Scarecrow Abyss, fourth layer overlapping space, the Forgotten Mansion.
The long corridor appeared dim and decayed under the candlelight's illumination.
The space was filled with invisible yet highly concentrated corrosive curses. Ordinary people without protection couldn't last even half a minute here before being corroded into a pile of rotting flesh.
Even more formidable were the mansion's scarecrow guards dressed in tailcoats, along with their subordinate servant monsters—not to mention the mansion's most terrifying butler.
Even true powerhouses had to approach carefully. Once entangled by the guards and drawing the scarecrow butler's attention, even hall-level experts dying here wasn't without precedent.
However, at this moment, those scarecrow guards wearing black tailcoats that clashed grotesquely with their straw bodies had lost all threat.
They lay collapsed at odd angles against walls and throughout the corridor in various states of incompleteness.
The terrible corrosive curse still permeated the air, but for the mansion's current victor, this seemed merely a seasoning to enhance the flavor.
Pop... pop pop...
Red and green slimes bounced happily through the long corridor.
They completely ignored the curse, gathering of their own accord beside the scarecrow remains, digesting the evil grass that composed their bodies.
These slimes had originally been confined to the third layer's Lost Manor, serving as guard dogs of sorts, yet now they had turned on their master and even won.
The Hollow Slurry Man strode through the corridor with measured steps.
His body consisted of constantly flowing gelatinous liquid, maintaining a humanoid outline. He even wore clothes, yet his interior was completely hollow, with magical halos occasionally flowing through.
In one hand formed of slurry, he casually carried the scarecrow butler's remains. The lower half had already disappeared, and the edges were being slowly digested by the slurry man's palm, converted into pure energy.
A red-green dual-colored slime perched on his shoulder—all the slimes currently feasting in the corridor had split from it.
As the slurry man passed, the feeding slimes on both sides of the corridor abandoned their partially digested scarecrow remains and bounced along to join the following procession.
Then, some kind of magical resonance rippled between them as the slimes gradually merged into one.
By the time the slurry man reached the door to the study in the mansion's deepest reaches, the slimes behind him had fused into a massive serpent that filled nearly half the corridor.
Entering the room, the bookshelves held no books but bundles of evil grass. It seemed there was nothing else worth exploring in the entire Forgotten Mansion.
For the vast majority of adventurers who ventured here, this was indeed the case.
But the visitor knew this dungeon had a fifth overlapping space.
Magical radiance spread from the slurry man's forehead, revealing a hidden magical lock on the bookshelf.
Just as the slurry man raised his arm to touch and unlock this intricate magical lock, his movement suddenly froze without warning.
After a moment, he slowly lowered his arm, temporarily setting aside the unlocking and turning to sit in the study's only chair, falling into quiet contemplation.
The slime serpent obediently coiled its body without moving. Only the dual-colored slime seemed somewhat impatient, jumping back and forth between the slurry man's shoulder and head.
After a long while, the slurry man—or rather, the Demon King—returned to his senses.
Just moments ago, a slime he was remotely controlling had been surrounded by three Puchis and literally stomped to death in an extremely humiliating manner.
The undisguised malice transmitted through left him somewhat puzzled—what grudge could there be?
That slime had originally been used to gather intelligence and monitor the Hand of Passage's movements.
That organization backed by a true god, though not large in scale, had intelligence priority above even Empire-related information.
Yet unexpectedly, that slime had suffered an undeserved calamity, running into...
"Puchis..."
He had naturally observed these things secretly, but he'd never been able to understand the form of their existence.
His knowledge of this world far exceeded ordinary people's, and therefore the Puchis that ordinary people had already accepted and even grown accustomed to seemed almost incomprehensible to him.
These Puchis clearly had some kind of unified will. It might be the Mushroom Tribe, or perhaps something existed above the Mushroom Tribe.
But this still didn't explain why their scale could be so vast, and their structure so... homogeneous.
Even Qisi, whose form most closely resembled theirs in his memory, built its staggering numbers on the premise of eye bugs serving as core control nodes.
For Qisi, the eye bugs were the true extensions of its will, extremely limited in number. Ordinary Qisi individuals separated from eye bugs, no matter how powerful, were merely walking corpses lacking instinct and autonomy—they couldn't be considered complete lives.
But Puchis were different. Each one was complete.
What puzzled him even more was that what they carried within wasn't pseudo-souls, but genuine souls.
This wouldn't be surprising for independent beings with self-will, but Puchis were clearly colony creatures...
It was as if all Puchis were actually one individual, sharing one enormous soul.
This hypothesis was too absurd.
Its ridiculousness was comparable to calculating running speed and arriving at a result exceeding the speed of light.
The Demon King had a vague premonition that these Puchis would very likely become stumbling blocks in his future plans.
Therefore, when the time was right, he planned to investigate the secrets behind them.
Of course, the immediate priority was still to recover his strength as quickly as possible—at least to a level sufficient for self-preservation.
A pseudopod extended from his body, touching the magical lock.
Just two seconds.
The intricately constructed magical lock was easily unlocked.
Then the surrounding space blurred, and he and the slime fell once more, arriving at the true core of Scarecrow Abyss.
There was no light here, only pure darkness that devoured all vision.
"You... should not have come here yet." A hoarse, withered voice emerged from deep within the darkness, echoing through the pitch-black space. "The three hundred thirty-three year period has not yet arrived."
"Plans can never keep up with changes," the Demon King's voice emanated from his slurry body, calm and intellectual. "Due to certain accidents, I came out early."
"A pact is a pact! The period hasn't arrived—even if you are the pact-maker, you have no right to set foot here now! Leave!"
In the darkness, countless dark purple points of light lit up one by one. They were eyes—densely packed, layer upon layer, each filled with evil.
Under the dark purple eyeballs' illumination, the massive body of a creature composed of evil grass appeared and disappeared.
"I know." The Demon King wasn't surprised by this development—otherwise he wouldn't have bothered creating that slime serpent. "How tragic. No matter how perfectly you simulate thought and reaction, a pseudo-soul is still a pseudo-soul, forever unable to give birth to a true self."
The slime serpent lunged forward bodily, magical radiance gathering within the Demon King's translucent form.
The dark core space was soon filled with surging magic power and terrible shrieks.
(End of Chapter)
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