Chapter 2 Flat Peach

After my reminder, Fatty finally understood and asked me, “Shigong’s mole?”

“Doesn’t it look similar?” I poked my head out and looked at the building in the distance, “But weren’t these things made of stone? How could it fall from a tree?”

Fatty also looked at his phone in bewilderment. Noticing that his expression seemed a little embarrassed, I asked him what was wrong. “Maybe I really am getting too old,” he said. “I couldn’t remember.”

I thought his face didn’t look too good and wanted to ask what was wrong, but Fatty shook his head and told me not to worry about it. I immediately understood what was on his mind—maybe the things he was thinking of weren’t that important, and he didn’t want to discuss them now.

After waiting for a while, the forest grew quiet again and those stone/mole-like fruits didn’t change in any way.

It didn’t make much sense for all of us to stay here and keep an eye on things the whole time, so I said to Xiuxiu, “Fat Master and I will take the left and right sides. You stay here and continue to observe. Based on how the situation looks, we’ll improvise.”

What I meant by improvising was that if we could beat that thing, then we’d destroy it. If we couldn’t beat it, we’d run.

Xiuxiu nodded. Fatty and I pulled the bolts back on our guns and gave each other a meaningful look that seemed to say: If you die, wait on the road to the underworld. The other one will definitely arrive soon.

Then, with one going left and one going right, we leapt out from behind the rock we were hiding behind like we were leaping out of a war trench, and crept towards the ancient building. If we saw flames along the way, we would stamp them out with our feet.

The underground forest’s terrain was very complicated, with fallen leaves and rocks mixed together on the ground. The roots of these trees must have been coiled deep in the rock crevices below; otherwise, they couldn’t have grown so tall. It was common for tree roots to coil around rocks in the tropics, but we were at a high latitude, and the roots looked very deformed.

When I arrived in front of a tree, I involuntarily looked up and felt my scalp go numb—the trunk was covered in a dense layer of Shigong’s moles.

It didn’t look like the fruit was growing on the tree, but more like an insect had laid a dense pile of eggs all over the tree. Trees at high latitudes grew ramrod straight, but these sarcoma-like fruits were sticking to the trunks in dense clusters like eggs.

I noticed that Fatty was also looking—it seemed that we were both equally curious—so I tapped out a message in our secret code: “This thing looks like some kind of fungus.”

If it was a fungus and it could grow on rock, then it made sense that it could also grow on trees.

Fatty tapped out a response: “I don’t have a good feeling. Let’s stop this operation first.”

I felt tears in my eyes. Fatty had finally grown up and understood my cautiousness. But at the same time, I felt like something was wrong. The Fatty of the past would never make such a decision.

Even so, his decision was correct. I now highly suspected that these fungal sarcoma things were the eggs of some kind of creature. If we entered the ancient building and these eggs hatched (which was very likely), then we would end up trapped inside. And if whatever hatched from them was aggressive, there was a high chance we’d die.

As I was thinking this, I noticed that there was another fruit in one of the crevices off to the side. I focused all of my attention on it and found that half of the fruit had turned into a mass of black liquid, which had seeped into the stone like it had melted into it. The pattern formed after the black liquid had seeped into the stone was like the shadow of a small baby.

I immediately looked around, wanting to find a second fruit because the shadow of the baby was too strange to have formed by chance. I soon found a second one, and saw that this one was in exactly the same condition. The fruit had basically melted and seeped into the stone, but the shape that was formed from this one was that of a small man with a big head.

Just as I was puzzling over it, Wen Binghui’s voice suddenly came over my headset, “Gentlemen, you must listen to me very carefully right now. You need to go into the ancient building at once. Do not linger around those fruits for too long.”

“What’s wrong?” Fatty asked him.

“Have you heard the story of the Queen of the West’s Jade Lake?”⁽¹⁾

<Chapter 1><Table of Contents><Chapter 3>

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TN Notes:

(1) Jade Lake (or Yaochi, 瑶池) is the jade lake on Mount Kunlun where the Queen Mother of the West resides. The Queen of the West is a mother goddess in Chinese religion and mythology that has numerous titles, one of which is Golden Mother of the Jade Lake. She’s the ruler of western paradise and the goddess of immortality. Her garden supposedly has a special orchard of longevity peaches (also known as flat peaches) which would ripen once every three thousand years. She’d hand them out to guests, which would make them immortal. Seph has provided the Chinese wiki link for Jade Lake here.

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Want to give a big shoutout to Seph for volunteering to help with Ghost Banquet. Everyone show lots of love! (≧◡≦) ♡