Chapter 435 - 208: Digging Deep, Cracking the Maze
Chapter 435: Chapter 208: Digging Deep, Cracking the Maze
Just as I thought. The racial trait of the Rot Eye Race was indeed that all-corroding liquid.
He stopped, raised his right hand, and a few drops of green acid seeped from his fingertips before dripping to the ground.
SIZZLE!
A few muffled hisses sounded.
Only a shallow pit was left on the hard, pale-white rock.
And in the center of the pit, a few barely perceptible wisps of white smoke rose from the surface of a small patch of rock.
’The power... is better than nothing, I suppose.’
But Lin Ye wasn’t concerned in the least.
When he had first obtained the Crystalization ability, the amethyst he could condense couldn’t even fully cover the back of his hand, and its Defense Power seemed almost laughable in retrospect.
And in the beginning, Shadow Scale had only allowed him to better hide his form in the shadows, a far cry from its current powerful effects of unrestricted disguise and traceless stealth.
’Any powerful ability requires a process of growth and development.’
’Now that I have the seed, the next step is to use enough nutrients to help it take root, sprout, and grow into a towering tree.’
’There are no useless abilities, only masters who don’t know how to develop and nurture them.’
The most important task now was to find high-quality Source Crystals.
However, he hadn’t seen so much as a shadow of a Source Crystal along the way.
On the tunnel walls, he could see many traces of veins that had clearly been mined recently. A faint energy from Source Crystals lingered in the air, but the concentration was pitifully low.
Clearly, it wasn’t that there were no Source Crystals here, but that someone had beaten him to it, systematically mining and relocating them.
’Who did this?’
’The explorers who came here before?’
’Or... was it other members of the Celestial Abyss Race on this planet?’
Lin Ye closed his eyes, his consciousness sinking into his Sea of Consciousness.
In an instant, hundreds, even thousands, of different perspectives flooded his mind.
There was the bird’s-eye view from his fly minions high above, as well as the first-person perspective of a member of the Rot Eye Race he had just converted, now speeding through the dark and damp tunnels.
He had previously given all his minions a single command: Map the area!
They were to explore every corner of this labyrinth at all costs, constructing a complete three-dimensional map for him.
However, even with thousands of eyes, the information that came back was still chaotic and repetitive.
Endless pale-white tunnels, monotonous dark-green moss, the occasional fork or cavern...
The entire Painful Labyrinth was unimaginably vast.
With a thought, he focused on his two most distant minions.
One was a fly, the other a member of the Rot Eye Race.
The straight-line horizontal distance between them had already exceeded a thousand kilometers!
And despite this incredible distance, their surroundings were still fundamentally identical!
’This seemingly barren planet... its interior has been hollowed out to such a horrifying extent?’
Lin Ye opened his eyes, his brow deeply furrowed.
’It seems if I want to find a Source Crystal Vein or encounter more powerful alien races, I have to go deeper underground.’
He selected a deep, vertical tunnel leading downward. A Gravity Field enveloped his body, and he turned into a streak of light, plummeting straight down.
The wind howled in his ears as his descent grew faster and faster.
Ten minutes later, he estimated he had descended at least ten thousand meters.
However, just as he passed through a tunnel exit below, a strong sensation of weightlessness hit him.
Immediately after, he discovered he had just fallen out of a tunnel in the ceiling of a cavern and was now hovering steadily in mid-air.
He subconsciously looked up and saw the familiar "sky" above, woven from countless pipe-like structures.
’I’m back on the first level?’
For the first time, Lin Ye’s expression turned solemn.
Refusing to accept it, he once again chose a downward tunnel. This time, he used his Spiritual Power to maintain a firm sense of his surroundings, continuously perceiving the changes in gravity.
The result was the same.
No matter which path he chose, and no matter how he confirmed he was moving downward, he would eventually pass through some invisible node and inexplicably return to the upper level.
He stopped, hovering in the middle of a tunnel, and fell into deep thought.
’It’s a problem with gravity.’
’In the Painful Labyrinth, you’re guaranteed to get lost if you rely solely on vision and your sense of direction.’
And Lin Ye had always relied on the guidance of "gravity."
But even so, he had still gotten lost.
Lin Ye sank into contemplation.
In the end, he reached a conclusion—
The creator of this labyrinth had set traps of gravitational distortion at certain key nodes in the tunnels.
In those places, the concepts of up, down, left, and right were inverted, or even distorted.
’You think you’re going down, but you might actually be going up, or even just moving horizontally.’
Even he was completely unable to discern the true direction here.
This was the true horror of the Painful Labyrinth.
It didn’t just trap your body; it twisted your very perception, forcing you to exhaust all hope in an endless loop until you finally died in despair.
When Lin Ye returned to the massive cavern with this astonishing discovery, Hu Dahai and the others were resting where he had left them, tending to their wounds.
Seeing Lin Ye return, everyone instinctively looked over, their eyes filled with undisguised awe.
Hu Dahai stepped forward, wanting to ask something but not knowing where to begin.
Lin Ye didn’t waste words, concisely explaining his discoveries and theories.
After hearing his explanation, the faces of all the Xinhuo members present turned incredibly grim.