Chapter 112.2
Xiao Tangqiu couldn’t help but freeze, this weird tree made a scream like a human, and it was even a woman’s voice…
Just as he was shocked, the crisscrossed branches of this strange tree suddenly grew violently and the barbed branches stretched towards him.
Tang Mianmian immediately charged forward and cut off the branches with a knife. The moment the branches broke, bloodlike sap spurted out.
Xiao Tangqiu frowned, “…It’s blood!”
He immediately smelled the strong smell of rust in the air. The sap wasn’t like blood, it was blood!
“f.u.c.k, what is it!?” Tang Mianmian also smelled the b.l.o.o.d.y scent, and suddenly felt unwell, “Is this a tree or a person?”
Xiao Tangqiu, “…Maybe it’s a tree person.”
Tang Mianmian’s mouth twitched, “Maybe it’s Zhou Shuren?”
On the other side, Duan Hongzhen and Xue Junli joined forces and quickly rescued the person who was half-swallowed by the tree.
Fortunately, they were saved in time and the guy only lost an arm. The wound was b.l.o.o.d.y, but the break was very neat, looking like it was bitten off.
They turned the man over to look at him and were shocked. The guy whose arm was eaten by a tree was the middle-aged man who had fainted on them earlier!
The middle-aged man was still conscious, and when he saw Xiao Tangqiu’s group he trembled with fear.
Duan Hongzhen raised his eyebrows, “You’re here right in time, we happen to have a lot of questions to ask you.”
The middle-aged man shivered harder, “I… I don’t know anything…”
Duan Hongzhen gave a cold laugh.
Meanwhile, Xiao Tangqiu and Tang Mianmian teamed up to cut down countless attacking branches. The strange tree originally had spa.r.s.e leaves, and it turned into a bare tree in a blink of an eye.
Whenever they cut a branch or leaf, endless blood spewed from the break.
Seeing that the ground was full of branches and leaves, the middle-aged man finally couldn’t help but cry out tremblingly, “Stop! Don’t!”
“Why?”
Xiao Tangqiu moved his mouth, but the movement of his hands did not stop. Branches and leaves continued to fall all over the ground.
The middle-aged man struggled to get up and he used his body to block between Xiao Tangqiu’s group and the strange tree. He stretched out his arms and shouted with all his strength, “Don’t hurt it! Please don’t hurt it!”
Xiao Tangqiu stopped and said coldly, “Are you crazy? It almost killed you just now!”
“Don’t hurt it!”
The middle-aged man repeated hysterically, “Don’t hurt it! Don’t hurt it!”
Xiao Tangqiu asked coldly, “Why?”
“Becausek2026; becausek2026;” The middle-aged man hesitated for a long time before speaking with difficulty, “This is my wifek2026;”
Xiao Tangqiu raised his eyebrows. Although he had already expected the answer, he still found it hard to believe when he heard the middle-aged man admit it himselfk2026; A living person turned into a tree?!
At this moment, he suddenly felt the ground under his feet collapse. Then, something grabbed his ankle and dragged him deep underground!
Tang Mianmian watched as Xiao Tangqiu vanished into the ground in an instant, dragged by a thick protruding root.
The newbie was taken aback and screamed, “Ah!”
Tang Mianmian immediately glared at the middle-aged man, “…You did this on purpose?”
The middle-aged man still looked worried and uneasy, “Don’t hurt my wife…”
“This is a trap!” Tang Mianmian realized.
In the next moment, a thick root also shot out from under his feet and it dragged him to the depths of the earth!
Duan Hongzhen and Xue Junli glanced at each other. But before they could act, thick tree roots also shot out from under their feet.
Next were Yu Fuling and Sai Lulu. In a blink of an eye, there was only the newbie left.
The newbie looked around in disbelief, making sure that he was really the only one left.
He took a step back subconsciously and heard the middle-aged man tremblingly repeat, “Don’t hurt my wife… She is just pregnant… She is hungry…
“She’s just hungry… She’s pregnant… I’m sorry…”
The middle-aged man repeated it over and over again and again, and finally, he looked at the newbie shakily, “I’m sorry… But for my child…”
The newbie felt cold all over. Just when he was about to turn and run away, the strange tree with bare branches suddenly let out a blood-curdling scream.
“Ahhhh!”
He was startled and instinctively took a step back, and in the next second, a ton of blood out of nowhere suddenly soaked the ground.
The middle-aged man widened his eyes, “Wife! Wife!”
The strange tree continued its extremely sharp screams. At this moment, Xiao Tangqiu re-emerged from the ground. He was covered in mud and blood, and a large section of chopped off root was in his right hand.
The middle-aged man cried out in disbelief, “That’s impossible!”
Then, the others who were dragged deep underground also crawled out one by one, Tang Mianmian spat out a mouthful of mud, and threw a chunk of root on the ground, “What the h.e.l.l! Making me eat dirt!”
“No! No!” The middle-aged man rushed over and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the broken roots with his remaining hand. The branches were bleeding as they wriggled and struggled as if they really had life. “Wife! Wife!”
Xiao Tangqiu patted the dirt on his body, turned around, and reconsidered the strange tree. After they had cut off a dozen roots, the strange tree finally turned tamer, even a little withered.
“Tell me everything honestly,” he stepped forward and aimed the crossbow against the middle-aged man’s throat again, threatening coldly, “Don’t pretend to faint or I will directly shoot. First question, is this tree really your wife?”
The middle-aged man held the tree roots with his remaining hand and looked at Xiao Tangqiu with grief. But under Xiao Tangqiu’s threat, he still responded tremblingly, “My wife is just hungry… She hasn’t eaten in a long time… and she is pregnant…”
Xiao Tangqiu looked back. As expected, the trunk of this particular tree really seemed to bulge out a bit more than others… But the problem was that this was a tree! Could a tree give birth to a child like a human?
No! Strictly speaking, this should be… a tree person?
“Why is your wife a tree?” Xiao Tangqiu frowned and asked, “Aren’t you from outside the island? What happened after you came to the island?”
Seeing the middle-aged man holding the tree roots and not speaking, Xiao Tangqiu sneered and threatened, “Talk, or I’ll chop down all the remaining roots.”
The middle-aged man shuddered violently before he confessed.
It turned out that this guy and his wife really experienced a shipwreck, but they didn’t drift to this island from the sea.
“…Our ship encountered a tsunami, the ship capsized, and my wife and I both fell into the sea,” the middle-aged man spoke with a numb expression, “I thought I was going to drown, but suddenly, I appeared on this island.”
“Oh? Suddenly appeared on the beach?” Xiao Tangqiu asked.
“No, in the forest in the middle of the island. To be precise, it was under the Sacred Tree.” As soon as the Sacred Tree was mentioned, the middle-aged man began to show the expression of pious worship. “My wife and I just woke up under the Sacred Tree. It was the Sacred Tree that saved us.”
Xiao Tangqiu frowned, “And then?”
The middle-aged man continued with that pious expression. Then they met the island’s aboriginal people, but those people were not exactly aboriginals either. They were also survivors of various shipwrecks and plane crashes. After they survived the disaster, they all appeared under the Sacred Tree as soon as they opened their eyes.
They believed that it was the Sacred Tree that saved them, and their att.i.tude towards the Sacred Tree was very pious and worshipful. The middle-aged man and his wife were not particularly faithful at first, but later they discovered that there was no food on the island besides the Sacred Tree
It provided them with the only source of food, coupled with their inability to leave the island, their belief in the Sacred Tree began to increase day by day.
Xiao Tangqiu frowned. The worship of some G.o.dly tree on this island reminded him involuntarily of the previous instance, Hundred Ghost Night Parade. They were too similar.
“Wait a minute… How many years have you been on this island?” Tang Mianmian suddenly interrupted.
The middle-aged man replied, “…Two years.”
“You’re joking. You’re only in your twenties?” Tang Mianmian’s mouth twitched.
The middle-aged man was silent for a long time before he said hoa.r.s.ely, “I am already twenty-eight years old.”
“Wait, you’re really in your twenties?” Tang Mianmian looked incredulous. “It’s more believable if you said you are forty-eight! And… what does ‘already’ mean? Is twenty-eight very old?”
The middle-aged man shuddered, then continued shakily, “On this island, twenty-eight years old is already very old…”
Xiao Tangqiu frowned, “What do you mean?”
The middle-aged man was silent for another stretch before he said hoa.r.s.ely, “Because the people on this island… don’t live past thirty…”
He went on to explain that the first group of people who came to the island had only been here for little more than a decade, but only one last survivor was left. That survivor came to this island in his tens, but now he was a very old man.
Xiao Tangqiu said coldly, “And then? Keep going.”
The middle-aged man continued. When he had just arrived on the island, there were still many survivors from the first group, but they had gradually lost their ability to speak and became almost unable to communicate with people. Even their intellect seemed to have dropped a lot, only the instinct to eat was left. And they disappeared soon after.
Xiao Tangqiu fell into silence. It was clear that the time flow on this island was different from the normal world, but this couldn’t be considered terrible. The gradual degradation from normal people to lower animals with only eating instincts was terrible. Just thinking about staying on this island while regressing into a mindless animal that could only eat made chills break out all over his body.
Tang Mianmian finally couldn’t help but say, “It’s like this, yet you still worship the Sacred Tree?”
The middle-aged man glanced at Tang Mianmian numbly, “If there were no Sacred Tree, we would have long starved to death…”
“But you will degenerate and age rapidly. Maybe it’s the Sacred Tree’s fault!”
The middle-aged man repeated the sentence, “If there were no Sacred Tree, we would have long starved to death.”
“Nevermind, he’s clearly been brainwashed, why bother arguing with him!” Duan Hongzhen snorted, fiddling with a knife in his hand while asking the middle-aged man, “Then what happened in regards to your wife becoming a tree?”
The middle-aged man glanced at Duan Hongzhen and told them.
It turned out that when they first came to the island, they were warned by others not to run around at night, but one night his wife ran out somehow. He woke up and found that his wife was missing, so he immediately ran out to look for her only to witness his wife being eaten by one of the strange trees.
The middle-aged man wielded a blade in heartbreak and chopped down the tree, then he buried the remaining half of the body here.
When he came here the next day to pay homage to his wife and unborn child, he found a tree growing from the place where his wife was buried.
After that, he visited every few days, watching the tree grow bigger and bigger.
Xiao Tangqiu couldn’t help feeling a chill on his back, “How can you be sure that this tree is your wife?”
The middle-aged man said blankly, “Of course I know, I can sense it… This is my wife. My wife and my unborn child…”
He stretched out his hand, touched the slightly bulging trunk lovingly, and continued to mutter, “Look. This is my child… my child is here…”