modified monsters one by one on the spot.

Watching more and more hieroglyphs on the ground being filled and lit up by blood, and the seams of the gate loosening more and more, the fear in everyone's hearts was about to hit rock bottom.

"Wah! Mommy!" However, just at this sudden moment, a loud cry of a young girl seemed to spread throughout the entire city. For a moment, Li Jiahong and the others were stunned, and even the Guhuo Bird seemed to pause its slaughter because it heard the child's voice it loved most.

In that split second of distraction, a thick, giant arm grabbed one of the Guhuo Bird's long legs.

The Guhuo Bird woke up with a start and fought back fiercely, breaking free from the arm that had grabbed its sharp claws.

But the Guhuo Bird underestimated the strength of that group of modified creatures. Even though she possessed greater strength and speed than these modified creatures, her defense was actually not much better than theirs. In the short time her long leg was grabbed by the giant hand, it had already been snapped by force.

Having lost a leg used for attacking, the Guhuo Bird's offensive not only weakened, but it even seemed to have difficulty controlling its flight balance.

"Let's go save the child first," He Jia'an said; he glanced at Li Jiahong and did not leave immediately, as if he wanted to get his choice from Li Jiahong.

Li Jiahong looked at his wife, who was mired in a bitter struggle, then looked at the little girl being held high above the head of a deformed creature, his heart falling into an incomparable tangle of conflict.

After a long moment, he decided to step forward, making the choice to save the child.

Everyone remained silent, keeping quiet as they ran all the way toward the young girl held above the head of the modified creature.

Arriving before the modified creature that was deliberately using the child to interfere with and affect the Guhuo Bird's battle, the modified creature unexpectedly opened its mouth and spoke human language to everyone's surprise: "Bugs, die."

As soon as the voice fell, the high-fat creature, whose head resembled that of a mealworm, swung its soft, heavy fist and smashed down.

"Don't hurt my child!" At the moment this fatty creature launched its attack, everyone was surprised to discover that on the finger of this suddenly attacking modified creature, there was actually a human woman's head embedded, and Xue Hanlei's head was screaming at the crowd with a frantic expression and a shrill voice.