My portable grandfather refreshes every week

Chapter 151 Another "Old Green" in Hell

Xue Dinglu looked up and saw many stones, finished metal frames, boxes of special materials, and all sorts of blood-stained things that he couldn't understand.

They seemed to want to unload everything from the two wooden carts, but Xue Dinglu stopped them, telling them to paddle the carts ahead while he followed.

The two of them paddled the wooden cart like this, giving off a feeling similar to when Xue Dinglu was a child and his bicycle chain broke, forcing him to paddle the cart for several kilometers to get it repaired.

After driving for a short while, Xue Dinglu saw a group of reinforced concrete buildings in the distance.

Xue Law: “???”

Where on earth has he come to? Spears with circuit boards stuck in them, primitive people wearing tribal animal skins, and reinforced concrete buildings—what kind of society is this?

And just by listening to the man's muttering to himself, he understood that the people of this world seemed to be still in the era of slavery, yet they used information-age circuit boards as decorations for spears and lived in industrial-age buildings.

In the distant farmland, he could see all sorts of strange plants that looked like some kind of fungus, as well as countless normal plants that barely resembled "trees".

Thank goodness, no human heads have grown on this tree.

The hellish drawing that drained his sanity had traumatized him considerably, and he hadn't recovered yet. He even suspected that he might dream about that disgusting scene again when he returned to Earth a day later.

Furthermore, the closer you get to this spot, the less mushroom carpet seems to grow on the ground, until there is almost no mushroom carpet left. Stepping on the soil, Xue's Law truly has a rare feeling of being grounded.

Led by them, the group walked out of the fungal carpet area, and then Xue Dinglu felt as if he was stepping on a concrete road. The broken concrete road was full of potholes, as if it had not been repaired for hundreds of years. Walking on it was not as good as walking on a dirt road.

In the distance, Xue's Law could even see "telephone poles"—yes, telephone poles, with broken streetlights and all the wires severed.

There was a similar pole at the previous location, but back then, the place where the streetlights were hanging had a human head hanging there, and it kept repeating the same words to Xue Luding, so he didn't recognize that this thing was actually a telephone pole.

Xue's Law was filled with an increasingly absurd and bizarre feeling. In the distance was an endless world covered with fungal carpet, which secreted countless blood-like liquids. Countless human heads could move and merge freely on the fungal carpet.

This resulted in people appearing wherever there was a fungal carpet. For a moment, he felt as if he had entered the world of Junji Ito, or as if the whole world had been swallowed up by Tomie, and he was now inside Tomie's body.

In this "tribe," however, life is peaceful and serene. Large-scale "farms" for cultivating fungi grow alongside normal trees, some of which have turned black. People can be seen coughing as they seem to be cleaning up other mycelia in the mushroom-covered fields.

"How many people are there here?" Xue Luding looked at the concrete jungle in the distance. He even felt that the wide-angle distortion of the world when looking into the distance was very unreal, and then asked.

“Great Lord of Light, there are only a little over a thousand of us left in the human kingdom. Even this year, we still don’t have enough food. Our mushrooms and land have been contaminated by monsters. The fungal carpets in our fields are increasing, and the harvest is decreasing. If this continues, hundreds more people will starve to death this year…” The man answered Xue’s question and then began to complain.

"So what do you do?" Xue asked.

"We're going to that grotesque land to search for the treasures left behind by the ancient gods. If we're lucky, like us, we might bring back quite a few good things. If we're unlucky, like my son, he'll be dragged away by the monsters and never come back." The man's expression was very sad, but he continued to explain.
"In this era, the king issued a treasure decree, encouraging people to go out and search for treasure, but every day many people don't return; they are all dragged away by monsters..."

The man looked at the twisted area covered with fungal carpet behind him, and then at Xue Luding, who was completely different from them and his group of people who seemed to be wallowing in a cesspool.

Their bodies were clean and tidy, they wore silk that they couldn't understand, and their faces, which were clearly not those of ordinary people, and their impeccably clean hair and face, made these people, who seemed to have grown up in a cesspool, feel ashamed and only feel a sense of worship.

Even with such a divine king descending to earth, he was unable to bring back his son who had been taken away.

Xue Dinglu didn't notice the sadness on the man's face as he paddled the wooden cart; he seemed to understand the king's actions.

There wasn't enough food to feed everyone, so the surplus was sent to their deaths. If they could bring back something like metal frames, stones, or some other strange object, then it wasn't a loss.

Therefore, looking at this social structure with only a little over a thousand people, they live in this only "pure land" and rely on growing a kind of mushroom that can synthesize starch as their staple food. The cement streets are full of potholes, and the wires on the utility poles are corroded to the point that they look like vines.

Xue and Old Green looked at this primitive society, which seemed to be built on the ruins of modern civilization, as if they were looking at a distorted and absurd dream.

In the distance, human heads still darted about on the boundless carpet of fungi, a stark contrast to this primitive tribe.

And those grotesque creatures have their own language; they keep saying strange things like "I feel great" and "I've come to save you."

But when it comes to their intelligence, they always repeat the same two sentences, like a programmed parrot that can only say no more than ten different things. Xue Lude, on the other hand, was utterly astonished when he saw that monstrous creature rip a person's head off and stab it into its own chest, and the head actually survive and was instantly assimilated. This kind of operation had shocked him for three hundred years.

"We've arrived, Lord of Light." The man's wooden cart slowly came to a stop at the entrance of a wooden stronghold. It was obvious that the wooden stronghold was built later, while the reinforced concrete buildings inside were products of a previous civilization.

At the entrance to the mountain stronghold, there were several guards carrying long guns. Their guns seemed to be wrapped with some kind of plastic strips, not like they were for stabbing people, but more like they were for laughs. What puzzled Xue Luding even more was that they were wearing clothes that looked like synthetic fibers. Although there were very few, only the underwear, it was still much better than the primitive father and daughter who went out wearing only a few pieces of leather.

I watched as the father and daughter parked their cart some distance away, then carried the trash they had collected to talk to the guard at the gate.

Xue's Law then turned to old Green and asked, "Old man, what do you think?"

After arriving in this world, Old Green frantically plucked his beard. This bizarre world was far too distorted for him, a magician from a fairy tale world. Even the "hell" he knew was not as terrifying as this place.

But setting aside those bizarre creatures, looking at the environment of this tribe, he could only say: "This should be a civilization at a similar level to your world, but they were wiped out. I don't know if it was done by those creatures, and then another group of people took over this place and became the natives."

Old Green pondered again: "But this new batch is just a bunch of primitive people who know nothing. They may not have inherited any of the knowledge and information of the original civilization. They worship everything from the original civilization as 'ancient gods'."

Xue Dinglu nodded, which was roughly what he had thought, but he added, "I can see wide-angle distortion in this world from a distance with the naked eye, but I've never experienced this before. The only explanation is that this isn't wide-angle distortion, but rather that the world itself is extremely small, so small that the naked eye can discern that the world is round..."

Xue's Law continued to gaze into the distance, at the distorted landscape of the original.

“However, the human body automatically perceives the ground it is standing on as ‘flat,’ so the naked eye will have the illusion of wide-angle distortion. And so, let me calculate…” Xue Dinglu took out his phone and started typing on the calculator, and then said, “The circumference of this planet is estimated to be less than 1000 kilometers.”

In comparison, the circumference of Earth is 4 kilometers, and the circumference of the Moon is 1 kilometers. Standing on these planets, one would not experience any wide-angle distortion visible to the naked eye.

In other words, this planet is estimated to be only one-thousandth the size of the moon, and its total surface area may not even be as large as Australia.

However, he sensed that the gravity of this planet was about 1.6 times that of Earth. Such a small planet with such high gravity, he didn't know how the water cycle worked on this planet, or whether there were any seas.

Everything was so strange; the planet's physical parameters seemed as illogical as if an employee had just randomly filled them in before leaving get off work.

The guards quickly arrived at Xue Luding's side. Just by looking at Xue Luding's face, which looked like a god descending to earth, and his impeccably clean clothes, they believed the father and daughter's words without even seeing Xue Luding emitting holy light, and were about to kneel down on the spot.

"No, no, stop with your abstract kowtows in a dozen different poses. Take me to your king and tell him that a god has come to inspect this land," Xue Dinglu said immediately.

He understood that reasoning with these primitive people was ineffective, but pretending to be a charlatan worked particularly well for them. If Xue Luding had still held onto the values ​​he had from Earth and tried to persuade them in a gentle and persuasive manner, the guards would probably have been kowtowing in various ways for more than ten minutes without stopping.

Sure enough, upon hearing the phrase "divine inspection," they immediately wasted no time and quickly said, "I will take you to see old King Green right away."

"Huh?" Xue Law and Old Green were both taken aback.

"Is the translation module broken?" Xue Daolu patted the Great Sage's panel, but no matter how he patted it, the translation was always "Old Green".

“It might just be a coincidence of names. My name is quite common, after all, the pronunciation is too ordinary,” Old Green said as the guards led them to a house that resembled a small villa.

"King Green, the Lord of Light has come to inspect the mortal realm," the guard announced directly.

This scene doesn't look like a soldier speaking to a king; it looks more like a village boy knocking on the village chief's door.

There are over a thousand people in total; to be honest, it's no different from a village.

The door creaked open, and a young girl knelt timidly on the ground. Xue Lude didn't bother to correct their bizarre etiquette.

The room was spotless, but when Xue Dinglu walked in, he was horrified to see the "Old Green" King opposite him, and his pupils constricted.

Not only Xue Dinglu, but also the old mage Green beside him was stunned, because the person opposite him looked exactly like him! Except for being much older, they were completely cut from the same mold!

　The Hell Chapter, featuring a fairytale magician, stirs up a world so twisted it resembles a work by Junji Ito.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)