Xue Dili raised his eyes and looked over: a lot of stones, so finished tal fras, specially made boxes, and all sorts of things he couldn't understand covered in bloodstains.
They seed to want to unload everything from the two wooden carts, but Xue Dili stopped them, telling them to just push the cart in front while he followed along.
The two of them pushed the wooden cart like this, reminiscent of when Xue Dili was a child and the chain of his bicycle broke, forcing him to push it for miles to get it repaired.
After traveling a while like this, Xue Dili saw a cluster of reinforced concrete buildings in the distance.
Xue Dili: "???"
What kind of place had he arrived at? Long spears with circuit boards attached, primitive people clad in tribal animal skins, combined with reinforced concrete structures—what kind of society was this?
And rely by listening to the man's self-muttering recitations, he realized that the people of this world seed to still be in a slave era, yet they adorned their spears with circuit boards from the information age and resided in buildings from the industrial age.
And in the distant fields, he could see various strange-looking things being cultivated, resembling so type of fungi, alongside nurous other plants that just barely resembled "trees" in appearance.
Thank goodness, at least these trees didn't have human heads growing from them.
The hellish illustrations that previously eroded his sanity had left significant psychological scars, and he still hadn't recovered. He even suspected that once he returned to Blue Star, he'd dream of these disgusting scenes.
As he got closer to this place, the fungal mat on the ground seed to diminish, until there was almost none left, and stepping on the soil actually gave Xue Dili the rare sensation of being grounded.
Led by them, the group walked out of the fungal mat's range, and then Xue Dili felt himself stepping onto concrete pavent, which was uneven and pitted as if it hadn't been repaired in hundreds of years, making it less navigable than the dirt road.
In the distance, Xue Dili actually saw "utility poles," yes, utility poles, with broken streetlights on top and all the wires severed.
The previous place also had similar poles, but at that ti, where streetlights should have been, there were human heads hanging, continuously speaking in repetitive phrases to Xue Dili, so he didn't recognize them as utility poles.
Xue Dili only felt a growing sense of absurdity and strangeness swirling in his heart. In the distance lay the endless fungal mat world, secreting countless blood-like fluids, with nurous human heads able to move and rge freely on the fungal mat.
So, wherever there was fungal mat, there were human heads. In that instant, he felt as if he had entered the world view under Ito Junji's treacherous pen or as if the entire world had been devoured by Tomie, and he was now inside her.
Yet in this "tribe," ti remained tranquil, with fields cultivating large amounts of fungi and normal, though sowhat blackened, trees growing, where he saw people coughing while clearing other mycelium from the mushroom-growing fields.
"How many of you are here?" Xue Dili asked, looking at the distant cluster of reinforced concrete city buildings, even perceiving an unreal wide-angle distortion when viewing this world, leading him to inquire further.
"Great Lord of Light, in the realm of the Mortal World, only we, over a thousand people, are left. Even the food this year is still insufficient; our mushrooms and land have been contaminated by monsters, and the fungal mat in our fields is increasing, yields decreasing, so this year hundreds more might starve to death…" The man answered Xue Dili's question and began lanting.
"What work do you do?" Xue Dili asked.
"We venture to that monstrous land to seek the treasure left by the Ancient God, hoping to bring back many good things like this trip of ours if we are lucky. If not, like my son, we get dragged away by the monsters and never return." The man's expression was sad, but he continued to explain,
"This era, the King issued a treasure decree, encouraging people to go out and seek treasure, but every day many never return, dragged away by the monsters…"
The man looked at the fungal mat area behind him, then at Xue Dili, who seed completely different from them, as if rolling in a cesspool.
Completely clean and tidy, wearing silk clothes they couldn't comprehend, along with a face and impeccably clean hair that clearly didn't belong to a mortal, they felt ashad, only giving rise to a sense of worship.
But even with the descent of such a Divine King, he couldn't bring back his dragged-away son.
And Xue Dili didn't care about the sadness on the face of the man pushing the wooden cart; he seed to understand the King's actions.
There wasn't enough food to sustain enough people, so they sent the surplus people off to die. If they brought back things like tal fras, stones, or so rare and curious items, it wasn't a loss.
Thus, looking at this society of just over a thousand people, they lived within this only "Pure Land," relying on cultivating a kind of mushroom that could synthesize starch as a staple food. The cent streets were bumpy, and the wires on the utility poles corroded to the point of resembling vines.
Xue Dili and Old Green viewed this primitive society, seemingly built upon the ruins of modern civilization, as if watching a twisted and absurd dreamscape.
In the distance, human heads continued to erratically roam the boundless fungal mat, forming a stark contrast with the primitive tribe.
And those strange creatures have their own language, constantly saying bizarre phrases like "I feel great" and "I'm here to save you."
But to say they are intelligent is an overstatent, as they always repeat just these two sentences, like a programd recorder with no more than ten phrases.
Before, Xue Dili watched in shock as a strange creature directly pulled off a person's head and inserted it into its own chest, and astonishingly, the head was still alive and instantly assimilated. This operation was enough to shock him for three hundred years.
"We've arrived, Lord of Light." The man's wooden cart slowly ca to a stop at the entrance of a wooden fortress. It was obvious that this wooden fortress was built later, while the reinforced concrete buildings inside were remnants of a previous civilization.
At the gate of the fortress, there were so guards holding long spears, with their weapons wrapped in so kind of plastic tape, looking more like a joke than anything intended for stabbing. What puzzled Xue Dili even more was that they actually wore clothes resembling synthetic fibers, albeit only underwear, but still much more advanced than the primitive father and daughter who only draped themselves with a few pieces of hide.
Watching as the father and daughter stopped the cart at a distance and then carried their scavenged junk to converse with the guards at the gate.
Xue Dili turned to Old Green and asked, "Old man, what do you think?"
Since arriving in this world, Old Green had been desperately stroking his beard. This bizarre world was far too distorted for a Mage from the Fairy Tale World, even more terrifying than the "Hell" in his impression.
But eliminating those eerie creatures, looking at the environnt of this tribe, he could only say, "This should be a civilization similar to your world's level, but they were wiped out, perhaps by those strange creatures, and then another group occupied here as the inhabitants."
Old Green pondered again, "But this new group is purely primitive people, knowing nothing, not inheriting any knowledge or information from the original civilization. They regard everything from the original civilization as 'Ancient Gods' to worship."
Xue Dili nodded. This was roughly in line with his thinking, but he also added, "From afar, I saw that this world allows you to see wide-angle distortion with the naked eye, but I've never encountered this before, which can only be explained that it's not wide-angle distortion, but rather that this world is extrely small, so small that the eye can discern that the world is round..."
Xue Dili continued to gaze at the distance, at that distorted landscape in circular form.
"But, the human body instinctively perceives the ground beneath its feet as 'flat,' thus the eye experiences an illusion of wide-angle distortion, and so, calculating this..." Xue Dili took out his phone and tapped on the calculator, then said, "The circumference of this planet is estimated to be less than 1000 kiloters."
In comparison, Blue Star's circumference is 40,000 kiloters, and the Moon's circumference is 10,000 kiloters; standing on a planet, there's no visible wide-angle distortion.
This suggests that this planet is estimated to be only one-thousandth of the Moon, its surface area possibly not even as large as Australia.
Yet he felt that the gravity of this planet was about 1.6 tis that of Blue Star. A planet of such small volu has such high gravity, and he still didn't understand how water cycles on this planet, or whether there are any seas.
Everything was so strange, the physical paraters of this planet seed chaotically filled in by employees at the end of a workday.
The guards quickly arrived beside Xue Dili. Just by seeing Xue Dili's god-like features and impeccably clean clothes, they didn't need to see Xue Dili emit Holy Light to believe the words of the father and daughter and felt compelled to kneel imdiately.
"No, no, don't do that abstract kneeling in a dozen different postures. Take to see your King, and say that a God has co to inspect this land." Xue Dili promptly said.
He understood that reasoning with this bunch of primitives wouldn't work, but pretending to be a deity worked exceptionally well on them. If Xue Dili had stuck to his values from Blue Star and tried to persuade them kindly, those guards could have knelt and changed kneeling styles for a good ten minutes without stopping.
Indeed, hearing the words "God's inspection," they wasted no ti and quickly said, "I will take you to see King Old Green imdiately."
"Huh?" Xue Dili and Old Green both froze for a mont.
"Is the translation module broken?" Xue Dili tapped the panel of the Great Sage, but no matter how he tapped, the translation always ca out as "Old Green."
"Maybe it's just the sa na. My na is quite common after all, considering how ordinary the pronunciation is," Old Green said as they were led by the guards to a house resembling a small villa.
"King Green, the Lord of Light is here to inspect the Mortal World," the guard directly announced.
This scene didn't resemble soldiers reporting to a King, more like a village guy knocking on the village head's door.
With over a thousand people, truth be told, it was no different from a village.
The door creaked open, and a timid young lady knelt on the ground. Xue Dili didn't even bother to correct their bizarre etiquette.
The interior was impeccably clean, but as Xue Dili stepped inside, he was horrified to see the "Old Green" King opposite him, his pupils constricting.
Not only Xue Dili, but the Mage Old Green was also stunned because the man opposite was identical to him! Apart from being older, he was like an exact duplicate!
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