August 02, 2023 by Wyrd
Ning Su sat solemnly between the two children and said, “You must remember, human flesh cannot be eaten or cut, and it’s not something you should want.”
Gui Sheng replied, “Okay.”
Manman also nodded, but she said, “Humans themselves eat human flesh and cut human flesh, so why shouldn’t we do it as well?”
Ning Su asked, “How does Ah Fei know about that?”
Manman said, “I have two skulls, and they were both cut into pieces before they died.”
Ning Su made a thoughtful sound, “We are living in the human world, and the rules of the human world are not to kill and eat others to avoid trouble. So, we shall abide by the rules of the place we’re in, and besides, human flesh is poisonous and cannot be eaten.”
Gui Sheng understood and said, “Rules, the bride hits the groom!”
Ning Su remained silent.
“Yes, these are the rules in the Snowball dungeon world. If you don’t follow these rules, the consequences will be dire.”
Gui Sheng nodded in agreement.
Ning Su continued, “You also have to abide by the rules of the human world. Don’t kill and eat others without reason, and of course, don’t let others mistreat you, okay?”
Both children nodded.
Ning Su was satisfied, as if he saw two little seedlings growing strong and straight.
“Hmm?” Gui Sheng, who was about to do a handstand to wash his head in the creek, turned back and looked around the room. “Flower?”
Ning Su replied, “That flower got contaminated. We’ll find another one tomorrow.”
The two kids didn’t find it strange at all, and Ning Su realized that they had been considering those human heads as viruses on the flower that they had to drive away.
Ning Su pondered for a moment.
Gui Sheng asked, “Should I look for it? Should the skull look for it?”
Surprisingly, Ning Su shook his head and said, “I’ll find it myself. I’ll look for the one I want to raise the most.”
The night wind moaned, and players lay on their beds with different emotions.
Ning Su turned over in bed and scratched his arm.
In the previous two dungeons, he had seen the lily flowers, but surprisingly, he hadn’t seen it yet in this instance that was full of flowers.
The lily flower was born from hatred and intense resentment, growing in the deepest place of grudges. Would it appear in the Dark Swamp?
That land of the sleeping god.
As Ning Su pondered, he closed his eyes.
While falling into a dream, he unconsciously scratched his arm. He didn’t know what dream he was having, but the gu insect in his arm wriggled with excitement.
After lunch, Ning Su set out with two children.
The white-haired flower attendant said that the flowers in the Dark Swamp wouldn’t bloom when the sun was too scorching, so it was pointless to go too early.
Ning Su paid no attention to that and ventured deep into the swamp to find his most beloved flower.
Last night, Ning Su told the two children, “If I find it, you must pull me back.”
“Ah Fei, your army of skeletons can surely carry me back, right?”
Manman: “...”
After arranging everything, Ning Su tied his pant legs and walked into the deep and boundless swamp, facing the sun.
This was the most sacred place in Furen County, known as the Land of the Sleeping God.
Just last night, Jiang Ying’s body sank into this place.
The muck here was wrapped in corpse water.
His legs sank deep into it, making every step difficult.
Ning Su lifted his feet from the mud and walked forward step by step.
Today, he was going down into the swamp, so he tied up his hair and made a messy bun on top of his head.
The clothes had also been changed to neat trousers, and a diagonally buttoned short robe, all in a deep red color.
Two children sat under a tree by the swamp, watching that touch of red facing the scorching sun, gradually shrinking and sinking into the boundless black swamp.
When the swamp rose to his neck, Ning Su’s whole body was wrapped in a layer of dark energy.
Ning Su was the only one who had dark energy ability in the apocalypse.
When he awakened, he possessed a strange ability that could devour all dark substances and convert them into his own energy. It was an ability that even experts in human abilities couldn’t understand despite trying various methods.
They asked him if the dark energy in his body was there from the moment of awakening or if it was acquired later through devouring and transforming.
After so many years of going from a dark energy ability user to a dark loss, Ning Su himself couldn’t explain what exactly the dark energy in his body was.
He devoured many things he didn’t know or understand, including things that only he could see since he was little.
The majority of it came from countless, indeterminable substances within zombies, which human scientists called the zombie virus. It became a vast and immense dark energy within Ning Su.
He couldn’t clearly define what the dark energy in his body was, but there was one thing he was sure of, something he never told those researchers: this energy wasn’t entirely acquired through devouring other energy or whatnot; it flowed in his blood even before he awakened.
At this moment, the energy wrapped around his heavy legs, allowing him to walk as if on flat ground through the swamp.
He didn’t know how long he had been walking, but the dark energy on his body scattered within the swamp, as if connecting with the neural network of the swamp.
He felt the broken flesh in the dark swamp forming a hand, struggling and pulling at his legs.
He felt the blood coalescing into a mouth, emitting a heavy sob.
He felt countless undead getting closer to him.
***
“So, the Dark Swamp has no end?”
The pavilion and wooden bridge destroyed last night were not much in front of the wealthy power of the Yenan Family. Within just one morning, everything here had been completely renovated.
After Zhu Shuangshuang and Su Wangsheng finished lunch, they saw the white-haired flower attendant in the pavilion.
He was holding the flower that bloomed that rotted hand, sitting there with a pale face, quietly gazing at the shallow green lake.
As of now, he was the only native flower attendant who was willing to communicate with players. The two of them sat down in the pavilion, inquiring about the Dark Swamp.
The silver-haired flower attendant lowered his head to glance at the hand ‘flower’ he’s holding and calmly said, “That is the Land of the Sleeping God. How could a god confine themselves within a bounded place?”
His eyes would light up when mentioning the god, and he said, “The god is infinite and boundless.”
Zhu Shuangshuang didn’t understand, “Even if it’s vast, it should still have boundaries, right?”
The silver-haired flower attendant said, “There are no boundaries, not even the Holy Maiden has reached its end.”
Su Wangsheng also couldn’t comprehend, “The Furen County has its borders, the Shigen Kingdom has its nation’s boundaries. But the Dark Swamp that only exists within the Furen County, how can it have no boundaries? Isn’t that strange?”
“Because it leads to the realm of gods, and humans cannot step into the realm of gods.”
***
The feeling of Ning Su connecting to the network of the swamp grew stronger.
The dark energy within his body continuously overflowed into the swamp. This was the most he had ever spilled his energy.
However, this energy overflow didn’t consume his physical strength, nor did it cause the panic of life slipping away.
He hoped that the dark energy that once burst out from his body would quickly dissipate into this boundless dark swamp and help him find...
He didn’t even know what he was looking for.
He didn’t know where he had walked to or what time it was.
The sun was right beside his head, round and dimly bright.
He could see it with just a turn of his head, as if it moved along with him, yet he couldn’t capture its movement.
The dark swamp in front of him turned into a tranquil black, like boundless black water, yet also like a smooth and quiet black stone.
Walking became even more arduous.
The wailing of the undead grew heavier, as if countless spirits were holding onto his legs, trying to drag him down into the bottom.
Trying to lift himself up was already extremely difficult.
Ning Su was already exhausted, and the dark energy continued to surge out from within him.
The young man pulled his hands out of the dark swamp, rested his slender neck on top of it, and took a tired breath. He placed his hands on the swamp to support his upper body and continued moving forward.
The more it was like this, the more he wanted to find it.
Originally, he only wanted to find a kind of flower he truly wished to nurture forever.
The lily flower.
But being deeply trapped in this boundless dark swamp, struggling forward in loneliness, and searching for responses with scattered energy in this desolate world, everything seemed to have changed.
Ning Su thought of many past events.
In this boundless and empty darkness.
On the day of the apocalypse, the world was also this dark.
When he fell into a coma alone in that vast and lifeless world, he thought he would never wake up again.
His eighteen years of life had been spent like this, alone, even at the moment of death, so solitary that he couldn’t hear any sound in the world.
At that time, he really wished to hear any sound, any sound would do.
And then he heard it.
The sound of a heartbeat.
The surging of blood brought about by the beating heart, vast amounts of blood, spraying out like fountains, dyeing the world red.
Not only was there sound but also bright colors.
Trembling and wavering, he woke up, lying on the densely entwined lily flower vines.
Apocalypse arrived, and the world crumbled.
Lying beneath a cliff 3000m deep.
The boundless lily flower vines supported him firmly, and before his eyes were clusters of blood-red lily flowers.
When he was very young, whenever he had no food, he would eat these lily flowers.
The lily flowers were blood-red with three oval petals.
He had always felt that half of his blood was made up of these flowers.
When he awakened, he saw a four-petal lily flower, and his heart was beating with the rhythm of that four-petal lily flower, even resonating with the endless lily flower vines on the cliff.
At that moment, Ning Su felt as if he was in a cradle.
The dark energy merged with the increasingly apparent pulsations in the swamp.
Ning Su was already numb and unconscious.
The only feeling he had in his whole body was the itch in his arm, where the gu insect was struggling with all its might.
Relying on that slight itch, he stretched out his arm.
He caught it.
A throbbing heartbeat.
The boundless swamp trembled as a result.
Under the distant tree, two little ghost masters stood up.
“Bang! -“
“Bang! -“
“Bang! -“
The heartbeat was slow, but heavy.
The quiet and long eyelashes slowly lifted, revealing boundless chaos in his eyes opening to the world.
A condensed and ancient voice resounded once again.
[System requests player Ling Xiao to kill player Ning Su.]
T/N: The character used for Ling Xiao’s name was ‘凌霄’. It was also the name of the flower Ning Su often mentioned since the first dungeon world. Since it doesn’t really have a direct translation, I used ‘lily flower’ instead. So, technically, Ling Xiao’s presence was felt since arc 1. And yes, Ling Xiao is our ML. ^^
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