Shrouded Seascape

Chapter 303. The Figure inside the Sphere

The sound of rustling leaves echoed incessantly in the forest. Charles led his crew into the forest with a group of mice up ahead of them as their vanguard.

Charles' expression was tinged with shock and excitement. He was anticipating something, and he knew that he would soon receive his answer. Charles and his crew emerged from a bush to find a huge metal construct before them.

The metal construct was a submarine. More specifically, it was an unfinished submarine. Overgrown with weeds and green vines, it became clear that the advanced technological product would never be completed, nor would it see the light of day outside.

Someone was trapped here, and they wanted to use this submarine to escape! Charles came to a conclusion immediately. Are they the Whitebeasts' controller? But Charles quickly dismissed the idea. If he were the marooned individual, he would have escaped long ago with the Whitebeasts' help.

"Mr. Charles, shall we go and take a look?" the blue Lily said while tugging on Charles' pants.

"Get your friends to spread out and act as our sentries so that we won't get ambushed by anything hiding in the shadows. Everyone, keep your guard up," Charles ordered.

There was no way an individual could have built an entire submarine by themselves. In other words, there had to have been multiple people here. Of course, their affiliation remained questionable, but it was highly likely that they were from the Foundation.

With the flesh revolver in hand, Charles walked into the submarine, looking around vigilantly for any signs of life.

The metal construct had long been abandoned, and it quickly became apparent to Charles that it was way ahead of the Subterranean Seascape's level of technology. Charles deduced that it was a nuclear submarine due to the nuclear warning signs.

Are there factories here? No, there's no way they could have built such a huge submarine, even with enough factories.

The ship designers of Albion Isles even told me that building a safe submarine would require an entire industrial chain, not to mention a nuclear submarine, Charles thought to himself. He then turned around to look at the forest around them. Is this place similar to DE1344? Perhaps there's human civilization beyond the forest we are in?

Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!

Charles was dragged out of his train of thought by the urgent cries of mice.

"Mr. Charles! They found enemies!" Lily shouted.

"Follow me!" Charles kicked off against the ground and sprinted toward where the sound had come from. Soon, they saw what the mice had been relentlessly attacking, and the figure under the mice's assault slapped the mice away, sending them rolling on the ground.

The rats receded like a tide, allowing Charles to take a good look at the figure. The figure was humanoid, but he found it hard to call it human.

The figure's swollen body was riddled with tumors of varying sizes. Its white ribs were twisted outward, and green pus oozed out of the tumors that the mice had bitten off.

The most terrifying feature of the figure was its mouth. The tumors had displaced its lower teeth, and its jaw had been replaced by a rotting ulcer on top of the mangled flesh.

Charles felt a bout of nausea at the disgusting appearance of the entity before him. He raised his flesh revolver and pointed it at the figure before saying, "Can you understand human speech? Speak!"

"Grrr, grrr!" Its mouth chattered as it growled, and it didn't answer. It staggered away, seemingly trying its best to escape Charles. However, a sharp anchor hook pierced it and pinned it to a nearby tree trunk that was covered in green moss.

Charles called over Tobba and asked if the hideous-looking figure was a relic. If it were a relic contained by the Foundation, perhaps Tobba could communicate with it.

However, Tobba shook his head vigorously and said, "No, no, no! I don't know this guy at all. There's no way I could have forgotten him as well. He's so ugly that I definitely won't forget him!"

Charles frowned while looking down at the squirming figure on the ground. This place was getting stranger and stranger by the minute. Everything in this forest so far had been beyond Charles' understanding.

His instinct was sounding the warning sirens to him that the forest was getting more and more dangerous by the minute, so Charles made up his mind—he'd pick up the pace and leave this damned place once he had discovered 319.

Having made up his mind, Charles tugged at the bloodied anchor hook with his prosthetic arm to retract it. The deformed humanoid monster was free once more, and it stood up before curling up once more. Eventually, it stumbled and started running away.

"Let's follow it and see where it goes," Charles said. He led his crew members and trailed the deformed monster from afar. Their guard was raised high up, and they knew that they couldn't afford to let their guard down here.

They had zero information about this place, after all. And that monster was their only clue.

Along the way, Charles would mark the nearby trees to make sure that they hadn't been going in circles. Fortunately, when he examined the trees earlier, they were all ordinary species.

Time passed, and the deformed monster gradually slowed down. The blood dripping onto the soil from its wound showed that it was about to die of blood loss.

When the monster collapsed, buildings clustered like tree houses suddenly appeared in front of everyone. Every single house was suspended among the trees in the forest, like that in the world of a magical fantasy story.

The change of scenery was so sudden that it mesmerized everyone. Despite the presence of vines encroaching on the buildings like the submarine, there was a key difference. Charles saw trails between the buildings, which meant that there were people living here!

Charles led his crew slowly into the town.

Bang!

A door suddenly opened by itself in the distance. A black shadow flashed past the open door from the inside before disappearing completely. It was an eerie sight sure to send shivers down anyone's spine, but Charles saw it as an opportunity.

He rushed toward the open door, but he found no one.

However, Charles still profited upon discovering that the building's walls were covered with dense writing in the language of the Subterranean Seascape. Charles made a sidelong glance outside before reading the first passage of the wall diary.

We've been in Ecological Zone 4 for eight months now. We don't know what calamity had annihilated the Foundation, but we all know one thing for sure—the crisis was finally over. We're going up soon.

Charles' heart sank. The people here weren't members of the Foundation? Who were they, then? Charles became impatient for answers, but he held his impatience in and continued reading.

The outside world has been completely submerged by seawater. It was a good thing that we decided to go down together with those projects. It was all thanks to their assistance that we had food and supplies to sustain us for a while.

It's actually funny now that I think about it. The test subjects were just lowly little guinea pigs we've been using for our experiments, but to think that we would rely on their charity one day for us to survive?

177 is a great person. He helped us get along with those projects. We used the projects to generate food and water. 177 even helped us build our submarine, which is what's going to bring us away from here.

He said something weird to me, though. He said that I should carve my diary on the wall, saying that my diary would one day become useful to someone wanting to understand the situation here. Of course, I really don't know what or who he meant by that.

177?! Isn't that Tobba's project ID?! Charles looked up and cast a dumbfounded gaze at Tobba next to him. However, Tobba himself seemed as shocked as him, but he was staring at the door rather than at the wall diary.

Charles followed Tobba's gaze and was stupefied to see a variety of humanoid monsters made out of flesh. At some unknown point in time, they had converged here and had blocked the exit.

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