Lu Shiyu lost all strength in one leg and slumped to the ground. Seeing her sit down so suddenly, Yan Hong hurriedly tried to pull her up.
“What are you doing sitting down?!”
“My—my leg is numb.”
Hearing such a ridiculous reason made Yan Hong anxious and frustrated. Just as she was about to haul Lu Shiyu up by force, she spotted a tiny vine wrapped around Lu Shiyu’s ankle.
“Damn,” Yan Hong cursed under her breath. she swung her blade and severed the inconspicuous vine. “Can you stand?”
Lu Shiyu pinched her leg; it was completely paralyzed.
“I can’t. I can’t get any strength into it.”
Yan Hong tossed her a dagger for self-defense and grit her teeth to face the surrounding vines alone, unable to move her position because Lu Shiyu was immobilized.
“Crap! There’s no end to them!” Shao Xingyang was also nearing his limit.
On the other side, Tang Zeyu was further away. The vines hadn’t reached him yet, so he could clearly see that the other two were fighting a losing battle; no matter how fast they cut, they would eventually be overwhelmed.
Lu Shiyu picked up the dagger and did her best to cut the thin vines creeping along the ground. One vine suddenly leaped from the earth toward her face. Lu Shiyu caught it and deftly sliced it through with the dagger, but she was forced to release her grip the very next second.
She could clearly feel a subtle sensation traveling from her palm the moment she grabbed the vine. Immediately after, her hand began to go numb, the symptoms identical to those in her leg.
Realizing the gravity of the situation, Lu Shiyu shouted, “Don’t let these vines touch you!”
But it was too late. On the other side, Shao Xingyang and Chen Yunliang, in their desperation to break through the encirclement, had come into close contact with the vines. The result was predictable: both were paralyzed and lost their strength, collapsing to the ground. They could do nothing as the vines swarmed over them. Eventually, the vines bound them and began slowly dragging them toward the flowers in the canopy.
Seeing their situation, Tang Zeyu guessed what happened upon contact with the vines. He tucked his pant legs into his boots, tucked his shirt into his pants, and put on a hood and gloves, wrapping his entire body tightly so that not an inch of skin was exposed.
“Captain…” Shao Xingyang’s call was weak. He and Chen Yunliang had already been dragged to the base of a tree. If they weren’t rescued soon, they would likely become flower fertilizer.
Lu Shiyu had one hand and one leg paralyzed, and Yan Hong alone was clearly struggling to repel the onslaught of vines. Just as Yan Hong was about to be entangled, the previously frantic, twisting vines suddenly lost their vitality, falling limp to the ground and ceasing all movement.
Lu Shiyu stared at the suddenly dormant vines in a daze. Sensing something, she searched for Tang Zeyu and finally found him at the base of a tree, completely bundled up.
Tang Zeyu stood there, the vine in front of him severed by his blade. But why did this one cut cause all the vines to lose their mobility?
Through careful observation, Lu Shiyu finally realized that the part Tang Zeyu had cut was the connection between the main body and the roots. By severing it at the base, he had taken out the entire plant at once.
“Are you okay?”
When Tang Zeyu turned around, Lu Shiyu couldn’t help but laugh. The hood Tang Zeyu wore was a full-face one, exposing only his mouth and eyes; he looked exactly like a bank robber.
Tang Zeyu immediately pulled off the hood. “I had no choice. We only prepared this style of headgear.”
“Never mind that for now…” Shao Xingyang, lying on the ground, issued a final, feeble protest. “Fish me out first…”
Tang Zeyu gave Yan Hong a pair of gloves, and the two worked together to pull Shao Xingyang and Chen Yunliang out from under the vines. As for Lu Shiyu, having lost the use of one leg and one hand, she could only sit in the clearing and wait for the paralysis to wear off.
Yan Hong flipped Shao Xingyang over so he was lying face up, preventing him from getting a mouthful of dirt. Suddenly, she noticed red welts on his neck.
“Is the strength of these vines really that great?” Yan Hong touched them out of curiosity and found small, short hairs stuck to her glove.
“The strength isn’t that bad, but it’s too uncomfortable,” Shao Xingyang coughed twice before catching his breath. “Everywhere the vines touched feels numb and itchy. Ugh, scratch it for me, it’s so itchy!”
“Is it really that serious…”
Reluctant as she sounded, Yan Hong out of a sense of humanity chose to help Shao Xingyang scratch the areas that weren’t too private. Tang Zeyu looked at Lu Shiyu sitting nearby; she was also starting to feel an itch, though it wasn’t severe—about the level of a normal mosquito bite.
“Does it itch badly?”
“A little, but I can endure it,” Lu Shiyu said, trying her best to restrain the urge to scratch. “It’ll be more trouble if I break the skin.”
On the other side, Chen Yunliang lay looking at the sky and sighed.
“Is anyone going to look after me?”
Unable to walk or carry things, Lu Shiyu could only sit on the ground and wait for her body to metabolize the toxins. Bored, she began to observe the plant that had attacked them. From what she could see, although several nearby trees had those giant flowers, they all belonged to the same plant. They had all died after Tang Zeyu cut the root. Perhaps they would grow back next year, but there was no telling how long it would take to reach this size again.
Lu Shiyu noticed that some of the flowers were in the form of buds, whereas the one that tried to turn them into fertilizer had been fully bloomed.
Were these unbloomed buds simply yet to flower, or was something hidden inside them?
“Tang… Tang Zeyu,” Lu Shiyu pointed to the buds hanging from the trees. “Can you help me get those flowers down?”
Tang Zeyu looked up at the flowers and, without much hesitation, climbed the tree and tossed them down. Picking one wasn’t enough; he climbed several trees in succession. His movements were agile; it took him only a few seconds to reach the branches as if it required no effort at all. He was extremely fast, and soon he had almost picked them all.
“That’s enough, that’s enough! No need to pick any more.”
Lu Shiyu was worried that picking too many would affect the local ecology, so she hurriedly called for Tang Zeyu, who was immersed in his flower-picking, to stop. Tang Zeyu then reluctantly climbed down.
Tang Zeyu gathered the flowers from the ground and brought them to Lu Shiyu in his arms. He couldn’t help but ask out of curiosity, “What do you want these flowers for?”
“I just want to confirm a theory.”
Lu Shiyu first picked up a bloomed flower. Although it looked similar to a Rafflesia, luckily it didn’t have any strange smell; it was just that the patterns on it were incredibly ugly, and the center was covered in a layer of mucus.
Lu Shiyu picked up a bud. Since she could only use one hand, she weighed them individually; clearly, the bud was much heavier.
She wanted to cut the bud open, but with only one hand, the bud kept rolling around, making it difficult to start. Tang Zeyu stepped in to hold the rolling bud steady so she could cut it.
The dagger sank into the bud with a sensation similar to cutting into a cabbage. However, when Lu Shiyu tried to push the blade deeper, she met significant resistance. She didn’t know what it was, so she carefully bypassed the object and sliced the bud open from the center. Because the knife was too short and the bud too large, it was like cutting a watermelon with a paring knife. In the end, Tang Zeyu had to use his bare hands to pry it apart to completely separate the bud.
The contents of the bud caught them both by surprise. Inside was a curled-up avian creature, resembling both a hawk and a chicken. Most peculiar of all was that this creature’s tail was actually a snake’s tail. Two creatures that would be natural enemies in the wild had actually merged into one; biological mutation truly defied all logic.
“Why is there a chicken inside?” Lu Shiyu pulled the snake-tailed chicken out of the bud. “Don’t tell me chickens grow out of flowers?”
“I don’t think so,” Tang Zeyu interrupted her wild guess. “It looks more like it was preyed upon by this flower. It just hadn’t been digested yet.”
Lu Shiyu checked the chicken’s breathing and confirmed it was still alive, though its breath was very faint.
To verify their theory, the two proceeded to cut open several other buds. Without exception, there was something inside each one. The difference was that the contents varied, and most had already been largely digested, leaving only skeletons with some residual flesh.
“So that’s how it processes them,” Lu Shiyu marveled at the wonder of mutated creatures. “I thought the vines would just keep the creature bound until it died, and the corpse would fall to the ground to be decomposed into nutrients for the soil to be absorbed by the plant. It turns out it’s stuffed directly into the flowers for digestion. This method is certainly much more efficient.”
The paralysis from the vines began to fade. With Tang Zeyu’s support, Lu Shiyu tried to stand up and confirmed she could move normally.
The other three also walked over. Because Shao Xingyang and Chen Yunliang had been in close contact with the vines, they were still covered in a lot of fuzz. Although the paralyzing effect was gone, it still caused an unbearable itch.
Seeing that none of them were in top shape, Tang Zeyu chose to pause for a rest until they had recovered.
Lu Shiyu boiled a pot of hot water, soaked a towel, and wrung it out. She had Shao Xingyang and Chen Yunliang wipe their bodies with the damp towel. The fuzz was naturally cleaned away, and the two immediately felt refreshed.
“That’s better. Finally, it doesn’t itch.”
Shao Xingyang felt completely relaxed, but his stomach betrayed him with a loud growl.
“Uh, I’m hungry,” Shao Xingyang looked expectantly at Lu Shiyu. “There should be some rabbit meat left, right? Can we eat now?”
“It’s not early anymore. Why don’t we just make dinner now?”
After obtaining Tang Zeyu’s consent, Lu Shiyu took out her cooking utensils and began preparing the meal, showing no intention of going out to look for ingredients.
Shao Xingyang peered over her shoulder to watch her movements.
“Lu Shiyu, what are we having for dinner?” Shao Xingyang looked at the vines covering the ground. “We aren’t going to eat those, are we?”
“No, we aren’t eating that,” Lu Shiyu smiled at Shao Xingyang. “We’re eating this.”
With that, Lu Shiyu held up the snake-tailed chicken. Shao Xingyang’s eyes instantly widened. “A chicken? Where did you get that? I didn’t notice any chickens nearby.”
Lu Shiyu looked away guiltily. “Haha, don’t worry about where it came from for now. Either way, the taste won’t be bad.”
The steps for plucking a chicken were already etched in Lu Shiyu’s mind, and she performed them with practiced ease. She first sharpened her knife to ensure it was keen. The water needed to be boiled in advance; because the water for scalding feathers shouldn’t be too hot, she had to let it cool slightly after boiling. Then came the slaughter. She grabbed the snake-tailed chicken’s head and pulled it back to expose the neck for bleeding. Once the blood was drained, she could begin plucking.
Lu Shiyu’s hands moved with extreme speed, plucking the feathers of the snake-tailed chicken from its feet to its head. Her clean and efficient movements left the others watching in amazement. In the blink of an eye, the chicken went from being fluffy to completely bare, with feathers scattered all over the ground.
Watching the snake-tailed chicken turn into a naked bird in just a few minutes, Shao Xingyang remarked, “The chicken hasn’t even realized what happened and it’s already in the underworld.”