Chapter 37
This is not a message conveyed through sound, but a very crude usage of the thought transmission technique. This message was no doubt meant for Jianmen, yet since the message was simple and crude, he did not fully get if the "child” was meant to be singular or miscommunicated plural.
Jianmen frowned - he knew that the main creature occupying this nest had some level of intelligence, enough so to whisper to animals to turn and control them. But he did not expect it to be intelligent enough to form basic coherent thoughts and messages.
"You are in a place you shouldn’t be.” Jianmen replied.
"I am where I am to be. You killed my child. You … Will … Die!”
The hundreds of faces on the tree all started screaming at the same time, what came of it was an ear-piercing scream and several waves of dark and corrosive energy. Jianmen’s both hands glew in orange and golden light as he clenched his hands, while almost completely unaffected by the scream. In the very next second, he released two balls of energy from his hands.
Two bolts of golden lightning emerged from Jianmen’s hands, joining into one in front of him, and struck one of the still intact flesh bags. Then before the tree could do anything, the golden lightning bolt jumped onto the other two flesh bags then finished its jump on the tree itself.
All three flesh bags exploded in golden and orange fire and light, whatever creatures that were incubating in them were annihilated without a chance, scattered pieces of charred flesh and bone and organs were all that were left of them.
The golden lightning left a huge burn hole on the trunk of the tree, and it caused the screaming to stop abruptly.
Meanwhile, Jianmen got a feeling that the Demon Suppression Sigils he buried in corners on the streets up above started getting triggered - apparently, although the horrible scream did not affect him, it reached the surface and affected the civilians there.
A loud screech came out from the burn hole on the tree, just as Jianmen conjured Real Fire to burn down the body parts of the creatures in the flesh bags and the pieces of the flesh bags themselves, a slim creature with six legs and two boney wings on its back leapt out of the hole and extended the claws on both of its front legs against Jianmen.
With a quick side step, Jianmen barely dodged the creature’s attack, yet he still took the time to observe this creature: the creature had the body like the hybrid of an insect and human; its body was covered with slime, tough hide and fine scale, underneath which were muscles and bones of extremely high density; this creature also had a cord like tail that connected to the inside of the tree, not unlike an umbilical cord; aside from the explosive body structure, the creature’s whole body was infused with the same kind of unclean and dark energy that Jianmen could almost smell in the air.
The creature almost fell into a pit of golden fire on the ground left by Jianmen, causing its front legs to catch fire. While it was rolling on the ground and trying to put out the fire, Jianmen extended his right hand and pointed at the cord connecting the creature and the tree with his middle and index fingers.
"Pop!” the cord was broken by a concentrated energy blast, densen and sticky dark green and yellow goo spilled out of the cord, and yet the drops did not fall on the ground, instead they just floated around.
Jianmen scooped a few drops of the goo from midair and quickly examined it. And what he saw in the karmic vision of the goo brought great trouble on his mind. This goo was practically a mixture of the unclean and dark energy that ran rampant in this area, and the life force of thousands of people on the surface above.
And the life force was collected through some connection to the city’s underground water system. Before he could read anymore from the goo, the creature already recovered from the fire and the pain from the broken cord. Its face, neck and chest cavity opened up from the middle like a giant horizontal mouth as it lunged towards Jianmen, exposing the long, sharp and light brown teeth from both sides of the cavities and the long, red, spikey and extendible tongues within its body.
Jianmen again swiftly stepped to the side, leaving the creature’s ferocious bit to land only on his afterimage. His finger attack landed on the creature’s spine before it could try to turn around, sending a powerful shock through its body to all of its extremities.
"Please… spare… me...” the creature finally started to beg after almost every bone in its body was shattered by the shock.
Ignoring the plea for its life, Jianmen placed a seal charm on the creature to ensure its inability to move, then he grabbed the creature’s back of its head and began forcefully reading its memory.
Buried inside the tree, there was a very small piece of rock that possessed an arcane energy. The creature fought off its fellow rats and took the rock for itself. The energy from the rock made it bigger, stronger and hungrier. It slowly became sentient and self aware, and it found out it was able to utilize the energy in its own ways - it could control, mutate and drain life force from other animals and even humans if it wanted to, and it could even deploy small deposits of the energy into media like blood, bodily floods and water to extend its reach and control.
At first, this creature was still lurking underground and hunting smaller prey as it could not withstand the burns from the sun. But then the tunnel was constructed and it took the chance to expand its territory through it, eventually taking over the tunnels and driving the humans out.
One day this creature broke a hole in one of the underground water pipes, and it started depositing its energy in the water pipes and let these deposits flow through the city, infecting hundreds of thousands and even millions of people and slowly draining life force from them.
From the freshness of this creature’s memory of taking over the tunnel and forming the incubating tree, this happened not too long ago.
"Please … spare … me...” this creature did not fight back even for a little bit on Jianmen’s action of reading its memory, fear had taken over it.
"Too bad. At this stage, the only thing I can do is mercy.” Jianmen shook his head as he sent his message.
Jianmen’s hand holding the creature’s head lit up in orange and golden, lightning bolts of similar color started shooting through the air and striking the walls around them. The creature’s body was twitching and flickering under the blinding light and powerful lightning bolts. Having spent enough time with the energy from the mysterious piece of rock, it knew what was happening to it but it could not resist for one bit.
Its existence was being wiped away - not just that its body was being destroyed or pulverized, its entire sole existence, the causes that put it in this place at this time, the effects it had on its surroundings, its controlled minions and the whole world, was being erased and removed.
Everything around them, including the goo, the blood, the shattered body parts and ashes scattered around the ground and even the air around them seemed to have caught on fire. The tree made of flesh and skin went up in flames, the cries and curses from all the faces did nothing to stop the fire.
Giving out a final screech, the creature finally stopped resisting and collapsed from within, its flesh, blood, internal organs and bones turned into ashes and the ashes then evaporated without any traces.
As the fires around him dissipated, the skin on Jianmen’s right arm started blistering, cracking up and bleeding. He coughed when he tried to take a deep breath to ease the pain, and he could taste the blood in his mouth, throat and lungs.
"Guess Karma’s a bitch.” he shook his head with a wry smile, meanwhile still trying his best to conjure up more of his Xuanli, preparing to cast spells on the small piece of rock floating in the air where the ugly and creepy tree once was.