Chapter 49: Door Kill

Chapter 49: Door Kill

The wind in the Valley became restless.

Yu Sheng did not know what was happening, but he could clearly feel that the “atmosphere” permeating the entire Other Domain was changing. The feeling was difficult to describe with words. If he absolutely had to put it into words...

He felt as though the entire valley was gradually coming alive.

The distant forest was awakening.

The mountains were awakening.

The earth was awakening.

Even the sky overhead seemed to be casting down a cold gaze filled with hunger, a gaze that made his scalp tingle.

He noticed Hu Li trembling slightly beside him.

The demon fox girl clutched her food tightly, yet fear had appeared on her face. She raised her head and stared at the dark night sky above while inching step by step behind Yu Sheng. She kept muttering something under her breath. Only when she drew closer did Yu Sheng hear what she was repeating over and over:

“It was like this when the immortal died... It was like this when the immortal died...”

“What’s happening now?” Irene asked quickly. The little doll had become nervous as well, her entire body tense while clutching the cleaver in her arms. “Do you know something?”

But Hu Li did not answer.

It was as if she had once again fallen into a muddled state of mind. She only kept repeating that same sentence.

Soon, however, neither Irene nor Yu Sheng had any attention left to spare for Hu Li’s abnormal behavior.

Yu Sheng felt that familiar presence appear nearby.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an entity rapidly condense within the shadows at the edge of the ruined temple. Layer upon layer of deformed, swollen flesh proliferated. Strange limbs that looked as though they had been cut from various creatures grew one after another from the mass of meat. Dozens of hungry eyes opened across the monster’s body. Fanged jaws and torn mouthparts continuously emerged between those eyes while it emitted murky growls.

The entity, Hunger, had finally appeared near its prey.

“Holy sh...” Irene blurted out immediately. “That thing is so ugly!”

“Be careful of surprise attacks. Every limb on this thing can deform, and it can suddenly grow tentacles and tails from inside its body,” Yu Sheng immediately warned. Then he turned to Hu Li beside him. “Just focus on protecting yourself later. You’ve already been deeply corrupted by this thing. You can’t fight it.”

Hu Li’s condition was clearly wrong.

Even after the monster appeared, she continued staring at the sky in terror. Yet after hearing Yu Sheng’s words, she still nodded blankly. Gathering up the food scattered on the ground, she retreated backward.

But she did not dare retreat too far, as if afraid something might happen to Yu Sheng.

“How exactly are you planning to fight this?” Irene whispered.

The monster was still prowling in the distance, seemingly waiting patiently for something. But that delay only made her increasingly uneasy.

“Don’t tell me you’re really planning to charge in bare-handed and use military combat fist on it. You didn’t even bring a weapon. At least I’m carrying a cleaver.”

Of course Yu Sheng knew he had not brought a weapon.

He had already tested it. Most of the creature’s body was harder than stone. Even if he brought an axe and managed to chop off some of its softer flesh, the effect would be negligible.

So from the very beginning, he had never intended to bring a “weapon.”

For an ordinary person with no weapons training, even if he really showed up carrying some legendary dragon-slaying blade, he would probably chop himself before he chopped the enemy.

He had prepared a different method of dealing damage.

“It’s still the plan we discussed back home. Just restrict its movements using those threads of yours,” Yu Sheng said rapidly. “Then I’ll rush in and tear open a gap. Watch carefully. If I mess up, take Hu Li and run immediately. Don’t worry about me. Hu Li has a way to survive under that monster’s attacks, and Hunger won’t actively chase you.”

Irene froze.

“Uh, and then what?”

“After I come back to life, we’ll regroup and try again. Everything dies eventually.”

“Damn you. So it really is this simple and brutal plan, isn’t it? We agreed you’d try not to use resurrection as a basic attack!”

“Aren’t I already trying?” Yu Sheng replied quickly.

But then he frowned.

Something about the monster felt wrong.

“Why still hasn’t it attacked?”

Irene shared the same doubt.

“It feels like it’s deliberately stalling for time, like it’s waiting for something. Has this thing actually developed a sense of strategy?”

“Then we definitely can’t let it keep waiting,” Yu Sheng immediately said through gritted teeth. “We attack first.”

The moment he finished speaking, he charged directly toward the monster.

At nearly the same instant, Irene performed a nimble flip off his shoulder and landed on the ground. At the same time, she extended her right hand toward the creature.

The instant she touched down, the doll’s eyes turned completely black.

Countless dense black threads carrying a strange and chilling aura spread from her hand, expanding madly through the surrounding space like a rapidly growing spiderweb.

All the spider threads avoided Yu Sheng’s path.

Within the ever-expanding web of threads, he accelerated once more. His enhanced body left an afterimage through the air as he lunged toward the grotesque flesh giant.

The monster finally moved.

Faced with prey that had chosen to attack on its own, it seemed momentarily surprised, but it still reacted swiftly.

A savage claw rose high from the beast’s back and smashed directly toward the path of Yu Sheng’s charge.

At that very instant, Yu Sheng once again experienced that strange... foresight.

He sensed which muscles in the monster were contracting.

He sensed its intent to attack and the true focus of its gaze.

It was as though he could already see a tentacle extending from behind the claw, sealing every possible route of escape he might choose in the next second.

Perhaps it was an illusion, but this time his foresight felt even more accurate than before.

In fact...

He was beginning to realize it was not some so-called intuition born of spiritual nature at all.

Because now he actually possessed genuine intuition of spiritual nature and had experienced what it felt like.

He discovered that what he saw and sensed while predicting the monster’s movements was completely different.

Whenever he anticipated the monster’s actions, it was almost from a first-person perspective.

All these thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant.

In the blink of an eye, Yu Sheng crossed the final few meters.

The flesh giant’s claw crashed down.

Yu Sheng did not dodge at all.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the threads spreading from behind him converge in midair.

The next moment, countless black lines wrapped around the monster’s limbs. Like phantasmal projections that pierced through flesh and bone, they crisscrossed through its claws, tentacles, and enormous mouths...

Coldness.

Numbness.

Sluggishness.

It was as though even thought itself had been pierced full of holes.

As though the soul had been wrapped layer upon layer in a chilling spiderweb.

An overwhelming tide of negative sensations surged over him.

For an instant, Yu Sheng thought he saw a vision.

He saw himself trapped within a giant spiderweb.

Countless strands bound him and even pierced through his limbs.

At the edge of the web, a crimson-eyed shadow lurked in the darkness, slowly crawling toward him in a twisted and horrifying manner...

“Yu Sheng! Stop spacing out! I can’t hold it much longer!”

The sudden shout beside his ear jolted him awake.

Looking up, he saw the flesh giant frozen in a bizarre posture at the center of layer upon layer of black threads. The ends of those threads were stretched taut, as though the monster would snap them apart by force at any moment.

There was no time to think about what that vision had been.

Yu Sheng lunged toward a particular spot at the monster’s side.

Within the precious opening Irene had created, he grabbed a black thread with one hand.

With the other, he reached into empty air.

Concentrating with all his might, he slowly pulled.

A door appeared.

A doorway manifested from nothing, its surface shimmering with flowing, dreamlike light.

Opening a door from thin air required far more effort and time than opening a physical door.

Yu Sheng needed a relatively stable environment to focus and complete the process.

Yet as he watched the monster’s trembling limbs and the black spider threads slowly beginning to crack apart, even these few seconds felt as long as a lifetime.

Though, admittedly, his recent lifetimes had not been particularly long.

The next second, accompanied by the sound of a door opening, the fabricated door finally swung fully open.

It was even larger than any door he had opened before.

Large enough to throw the entire monster through.

Blazing firelight erupted from within the doorway, illuminating a vast area around it.

Beyond the door was a vast lake of churning magma.

It was a “pleasant surprise” Yu Sheng had discovered during his countless door-opening experiments.

He had no idea what place it was.

He only knew that it contained endless molten lava and surging flames, like a landscape from hell itself.

The entity Hunger was powerful.

But most of its threat came from mental contamination and its nearly law-like power of hunger.

As for the physical vessel it manifested through...

Compared to those rules, it was not particularly durable.

It could be cooked.

And if it could not be cooked...

Then he would use even more firepower.

“Throw it in there!”

Yu Sheng shouted to Irene.

“Got it!”