svetikya Chapter 30 Feeding
Chapter 30 Feeding
Before the [Berserk] buff expired, Luo Lan took a deep breath and changed his stance.
Eight spider spears were pulled out from the top of the giant centipede's head. The bone hand and the spider spears together gripped the cracks on the carapace that had been brittled by the electric current, and pulled hard.
"Click click click..."
The charred carapace cracked and splintered under the violent pulling.
Luo Lan focused all his strength on his hands and eight spider spears, and with a powerful upward pull, he ripped the giant centipede's disfigured head, along with a large section of torn nerves and turbid yellow fluid, from its body!
"Pfft!"
A murky yellow liquid gushed out from the tear, spreading along the grooves between the soil and gravel.
The cool, silvery light streamed down from the crevices in the rock at the very top of the cave, illuminating the battlefield that had been turned upside down.
The cave floor was covered with deep craters, as if shattered by tremendous force, and the surrounding rough rock walls were covered with deep impact marks and charred lightning strike patterns.
Luo Lan stepped on the lifeless, massive corpse, and used the Eight Spider Spears to cut through the giant centipede's charred remains. The spear tips inserted themselves along the seams of its carapace, prying open pieces of the shattered shell.
He picked out the large chunks of tender flesh that were still seeping with murky yellow fluid and sent them directly to the deep part of the bone hand's body buried in front of his chest.
The massive wreckage transformed into purplish-black particles of light, gradually disintegrating and dissolving. The hard, earthy-yellow carapace and layered legs vanished inch by inch in the purplish-black light.
[Chaos Essence +477]
[Current Chaotic Essence: 600]
Half a day later, a large area of rubble was cleared out where the pile of corpses had been.
The massive wreckage brought Luo Lan a considerable harvest of source energy.
A pair of jet-black mandibles and mouthparts were deliberately preserved, resting among the rubble and gleaming with a dark, cold light.
While these mandibles were indeed hard and sharp, they were still slightly inferior to the [External Eight Spider Lances], which had been reinforced several times. However, what Luo Lan valued was not its cutting power at all.
He reached out and grabbed the pair of heavy mandibles. Luo Lan's gaze fell on the mouthparts, which were clamped in the middle of the mandibles and had a strange shape, resembling a megaphone.
The giant centipede previously released those high-frequency sound waves powerful enough to shatter rock walls thanks to this extraordinary organ.
[Casting - Assembly]
[Consumed Chaos Essence: 555]
[Current Chaotic Essence: 45]
The reserves of source matter, which hadn't even had a chance to warm up, plummeted to rock bottom in an instant.
Under the mysterious purple-black light, the pair of huge mandibles in Luo Lan's hands began to shrink rapidly.
The hard, black jaws melted and reshaped, eventually becoming an extremely dense, jet-black shell that covered the soft, trumpet-shaped mouthparts.
The mouthparts, encased in a hard shell, continued to stretch and shape in the purple light, eventually transforming into a fist-sized black structure that flew directly into Luo Lan's throat, bypassing the physical barrier.
Luo Lan felt as if there was a lump of ice stuck in her throat, both numb and swollen, and her vocal cords felt as if something was gently squeezing them.
After enduring the nausea caused by the foreign object for a while, the black membrane structure pulled out by the giant centipede's mouthparts transformed into a peculiar Adam's apple, merging with the vocal cords.
[Assembled: The mouthpiece of the tunnel weaver]
[Rank: Silver]
Specialty: Ultrasonic Sensing
[Skill: Sonic Shock Lv.2]
Ultrasonic sensing: It emits ultrasonic waves and receives the sound waves reflected back from objects to measure distance, speed, or detect the presence of objects.
[Sonic Shock Lv.2: Consumes stamina to emit multi-frequency, diffused sound waves, causing physical shock damage. Damage and range are affected by skill level.]
[Another Silver Rank...]
Now, Luo Lan was certain that the long worm he had just killed was indeed a monster of the same class as the Thunder Crocodile.
Trying to activate this newly implanted extraordinary organ, Luo Lan closed her single eye, stood still, and focused her mind.
The black, hard lump that had just been attached to his Adam's apple began to tremble slightly.
"Buzz—"
A low-frequency vibration, transmitted through the bones, spread rapidly in a hemispherical shape from roughly the mouth area on Luo Lan's skull towards the depths of the dark cave.
Invisible sound waves swept across the rubble and pits on the ground, striking the distant rock walls and stalactite formations.
The rebounding shockwave is rapidly transmitted back into the depths of the brain via sensor neurons closely connected to the throat.
In Luo Lan's mind, with her eyes closed, the echoing sound waves wove a three-dimensional map of the entire cave: the outlines of stalactites, the curved surfaces of the dome, the tunnel entrances on the rock walls... all presented one by one in the form of wireframes.
[It's fairly detailed, but there's a slight delay...]
The images depicted by the rebounding sound waves do have a brief delay, which is a bit of a stretch to deal with high-speed moving enemies, but it is an absolutely impeccable detection method for navigating through areas where optical visibility is not visible.
After carefully examining the area, Luo Lan reopened her single eye.
He casually spoke towards the distant dome of the cave:
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
[Sonic Shock Lv.2]
The muffled words were captured and amplified by the supernatural organs, transforming into visible, vibrating sound waves that spread out from the front of the skeletal head.
Compared to the precise control of ultrasonic pathfinding, the sonic waves used for attack are far more violent.
The sound waves struck the cave ceiling, creating a circular crater. The cracking sound of the rock strata breaking echoed inside the cave. Amidst the flying debris, a loose stalactite was broken off and fell, smashing to pieces below.
His energy was being depleted quickly. Luo Lan carefully felt the fatigue spreading from deep within his throat and came to a conclusion:
The damage range of [Sonic Shock] is indeed very large, but if you need to fight a prolonged battle or require precision and speed, [Bone Spike Burst] is more practical.
After testing his newly acquired skills, Luo Lan looked towards the cave wall.
The light curtain exit, swirling with distorted purple light, still stood there quietly.
[The outside world, finally...]
Step by step, Luo Lan walked to the light screen.
Without any further hesitation, he stepped across the purple light barrier that separated the underground palace from the outside world.
The environment in my field of vision was instantly overturned.
What went out diagonally appeared vertically on the ground.
The wilderness was vast and empty, with a cool night breeze.
The purple light curtain of the exit cracked at Luo Lan's feet, and beneath her feet was no longer damp, hard rock, but covered with dark, withered grass. Occasionally, a few oddly shaped low shrubs dotted the withered grass.
A few wisps of breeze, carrying the fresh scent of grass and trees, swept past Luo Lan. Her three lungs expanded and contracted, filtering the air—so different from the cold, damp atmosphere inside the underground palace—through her trachea and pumping it into her bloodstream.
The air is clean and refreshing, making one feel relaxed.
The vast wilderness stretched out before me. There were no buildings, no lights, no roads, and no animals.
Within a radius of several miles, judging from the sight, apart from vegetation and Luo Lan, there are probably no other living creatures.
[...It's so quiet.]
Luo Lan was able to see all of this not only because the wilderness was so vast, but also because of the bright moonlight.
Yes, bright.
The moonlight in this world is exceptionally bright, almost as bright as the sunlight on Earth.
Luo Lan looked up at the night sky.
The silver moon hung high, occupying almost a quarter of the sky. Its surface was covered with intricate patterns, which twisted and extended between silver-gray and pale, emitting an unnatural, scorching light.
Similar to the aurora borealis on Earth, colorful streaks of light trailed across the night sky, drifting aimlessly.
A dense array of stars, each a different color, dotted the band of light.
The night sky in this other world is clearly a hundred times more colorful than the night view in the cities of Earth, where you can't even see the stars.
But as Luo Lan gazed at this bizarre and fantastical sky, she felt—
It's so dark, so incredibly dark.
It is not black in the sense of color, but a black that is purely empty.
In a corner untouched by the starlight and the silvery moonlight, the darkness was so profound, so utterly empty, that it swallowed all life, leaving Luo Lan staring in a daze.