Chapter 136. Liúshuǐ People (12) Close to Magnitude 7 Earthquake

     It is a simple matter to destroy the outer wall of the forbidden area, but the difficulty lies in entering the forbidden area without being seen by the stationed agents and other survivors, and preventing them from causing trouble.

     Yes, other survivors.

     Whenever a survivor approaches Yin Mountain, Wang Xue will receive a team invitation from the system.

     They quickly discovered that in addition to the agent group, there are three survivors who came to Black Mountain to try their luck. Fortune and wealth are sought in danger. They are now hiding near the mass grave and may have known each other.

     Among them, two survivors are quite ruthless. Even when the ghosts didn’t provoke them, they still caused several undead ghosts to dissipate, and they repeatedly tried to linger outside the mountain stronghold.

     Ye Mo started by setting up a black mist obscuring array at the base of the mountain stronghold. While this array would be more effective with mental illusions, her current research on illusions is insufficient. Individuals with a physical fitness exceeding 20 could easily detect flaws in the array upon approaching.

     Therefore, while Ye Mo tunneled into the cliff at the base of the mountain, Wang Xue stayed outside, repairing the outer wall of the cliff. Dressed in red, she stood guard and provided logistical support. Dozens of undead in the mountain now served as her eyes and ears.

     The special agent team at the summit was discussing the long-lost ghost techniques of the mountain stronghold. The survivors in the mass grave couldn’t withstand the yin energy, so they would periodically descend the mountain or consume yang-boosting potions.

     Ye Mo followed the cliff inward and soon reached the boundary of the forbidden area, which couldn’t be accurately detected.

     The black fog with imbalanced Yin and Yang here is several times thicker than outside the green mountain. The origin of the black fog in the mountains is mostly here. The way to cross the boundary is to cover up the Yang Qi on your body and merge with the Yin Qi.

     For this reason, she had already urgently changed her name to the underworld in the Nordic world, “Heim”^[1]from Helheim the underworld in Norse mythology, a very dark-themed name. Watson confirmed that changing one’s name in a dungeon will also change the displayed account name in the survivor app.

 

     A firework display and an announcement:【Chief Survivor ‘Traveler’ has changed their account name to “Heim”.】 

    Survivors: 【The big boss has a lot of prestige; even changing a name gets a worldwide announcement.】

  【The big boss really likes changing names, they’ve changed it several times in dungeons before. Could their ability be related to changing names? If other survivors rise to power in the future, they might think it’s just them changing names!】

   【Heimlich maneuver? Anaheim? Haym Salomon? After googling, I couldn’t find any special meaning for this name. The name ‘Traveler’ is even more common.】

   【……】

 

     Some people also associate ‘Heim’ with Norse mythology, but these are just one of many speculations. Ye Mo has already browsed through the Runic characters, and this ‘Heim’ is the most suitable for the current scenario. The other option, Valhalla, would be more likely to expose her.

     She doesn’t mind revealing her previous Norse mythology dungeon, but she doesn’t want to reveal that she is currently clearing a necromancy dungeon.

     …

     As soon as she entered the forbidden area, she really had the illusion of stepping into the underworld.

     Except for the black fog, there are ancient murals on both sides.The colors have not faded for thousands of years, and they are still as bright and lifelike as before. The murals depict some “strange” humans.

     Strange is an adjective, not an insult.

     There are men and women among these strange humans. They have some obvious animalistic features, such as horns or wings, and some are only human in the upper body or lower body.

     The common characteristic is that when Ye Mo enters the forbidden area, these murals are somewhat like the Mona Lisa’s smile. No matter where she is, the eyes in the murals seem to be staring at her. The feeling of being watched by the murals is even more uncomfortable than being besieged by people or ghosts.

     Sweeping mental energy across these murals will be bounced back, and even HawkEye cannot see through them. They are precisely the key to the forbidden area’s anti-detection.

     Within this forbidden area, it is also impossible to observe other locations in the Qingshan using Eagle Eye or mental energy, which is why Wang Xue must remain outside to respond to emergencies at any time.

     Ye Mo paused her study of ‘Water Scripture’. because she discovered that the colorful dyes in these murals contained animal blood, jade minerals, and ancient exotic plants. The ancient exotic plants were what provided the shielding effect.

     There are many kinds of exotic plants.

     One type of ‘ghost grass’ that has a shielding effect has ‘leaves like mallow with a red stem, and ears like grain.’ It grows on Ox Head Mountain, and when ingested, it has the same memory-erasing effect as Meng Po soup. This was the first time she had discovered something related to mental power in a copy world.

     At least it proves that in ancient times, there may be people with mental power talents like her.

     …

     After walking through the mural passage, she arrived at a rather large circular cavern.

     The circular cavern was excessively empty, filled with dense yin energy but devoid of any spirits. Embedded in the walls around it were over 300 top-grade spirit jades, all of the dark earth element. After the spiritual energy revival, these spirit jades showed signs of regaining their spiritual power, with some already reaching the quality of low-grade spirit jades.

     Observe carefully, there are four fist-sized pieces of pure black jade in the middle of the four directions of southeast, northwest, and northeast. These jades continuously infuse their spiritual energy into other jades.

     This is the “jade essence” mentioned by Qiong

     Ye Mo tried to destroy this very obvious jade formation, but failed. With her strength attribute value of more than 200, she couldn’t even deal with any of the jades.

     The reason appeared in the tree in front of her.

     Yes, it’s another sacred tree.

     Basically, every mythology has a sacred tree, such as the World Tree, the Jianmu Tree, and the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. They all serve the same purpose of connecting all realms, perhaps with only slight differences in their names.

     The tree before her was also recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, though perhaps not as famous as the three great sacred trees of Jianmu, Ruomu, and Fusang: ‘Its coiled roots span three thousand li, and to the northeast between its branches is the Gate of Ghosts, where myriad ghosts enter and exit.’

     There were many banyan trees, each forming its own forest, within the mountains. Banyan trees are one of the yin wood types. There is also one planted in front of Mo Shenpo’s door. The roots of these banyan trees penetrated deep into the earth, connecting with the branches and canopy of the towering sacred tree before her.

     It was actually like this!

     Perhaps this sacred tree, forming a forest from a single tree, was the appearance of a banyan tree ten thousand years ago. Or perhaps, it was a ten-thousand-year-old banyan tree spirit?

     Ye Mo felt that she had an inexhaustible fate with the mythical tree.

     On each branch of this sacred tree, there were cold corpses hanging, a total of hundreds.

     These corpses were both male and female, naked, with unusually developed body hair, and all over two meters tall. Unlike the corpses processed by the Miao people, they retained their appearance from when they were alive.

     But they are different from when they were alive. Not only because of the corpse spots and the obvious stench, but also because they have uniformly long black nails, a bit like the zombies in the doomsday supermarket copy.

     The reason they were classified as corpses was that they were all without breath or heartbeat, and Ye Mo detected a faint smell of blood on these bodies, a familiar smell of blood.

     “Li?”

     The corpse had no wounds. Upon closer inspection, the scent of blood came from the crown of the sacred tree. The sacred tree acted like a conduit, channeling blood into the corpse. The corpse would absorb the yang energy from the blood to sustain the living sacrifice ritual.

     This blood originated from the other two forbidden areas. No wonder even the mass graves in the forbidden areas were filled with mummies or skeletal remains. It had been a long time since the last living sacrifice, and due to the revival of spiritual energy, the corpse’s blood absorption rate had slowed down.

     But once the blood of the previous living sacrifice is absorbed and there is no new living sacrifice, they will absorb the blood of all living things in the whole mountain, turning the Yin land into a dead land. As for what happens after the dead land – ‘Shui Scripture’ only uses the word “horrible” to describe it. It is a disaster that only the ancient witch can prevent.

     According to the records in the ‘Shui Scripture’, the core of the forbidden area is this tree, and these men and women are the first batch of ancestors who were sacrificed alive. The only way to break the formation is to cut down this tree.

     Ye Mo took out the Mozi Sword from the storage space, swung it and chopped at the tree trunk. Bang, the whole mountain shook slightly, but the trunk only lost its skin and was unscathed.

     At the same time, Wang Xue, the special agent team, the villagers, and the survivors all felt the Qingshan shaking.

     “Earthquake?”

     The special agent team immediately helped the people move out of the stilt house, and at the same time urgently contacted the Earthquake Bureau. The other party did not detect the news of the earthquake, and there was no earthquake in places other than Qingshan.

     This is a local problem.

     Soon there were two more vibrations, and the special agent team finally found that in addition to the mountain shaking, the banyan tree in the village shook more violently. They looked at the village chief and Mo Shenpo.

     The two responded with the same confused eyes.

     Yuan Yuan ordered: “Cut down a tree for research.”

     No matter how thick the banyan tree was, the survivors had great strength. In less than a minute, it was broken in half. Soon, they found a little red blood in the center of the trunk.

     Preliminary conclusion: human blood!

     The village chief cried out: “We don’t know, we really don’t know. The live sacrifices in the Shui people before included the steps of bloodletting rituals, but we haven’t done the live sacrifices in the past for hundreds of years.”

     The special agent team asked the agents to send blood down the mountain for testing, and cut down a few more banyan trees. As expected, the trunks of these banyan trees also had blood. There may be many banyan trees not only in the village, but also on the mountain.

    …

     Ye Mo was also cutting trees below.

     Since chopping the trunk wasn’t working, the sword was swung towards one of the sacred tree’s branches. Each swing caused the ground to shake, and it took three strikes for the branch to finally break.

     At the moment the branch was severed, the corpse hanging from it suddenly opened its eyes. Still without a heartbeat or breath, it revealed distinctly inhuman fangs and swiped its black fingernails towards Ye Mo. Ye Mo dodged with a lunge, and simultaneously delivered a sword strike.

     The sword struck the corpse’s back, but not a drop of blood was spilled, and it had no effect on it whatsoever.

     The two, one human and one corpse, began to fight.

     Ye Mo found that the zombies in the doomsday copy were significantly weaker than the unknown corpses here. After all, these were corpses from over 2000 years ago, but she was no longer the person she used to be.

     The corpse was not her opponent.

     During the fight, the corpses kept losing parts. What shocked Ye Mo was that every part of the body of these corpses seemed to have wisdom and they could act alone.

     In the end, she had to fight a chaotic battle against a head, a torso, two hands, and two feet. Even a fingernail fragment could move. Headshots were completely useless; even with a shattered head, it would continue to bite.

     Burning the corpse with fire was like adding fuel to the flames. After all, fire generates earth, and ordinary fire couldn’t burn the corpse, especially in an environment filled with jade essence.

     She had fallen into various habitual misconceptions.

     Ye Mo finally managed to destroy every part of the corpse by utilizing wood-type formations and light-type magical items, at a cost equivalent to two seventh-tier high-grade magical beast crystal cores and a piece of low-grade light-type spiritual jade.

     “…”

     When Ye Mo dealt with the next corpse, she learned from her experience and no longer dismembered it, but dealt with it directly. As expected, her energy and consumption were greatly reduced. If it weren’t for these pieces of equipment, she really wouldn’t have been able to handle these corpses.

     However, this corpse was clearly stronger than the previous one.

     The third corpse was stronger than the second one. The strength of these corpses had nothing to do with their original selves, but with the order in which they were encountered. 

     As the corpses were dealt with one by one, and the branches of the sacred tree were gradually severed, the sacred tree’s shaking intensified, and the remaining corpses absorbed blood at an increasingly rapid pace.

     When Ye Mo had dealt with 60 corpses, the blood was completely absorbed. The corpse beneath her began to frantically absorb the corpses of other living creatures in the mountain, utilizing the ubiquitous banyan tree roots.

     Yes, the special ops team had discovered that not only were there numerous banyan trees in the village, but the entire mountain was also filled with them. And the roots of these banyan trees almost covered the entire mountain. In a certain instant, they seemed to come alive, frantically attacking any blood-bearing creatures.

     “!!!”

     The villagers truly brought out all eighteen martial arts skills. Wang Xue was secretly helping them. The special ops team sent more people up the mountain for support and evacuation. The survivors on the mountainside were finally exposed.

     As the tremors grew stronger, the seismological bureau was able to detect them. People from all directions began to evacuate urgently, echoing the animals escaping that had occurred a few days earlier.

     It really was an earthquake!

     And it was a series of quakes, with a guaranteed tremor every so often, and each tremor was increasing in intensity.

     Ye Mo sped up the rate at which she dealt with the corpses. When only ten corpses remained, the sacred tree was finally severed with a single sword strike. With a rumble, a nearly magnitude 7 earthquake occurred, centered on Green Mountain.

     At the same time, the system voice sounded again.