Chapter 484 - 483-

Grey knew it was his because it reflected the same starry symbol that his own jade slip currently displayed.

The moment he saw it lodged within the belly of the mutated creature, his footsteps came to an abrupt halt.

For several seconds, he simply stared at it.

His breath caught slightly in his throat.

A faint uneasiness rose within him as he bent down and carefully examined the corpse of the mutated beast. He reached out and ran his fingers lightly across its ruined hide, his gaze sweeping over every part of its body.

The creature’s flesh had been horribly distorted, and several parts of its body had already begun to rot. Its blood had mixed with the strange fluids produced by the corrosion, creating a foul-smelling substance that clung to its wounds.

Grey’s expression gradually became more solemn.

Fortunately, after carefully examining the corpse, he didn’t find any traces of human flesh within the grotesque mixture.

Only then did he quietly heave a small sigh of relief.

His shoulders loosened slightly.

Only slightly.

Relief was a precious thing in the Corroded Zone, and it was never wise to allow oneself to become too comfortable.

"If the jade slip is here, then it means that Iria must have encountered some significant danger."

Grey straightened slowly, his eyes narrowing as he turned the thought over in his mind.

"The only reasonable explanation is that she entered the depths as well."

He couldn’t think of many other possibilities.

With the resources Iria possessed, ordinary mutated creatures should not have been capable of causing her much trouble, especially if she remained within the Peripheral and actively avoided seeking out dangerous areas.

Iria was cautious by nature.

She wasn’t the kind of person who would recklessly throw herself into danger without a reason.

That was precisely why the discovery of the jade slip made Grey even more concerned.

If she had merely wandered around the Peripheral, she shouldn’t have encountered a situation dangerous enough to cause her to lose the jade slip.

Unless...

An unexpected incident had occurred.

Grey’s gaze flickered.

"But why would she enter the depths?"

This was the question that troubled him the most.

Even if Iria possessed powerful protective talismans and a relatively high level of cultivation, those things could not guarantee her safety within the depths of the Corroded Zone.

The dangers hidden there were fundamentally different from ordinary threats.

Some creatures possessed strength that could be measured.

Others couldn’t.

There were strange existences whose abilities were completely beyond common sense, creatures that could kill someone without giving them the opportunity to understand what had happened.

Strength alone wasn’t always enough.

Sometimes, even knowing that something was dangerous was already too late.

Hence, if Iria had knowingly entered the depths, then there had to be a reason.

Grey’s brows furrowed.

"Could something have happened in the Peripheral?"

He considered another possibility.

Perhaps an anomaly had occurred in the Peripheral and forcibly pushed Iria into the depths.

If that were the case, she might not have entered willingly at all.

She could have been forced into it.

And if she had truly been forced into the depths, then the situation was far more serious than he initially imagined.

Grey’s expression darkened.

"If she’s still here, the best course of action is to find her before an even stronger existence finds her... or before she stumbles into danger far beyond her level."

He spoke softly to himself.

His gaze shifted toward a certain direction.

From the traces he had previously discerned, that was the direction from which the mutated beast had come.

There was a high chance that it had encountered Iria somewhere along that path.

And if so, there might still be traces of her left behind.

Grey didn’t hesitate any longer.

He glanced down at his shadow.

A strange darkness seemed to ripple beneath his feet.

The next instant, his body suddenly swayed.

Whoosh!

His figure vanished from the spot.

He shot forward in the chosen direction, moving so quickly that only a faint disturbance in the air remained where he had been standing.

Meanwhile, the shadow beneath his feet remained eerily quiet.

It was still struggling to accommodate the divinity it had consumed.

Ever since it had devoured that strange divinity, the shadow had entered an unusual comatose state.

Grey had already witnessed a thin layer of dark substance slowly seep out from within it, gradually spreading across its surface and wrapping around its body like a cocoon.

The dark cocoon pulsed faintly with every passing moment.

It looked almost as though something terrifying was gestating within.

Extremely powerful fluctuations continuously emanated from the cocoon.

There was no doubt about it.

The shadow was currently in a critical stage of breaking through and evolving.

Grey felt both anxious and excited whenever he thought about it.

He was excited because he was naturally pleased to see the shadow’s strength increase.

The stronger the shadow became, the greater his own overall strength would become in turn.

After all, the two were closely connected.

But his anxiety came from another possibility.

What if the shadow rebelled?

Grey’s eyes became slightly colder.

The shadow had always possessed an extremely dangerous nature. It had repeatedly shown signs that it desired to devour him and seize control of his body.

There was no guarantee that its evolution wouldn’t make that desire even stronger.

If the shadow emerged from its cocoon with vastly increased strength, it might immediately attempt to turn against him.

Therefore, despite his excitement, Grey never allowed his vigilance to drop.

His spiritual senses remained focused on his shadow, while the power of the Purple Crystal quietly circulated within his body.

If the shadow displayed even the slightest abnormal behavior after emerging, he would suppress it immediately.

There would be no hesitation.

Grey continued moving through the deformed forest.

Bizarre trees rose from the corrupted earth around him, their trunks twisted into unnatural shapes. Some grew sideways before abruptly bending upward, while others had branches that resembled skeletal limbs reaching toward the dark sky.

Dangerous plants were scattered everywhere.

Some of them remained completely motionless, but Grey could sense faint fluctuations coming from within their bodies.

He didn’t approach them.

In the Corroded Zone, anything that looked harmless could become deadly the moment one lowered their guard.

Grey continued weaving between the strange trees at high speed.

It was then that he suddenly caught sight of something strange in the distance.

His movements slowed slightly as his eyes narrowed. In the cold, dark forest ahead stood a swarm of flying jellyfish.

There were dozens of them.

Each one was several meters wide, and their translucent bodies drifted through the air with the same lazy grace that ordinary jellyfish displayed while swimming through the sea.

Their tentacles trailed beneath their bodies as they floated silently through the corrupted air.

Faint, sickly light pulsed within their translucent forms. Grey’s expression became strange.

He had never seen such creatures before. The jellyfish had gathered around a mutated corpse lying on the ground.

One by one, they floated toward the corpse. Then they sank directly into it. Their translucent bodies disappeared beneath the ruined flesh before emerging again several moments later.

When they came out, their bodies were slick with dark blood.

Several organs could even be seen drifting within their transparent forms. The sight was grotesque.

Grey’s brows furrowed. Because of the distance between them, he couldn’t determine whether the corpse belonged to a human or a beast.

Frankly, he didn’t dare approach closely enough to find out. There was something deeply unsettling about the swarm.

It wasn’t simply their appearance. There was an indescribable feeling emanating from them.

Something ancient and fundamentally wrong. Grey instinctively became more cautious.

Each time one of the jellyfish emerged from the corpse, the body beneath them became more greenish-black.

The corpse was rapidly deteriorating.

Its flesh seemed to be losing its structure, gradually becoming softer and more unstable.

If this continued, Grey suspected that the entire corpse would eventually collapse into a pool of blood and mist.

"Corrosive substance..."

Grey silently analyzed the scene. It was highly likely that these jellyfish secreted some kind of extremely dense corrosive substance.

The fact that they were able to reduce a mutated creature’s corpse to such a state in such a short period of time was enough to demonstrate how terrifying that corrosive ability was.

Approaching them would undoubtedly be dangerous. If there had only been one jellyfish, Grey might have considered testing it.

But there were dozens. And judging from the fluctuations he could sense from them, their collective strength was enough to make even him feel a faint chill.

"There is no guarantee that the corpse is Iria’s."

Grey murmured quietly. He immediately abandoned the idea of investigating. There was no reason to take an unnecessary risk over a possibility.

He chose a direction parallel to the swarm of jellyfish and continued onward, deliberately keeping a considerable distance from them.

The forest gradually swallowed his figure. Time passed quickly as the day seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye as Grey continued sprinting through the Corroded Zone.

His figure moved like a blur with every step.

Despite maintaining an extremely punishing pace for hours without rest, Grey showed no obvious signs of exhaustion.

At his current level of cultivation, physical fatigue was almost a foreign concept. His body had long since surpassed the limits of ordinary humans.

Even so, his mental vigilance never relaxed.

He constantly scanned the surroundings, searching for any trace of Iria. Yet the further he traveled, the more doubtful he became that he would find her.

Could she have already left? Or perhaps...

Grey’s eyes darkened.

Perhaps she had encountered something that prevented her from escaping. Just as his thoughts were becoming increasingly grim, he suddenly heard distant sounds of fighting coming from somewhere ahead.

His expression immediately changed. His eyes narrowed into a sharp glint. Someone was fighting in the distance!

Grey’s hand moved toward his storage bag, and a dagger appeared within his grasp.

He didn’t necessarily need to use it. At his current strength, a dagger was hardly necessary when dealing with ordinary mutated beasts.

However, it was useful for silent attacks and could be thrown at a moment’s notice.

More importantly, it allowed him to kill from a distance without immediately revealing the full extent of his strength.

Grey slowed his movements and cautiously approached the source of the disturbance. The sounds of battle gradually became clearer.

Roars.

Explosions. The sharp cries of something that sounded neither entirely human nor entirely beast.

Grey’s eyes became cold.

He moved through the trees without making much noise. A moment later, he finally saw the scene ahead.

His pupils contracted. A familiar figure was locked in combat against several mutated beasts.

Her clothes were torn in several places, and her usually composed appearance had become haggard and exhausted.

Her breathing was heavy and Her face was deathly pale.

It was obvious that she had been fighting for a long time without any opportunity to properly rest. Grey immediately recognized her to be Iria.

The moment he saw her, his expression became solemn. But it wasn’t Iria herself that shocked him.

It was the things attacking her.

Grey’s pupils dilated slightly. The creatures surrounding Iria were grotesque mixtures of mutated beasts and strange existences that he had never encountered before.

Their bodies resembled distorted humanoid forms fused together with the bodies of mutated creatures.

But none of them possessed heads.

Instead, grotesque faces had been embedded directly into their chests.

Others had faces growing beneath their bodies.

Those faces were twisted into permanent expressions of agony, their mouths stretched open as though they were trapped in an eternal, silent scream.

Yet despite their bizarre appearances, they moved with terrifying speed.

They cackled wickedly as they attacked Iria from all directions.

Iria gritted her teeth.

She unleashed every technique and attack talisman her master had given her.

Brilliant flashes of light erupted across the battlefield as one talisman after another was activated.

But the difference in strength was simply too great.

The mutated creatures were far stronger than her.

Worse still, Iria had already consumed most of the talismans’ charges.

The brilliant light that had once illuminated the battlefield was now becoming increasingly dim.

Each subsequent attack was weaker than the previous one.

A faint barrier of light clung tightly to Iria’s body, protecting her from the worst of the creatures’ attacks.

But even that barrier was beginning to fail.

Every few seconds, the protective light trembled violently.

Then it flickered and its radiance dimmed further. Iria’s heart sank every time she saw it happen.

This was her final protective talisman. Once it was exhausted, she would have nothing left to protect herself. And judging from its current condition, it wouldn’t last much longer.

Her grip tightened. She bit her lower lip, frustration and worry slowly building within her heart.

She couldn’t retreat. There were too many creatures. She couldn’t continue fighting.

There were too many of them.

Her only hope was to somehow survive until an opportunity presented itself. But deep down, Iria knew that such an opportunity might never come.

But it was at this exact moment that Grey decided to strike.