Bai Ci wanted to see more clearly, so she switched her phone's flashlight back on.
Unable to adapt to the sudden white light, her eyes immediately squeezed shut. She waited a good while before opening them again.
She aimed the beam at the ceiling of the cave and directed her gaze there.
Once there was a clear source of light, the tiny, scattered points of light on the ceiling became invisible to the naked eye.
This followed the same principle as being unable to see the glow from a firefly's tail during the day, so Bai Ci didn't find it unusual.
It simply proved that the light emitted by those points of light was actually very faint.
The ceiling of the cave was only seven or eight meters high. This wasn't very high, and the flashlight was bright enough to illuminate the entire rocky dome.
However, for Bai Ci's eyesight—or rather, for the vision of an average person—it was difficult to see details at that height with perfect clarity.
What she could see with her naked eye now was nothing but a dense, tangled, and stacked mass of vines covering the ceiling.
They spread and grew along the stone walls, their thick, heavy leaves and branches firmly covering almost the entire ceiling of the cave.
What was chilling, however, was that these sprawling, creeping vines had no visible root system anchored to the ground or the rock layers.
The rock walls were flat and hard, with no cracks where they had burst through, nor any trace of clinging rootlets. These vines of an unknown species seemed to be glued to the ceiling out of thin air, growing in suspension and forming their own self-contained ecosystem.
This was definitely not a sight that could be achieved through natural growth.
Unless this cave connected to another place, and that connection happened to be at roughly the same height as the vines.
Only if these vines were rooted in another space and had spread here through crevices in the dome could it logically explain why they had no roots.
As for anything more, it was impossible to see clearly with the naked eye.
Unable to see clearly with the naked eye?
Not a big deal. Humans knew how to use tools.
Bai Ci unlocked her phone, opened the camera app, and aimed the lens at the vines on the ceiling.
Take a photo?
No.
She was obviously going to use the simple and practical pinch-to-zoom feature, even if the image sometimes became distorted.
Under the high-definition lens, even the veins of the leaves became clearly visible.
She snapped a photo of the zoomed-in leaves, threw it into an image search app, and waited patiently for a few seconds.
The matching result came back: Boston ivy, with ninety percent accuracy.
Bai Ci lowered her eyes in thought. There were indeed anomalies in this cave, and she had discovered a few, but these discoveries didn't align with her objective.
How exactly had Wang Huizong used these glowing points on the ceiling to catch a glimpse of the village's secret of replacing living people a year ago?
The clues were stuck here, unable to progress even a single step further.
Bai Ci pondered but still couldn't figure it out. Her time to move around freely was limited; if she couldn't think of anything, she wouldn't waste any more time on idle speculation.
She was still holding the palm-sized vine doll in her right hand—the item Gluttony.
“Part the vines on the ceiling of the cave. I want to see what is underneath them.”
Bai Ci issued the command, and the vine doll began to move.
The faint rustle of unraveling twigs echoed in the quiet cavern. The small flower at Gluttony's chest retracted into its vine body, and a length of vine sprouted from the doll's head.
It was a vine that appeared almost withered. As it grew continuously toward the ceiling, the doll's body began to shrink and disassemble, like a ball of yarn being unraveled.
Though the vine doll was only the size of a palm, it had only unraveled its upper half by the time it reached the ceiling.
Gluttony's vine precisely wrapped around a thick Boston ivy vine on the outer edge of the dome and pulled outward with force, intending to tear open the leafy cover.
Suddenly, a change occurred.
Gluttony's actions were like pouring cold water into a pot of boiling oil, triggering a series of violent reactions.
The entire patch of Boston ivy, which had been clinging silently to the rock face, instantly came alive.
It wasn't alive in the botanical sense, but in the animal sense—as if startled, they began to react in various ways.
Leaves flipped, stems writhed, and thorns stood on end...
Wait, Boston ivy didn't have thorns, did it?
So what on earth was this thing?
Dozens of vines turned in unison, closing in to tightly constrict Gluttony's unraveled vine, displaying extreme aggression.
The first vine lunged forward and wrapped around Gluttony's vine, but its aggressive movement suddenly ground to a halt.
The other closing vines also lagged and froze mid-air.
Stiff and unable to advance or retreat, they remained frozen in their offensive stance like a machine with a frozen program or glitched code.
The Boston ivy vine wrapping Gluttony squirmed a bit more, as if repeatedly trying to sense and confirm exactly what it had caught.
Confirmation complete: it was just a lifeless, withered twig.
The vine holding Gluttony slowly let go and retreated to its original position, and the other vines receded like an ebbing tide.
They continued to nestle on the ceiling, pretending to be ordinary plants, ready to deal a fatal blow to any unsuspecting living being that entered and disturbed them.
Gluttony's vine resumed tearing at them. After several repetitions, all the other vines seemed to have grown numbly familiar with it.
They went from their initial sharp reactions to lazy responses, and finally to completely ignoring Gluttony's actions.
It was the story of the boy who cried wolf.
In this manner, Gluttony's vine gradually lowered the vigilance of these animated vines.
These animated vines determined their targets based on living matter. When faced with the inanimate item Gluttony, their recognition mechanism glitched out after a few attempts.
Unable to determine, unable to attack, and unable to evade, they completely crashed.
A perfect opening.
Taking advantage of the frozen, glitched vines, Gluttony exerted its strength again and violently tore away the sheets of Boston ivy.
The heavy vegetation was forcibly stripped away, revealing the long-hidden surface of the dome behind it.
Bai Ci immediately raised her phone's camera, zoomed in, and stared intently.
?
Am I still dreaming? Or am I hallucinating?
The wall behind it wasn't a natural stone cliff face at all.
It was matte grayish-black, with perfectly uniform panel seams and neatly cut edges—a heavy metal plate forged and pieced together using mechanical technology.
Without the cover of the vines, she could see lines of glowing sensor pathways on the metal plate. This was the source of the "fireflies."
Because the sensor pathways lit up and turned off rhythmically, and were obscured by the vines, they looked like fireflies darting around.
So, this was essentially some kind of machine? That was as far as Bai Ci's thoughts could take her.
With the task complete, the solitary vine of Gluttony retracted its unraveled branches and leaves, falling back into Bai Ci's left palm, where it pieced itself back together into the shape of a tiny vine doll.
And in the next second, the item's demand for compensation arrived as expected.
Bai Ci was dazed. After such a seemingly effortless series of commands, she couldn't fathom where Gluttony had been bruised or bumped to demand compensation now.
Well, when those vines first attacked Gluttony, it had indeed gotten bumped a little.
Rate on N.U.
