“You’re saying… we’re currently inside a monster’s stomach?” Fang Mingyue was stunned; this was the first time she’d ever heard such a notion.
Shen Ge shot back with a question of his own: “High-rank monsters usually have a layer of spectral energy on their surface that can absorb attacks, which means you have to burn through that energy just to hurt them. And even after you deal with that, their shells can withstand missiles. So the best way to take down a high-rank monster is to destroy it from the inside. You’ve never been inside a monster’s stomach? How did you handle high-rank monsters before?”
“…” Fang Mingyue’s expression froze.
Shen Ge’s eyelid twitched, and he asked with a hint of disbelief: “Don’t tell me you haven’t actually taken down a single high-rank monster so far?”
“…” Fang Mingyue’s silence was deafening. Her awkward expression made it clear that Shen Ge had hit the nail on the head—so far, the shelter indeed had zero records of killing anything above rank 4.
“Sigh.” Shen Ge let out a sigh. It wasn’t that he wanted to criticize Fang Mingyue, but he honestly hadn’t expected that even years into the apocalypse—equivalent to the present timeline—there still wasn’t a single high-rank monster kill on record. No wonder the world had fallen in just a few years.
Shen Ge had originally planned to help these “old acquaintances” as much as he could, so he led Fang Mingyue into the caverns of those horrifying internal organs while sharing some of his experience dealing with high-rank monsters.
After listening to Shen Ge’s explanation, Fang Mingyue stared at the disgusting and terrifying “organs” before her and asked with a slightly odd tone: “Shen Ge… why does it sound like your group has killed a ton of high-rank monsters? If there really was an organization that powerful, how could the world have been destroyed?”
“What if I told you I’m not from this world? Would you believe me?” Shen Ge asked.
Fang Mingyue paused, then nodded: “I would. If you really are from another world, then all those ‘suspicious’ things about you start to make sense. So when you said before that you had a friend who was a lot like me, it’s because there’s also a ‘Fang Mingyue’ in your world, right?”
“Yes,” Shen Ge confirmed with a nod.
Fang Mingyue hesitated, but still asked: “Her… how is she?”
“She’s a lot like you—completely stubborn. I used to tease her all the time, calling her a single-celled organism.” Shen Ge stepped forward as he spoke, moving closer to examine the monster’s internal organs hanging from the center of the cavern.
Fang Mingyue followed behind him and asked: “Your world… there’s no apocalypse, right?”
“The apocalypse hasn’t come yet, but it’s still a huge mess. Oh, the cherry blossoms are almost gone, the Stick Nation is barely hanging on, and the other countries aren’t doing much better either. Honestly, it’s not that much better than this place.” Shen Ge didn’t mention the Monster Organization—in his opinion, they were even harder to deal with than the monsters.
Fang Mingyue was about to ask more about that other world when the cavern suddenly started shaking violently. The “organs” inside began bubbling with rotting flesh and bloody blisters, spreading outward in all directions.
“What’s happening?” Fang Mingyue asked.
“We must have made too much noise, and the monster noticed us. It’d rather give up the spectral energy it was absorbing than let us live,” Shen Ge said, but his tone was incredibly calm—clearly, this was nothing new to him.
“So… what do we do now?” Ever since Shen Ge had started sharing his monster-fighting experience with Fang Mingyue, she knew he must have a way to deal with a monster at this level.
Mainly because he radiated such confidence that it even rubbed off on her. Despite knowing they were facing a rank 4 or 5 monster, Fang Mingyue didn’t feel the usual terror that came with confronting high-rank monsters.
“No rush. It’ll definitely try to swallow us whole,” Shen Ge replied.
“Huh?” Fang Mingyue was dumbfounded. The monster was about to eat them, and he still wasn’t worried?
But then she thought about it—according to Shen Ge’s earlier logic, they were already essentially inside the monster’s belly. Getting swallowed from the mouth to the stomach didn’t seem all that different… right?
At that moment, the shaking in the cavern grew more violent. Fang Mingyue could barely stand. The walls were completely covered in rotting flesh, about to swallow both her and Shen Ge whole—
Shen Ge reached out and pressed a hand on Fang Mingyue’s shoulder, then deployed his invisible domain, forming a barrier that wrapped around the two of them.
The spreading rot was blocked by an unseen wall. Fang Mingyue stared in shock, but before she could ask how he’d done it, the ground beneath her vanished, and both she and Shen Ge plunged into an endless abyss below.
“Ahhh—”
After sliding down a smooth passage for a while, the two landed on a heap of bright red flesh.
The “flesh” was covered in visible blood vessels that writhed like worms, crawling toward them—but all were blocked by the invisible barrier.
“What is this? How disgusting! Ah!” Fang Mingyue had just let out a sigh of relief upon landing when her flashlight swept across those worm-like blood vessels. She shrieked and jumped to her feet—only to bang her head against the invisible barrier.
“Is this… glass?” Fang Mingyue reached up and touched the barrier, her face full of astonishment.
Shen Ge ignored her question, expanded the invisible barrier a bit to keep someone from hitting their head again, then walked to the edge with his flashlight and peered down.
In the past, Shen Ge wouldn’t have hesitated to jump straight down, exploring from the depths to find the monster’s “heart.” But now, without his Red Mist Armor for defense, the invisible barrier required spectral energy to maintain. If he jumped straight into stomach acid, the energy drain would be enormous.
Without the Red Mist Armor’s HP backpack, Shen Ge’s resources were limited. He didn’t want to waste Spirit Apples on such things.
“Follow me.” After getting a feel for the surroundings, Shen Ge began layering the invisible barrier downward, constructing a path as he descended.
Fang Mingyue quickly followed. As a rookie soldier who’d been swallowed by a monster for the first time, everything felt new and curious—but reason won out over fear, and she was convinced that sticking close to Shen Ge was her only chance of getting out.
“Where are we? What’s that green liquid?” Fang Mingyue couldn’t help asking.
As he walked, Shen Ge replied: “Probably the monster’s stomach. That green stuff… stomach acid, I guess. Be careful not to fall in—it can even corrode monsters.”
Although the invisible barrier would keep Fang Mingyue from falling as long as Shen Ge didn’t dispel his domain, he still gave her a warning.
Since she couldn’t see exactly where the barrier was placed, Fang Mingyue did her best to stay close to Shen Ge, feeling her way down with one hand on the invisible wall.
“Based on the spectral energy levels, it’s a rank 4 monster. No weird abilities to worry about. Most importantly, it shouldn’t have multiple hearts, so it won’t be too hard to deal with.” Shen Ge swept his flashlight across the area.
“…” Rank 4. Not too hard to deal with?
Can you even call that human speech?
The deeper they went, the stronger the stench of rot in the stomach. Fang Mingyue felt like she was walking through a pile of corpses left out under the scorching sun—decaying bodies everywhere, the smell so foul it made her head spin.
Even Fang Mingyue, who was used to the apocalypse, couldn’t help but gag, feeling like she was about to pass out from the stench.
Once he found a good spot, Shen Ge motioned for Fang Mingyue to stand aside. He then drew his monster-killing revolver and fired several shots at a specific area of the stomach wall.
Bang!
Bang! Bang!
After several shots, the spectral bullets easily pierced the stomach wall, leaving bullet holes. Then Shen Ge raised his hand and made a grasping motion toward the holes, using his control trait “Misfortune” to transfer the negative spectral energy from the stomach wall and create a “disaster.”
“Sh-Shen Ge! The shaking’s getting worse! Is it… is it going to collapse?” Fang Mingyue said urgently.
But before Shen Ge could answer, a deafening BOOM echoed—something massive had slammed into the monster’s body from the outside, making it lurch violently.
And the area with the bullet holes was right at the “epicenter” of the impact, as if the entire stomach wall was about to split open.
“Misfortune” was a power rooted in the occult, and the only ability that could go head-to-head with Earth’s monsters. Though the “Silkworm” had been crucial in Shen Ge’s battles against Earth monsters, it was still built on the powerful “mechanism” of Misfortune.
If he’d been using any of his other traits, even with the Silkworm’s infinite mana, he wouldn’t have been able to fight Earth monsters head-on.
“Wh-What is that?!” Fang Mingyue stared at the red glow seeping through the cracked stomach wall, feeling like her brain was about to shut down.
But Shen Ge had no time to explain. Under the violent impact, the stomach wall ruptured, and stomach acid surged out, corroding the monster’s internal organs and increasing the spectral energy drain on its inner defenses.
Facing the wave of gushing acid, Shen Ge could only keep forming invisible barriers to hold it back, causing his spectral energy to plummet.
“Hold on tight!” Shen Ge pulled Fang Mingyue close, then shrank the invisible barrier, reinforced it, thickened it, and kept replenishing it.
The invisible barrier, like a “capsule,” was flushed out of the stomach by the surging acid. Only then did Shen Ge realize that the monster’s entire abdomen had been ripped open.
And the culprit was the giant spectral rat from before. Its sharp claws had pierced the monster’s belly, tearing it wide open.
Whether the two monsters had just happened to collide, or Shen Ge’s “Misfortune” had played some catalytic role, the spectral rat’s accidental attack had helped Shen Ge and Fang Mingyue escape.
Shen Ge led Fang Mingyue out of the monster’s stomach and saw that the creature that had “swallowed” them was a massive bug—and its body was actually an old, dilapidated building, with crimson blood vessels extending from windows on every floor, plunging into the ground.
Not far away was a giant crater, as if a meteorite had struck, littered with shattered, flaming rocks.
Seeing this, Shen Ge instantly understood. Due to the transfer effect of “Misfortune,” a meteorite had fallen, and by sheer coincidence, it had landed right on the spectral rat’s new nest. The rat had crawled out, spotted the bug, assumed it was the culprit, and the two monsters had started fighting.
While the two monsters were locked in combat, Shen Ge led Fang Mingyue back to the surface. They were now only half a street away from the Penguin Building.
“Looks like we’re the first ones here.” Using his spectral eye, Shen Ge scanned the area and didn’t detect any obvious spectral energy fluctuations.
Fang Mingyue pulled some high explosives from her backpack and said: “Even though we sent our elite soldiers on this mission, they won’t risk a breakthrough when high-rank monsters show up, especially now that two of them are fighting. The vice-captain’s probably tearing his hair out right now.”
“So how do we contact them?” This was something Shen Ge had always been curious about. The shelter didn’t have efficient communication devices, and with all the layered spectral spaces everywhere, even spectral energy communicators couldn’t guarantee message delivery.
Fang Mingyue pulled out a flare gun and said: “We’re probably in the same spectral space, so the simplest way is to use signal flares.”
With that, she fired a shot into the air. Bang! A red firework burst in the sky.
“When the vice-captain sees this flare, he’ll know we’ve successfully reached the Penguin Building area. They’ll slow down their advance to avoid being detected by the high-rank monsters,” Fang Mingyue explained.
Shen Ge nodded. They’d used the same method before, but as spectral equipment became more advanced, these simple communication methods had basically been abandoned.
After they fired the signal flare, the two hurried over to the Penguin Building. Shen Ge’s original plan was to search the building while Fang Mingyue planted explosives to bring it down, but his system scan showed no high-rank monsters inside.
Strangely though, while the system didn’t detect any high-rank monsters, Shen Ge’s spectral eye saw a powerful surge of spectral energy spreading from within the building.
“Shen Ge, according to the blueprints, besides the spots we just set, we also need to go into the ground floor and place explosives on a few key load-bearing walls—wait, what’s that?!” Fang Mingyue was comparing the Penguin Building’s blueprints when she suddenly noticed a massive dark cloud gathering above the building.
They’d seen this type of “dark cloud” just yesterday—it was the “Big Whale” monster that had triggered the incident at Defense Line 3.
“Why is it here?” Shen Ge had been looking for the “Big Whale,” but it was as elusive as the trait “Vanishing.” Once it disappeared into the clouds, the system couldn’t scan it, and even his spectral eye couldn’t spot it, making it a real pain to track.
Yet now, just as Shen Ge had given up searching, the thing came to him.
Suddenly, fierce winds kicked up around the Penguin Building. The roiling clouds spun into massive fog tornadoes. The old building that the bug and the rat had smashed through, along with the rubble and wandering monsters nearby, were all swept into the air.
“Wow. So this thing wants to play the mantis catching the cicada, with the oriole behind?” Shen Ge stared at the fog tornadoes in the sky, his voice cold.
Both the bug and the rat were rank 4. They’d been hiding until Shen Ge’s meteorite had flushed one out—and the rat had gotten injured because of it.
Then the bug had been wounded by the rat. Both rank 4 monsters wanted to eat each other and had gone all out. Now, just as they were about to determine the victor, the “Big Whale,” lurking in the shadows, could no longer hold back!
