Chapter 2169: Scraping by with a Narrow Escape
Xu Huo was immersed in a vast black ocean.
He didn't know when he had woken up, or if he had truly woken up at all. From the moment he became conscious, he was submerged in a dim, murky water. His items, instruments, and even his traits were unusable. He couldn't summon the Library Tower, and he couldn't sense his Space Ray or Time Power at all. The only thing he could see was a faint light shining down from above his head.
Everything around him was pitch black. Unable to breathe underwater, instinct drove him to struggle upward with all his might. But the water's surface, which seemed just a few meters away, remained perpetually out of reach. So, in the process of swimming upward, he drowned repeatedly. And every time he died and woke up again, he found that the distance to the surface had grown a little farther.
At first, he could still remember the number of times he had drowned. But as the line between waking and sleeping became blurred, his consciousness began to fade. He felt as if he were sinking into an abyss. The faint light on the water's surface changed from a single patch into a cluster, then from a cluster into a single thread, and finally, it was like a thin strand of silk penetrating the water, so weak that it could disappear at any moment with the flowing current.
In the process of drowning over and over, he clearly understood that he had fallen into Dou Shengnan's trap. The black light that had entered his eyes at the end was likely her Spiritual Power. It was similar to when the Shadow Personality had tampered with things in Zone 01. He still didn't understand how it was done, but he couldn't summon his Spiritual Realm, and he could only die, again and again.
This situation continued for an unknown amount of time. Finally, not a single ray of light could reach him from above, and he seemed to have sunk to the bottom. The realistic water pressure, accompanied by a suffocating sensation, assaulted him. He coughed violently, constantly expelling air, as if trying to squeeze out the last bit of oxygen from his body... Gradually, the frequency of his coughing decreased, and the trembling of his body subsided. The flowing water surrounded him from all sides, buoying his body, letting him float, and slowly tilting him toward the bottom...
Footsteps approached. It was a young man wearing a simple protective suit. He walked up to Xu Huo, carefully observed his appearance, then leaned in to check if he was still breathing. After waiting for a moment, he exclaimed in surprise, "He's actually alive! I thought you were a dead body."
"Aren't players supposed to be incredibly capable? Besides, they have tickets, so they'd come in style. How could they be this miserable? Look at him, he doesn't even have a decent set of clothes."
"Running into me is your lucky break. No one usually dares to come near this place."
"Thank you." Xu Huo finally managed to open his eyes and speak, and he could finally breathe normally again. "No wonder I kept drowning. It turns out my nose was blocked."
The feeling of pressure and suffocation gradually eased. With the help of an external force, Xu Huo's whole body felt light, and his mind cleared up a little. The light on the water's surface shone through again. He saw his Childhood Personality, still wearing pajamas, above him. In his hand, he held a black cube. The black cube carried the Childhood Personality, and the Childhood Personality carried him, slowly swimming toward the surface.
"We rarely have outsiders here. Could he be a player?"
Xu Huo knew that if he drowned one more time, he might never wake up again. But the exhaustion brought on by death numbed his body and mind, and instinct made him choose the easier path...
Suddenly, a small hand grabbed his, pulling him away from the bottom.
The Childhood Personality frowned at him, seemingly disapproving of his joke.
The poisonous mushrooms didn't taste good, but they were better than starving to death.
The Childhood Personality suddenly turned his head to look outside the mushroom patch, then vanished into the ground.
But beside him lay several withered flowers.
Although the few people verbally expressed disgust at the poisonous mushrooms on Xu Huo, they still helped. With several people taking turns carrying him, it was much easier, and they even had the energy to chat and speculate about Xu Huo's identity.
"Maybe he's a down-on-his-luck player," another person said. "I pulled out a few mushrooms. His clothes are different from what we wear here."
The moment he broke through the water's surface, Xu Huo was completely awake. In just one second, he understood his current situation.
That's right. He was now like a human-shaped protrusion growing out of a patch of wild fungi. The tenacious fungi were using him as a nutrient source. Any exposed skin was now covered in fungi. The root filaments and toxins of the fungi were devouring and destroying his muscles and meridians. If it weren't for the King Fungus still stubbornly growing inside his body, he would have either died from the fall or truly become fertilizer for the fungi.
The Childhood Personality appeared beside him, crouched by his head for a moment, then reached out and pulled the mushrooms off his eyelids, nostrils, and mouth.
Hearing this, the others stopped speculating about his identity and said angrily, "We don't even know what kind of poisonous mushrooms those are! What if spores fly out and poison us!"
"Surviving a disaster, landing in a remote place, and not landing headfirst—doesn't that luck deserve a smile?" Xu Huo said, then suddenly coughed, spitting up several mouthfuls of black blood. After his breathing had steadied, the Childhood Personality lifted the items on him, indicating that an item had saved him.
His passive defense items had been mostly stripped away by Dou Shengnan. He didn't know which one had activated to let him scrape by with his life.
He said this while poking Xu Huo. Finding him unresponsive, he seemed to have a sudden realization. "If I'd known you were alive, I would have taken you back. But you haven't eaten for days. Even a living person would starve to death."
The young man muttered to himself as he went to cut some branches to make a stretcher. He struggled to lift the person onto it and then dragged him out. Every few steps, he would stop to spray some insect and animal repellent. They were lucky; they didn't encounter any Mutant Animals along the way. When they reached the edge of the woods, the young man met a few acquaintances and asked them to help carry the person out.
The Childhood Personality used whatever was available, grabbing a handful of mushrooms and stuffing them into his mouth.
"Mushrooms have grown this big, so it's probably been a while," Xu Huo said while chewing. "Someone has been here."
This area was a jungle, full of all kinds of Mutant Plants. Probably because of the poison, Mutant Animals avoided this place, and there were no signs of human activity.
Was that something he had stolen from Dou Shengnan's Spiritual Realm? He didn't expect it to come in handy here...
"How long has it been?" Xu Huo had no feeling in his body and couldn't lift his head, so he had to ask the Childhood Personality to find him some food. Observing his own physical state, this weakness and powerlessness probably wasn't just due to injuries and the fungi.
The black vortex he had fallen into should have been a Space Teleportation Channel. As for where it had sent him, it was most likely random. His luck was both good and bad. The good part was that no one was around when he came out. The bad part was that he had broken several bones from the fall and was buried by various poisonous fungi.
"Don't we have protective suits?" the person pulling out the mushrooms said weakly.
"Even so, you can't just pull them out. Some mushrooms that grow on people need a special potion to remove. If you mess around and he dies, then all our effort carrying him here will be for nothing."
"Alright, alright... We're almost at the town. I'll go ahead and inform the town team so they can come and register him." Someone quickly ran off.