I awakened to be a menace at the start of the game, and my parents sent me to the cherry blossom vie

"Are you leaving now?"

Miller was taken aback.

"But it's nighttime now!"

"Danger doesn't care whether it's day or night."

Lin Fan interrupted him, turned around and patted Xiao Wu's body.

"Let's go, lead the way, let's see what's going on."

Little Wu understood his words, happily shook its tentacles, and its huge body floated up silently.

Under Miller's shocked and awe-inspiring gaze, the man and the beast walked out of the base gate without looking back and quickly disappeared into the thick night.

……

The night was as dark as ink.

Once outside the base's perimeter, the world was instantly swallowed by endless darkness and deathly silence.

Only a sliver of a crescent moon on the horizon casts a few insignificant, pale rays of light, barely outlining the contours of the earth.

"Hey, can't you fly a little slower? And can you wipe those tentacles clean? They're all sticky."

Lin Fan sat on one of the relatively flat tentacles of the little bird, his face feeling tight from the night wind.

The little bird was incredibly fast; its massive body glided silently dozens of meters above the ground, creating a gust of wind that made it impossible for people to open their eyes.

"Gurgle?"

Xiao Wu slowed down, and dozens of eyes looked at Lin Fan with concern, as if asking him what was wrong.

"Okay, that's the speed, no need to go too fast, we're just crashing into trees in the dark!"

Lin Fan pulled his coat tighter around himself, looking annoyed.

"Also, could you please stop eating that junk food? It makes you smell weird all over."

Just now, a mutated rat that was passing by, the size of a small calf, was caught by another tentacle of Xiao Wu before it could even let out a scream. It was then stuffed into the folds of Xiao Wu's body and went silent with a tooth-grinding chewing sound.

"Smack...smack..."

Upon hearing his words, Xiao Wu showed no remorse whatsoever; instead, he let out a satisfied, lingering sound.

I fucking...

Lin Fan felt a wave of nausea and vomiting when he saw a child who was beyond saving.

"It's disgusting."

He complained,

"You're supposed to be a dominant species now, so why are you eating like Pigsy eating ginseng fruit?"

"No, you can't even catch up to that Pigsy."

Little Wu seemed to understand that "Pigsy" wasn't a good word, and swayed its body in grievance.

The man and the beast bickered in the darkness as they flew rapidly toward the nuclear power plant.

The closer you get to that area, the stranger the surrounding environment becomes.

The earth turned black, and the air was filled with a faint, pungent smell, like a mixture of ozone and sulfur.

Finally, several hideous scars appeared on the distant horizon.

A huge crater, with remnants of the blood and flesh that were blown away still around it.

"arrive."

Lin Fan tensed up instantly. He patted Xiao Wu and said, "Go down, let's walk over."

Little Wu obediently lowered the height and placed him steadily on the ground.

Lin Fan jumped down, stretched his stiff body, and scanned his surroundings warily.

It's too quiet.

This place is still some distance from the Dark Forest, but the surroundings are already unusually quiet.

There were no insect chirps, no wind, and not even any signs of mutated creature activity.

The whole world seemed to have been muted.

"Something's not right." Lin Fan frowned.

There was fog when we were here before.

But at least he could still sense a bit of "life" in those misty fogs.

Now, however, this place is like a forbidden zone for life, eerily strange.

"Stay close to me."

Lin Fan dared not be careless in the slightest. His black scales covered his vital points as he stepped forward.

Seeing this, Xiao Wu quickly followed.

A massive body followed closely behind him, dozens of eyes scanning the surroundings warily, tentacles wriggling uneasily around its body, as if it too sensed the abnormality of the place.

And so, the two carefully made their way across the ravaged ground and ruins, heading deeper into the forest.

Soon the two crossed the battlefield and arrived at the edge of the forest.

Lin Fan stopped in his tracks, his pupils contracting slightly.

Even in the dark, his eyesight is excellent.

It was precisely because of his good eyesight that he discovered the forest before him was completely different from what he remembered.

What was originally just a dense forest has now undergone a bizarre transformation in the shape of its trees.

The trees were no longer just trees; their trunks looked as if they had been twisted into pretzels by an invisible hand, and their branches stretched outwards at an angle that defied the laws of physics, weaving together into a dense, impenetrable black net.

The ground in the woods was covered with a thick layer of sticky, dark green moss.

And the moss was even pulsating slightly, as if it were alive.

"Holy crap..."

Seeing this, Lin Fan couldn't help but mutter a curse under his breath.

"What's going on? Is it contaminated?"

He bent down in surprise, picked up a small twig from the side, and carefully poked at the moss on the ground.

"Sizzle—"

A slight corroding sound rang out in an instant, and a wisp of white smoke rose from where the wooden branch touched the moss, leaving a shallow burn mark.

"This is... a strong acid?"

Lin Fan's heart sank.

He never expected that this place would become even more dangerous than before.

He looked up into the depths of the forest, where the distortion of space was even more intense, and he could vaguely see a pure, all-consuming black spot.

Could it be that the portal has expanded?

He was startled by his own guess, and then he subconsciously looked at Xiao Wu:

"Have you noticed anything unusual?"

However, Xiao Wu paused for a moment upon hearing his words, as if pondering what they meant.

But he quickly waved his hand, conveying a sense of denial mixed with confusion.

It can only remember that it didn't look like this when it first entered the place.

Lin Fan was a bit annoyed by this; communicating with this thing was really difficult.

Then, he looked at the forest again.

The only thing he's certain of now is that this place was definitely not like this when he first came here.

Was it caused by that lumpy monster that came out?

Or is something else coming out of there?

"Let's go in and take a look."

After thinking it over and over, he couldn't figure it out. Now, all he could do was go in and see what was going on.

He took a deep breath, black scales covered his entire body, and then stepped into the eerie forest before him.

chi chi-

Accompanied by the sound of decay, the moss underfoot felt soft and spongy, like stepping on rotting flesh—a truly awful experience.

And at that instant, the strange plants around them seemed to have spotted their target and began to converge on them.

Little Wu followed closely behind, its massive body moving nimbly through the twisted trees, its aura causing the strange plants that tried to approach to retreat.

And so the two of them walked into the forest, one after the other.