Garden of Eden || Apocalypse Paradise #2 [Complete]

163: A Western Cowboy-Style Belt Pocket

Clumps of dirt were flung into the air. They fell like misty rain, forming a small mound behind a sweaty woman. She had been digging for almost an hour. Looking from a distance, she saw about five small mounds scattered around her. Based on her memory, this was certainly the spot where Snow disappeared. Unfortunately, though Lin Sanjiu had dug through a large surface area of soil, revealing the network of tightly packed giant white rhizomes underneath, she could not spot a single person even after much scrutiny.

The fuzzy feeling of hope was dashed abruptly. Lin Sanjiu could feel her blood vessels pulsating. She massaged her throbbing temples, unaware of what went wrong.

'Should I try another area?' She tried her best to encourage herself. She walked back to the camping ground nervously. She didn't even dare to take a break to catch her breath. She continued digging for another two hours before finally collapsing and sitting on one of the mounds. She looked at the sweat and dirt all over her and tasted the bitterness in her mouth.

At that moment, a strange sight was before her. The plants that once spotted the landscape had been uprooted and dumped into a pile, along with soil and rocks. White rhizomes with the size of locomotives were revealed beneath the surface. The intricate network of roots covered a large area. It was just as if someone's skin had been pried open, and instead of blood and flesh, there were countless white maggots.

However, this was only the upper layer of the white radishes. A large part of their main body was hidden underground, and who knows how deep they extended.

"Is it possible that the missing people and animals weren't sucked into this network of radishes?" Lin Sanjiu mumbled to herself. "If it wasn't their doing, why are there dead people encased within them."

The alternative was that people coincidentally died in this area. As the white radish grew, they gradually wrapped around the corpses. Lin Sanjiu thought that this hypothesis was also plausible. After all, she had touched those things many times while digging. If the 'white radishes' did attack people, there was no reason she was still perfectly fine here.

The simplest solution was to find a rat or a worm to test her hypothesis. But Lin Sanjiu noticed that though she had stirred up the ground quite a bit while digging, no bug appeared from the soil or the plants.

She remembered that when she first came to the Garden of Eden, she saw many hideous, helmet-sized beetles. Their heads were covered with red compound eyes, and there was always a couple around, whether she was sleeping, eating, or walking. They appeared out of nowhere, and occasionally, Hui Chuyan would shriek out when she was caught off guard. Xueqin even taunted the girl for that.

The beetles' nests were equally disgusting. The nests comprised of a few shallow round holes. Typically, each nest held four beetles, which also fitted precisely four human heads. Lin Sanjiu was so familiar with this detail because she had already destroyed several empty nests when digging. She wondered when those beetles disappeared from their nests like her companions.

While she sat, she stretched her legs out and gazed vacantly at the network of white roots in front of her. She started to count the hours subconsciously. Snow, Bai Xiaoke, and Error 517 were the earliest to disappear. It had already been 24 hours. Even though she didn't know the exact time the others disappeared, it had already been almost 15 hours since she first discovered their disappearance.

As her mind drifted in that direction, Lin Sanjiu quickly slapped herself.

"I don't care how long they've been gone!" She clenched her teeth as she furrowed her brows in resolution. "If they are alive, I want to see them. Even if they're dead, I need to see their corpses!"

As Lin Sanjiu did not know what those 'white radishes' were, she was still quite wary about them. She was cautious when digging and avoided even scraping the surface of their skin. However, now enraged, she didn't care anymore. She took out Er Dao's saber and swiftly struck a white radish with it.