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

172: The Joy of a Fruit Farmer

The soft, wretched wail came from the snake-faced person's throat. As it was behind a layer of snake skin, Lin Sanjiu almost thought she misheard it. Looking up, she saw a round protrusion at the snake-faced person's throat. It was the apple. Soon, the round protrusion slid down, and the wails became softer and softer until it disappeared into the person's stomach.

Cold sweat covered Lin Sanjiu's head in an instant.

The wails seemed to attract the attention of a few other snake-faced people who were nearby. They looked in their direction and quickly started to move. Their eyes narrowed, and they shouted angrily as they slithered swiftly to the tree that Lin Sanjiu was on.

Compared to the others, the snake-faced person who had just eaten the apple seemed smaller than the rest. It looked a bit uneasy after being surrounded by the larger snake-faced people. It nodded its head profusely, even raising the end of its tail, nodding it in mid-air as if apologizing.

'So, these apples can't be eaten casually?' Lin Sanjiu couldn't help thinking. Just when she wanted to crawl closer to have a look, a snake-faced person turned to look at the branch without warning. There were no emotions behind the yellow eyeball, which was almost the size of a room. The eyeball, with a vertical pupil, was directly in front of Lin Sanjiu.

Shocked, Lin Sanjiu immediately laid flat on the branch and hid behind a protruding piece of bark, hoping that the person didn't spot her.

The person's vertical pupil was even longer than her full height. Peeking out from the cracks of the tree bark, she saw the cold, translucent yellow eye, pausing for a moment before turning away. It probably didn't notice the ant-sized Lin Sanjiu. Meanwhile, the snake-faced people were still speaking loudly, with raised voices. Though their voices nearly made her deaf, she couldn't help rejoicing silently.

After some time, the noise gradually died down. Although she couldn't understand their language, she could still get a general gist of their conversation from their actions. The smaller snake-faced person who ate the apple on the sly was banished far away to one side. It could only rub its hands repeatedly as it looked on, with a pair of gloomy eyes, while the other snake-faced people plucked apples busily.

They obviously had some standards for their apples. Some were plucked, while others were left on the tree for unknown reasons. Perhaps those weren't ripe or big enough. Anyway, to Lin Sanjiu, they were all unbelievably huge.

After plucking the apples from the trees, the snake-faced people were not in a hurry to eat them. Instead, the apples were only collected in a small pile on the ground and left for another snake-faced person to point at them one by one, probably counting the numbers.

Noticing that the snake-faced person in charge of harvesting was slithering to another tree, Lin Sanjiu used all her limbs and ran toward the tip of the tree branch. Two apples on the very tree branch she was on were left untouched.

Since no leaves grew on the tree, Lin Sanjiu had no cover. She had no choice but to lay flat as she approached the apple. She crawled forward. As she got closer to the apple, she felt an apprehension when she saw the unique flesh-like appearance of the apple's skin.

Swaying in the breeze, occasionally, a ripple appeared on the surface of the flesh-like skin of the apple. A few pores would appear and then suddenly vanish.

Lin Sanjiu gulped as she reached out to touch the apple.

"Huh huh!"

A coarse gasp-like sound rang out from nowhere abruptly, almost causing her to fall over. Following that, she heard a rough, hoarse, weak voice. It was as if that person had struggled to squeeze out from someplace, "Huh, huh! Help... help..."