Chapter 625: The Withered ( GT Bonus - )

Chapter 625: The Withered ( GT Bonus Chapter )

"Did you sense something?" Rindo looked at him and asked quietly.

Lian kept his eyes on the crack.

"Yeah. There’s something down there, something alive."

"A monster?" Noah took his folded umbrella off his shoulder.

"I don’t know yet."

At that moment, the sound of scraping became clearer.

Krrrrrk...

A small stone broke off from the edge of the crack and fell down,

Then a second stone fell, and a few seconds later, something appeared from the darkness.

At first, only a few long fingers could be seen, fingers with gray, cracked skin, each of them unnaturally long.

Their joints were clearly visible, and some of them bent in directions that did not match the natural structure of a human hand.

The fingers gripped the edge of the rock, and then a thin, extremely long arm emerged from inside the crack.

Dark lines could be seen on its skin, looking more like cracks in stone than wounds.

The creature pushed itself upward.

Part of its shoulder appeared, and then its head rose from the darkness.

Lian looked at the thing in front of him for several seconds, at first glance, the creature had a distant resemblance to a human.

However, almost all the proportions of its body were unnatural, its head was smaller than normal, and an extremely thin neck connected it to a long, bony torso.

The skin on its face was dark gray, and it had no clear nose, only a thin bony bump in the center of its face, while an uneven mouth stretched from beneath it toward part of its cheek.

Several rows of thin, uneven teeth could be seen inside its mouth, but its eyes were even stranger.

Two deep, dark sockets with extremely faint lights shining at the back of them.

The creature remained motionless for a few moments, then opened its mouth, and the sound of its breathing was more like air passing through a broken pipe.

Then, with an irregular movement, it pulled more of itself out of the crack, and when the rest of its body finally emerged, its true shape became clear.

It had an almost human torso, but it was extremely long and thin.

Its rib cage was visible beneath its skin, and its raised ribs ran along both sides of its body.

Two extremely long arms extended from its shoulders, but there were four more limbs on the lower part of its torso.

These limbs looked more like the long legs of a spider, each had several joints and bent at unusual angles.

The creature used all of them to support its body weight, so when it finally settled onto the rocks, it looked more like a giant spider with a human upper body than an ordinary monster.

Noah slowly let out a breath for a moment.

"What kind of creature is this...?"

Rindo also raised his spear, but Lian still did not move, because the creature’s behavior was even stranger than its appearance.

After climbing out, instead of attacking, it remained completely motionless for several seconds, then tried to stand on two legs, but its lower limbs bent in the wrong directions, and its body fell to one side.

The creature supported itself with its long arms and tried to stand again... and failed again.

It was as if it did not even know how to use its own body, it looked at its long fingers for a moment, then brought one of them close to its face.

It opened and closed the finger several times, and finally muttered something in a hoarse voice.

"M... m... me..."

Lian narrowed his eyes.

’It can talk?’

The creature opened its mouth again, but this time, only an unclear sound came from its throat, then it began touching its own face with its long fingers.

Its nails scraped across its cracked skin, making a dry sound, as if it were trying to remember the shape of its face.

Or perhaps it was searching for something that no longer existed.

The young Vorhelm paid attention to the creature’s Mana flow for a moment, the energy inside its body was irregular.

Some parts held large amounts of Mana, but other parts seemed almost empty, even the connection between its physical movements and its energy flow was unusual.

’This isn’t a natural monster.’

He still did not know exactly what kind of creature he was facing, but even the monsters he had seen usually had more recognizable movement patterns.

This one seemed to have lost some of its natural control over its body, and before he could examine it further, another sound came from the left side of the crack.

This time, several large stones broke away from the wall, and an extremely tall shadow moved through the darkness.

Noah immediately prepared his umbrella.

Rindo also turned his spear toward the newly opened section of the crack.

A few moments later, the second creature emerged, and this one was much taller than the first.

Its body was about four and a half meters tall, but it was so thin that at first glance, it looked more like a stretched shadow than a living creature.

Its skin was completely black, not the natural black color of skin, but a color similar to stone that had burned in a fire for a long time, the blackest black imaginable.

Its body was covered in tiny cracks, and a very faint purple light could be seen inside some of them.

Its arms reached almost to its knees, and its long, thin, bony fingers were so long that when it bent its body, they almost touched the ground.

Its legs were also extremely long, and their joints were positioned in ways that made its stance look unnatural.

However, the most frightening part of its appearance was its face, or rather, what should have been its face.

There was no visible mouth, no nose, and not even a clear bump that could suggest its facial structure had once been human.

There was only a smooth, black surface, with extremely faint purple lights shining at two points on it.

The creature stood motionless for several seconds, then its head tilted slightly to the right before its body straightened with a fast, stiff movement.

However, the movement was so uneven that it seemed as if the space between the two positions had simply disappeared.

Lian took a closer look for a moment.

’Its movements are strange too.’

The creature took a step forward, and its feet slowly touched the rocks, then it stopped completely for several seconds.

After that, its neck began to turn, and without moving its shoulders, its head turned almost all the way toward the back of its body.

The movement came with a dry sound.

Crack... crack...

Then it returned to its original position.

Noah glanced at Lian for a moment.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?"

"No."

Of course, there were many strange creatures in the Ruined Realm, but something about the behavior of these two creatures made Lian feel that this was not simply a difference in race or appearance.

Their movements were unnatural, their reactions to the environment did not seem logical either, and most importantly, neither of them had tried to attack yet.

At the same time, more sounds came from underground, and from another crack a short distance away, a creature with white, cracked skin pulled itself out.

Its body was almost human, but its arms were much longer than its legs.

One of its shoulders was lower than the other, and its neck was bent so far backward that its face was almost looking at the sky.

To move, the creature placed its hands on the ground and pulled its body forward.

It moved several meters before stopping, and then its cracked lips began to move.

"I don’t want to..."

Its voice was weak.

"I don’t want to... I don’t want to..."

It repeated the words again and again, without making it clear who it was talking to.

A little farther away, another creature emerged from a crack, with a large part of its face covered by a layer of hard, black skin.

It had four arms, but one of them grew unnaturally from the back of its torso.

As it moved, that extra arm kept dragging along the ground, and its fingers opened and closed without moving in coordination with its other limbs.

The creature looked around for a moment, then fell to its knees and began digging into the soil.

It dug hurriedly with irregular movements, as if it wanted to return underground, but the more soil it moved aside, the more confused its movements became.

Lian carefully observed all of this behavior.

’Strange.’

If these creatures had emerged from underground to hunt, why were some of them trying to go back down?

Why could one of them not even walk properly?

And why were some of them repeating words that sounded more like forgotten memories than the roars of monsters?

He looked at the first spider-like creature for a moment, it was still running its long fingers over its face.

Sometimes its mouth opened, but most of the sounds that came out were unclear.

’Maybe they were intelligent creatures before.’

This possibility came to Lian’s mind, although he still had no evidence to support it, they might be an unknown race.

Perhaps they were creatures whose bodies and minds had changed because of some kind of corruption or severe damage.

However, the longer he watched them, the less likely it seemed that their condition was natural.

Especially when he noticed that some of them looked directly at the sky after emerging, instead of paying attention to their surroundings or the people present.

At the same sun that had awakened a few hours ago.

’Does that mean they have seen it before?’

At that moment, the tall, black creature stopped moving completely, and the purple lights on its face remained still for several seconds.

Then its head slowly rose until it was looking directly at the Hollow Sun.

Lian noticed that its body had started trembling, not like a creature preparing to attack, but like someone who had recognized something terrifying.

Its extremely long arms tightened at its sides, and its fingers slowly curled up as its dark nails scraped across the surface of the rock.

Noah, who had kept his umbrella ready for defense until then, narrowed his eyes.

"What is it afraid of?"

Rindo did not answer.

Lian continued examining the creature as well.

What stood before him was different from all his initial theories.

A creature with a terrifying appearance, a body that seemed to have lost much of its natural structure, and an unusual presence that made it difficult to even determine the exact state of its Mana.

But now, that same creature was afraid of looking at the sun.

Finally, a sound came from deep inside its black body.

It was hoarse and weak, and so uneven that it seemed to have to search through its mind to form each word.

"J... ju..."

Its body trembled again, and its head tilted slightly to one side, while the purple lights on its face weakened for a moment.

....Then it whispered in a clearer voice.

"Judge...?"

Lian narrowed his eyes.

’A judge?’

The creature looked at the sun again.

This time, its body trembled more violently, its fingers gripped the surface of the rock, and for a moment, it seemed as if it wanted to retreat.

But its long legs did not move, as if even its fear could not help it escape properly, and then the same hoarse voice sounded again.

"The judge... has awakened?"

For several seconds, no one said anything.

Rindo held his spear more tightly, and Noah lowered his umbrella slightly without taking his eyes off the creature.

And Lian shifted his gaze away from that terrifying body and looked at the Hollow Sun.

The black pupil was still at the center of the enormous golden rings.

But now, a new question had formed in his mind.

’So this creature recognizes it?’

Before he could ask anything, another scraping sound came from underground.

Then another, followed by several more sounds coming from different directions, long fingers appeared at the edges of cracks farther away.

Thin bodies moved between the rocks, and faint lights began appearing one after another in the depths of the earth.

Broken whispers rose from the darkness.

He slowly turned his head, until a few minutes ago, he had thought their biggest problems were the Hollow Sun and the sealed exit.

But now, something stood before him that none of the reports from the past seven months had mentioned.

Creatures with twisted bodies, confused minds, and memories that seemed to have lost large parts of their contents.

They were emerging from deep underground, and unlike ordinary monsters, some of them did not even know how to move.

Lian looked toward the darkness beneath the cracks.

Things were hidden deep beneath the Land of the First Dawn, and now, one after another, they were beginning to awaken.

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( Scene Visualization )