Chapter 20: The Facial Mask

The secret passage was filled with a stifling, moldy stench that stung the nose uncomfortably.

Holding his breath, Zhang Wuxun dashed down the stone steps, taking three steps in one.

Towering into the clouds, the massive bronze tree, nearly ten meters in diameter, stood right before his eyes.

As soon as Zhang Wuxun approached, a dead corpse-beetle dropped squarely at his heels with a soft smack. Its limbs twitched a few times before it dissolved into a patch of mush.

Immediately afterward, a torrential rain of corpse-beetles, both large and small, pelted down from above with a rattling clatter.

Startled, Zhang Wuxun quickly retreated to a safe distance.

The temperature here was exceedingly high, and gusts of intense hot wind induced a dizzying, feverish sensation. Combined with the shrill, wretched screams echoing from above at intervals, it stirred up a mounting sense of unprovoked agitation and unease.

After the beetle rain paused for a moment, Zhang Wuxun deliberated before pulling a pair of rubber gloves and a pair of string gloves from his spatial storage. Wearing them in double layers for maximum protection—rubber inside and cotton string outside to increase friction—he grasped a branch extending from the bronze tree trunk and began to climb rapidly upward.

Scattered, smaller twigs grew along the gnarled and interlocking branches, forcing him to weave through them carefully to avoid tearing his clothes.

At first, the gaps between the branches were wide, making the climb relatively easy, but as he ascended, the foliage grew increasingly dense.

After climbing nearly a hundred meters, Zhang Wuxun caught a faint whiff of blood in the air, causing his brows to furrow slightly. Someone was injured?

Could it be Wu Xiexie!

Growing anxious, Zhang Wuxun accelerated his pace.

The smell of blood grew heavier. Zhang Wuxun noticed that within the thunder-cloud patterns engraved on the bronze tree, fresh blood was slowly trickling along the carved blood-guiding grooves.

He reached out a finger, touched a drop, and brought it to his nose. It was not just human blood; it was mixed with the blood of other scavenger animals, as human blood did not carry such a foul stench.

With a loud thud, a heavy object dropped onto a branch right beside Zhang Wuxun, shaking the bough beneath his feet. Looking closely, he saw it was a white-furred monkey, about half the size of an adult human. The immense momentum of its fall had impaled its chest on a sharp, upright twig protruding from the large branch, leaving it suspended there.

A thick, foul stench of blood instantly spread through the air. Blood dripped steadily down from the branch onto the boughs below, then flowed along the slightly tilted trunk directly into the blood-guiding grooves. In an instant, that section and the surrounding thunder-cloud patterns were stained red, the blood continuing to seep downward along the engravings.

Zhang Wuxun suddenly recalled the flame-patterned sacrificial altar in the center of the Candle Dragon's cave. Both were sacrificial devices designed to channel blood; he wondered if there was any connection between the bronze tree and that altar.

However, now was not the time to ponder such things. The priority was to find little naive Wu.

Continuing upward, Zhang Wuxun spotted another corpse of a white-furred monkey. The wounds on this monkey were clearly inflicted by Laoyang's battered blunderbuss, leaving a massive, ruined cavity in its belly while the surrounding fur was scorched pitch-black by gunpowder.

Unlike the previous one, the monkey's face on this corpse was covered by a ghastly, pale-white mask.

As Zhang Wuxun passed by, the mask suddenly shifted. From his angle, the features carved upon the mask seemed to wear a half-smile, terrifyingly eerie.

Simultaneously, eight dark, sinister arthropod legs extended from beneath the mask.