Rules-related weird stories: 4016.

Chapter 578 Wiping Out the Whole Team in an Easy Way
Tian Bufan showed no intention of continuing the conversation and said directly, "Let's go."

Seeing this, Lin Yi stopped asking questions and instead asked, "What about the adhesive?"

"You don't need to worry about the adhesive," Tian Bufan said.

Kuai Hongji also sneered: "In the depths of pollution, everything will be lacking, except for high-purity extraordinary substances."

He also took the opportunity to express his disdain for the fanatics: "Those fanatics don't go there to pick them simply because they're incompetent."

As Tian Bufan spoke, he stepped into the forest of corpses.

Kuai Hongji followed closely like a bodyguard.

After walking for a while, Lin Yi's sensory tentacles seemed to detect some signs of biological activity!

"Young Master Tian, ​​I think I sense something," Lin Yi said. "It's probably not far to the left front..."

"To the left front?" Tian Bufan narrowed his eyes, a faint smile appearing at the corner of his mouth. "Although it's not a necessary route, the point of passage is somewhat close to it. Continue to sense it; if it's not anything important, then ignore it."

"Shouldn't we avoid it?" Lin Yi asked.

“No need,” Tian Bufan said. “A couple of days ago, I would have avoided it like the plague.”

"As for today..." Kuai Hongji chuckled sinisterly, "If you've offended us, then we'll seize you and refine you in an instant! Hehehe!"

Lin Yi almost facepalmed: "Wait... why do I feel like we're not the good guys?"

Putting everything else aside, their "hehehe" is the kind of thing that's considered bad taste, but when it comes to Kuai Hongji, it doesn't sound like he's acting at all.

"That's not important." Tian Bufan glanced at Kuai Hongji speechlessly. "Kuai, don't meddle."

"I know, I know," Kuai Hongji said with a sinister smile.

Looking at Kuai Hongji like this, Lin Yi felt as if he had a hallucination.

For some reason, he felt that after arriving at the Forest of Corpses, Kuai Hongji seemed to have become much more sinister.

It is not evil, but malevolent.

A kind of sinister aura emanating from the very core of one's being.

It is purely "evil," without any "malice."

Kuai Hongji said slowly, "I think I know what that is."

Lin Yi was slightly taken aback, but his senses quickly spread over there, and he saw the appearance of those creatures.

However, he was disappointed.

Or rather, he was disappointed when he saw those creatures.

“They’re just fanatics for art teachers…” he sighed softly, “and I instantly lost interest.”

The eerie art teacher seemed to be quite injured, and was selecting the body parts she wanted in front of a strange ancient tree.

She was very anxious, her face covered in large beads of sweat, which, in the interplay of light and shadow, made her face look like it was filled with tiny eyeballs.

Half of her body looked like it had been burned off, and her clothes were tattered. But the exposed areas did not show normal muscle texture; instead, they were like cross-sections of putty, with lines of blood vessels and bones drawn on those cross-sections.

The person looked like a clay figure formed by sticking many extraordinary substances onto a skeleton.

Besides her, there were other fanatics who were also repairing their bodies.

Lin Yi didn't pay them much attention. These people posed no threat to him now, and they hadn't come to block his way, so he didn't intend to bother with them.

But as they moved, the fanatics became aware of their presence and peered at them through the gaps in the branches in the darkness.

"Ignore them! Focus on healing your body!" the eerie art teacher said through gritted teeth.

However, her orders had little effect at this point, as several fanatics ignored them and simply slipped away into the shadows.

"Tomatoes... Teacher, I really want to eat tomatoes..."

The fanatic's eyes were filled with lust for food, and he quickly rushed to Tian Bufan and Kuai Hongji's side.

Tian Bufan sighed: "A waste of time."

"Leave it to me, you guys go first." Kuai Hongji said coldly, then stood still and briefly separated from the group.

Tian Bufan didn't stop and continued moving forward.

Their destination was at the edge of a crack in the layer, a long journey, so they needed to conserve their energy.

Before long, Kuai Hongji caught up, carrying a green bundle in his hand.

Tian Bufan glanced at the bundle and chuckled, "All taken care of?"

"Just a quick thing," Kuai Hongji said sinisterly.

Lin Yi was shocked. Only three of the fanatics had come, yet Kuai Hongji had killed them all.

“I’ve run into those people many times, especially that teacher… I always felt something was off,” Kuai Hongji said. “But I was too lazy to think too much about it, so I just took them all down.”

"And you'll never guess what else I found."

Kuai Hongji didn't keep them in suspense. He took out a crystal, played with it for a moment, and then tossed it to Tian Bufan.

"Ash crystals?" Tian Bufan's expression shifted. "Wait, no, it's not just crystals..."

“That’s right, there seems to be a trace of the aura from the ‘Primordial Ash Apostle’ hidden here…” Kuai Hongji nodded slightly.

Tian Bufan narrowed his eyes: "I understand. The ashes and debris in the fifth floor and above of the teaching building were produced when the 'Primordial Ash Apostle' infiltrated the layers. The eerie art teacher and her companions used their own to extract crystals, and when the concentration was sufficient, the aura of the 'Primordial Ash Apostle' became detectable."

“Those people are not just art students, but also fanatics from some strongholds in this desolate land. They are all injured, and the wounds have penetrated from the physical level to the spiritual level.”

Tian Bufan nodded and said, "You did the right thing. We should have killed them all. Otherwise, it would have been quite troublesome if they had all been set ablaze with ashes."

"Their stance was not on the human side to begin with, and that matrix... it was probably related to some kind of summoning ritual, but fortunately you destroyed it as well."

Kuai Hongji's lips curled into a wicked smile: "I'm quite good at this." "That eerie art teacher, is she dead?" Lin Yi asked slowly.

Tian Bufan was slightly taken aback: "What, you can't let go? You've developed feelings for him while being chased?"

Lin Yi's lips twitched violently: "No, what are you talking about? Why can't you let it go? I was just asking, okay? Was she... completely dead?"

Tian Bufan said, "Then you can rest assured... Since Kuai Kuai said the whole team would be wiped out, then they must have been completely wiped out, even the ashes."

Lin Yi: "That's good... I don't know why, but I always felt that something was off about her, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Just get rid of her, just get rid of her."

As Tian Bufan ventured deeper into the Forest of Corpses, the surrounding environment began to undergo strange changes after he distanced himself from the fanatics, as if he had stepped into a bizarre world forgotten by time.

"Snap snap... snap snap... snap snap..."

The Forest of Corpses was utterly silent; even the sound of the wind seemed to have faded. Only the footsteps and breathing of Tian Bufan and Kuai Hongji echoed in the air.

The faint sunlight was already noticeable; walking here felt as oppressive as walking through the tightly packed buildings of Kowloon Walled City.

Moreover, this isn't your average handshake building; it's a handshake building covered in skulls and organs. You never know which hand will suddenly tug at you or which eyeball will be rolling around looking at you.

The trees around them had long since become distorted. Although they were still upright and straight as a whole, there were always some areas with an inexplicable strange change, as if they had been twisted into bizarre shapes by some invisible force.

Those ancient trees, with their thick and eerie trunks, looked like a huge, twisted limb.

These "limbs" grow all sorts of organs that are no longer limited to human form. These organs extend in all directions, like pairs of grotesque, clawing hands, or like seaweed dancing wildly, making a chilling "whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh..." sound.

The longest branches even intertwined with the branches of other trees, forming a complex symbiotic relationship.

The bark of the ancient tree was dry and rough, oozing out strands of viscous sap that emitted a putrid smell. When the sap first seeped out, it was milky white, but as it flowed down the trunk, it began to take on color, eventually becoming like diesel fuel on the surface of water, shimmering with iridescent colors in the dark areas.

Tian Bufan slowly spoke: "Look, all of these are solidified extraordinary substances... There is no shortage of extraordinary substances here, it's just that no one has the ability to mine them here."

"The solidified substances from the original pollution have also corroded and deteriorated, just like rotten and fallen fruit."

Lin Yi was serious and seemed to be deep in thought.

He understands.

This is similar to how there are incredibly scarce and precious resources beneath Antarctica, yet no country in the world has been able to penetrate the Earth's surface.

A more apt analogy is like an ancient forbidden land. Treasures that are fought over fiercely by others in the outside world are just waste rotting by the roadside in the forbidden land, never to be mined.

Keep walking.

The fallen leaves on the ground were piled up like mountains, each one exuding a rotten smell. The "crunch, crunch, crunch..." sound made when you stepped on them was like the sound of a ghoul chewing bones.

Occasionally, through the gaps in the withered leaves, one could glimpse some strangely shaped fungi, emitting a faint green glow, like eyes lurking in the shadows, coldly watching Tian Bufan and Kuai Hongji's every move.

Such fungi are not even found in the remote primeval forests of the real world; they are like quantum state substances that only exist in the quantum realm of science fiction.

Further on, the previously dimly lit forest of bones began to flash with dazzling light from time to time.

The entire space gradually began to lose its physical rules and logic, and began to show a morbid distortion and aberration. Gravity seemed to have lost control. Lin Yi could feel that when Tian Bufan walked, his steps were sometimes light and sometimes heavy. Sometimes it felt like Tian Bufan was floating and about to fly, and sometimes it felt like his steps were very heavy, almost draining all his strength.

The surrounding scenery began to flicker and distort. The big tree that was just in front of me appeared behind me in the blink of an eye, while the path that was not there before suddenly appeared under my feet.

One moment they were here, the next they were in the distance. When Lin Yi looked down again, he found that Tian Bufan and Kuai Hongji's bodies had been assimilated by the layer and turned into strange rubber figures.

After just a few glances, his thoughts began to become chaotic. He couldn't tell which way was which, or even where he was. It was as if the whole world had fallen into a state of chaotic madness.

"Stop sensing your abnormality, Old Lin." Tian Bufan seemed to have noticed Lin Yi's unusual behavior and quickly reminded him.

Lin Yi was startled and quickly focused his mind, only then did he feel much better.

However, he asked in confusion, "I didn't release my senses just now!"

Tian Bufan said, "You can't entirely blame yourself. Your 'Adaptation' trait is a passive skill. Just now, you were most likely subconsciously starting to 'adapt' to the strange changes in this layer."

"But you have to understand that you can't force yourself to adapt to everything."

"You're still a little short of getting used to 'adapting' to the layer gaps."

"Once you are assimilated, you will become part of the cracks in the layers, part of those eerie ancient trees you just saw."

Lin Yi was horrified: "Those strange ancient trees...are they all alive?"

"Part of it is, and the other part is what was naturally produced by the aggregation of extraordinary creatures buried deep in the Forest of Bones."

"That's why we strictly controlled your adaptation speed when you first entered the school."

Lin Yi said, "So, this is already a crack in the layer?"

“We arrived a while ago,” Tian Bufan said. “However, we still need to find the most suitable place to deploy the puppets, otherwise it will be quite troublesome to keep traveling back and forth.”

Lin Yi said, "I understand, it's like baiting a fishing spot!"

Tian Bufan nodded slightly: "Yes, that's about the idea. The layer rift is like a river. We're on the edge of a forest of corpses, and behind us are raw materials and adhesives for making puppets."

"What we need to do is find the right location, then mass-produce puppets. Each puppet represents a life; we'll risk our lives for a chance to communicate with 'Orochi'."

The mere mention of the giant serpent sent a chill down Lin Yi's spine: "Can you really communicate with that thing?"

"And, are you serious about the old friend you mentioned?"

Tian Bufan said, "Of course we're serious. However, it's throwing a tantrum right now, so we need to spend a little more of our lives to let it vent its anger."

Lin Yi couldn't help but ask, "Then... when did we meet it?"

"That happened a long time ago, otherwise why would you call me an 'old friend'?"

Lin Yi said, "But I've never seen anyone meet an old friend and kill him twice without saying a word."

Tian Bufan remained noncommittal: "An existence of this level should have a bit of a temper, it's good. We should be grateful it throws a tantrum, otherwise, if it were completely inhuman, we would have lost the opportunity to 'negotiate' with it."

(End of this chapter)