Chapter 75: The Dead Forest

Chapter 75: The Dead Forest

The journey to find this dead tree was relatively peaceful. Sorry, peaceful was the wrong word. What I meant was that the journey was lifeless.

For an entire three hours, I never encountered a single life form. Not even a bug or an animal. It was quiet, so much so that the rustling sound of leaves being stepped on under my feet was loud enough to startle me.

I'm not scared, O-Okay!... I just had to momentarily shift into my rabbit form to utilize the enhanced hearing and ensure everything was safe.

Ahem...anyway, after thirty more minutes of walking, I began to understand the reason for the lack of life in this part of the forest. The trees and vegetation were vastly different from the other areas.

I wasn't sure what this dead tree looked like, but I had a hunch that the thing was causing this state. Everything around me was dying or already dead.

The green grass had turned black, the trees had lost their leaves, and the ground was covered in dead branches. The only thing that looked alive were the mushrooms growing from the rotten trees.

'Fuck! This place gives me the creeps,' I muttered, shivering a little, looking around the area for anything of value. There was nothing, not a single animal or a monster, even the air was stale.

"Now, how the hell am I supposed to find a dead tree in an already-dead forest?" I exclaimed, kicking a small rock in frustration. "It's like searching for a needle in a haystack."

"Sigh...at least I know the dead tree is big," taking a deep breath, wondering if this clue was enough for me to find it.

"Oh well...there's nothing I can do about it," I sighed, shrugging my shoulders and continuing my search.

I walked and walked for more than two hours, but there was nothing.

"This is getting boring," I complained, stretching my back and arms while thinking of giving up and going home. "With Hikari's egg, I can finish my quest and unlock my class."

I was tired, hungry, and sleepy. My feet were hurting, and the only thing I wanted to do right now was to take a nap...and a good fuck...maybe a big orgy.

Yep...that would be great.

"But first," I said, searching for a sturdy tree that could support my weight. I found one, a towering giant with thick, leafless branches.

'This should do,' I thought, climbing the tree and settling myself on a big branch that was sturdy enough to support me.

"Let's scan the place one more time," Slowly shifting to my wolf form, my sharp eyes scanned the forest in a matter of seconds.

"Hmm? What's this?" I hummed, spotting movement in the distance. Focusing my gaze, I could clearly see a pack of spider rats dragging the corpses of their own kind using their webs, leading them somewhere.

'Hey, aren't those the ones I killed?' I wondered inwardly, recognizing two corpses, they were the ones that I sliced in half using that massive blood scythe.

'Why are they retrieving the corpses?' I wondered again, watching them for a few seconds before deciding to follow them.

There were eight spider rats dragging four corpses. From what I remember, I slayed ten spider rats, and with the one inside my inventory. The remaining five must have been taken by the owner of the large paw prints.

The spider rats were heading north, which I presumed was the direction of the dead tree. However, after a few minutes of tailing them, they suddenly stopped and began sniffing the air.

Cautiously, I approached the tree, keeping a low profile and ensuring I didn't attract any attention. I needed to be careful, as there might still be some guards left behind.

'Good, I'm in,' I thought, successfully entering the tree's base without issue. However, I found a complex network of tunnels leading deeper underground.

'Damn it! It will take a lot of time to explore the place,' I groaned, looking around the place. The tunnel was dark and it kept going down deeper under the ground. The air was stuffy and smelled like rotten flesh.

'Fuck this is so gross,' I complained, walking through the tunnel with one hand on the wall, keeping me from falling.

I kept walking, not sure how long, but I finally arrived at a place that looked like an underground cave. The place was huge, and the ceiling was covered in web.

"What the hell?" I cursed, seeing that the whole cave was covered in a spider web that had hundreds of cocoons hanging from it.

"..."

However, I wasn't shocked by that. What really shocked me was something entirely different.

"Well?....this is..." I was speechless, staring with wide eyes at a colossal black and purple spider impaled to the cave wall with a thick tree root.

The spider was four times the size of the white spider rat, it had eight spiked legs and two huge mandibles that were sharp enough to slice anything in half. Its body was big, fat, and hairless.

'What the fuck is this?' I thought, looking at its dead corpse.

The size of the spider could easily surpass fifty feet (15m)—if it was complete. The lower half of the spider—four legs and the abdomen—was lying on the ground with its guts spilled out. While the upper half was impaled to the wall by a thick tree root that grew out of the ceiling. There were also massive claw marks all over the cave wall.

"Hmm?" When I got near the spider, I noticed something strange. Normal rats were feasting on the spider's guts. Among them, I spotted two rats with spider legs.

"Ah...I see," at that moment I realized why the system identifies the spider rats as 'Mutant rats' instead of the way I call them or any other name. "They've mutated by consuming the flesh of this giant black spider."

Suddenly, two system notifications materialized before my eyes, two I had never seen before. One was red, and the other was gold.

[Warning: An Extinction-level event has appeared]

"!!!" I was stunned by the ominous words in the red notification, but before I could react, the gold notification overlapped it.

[Hello, Morgana. It's me, Lilith.]

Hello everyone! How are you all doing?

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If you can take a few seconds of your time, please leave one. Have fun!

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