Chapter 181: Descent

The darkness in the bottle poured over, flowing through lips and teeth into the throat, sliding deep into the digestive tract.

There was no time to savor the taste; the thing was tasteless, or perhaps held a flavor condensing one part of every substance in the entire world, yet still could not match the taste of a mouthful of clear water, extremely complex yet extremely bland at once, impossible to describe with any single thing, yet resembling everything ever tasted.

Before entering the stomach, before the last trace of coolness was assimilated and vanished by body heat, a thought from the very depths of the heart told the drinker: to understand, one must first contact. The certainty was comparable to reading ink-still-wet text from a page one had copied by hand, without thought, without doubt.

The bottle mouth still waited by the lips for the remaining liquid to fall, yet an incredible change had already arisen.

She felt the building constructed of solid rock become as fragile as thin paper, as illusory as the bubble of a half-awake dream, unable to bear her light body weight.

This made no sense; by common logic, the potion swallowed should take effect on the body. She had prepared herself for stomach pain or pain in many more places, but in reality, everything except herself was changing.

Before she could figure it out, everything that seemed to be crumbling could no longer bear the body's weight; the support shattered with a boom, and the body plummeted vertically downward.

It was like falling from one floor of a building to the next, yet all scenery seen was motionless, and the floor did not crack.

Colored dots appeared everywhere within sight; these were mushroom colonies expanding at a speed too fast to see clearly, forming strange shapes of unprecedented size, engulfing and wrapping walls and furniture within them.

She seemed to touch the "floor," yet the fall did not stop; that "floor," not much more solid, shattered the instant it was touched, and the body fell to the layer beneath the layer below. At the same time, completely chaotic information rushed through the senses at high speed.

The vast, colorful hues of those patterned mushroom caps exploded in her ears; at the tip of her nose, she smelled dim, tasteless light overflowing from window cracks. These contents, combined with the high-speed descent, created a mental nausea so intense one wanted to vomit out one's internal organs and hollow out the abdominal cavity to relieve it.

Between the fall from the first floor to the second, a soft, gentle Bai Guang and many sensations of being watched turned their attention toward her, but soon, as the rapid descent carried her away, they exceeded the observable distance.

The growth of the mushroom colonies reached its peak, filling every inch of space; within them flowed that same unclear sensation of being watched from before. A congealed substance embedded in the fungal bodies, consistent in texture with the pendant, emitted red light as they arrived.

The fall continued; she could not count how many "floors" she had pierced through. Those incomprehensible contents filled consciousness like flourishing mushroom colonies, occupying the space for autonomous thought.

The surrounding environment underwent changes as violent as the fall itself; those mushroom colonies, having reached their peak, withered and rotted. The eternally solid stone walls collapsed and crumbled, as if countless years of time had slipped away in the blink of an eye, or perhaps time had reversed, everything moving toward disorder and destruction, returning to an extremely simple state.

That immature consciousness, formed by merely a decade of memories, was less than a single brick in a castle within it. When all this ended, standing empty in a desolate mountain ridge amidst a pile of rubble, she could not recall where she came from or what she sought. Like sand on an entire beach slipping through one's fingers, leaving only one or two grains.

【I think...】

Yin Feng stood dazed in place, still maintaining the posture of pinching and swallowing that liquid. Instinct made her want to breathe, yet the usual thin but fulfilling sensation did not rush into her lungs; her body could not capture the substance necessary to sustain operation.

She guessed she might be suffocating; the little strength remaining was being stolen from her body bit by bit. One more thing was understood: this was what slow-approaching suffocation felt like.

At this time, one should probably feel fear, regret, and the like; fear of death, regret for not listening to parents' warnings—according to what she knew, it should be so. Yet "parents' warnings" in her memory were thinner than the stuff she was now inhaling, and as for the fear of death...

【Humans themselves are in a state of chronic death.】

The paralyzed person on the bed died helplessly; most people cannot resist everything around them, struggling in vain like a drowning person flailing their hands on an endless sea to delay the arrival of a destined fate.

She remembered why she had come, that stubborn thought cultivated by a brief life of over ten years. She did not want to accept the fate of "chronic suffocation"; she needed a power surpassing common sense, like a paralyzed person growing new limbs, or a drowning person growing gills on their cheeks.

This thought drove her to move, looking upward, searching for the place from which she had fallen.

Above, there were no multi-layered, pierced-through pavilions; there was only a huge, dim celestial body, hanging high over a vast, desolate land, its surface densely covered with cracks too numerous to remember.

The sensation of falling struck again, in the exact opposite direction. As she shuttled between "floors," that Bai Guang and the sensation of being watched within the mushrooms descended once more.

This time, they surged forward eagerly, wanting to cling to this free ride, heading toward a higher "level."

The remaining consciousness, craving things beyond common sense, readily consented, accepting them to embark on the journey together.

"I've figured it out!" Kraft pushed away Kup's support, his steps unsteady, and returned to the church. He ordered the squad to seal off the second-floor corridor and, in passing, had Martin, whose limbs had gone soft, carried down from upstairs.

The "spell" invented by Edward itself had no problems. Even if someone establishing a connection with a Deep creature temporarily failed to resist its pull, at worst they would simply die cleanly, sparing others the trouble of collecting their corpse.

But once this thing was put to concrete use, two problems would arise.

The first: what would happen after multiple, even dozens of uses? Whether Edward had considered this question, Kraft did not know; the manuscript had no subsequent progress section. But this believer, whose head had been clouded by the discovery of another world and "angels," certainly had not thought of it, and not even once during the process of "sending people to the Father's Kingdom."

Having devoured dozens of Crawlers, it had become unprecedentedly massive; its proliferation might have even exceeded the volume of those bodies. Whether this was a factor of loss of control is now unascertainable.

The second problem: does the Deep truly contain only one kind of creature? The answer is obviously no. The Deep is a very complex place where the biological environment has significant regional characteristics; Crawler creatures interact with other things the Father doesn't even know what they are.

This might be the main cause of loss of control, or at least one of them. Later, the Fungal Spirits that took over the Crawler creatures, namely those suspected to be spiritual entities, used them as channels to reach the mortal world, catalyzing fungal growth on a massive scale, infecting plants and animals indiscriminately, seeking bodies to inhabit.

Fortunately, perhaps because Crawlers and human tissues share a similar origin, they chose human bodies. Otherwise, if a brown bear controlled by a parasite had sprung up here, the development of events would have been quite different.

But most fungal varieties are actually unsuitable for infecting the human body. Except for slowly changing the environment and relying on the inhalation of high-concentration spores, perhaps only some groups with low immunity would suffer from persistent fungal infections, such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or... tuberculosis.

Kraft had roughly guessed what the object moving during the Duke's two lung percussion examinations was.

It was a very lucky individual. When the old Duke toured his domain, came here for vacation, and tasted the mushroom colonies, it found a long-term living host carrying fungi, enjoying the rare conditions for host and fungus coexistence, and was carried everywhere.

And now, Kraft was going to meet the culprit sitting behind the desk once again.

Sensing someone enter the study, he seemed to still want to pretend to be motionless and repeat his old trick, but the person lingering at the doorway made him raise his head again.

Although there were no eyeballs in the eye sockets, it was not difficult to know from his movements that a clear, existing autonomous consciousness was present, and he could even identify the newcomer. The reappearance of a victim caused some confusion within him; afterward, his chest swelled, preparing to unleash that breath once more.

"Breathing requires a closed chest cavity to create negative pressure." Kraft raised his hand, leveling a cocked crossbow at that spellcaster who didn't need much chanting but still needed plenty of lung capacity, and released the trigger.

"You can see in his chest how the external intercostal muscles lift to expand the chest cavity volume. We will have the opportunity to explain this in detail later, but the chance to see it directly with one's own eyes is rare."

That small arrow, thick as a pen shaft, pierced the target that had failed to inflate, interrupting his inflation process. A small stream of spores sprayed from the tail of the hollow arrow shaft. He persisted, trying to continue, but a second arrow piercing his right lung completely cut off this idea.

"The times haven't changed, Your Excellency 'Spellcaster.' Spells cannot defeat flying steel. If your Lord has given you any other moves, feel free to try them out."

Treating the Father with such frivolous attitude produced an obvious effect of anger. He struggled to sit up from the chair, emitting a low, meaningless growl, his voice low due to air leaking from his lungs.

Thinking he needed an extra layer of insurance, Kraft nodded to Kup. The latter raised a winch crossbow, and a heavy arrow designed to pierce armor flew out, pinning the opponent against the back of the chair.

Seeing no hope of resistance, the shell, with its coral-horn-like mushroom cap held high, magnificent as a festival bishop, reached its hand to its chest like those saints in legends who practiced their faith even while dying, attempting to draw a circle in the air with a pen.

A very weak sensation, like a tiny airflow akin to a nasal breath, swept through the room. It passed unobstructed through various objects, reminding Kraft of his own spiritual organ, except this range was much smaller and much weaker, almost imperceptible.

Seemingly struck by a tremendous shock, the action of drawing the circle in the air ceased. The remaining parts of that scale-mushroom-covered face twisted into some unclear, yet definitely recognizable expression of "surprise."

"..."

An even weaker sound, but this time different from before; the tone was still strange, possibly indicating the development of normal Norse speech.

"What?" Not expecting anger to bring an unexpected windfall, Kraft cautiously did not approach. He pricked up his ears, wanting to hear the content clearly. Even if it were curses or oaths, it might prove useful.

"... Tell them, do not fear... I bring you..." The sentence was intermittent, spat out from a diseased throat, yet he tried his utmost to pronounce it standardly, word by word, as if he had prepared it many times. "... good news... concerning all people."

It was not a curse or the like; it should be a passage from the Holy Scripture. He failed to finish reciting it. His body, losing support, slumped down, his head smashing onto the desk, the mushroom colonies shattering.

Kraft and Kup locked eyes.

"So what does this say?"