The portable grandfathers that appear are all problematic.

Chapter 151 Another "Old Green" in Hell

Xue Dinglu looked up and saw many stones, finished metal frames, boxes of special materials, and all sorts of blood-stained things that he couldn't understand.

They seemed to want to unload everything from the two wooden carts, but Xue Dinglu stopped them, telling them to paddle the carts ahead while he followed.

The two of them paddled the wooden cart like this, giving off a feeling similar to when Xue Dinglu was a child and his bicycle chain broke, forcing him to paddle the cart for several kilometers to get it repaired.

After driving for a short while, Xue Dinglu saw a group of reinforced concrete buildings in the distance.

Xue Law: “???”

Where on earth has he come to? Spears with circuit boards stuck in them, primitive people wearing tribal animal skins, and reinforced concrete buildings—what kind of society is this?

And just by listening to the man's muttering to himself, he understood that the people of this world seemed to be still in the era of slavery, yet they used information-age circuit boards as decorations for spears and lived in industrial-age buildings.

In the distant farmland, he could see all sorts of strange plants that looked like some kind of fungus, as well as countless normal plants that barely resembled "trees".

Thank goodness, no human heads have grown on this tree.

The hellish drawing that drained his sanity had traumatized him considerably, and he hadn't recovered yet. He even suspected that he might dream about that disgusting scene again when he returned to Earth a day later.

Furthermore, the closer you get to this spot, the less mushroom carpet seems to grow on the ground, until there is almost no mushroom carpet left. Stepping on the soil, Xue's Law truly has a rare feeling of being grounded.

Led by them, the group walked out of the fungal carpet area, and then Xue Dinglu felt as if he was stepping on a concrete road. The broken concrete road was full of potholes, as if it had not been repaired for hundreds of years. Walking on it was not as good as walking on a dirt road.

In the distance, Xue's Law could even see "telephone poles"—yes, telephone poles, with broken streetlights and all the wires severed.

There was a similar pole at the previous location, but back then, the place where the streetlights were hanging had a human head hanging there, and it kept repeating the same words to Xue Luding, so he didn't recognize that this thing was actually a telephone pole.

Xue's Law was filled with an increasingly absurd and bizarre feeling. In the distance was an endless world covered with fungal carpet, which secreted countless blood-like liquids. Countless human heads could move and merge freely on the fungal carpet.

This resulted in people appearing wherever there was a fungal carpet. For a moment, he felt as if he had entered the world of Junji Ito, or as if the whole world had been swallowed up by Tomie, and he was now inside Tomie's body.

In this "tribe," however, life is peaceful and serene. Large-scale "farms" for cultivating fungi grow alongside normal trees, some of which have turned black. People can be seen coughing as they seem to be cleaning up other mycelia in the mushroom-covered fields.

"How many people are there here?" Xue Luding looked at the concrete jungle in the distance. He even felt that the wide-angle distortion of the world when looking into the distance was very unreal, and then asked.

“Great Lord of Light, there are only a little over a thousand of us left in the human kingdom. Even this year, we still don’t have enough food. Our mushrooms and land have been contaminated by monsters. The fungal carpets in our fields are increasing, and the harvest is decreasing. If this continues, hundreds more people will starve to death this year…” The man answered Xue’s question and then began to complain.

"So what do you do?" Xue asked.

"We're going to that grotesque land to search for the treasures left behind by the ancient gods. If we're lucky, like us, we might bring back quite a few good things. If we're unlucky, like my son, he'll be dragged away by the monsters and never come back." The man's expression was very sad, but he continued to explain.

"In this era, the king issued a treasure decree, encouraging people to go out and search for treasure, but every day many people don't return; they are all dragged away by monsters..."

The man looked at the twisted area covered with fungal carpet behind him, and then at Xue Luding, who was completely different from them and his group of people who seemed to be wallowing in a cesspool.

Their bodies were clean and tidy, they wore silk that they couldn't understand, and their faces, which were clearly not those of ordinary people, and their impeccably clean hair and face, made these people, who seemed to have grown up in a cesspool, feel ashamed and only feel a sense of worship.

Even with such a divine king descending to earth, he was unable to bring back his son who had been taken away.

Xue Dinglu didn't notice the sadness on the man's face as he paddled the wooden cart; he seemed to understand the king's actions.

There wasn't enough food to feed everyone, so the surplus was sent to their deaths. If they could bring back something like metal frames, stones, or some other strange object, then it wasn't a loss.

Therefore, looking at this social structure with only a little over a thousand people, they live in this only "pure land" and rely on growing a kind of mushroom that can synthesize starch as their staple food. The cement streets are full of potholes, and the wires on the utility poles are corroded to the point that they look like vines.

Xue and Old Green looked at this primitive society, which seemed to be built on the ruins of modern civilization, as if they were looking at a distorted and absurd dream.

In the distance, human heads still darted about on the boundless carpet of fungi, a stark contrast to this primitive tribe.

And those grotesque creatures have their own language; they keep saying strange things like "I feel great" and "I've come to save you."

But when it comes to their intelligence, they always repeat the same two sentences, like a pre-programmed parrot that can only say no more than ten different phrases.

Xue Dinglu had previously seen that grotesque creature pull a person's head off and stick it into his own chest. The head actually survived and was instantly assimilated. This kind of operation shocked him for three hundred years.

"We've arrived, Lord of Light." The man's wooden cart slowly came to a stop at the entrance of a wooden stronghold. It was obvious that the wooden stronghold was built later, while the reinforced concrete buildings inside were products of a previous civilization.

At the entrance to the mountain stronghold, there were several guards carrying long guns. Their guns seemed to be wrapped with some kind of plastic strips, not like they were for stabbing people, but more like they were for laughs. What puzzled Xue Luding even more was that they were wearing clothes that looked like synthetic fibers. Although there were very few, only the underwear, it was still much better than the primitive father and daughter who went out wearing only a few pieces of leather.

I watched as the father and daughter parked their cart some distance away, then carried the trash they had collected to talk to the guard at the gate.

Xue's Law then turned to old Green and asked, "Old man, what do you think?"

After arriving in this world, Old Green frantically plucked his beard. This bizarre world was far too distorted for him, a magician from a fairy tale world. Even the "hell" he knew was not as terrifying as this place.

But setting aside those bizarre creatures, looking at the environment of this tribe, he could only say: "This should be a civilization at a similar level to your world, but they were wiped out. I don't know if it was done by those creatures, and then another group of people took over this place and became the natives."

Old Green pondered again: "But this new batch is just a bunch of primitive people who know nothing. They may not have inherited any of the knowledge and information of the original civilization. They worship everything from the original civilization as 'ancient gods'."

Xue Dinglu nodded, which was roughly what he had thought, but he added, "I can see wide-angle distortion in this world from a distance with the naked eye, but I've never experienced this before. The only explanation is that this isn't wide-angle distortion, but rather that the world itself is extremely small, so small that the naked eye can discern that the world is round..."

Xue's Law continued to gaze into the distance, at the distorted landscape of the original.

“However, the human body automatically perceives the ground it is standing on as ‘flat,’ so the naked eye will have the illusion of wide-angle distortion. And so, let me calculate…” Xue Dinglu took out his phone and started typing on the calculator, and then said, “The circumference of this planet is estimated to be less than 1000 kilometers.”

In comparison, the circumference of Earth is 4 kilometers, and the circumference of the Moon is 1 kilometers. Standing on these planets, one would not experience any wide-angle distortion visible to the naked eye.

In other words, this planet is estimated to be only one-thousandth the size of the moon, and its total surface area may not even be as large as Australia.

However, he sensed that the gravity of this planet was about 1.6 times that of Earth. Such a small planet with such high gravity, he didn't know how the water cycle worked on this planet, or whether there were any seas.

Everything was so strange; the planet's physical parameters seemed as illogical as if an employee had just randomly filled them in before leaving get off work.

The guards quickly arrived at Xue Luding's side. Just by looking at Xue Luding's face, which looked like a god descending to earth, and his impeccably clean clothes, they believed the father and daughter's words without even seeing Xue Luding emitting holy light, and were about to kneel down on the spot.

"No, no, stop with your abstract kowtows in a dozen different poses. Take me to your king and tell him that a god has come to inspect this land," Xue Dinglu said immediately.

He understood that reasoning with these primitive people was ineffective, but pretending to be a charlatan worked particularly well for them. If Xue Luding had still held onto the values ​​he had from Earth and tried to persuade them in a gentle and persuasive manner, the guards would probably have been kowtowing in various ways for more than ten minutes without stopping.

Sure enough, upon hearing the phrase "divine inspection," they immediately wasted no time and quickly said, "I will take you to see old King Green right away."

"Huh?" Xue Law and Old Green were both taken aback.

"Is the translation module broken?" Xue Daolu patted the Great Sage's panel, but no matter how he patted it, the translation was always "Old Green".

“It might just be a coincidence of names. My name is quite common, after all, the pronunciation is too ordinary,” Old Green said as the guards led them to a house that resembled a small villa.

"King Green, the Lord of Light has come to inspect the mortal realm," the guard announced directly.

This scene doesn't look like a soldier speaking to a king; it looks more like a village boy knocking on the village chief's door.

There are over a thousand people in total; to be honest, it's no different from a village.

The door creaked open, and a young girl knelt timidly on the ground. Xue Lude didn't bother to correct their bizarre etiquette.

The room was spotless, but when Xue Dinglu walked in, he was horrified to see the "Old Green" King opposite him, and his pupils constricted.

Not only Xue Dinglu, but also the old mage Green beside him was stunned, because the person opposite him looked exactly like him! Except for being much older, they were completely cut from the same mold!

Chapter 152 Am I a substitute?

"Oh no, it's Green on the other side, so who am I?" Old Green suddenly froze, looking at the person opposite him who looked much older, and was completely dumbfounded.

It wasn't just him; Xue's Law also began to doubt the world.

Was he under a cognitive manipulation illusion? Although they weren't exactly the same—the old Green on the other side looked like he was in his seventies or eighties, while the old Green inside Xue's body looked only in his fifties or sixties—it was clear that they shared the same name and appearance, and Xue would never believe they weren't related.

In old Green's memory, he had no offspring; his wife was in poor health, so they had not had children for many years.

Furthermore, given that this hellish world was accessed through an emergency communication device from a fairy tale world, Xue Daolu couldn't help but have a terrifying thought.

"Rabbi, brew a pot of fragrant tea to serve our guests," King Green said, seemingly noticing the unusual expression on Xue's face.

“Yes, Father,” the girl said.

Xue Dinglu was taken aback. The voice sounded familiar. He turned his head and saw the girl who had been kneeling on the ground raise her head and stand up. Her face was exactly the same as that of the princess of the Silver Kingdom.

Not only Xue's Law, but Old Green was also stunned by this completely illogical event.

A hell of twisted human bodies, bizarre creatures with their own language, humans barely clinging to life, and the Silver Princess who should have been born in a fairy tale world but is now imprisoned in a detention center reciting a political theory text, along with Old Grimm, all appear in this strange world...

Xue Lude now has only two ideas: either he has been under an illusion, or his perception has been altered since he came to this world.

Or perhaps this hellish planet and the fairytale world have some kind of correspondence, like a "world in the sky" or a "mirror world."

He leaned more towards the latter, because although Xue Luding's true form was only legendary, many of his blessings and treasures had anti-magic properties, and deep within his consciousness was the sealed divine authority consciousness.

If it's an illusion, both the birdman and the cursed blood should react.

However, neither Birdman A nor Cursed Blood has been triggered yet.

Old Green looked even more worried. His soul kept hovering in front of the king, and he came to a horrifying conclusion.

"This guy, even his soul is exactly the same as mine, except that our experiences and memories are completely different. He's like, just like..."

"Like a clone of yourself?" Xue asked.

“Yes, it’s strange, why is this happening… It’s not just me, the princess of Silver City is here too, Xiao Xue, there’s a big problem here, I feel like we’ve touched some terrible taboo…” Old Green’s expression was very complicated, as could be seen from the tuft of beard that had been plucked from his hand.

"Don't panic, this is a big problem. There's no use panicking. Besides, we're both veteran mages. What haven't we seen?" Xue Dinglu comforted Old Green.

Old Green: "..."

He felt even more panicked.

"Guests, the tea is ready." The girl brought out three bowls of tea. Looking at her face, Xue Luding and Old Green found it hard to imagine that this Silver Princess would have such skills.

Upon closer inspection, it wasn't tea leaves, but rather the taste of tea brewed from some kind of dried shiitake mushroom.

"You must be the 'magician' recorded in ancient times, right?" The king took a sip of mushroom tea and looked at Xue Dinglu.

Xue Luding also took a sip. It tasted like some kind of boiled mushroom. One sip and his mouth was full of mushrooms. Xue Luding was not surprised that the king opposite him said that. As the nominal supreme leader, he must be the person here who knows the most about the stories of ancient civilizations and magicians.

He even shares the same face as the principal of the magic academy in the fairy tale world. Xue Luding thinks it wouldn't be surprising if he revealed himself to be a fourth-tier magician at any moment.

“I guess so. I’m a tourist from out of town who accidentally wandered into this place, and your people immediately mistook me for some kind of master,” Xue Dinglu replied.

"Lord of Light, he is the chief god in our local mythology."

Seeing that King Green seemed to know some ancient stories, Xue Dinglu said directly, "Then I'd like to ask even more, how much of your ancient records have you preserved? And where did those strange creatures outside come from?"

Xue made no attempt to conceal his purpose, and this direct approach clearly made King Green uncomfortable. In the end, he could only lend Xue a book that seemed to contain myths and legends.

Looking at this book, Xue felt as if he were reading an ancient myth or legend of a primitive tribe. In it, the Lord of Light led the people to establish a city-state, but the people betrayed the Lord of Light and killed him, imprisoning him in the sky forever.

Therefore, the ancestors who betrayed the gods were also cursed, becoming "monstrous shapes" who were forever tormented, which are the strange heads that Xue Dinglu saw when he first entered, integrated with the fungal carpet.

Then, a drop of blood from the wounded Lord of Light merged into the earth, giving birth to new people, who are now the more than one thousand people in this tribe.

I skimmed through this myth and found it to be utterly absurd, filled with the ridiculous and whimsical feel of primitive worship. However, some information could still be gleaned from certain parts of the myth.

In other words, those strange shapes outside are "early people," the creators of these reinforced concrete, cement roads, circuit boards, and other products. They seem to be the original inhabitants of this planet, which is less than the size of Australia, but for some reason they have all turned into strange shapes.

Then a new wave of immigrants took over the area, struggling to survive while fighting against those grotesque creatures. This continued for who knows how many years, until now, and it seems they can't hold on any longer.

Xue continued to subtly hint at some ancient stories, while King Green began to stammer. He seemed to know some of them, but seemed to feel that this information was not something an outsider should know, so he was very wary.

Unable to obtain much information from this place, Xue Dinglu asked, "Old King, as a magician, I know many medical spells. Let me heal your body. All you need to do is extend your arm."

Xue Dinglu laughed, and a small orb of holy light appeared in his hand.

"Hmm." This time the old man didn't refuse; he simply extended his hand.

Xue Luding took the opportunity to collect some body samples with the cursed blood. Then, the girl next to him, who had the same face as the Silver City princess and was named "Rabi", also received a holy light from Xue Luding and had her DNA sample collected by Xue Luding through the cursed blood.

As a mage, Xue Lude was entertained by what was called "King," but was actually more like "Village Chief." The rabbi led him to a house that looked like a converted abandoned shipping container, which served as Xue Lude's residence.

This place is just a modified container house. Inside, there are some simple pieces of furniture pieced together from wood. It's extremely shabby, cold in winter and warm in summer, and the container itself seems to be leaking air.

Before leaving, the "princess" asked, "As a distinguished monk, does the guest need a 'bride' to serve him?"

“No need, but have those two people I met earlier come see me. I have some questions for them,” Xue Dinglu said directly.

The girl left, and Xue looked at the scene outside the container. It seemed that there were not many people walking on the streets in the entire tribe. This group of people lived on this hellish planet by cultivating mushrooms. Apart from the tribe, there were all kinds of strange and distorted human heads.

In the village, even though many people passing by were wearing colorful plastic straps, they seemed to worship all the technological creations of their ancestors as divine objects. As a result, some rather unsettling sights could be seen, such as grinding circuit boards into spears or using plastic straps as decorations for spearheads.

In Xue Dinglu's hand, three pieces of blood were spinning continuously. These were the "grotesque blood" from those twisted human heads, the old village chief's blood, and the princess's blood.

Xue's Law and Old Green both have many speculations and ideas, and now they urgently need to exchange information.

As he analyzed with the cursed blood, he said, "Old Green, I analyzed the freak's DNA and compared it with the DNA of this old village chief and that princess. I found that they are essentially the same species, with no changes in the DNA of their cell nuclei."

"In other words, the Things and these humans are essentially the same species, but their forms of expression are vastly different. I still can't understand why those Things exhibit such inhumanity." Xue Luding's cursed blood continued to analyze the DNA.

“There are still more questions.” Old Green sighed. “I’m very curious why they have regressed to the appearance of a primitive society. I previously suggested that these people migrated here, but looking at the strange world outside, this village is like an isolated island. Where did they migrate from?”

Old Green paused, then continued, "And most importantly, the connection between these people and my world. I don't believe it's a coincidence that the village chief has the same face as me, and that the village chief's daughter has the face of the Silver Princess."

Xue also felt that this hellish star must be related to the fairy tale world, but there was too little information available at the moment.

Then, the father and daughter whom Xue had met in the wilderness arrived. Xue, still pretending to be a charlatan, touched them and obtained their DNA samples. After they left, Xue frowned.