19: Chapter 19 Collection Team

...

The Infected Grey Rat lurked gloomily in the crevices of the Gravel Slope.

It curled itself into a ball of grey fur, leaving only its two ears exposed on the outside to twitch.

Jiang Ming perceived the vibrations of the ground ahead through its tactile feedback.

It was neither the scattered trampling of the carrion hyenas nor the heavy hoofbeats of the corrupted deer.

It was very light and rhythmic.

There were four sets of hoofprints, with the stride frequency of each set being close.

The spacing between landing points was even, and the marching route was almost a straight line.

It was not wild animals!

Wild animals would not walk in a straight line in the fog; they would circle trees, sniff the ground, and stop and go.

Only domesticated pack animals would stubbornly move forward along a fixed route because they knew where they were going.

Behind the hoofprints followed two sets of human footsteps.

Two people, both weighing around sixty-five kilograms, walked at an unhurried pace without alert movements, occasionally chatting with each other.

Four pack goats walked in front.

Coarse hemp ropes were tied around the goats' necks, with every two tied together side by side, carrying bulging straw-woven bags on their backs.

Goats were domesticated; this was not hunting, not gathering, but transportation.

This indicated that the shelter two kilometers away already had surplus grain to raise livestock.

"Brother Xu and the others went this way."

The gatherer walking on the left spoke first, with a refreshing voice, just in his early twenties.

His speech was rather fast, carrying a hint of undisguised nervousness.

"They walked this way and didn't return, so we were sent."

The other one was older, with a flat tone—neither nervous nor relaxed—the kind of person who just did whatever task was assigned without thinking too much.

"Don't go too deep! Higher-ups instructed us to stop upon seeing the Wooden Cabin, pick up whatever we can find, and retreat if we can't find anything! Entering the house is strictly prohibited!!!"

"Then what if we run into..."

The younger one didn't finish before being directly interrupted by the older one.

"No matter what we run into, you are not allowed to chase! This is recovery, not a search!"

Jiang Ming dissected and analyzed this conversation.

First, the disappearance of Xu He and the other two had been known to their Settlement, but the cause of disappearance was unknown. The other party judged it as "encountering something" rather than "being eaten by trees".

This indicated that the information Su Xiaoyun previously sent in the channel—that "tree roots can eat people"—did not gain widespread acceptance.

Second, the people they sent were not a combat team, but a recovery team bringing goats to carry things.

This showed that the expected return was not to save people, but to scavenge equipment.

Third, the order was "stop upon seeing the Wooden Cabin", indicating that before returning, Xu He had already brought the coordinates of the Wooden Cabin back to the Settlement.

These coordinates had now become their preset dangerous cordon.

The recovery team continued moving forward, and the goats were the first to step into the edge of the Tree Domain.

Livestock reacted much faster than humans; the first goat suddenly stopped when it was about seventy meters away from the Wooden Cabin.

It braced its four hooves against the ground and refused to move, its ears pinned backward against the top of its head, emitting a low gurgling sound in its throat.

The trailing three also stopped, the ropes strained taut. They sensed the danger before the humans did.

The Tree Domain's effect on low-intelligence creatures was more direct.

They wouldn't analyze why they felt uncomfortable; they simply perceived instinctively that this piece of land should not be stepped on.

"Move!!!" The young gatherer tugged on the rope, while the goat stubbornly braced backward.

The older one squatted down to touch the ground, checking the soil quality and fallen leaves, but saw no abnormalities.

However, he did not forcibly drive the goats; instead, he untied the rope of the lead goat.

"We aren't going in! Unload the things here, let them graze for a while, and go carve a mark on a tree by the road, writing: Xu He has not returned, danger ahead!"

Seeing this action, Jiang Ming adjusted his threat rating for these two people from "low" to "extremely low" in his heart.

It wasn't just because they were weak, but because they were strictly executing orders.

No going deep, no taking risks, no triggering any unknown reactions.

Killing such people offered little benefit, whereas escaping back would instead bring back more accurate intelligence.

If they were allowed to return alive to report that "the goats feel fear when approaching the Wooden Cabin, and there are no obvious abnormalities on the ground",

then the next ones to come wouldn't be a recovery team, but possibly a cleanup team carrying kerosene.

But he didn't plan to kill them all either.

What he needed right now was information, not evolution points.

He needed to know how many people were left in this Settlement, whether there were any Awakened ones, and to what extent their material reserves were.

As well as how they planned to handle the matter of Xu He's disappearance next.

While eavesdropping on the conversation between the two, he re-sorted the fragmented memories he had previously absorbed.

Su Xiaoyun's memories were fragmented, mainly focused on daily scenes of life in the Wooden Cabin and fear fragments before her death.

But two frames among them had nothing to do with the Wooden Cabin.

She had once heard a man's voice in the channel; the voice was very low, and what he said wasn't for help, but "I can almost hear the fog speaking".

At that time, everyone in the channel cursed him as crazy, and Su Xiaoyun also regarded him as having a mental breakdown.

But now it seemed that wasn't the case.

Before Xu He's Team set out, the pack hand had also mentioned a sentence in the channel.

"Old Chen said that recently something is moving in the forest; it's not eerie movements, but something even more different."

"Old Chen."

This name again.

The conversation of the two gatherers happened to cut in.

"...Old Chen has gone crazy again over at the Settlement. During last night's watch, he suddenly stood up and said something was drinking water in the forest."

The young gatherer said while carving words on the tree trunk.

"What something is drinking water?"

The older one squatted by the roadside to repackage the supplies in the pack bags without raising his head.

"He said it's trees! Trees are drinking water, drinking human blood, sucking from underground through their roots. He said he can hear the sucking sound! He also said that tree isn't hungry; it's picky, picking what to eat."

The older one was silent for a while.

"What is Old Chen's sanity value at?"

"Nobody dared to ask! Last time someone asked, he smiled and said 'The numbers are a lie from the system; your sanity value has been fake right from the start'."

The young gatherer put the wood chips and charcoal pencil into his arms, lowering his voice even further.

"But a few times what he said was true! Last time he said a big thing was coming from the southeast, and the next day that One-horned Corrupted Deer crashed over."

"That's why the higher-ups keep him."

The older one stood up and tugged on the goats' ropes.

"Shut up and get to work."

Jiang Ming recorded every single word.

Old Chen.

This person's sanity value might have already dropped below thirty; perhaps it wasn't a breakdown, but walking another path.

Long ago, he had repeatedly verified that the lower the sanity value, the better one could perceive the true threat of the Tree Domain.

When Zhou Cheng was in the fifties, he only felt oppression and being watched; when Su Xiaoyun was at thirty-seven, she could accurately describe the color and movements of the roots.

If this Old Chen was at thirty or even lower, he might not just perceive "trees drinking water".

He might be vaguely receiving the mental fluctuation frequency of the Tree Domain, treating the rhythm of spore dispersion as breathing and the extraction of Nutrient Plunder as swallowing.

This person was not a madman, but a hyper-perceiver who hadn't completely Awakened yet.

If he could devour him and absorb his perceptual characteristics, his own spiritual detection ability might undergo a qualitative change.

But conversely, such a person was also most capable of detecting his disguise and buried roots.

If he led a team to clear the forest, his hunting ground layout might be exposed layer by layer.

The older gatherer unloaded a portion of the supplies from the goat's back and placed them on a dry rock by the roadside.

Not equipment, but food—two thick flatbreads, a small bag of dried fruit, and half a section of cured meat.

The other gatherer pulled a small wood chip from his arms and stuck it next to the food, with a few words written on it in charcoal ash.

It was too far to see clearly, but through the perspective of the Infected Grey Rat, Jiang Ming barely discerned the direction of the strokes; it was roughly "For Brother Xu".

Offerings.

They had left food for the missing Xu Hes Team.

Not search and rescue, but a memorial.

Meaning that in the cognition over at the Settlement, Xu He and the other three were in all likelihood categorized as dead.

"Let's go back, it's getting dark."

The older one pulled up the goats' lead ropes, preparing to return along the original path.

Jiang Ming couldn't let this road be cut off just like that.

The transportation route was a stable hunting ground artery. If these two people went back to report "danger ahead, no findings at all",

the people coming next time would be more cautious and fully armed. Conversely, if he could make them feel that ahead wasn't danger, but an opportunity—

supplies scattered and unattended, weapons lying about awaiting recovery, and perhaps residual resources remaining in the Wooden Cabin—

then the team coming next time might bring more goats, walk deeper paths, and step into an even denser root network.

He controlled the Infected Crow on the roof to take off, skimming low from the side across their field of vision. The target wasn't the people, but the foremost goat.

The crow's black wings brushed past the tips of the goat's horns. The goat jumped in fright, violently struggling to the side, and the rope slipped from the older gatherer's hand.

The remaining three goats had a chain reaction, and all four goats dragged their ropes and ran around in two directions.

"Hold on! Pull separately!"

The young gatherer chased the one on the left, while the older one chased the one on the right, widening a distance of at least forty meters between them.

Even though they were scattered, they did not shout or run too far out of the preset route.

The young gatherer suddenly stopped when he chased to the edge of the bushes, lowering his head to glance at the mud.

There was a shallow root mark that Jiang Ming had intentionally exposed.

He simply made the roots wriggle beneath the fallen leaves, like a hand turning over beneath a quilt.

The young gatherer's face probably turned pale.

He didn't scream or call out to his companion.

Instead, he slowly retreated back to the roadside, pulling back the last goat still within his line of sight.

Then he said in a low voice toward the forest: "Sorry! The things are left here, we aren't going in!"

After speaking, he pulled the goat and walked back quickly.

This young man was very smart and sensible.

The older one didn't ask much either, re-tying the goats and glancing at the offerings on the ground.

He nodded toward the Wooden Cabin and turned to leave.

After the footsteps of the two faded away, Jiang Ming did a very small but very important thing.

He made the Infected Grey Rat crawl onto the trunk carved with words, chewing a few more marks beneath "Xu He has not returned, danger ahead".

It was a certain shape; viewed from a human perspective, those marks combined looked like a crooked arrow pointing toward the Wooden Cabin.

A wrong signpost!

The next time someone came to look at the marks on this tree, they would think the previous people had left directional guidance.

Following the arrow meant walking straight into the deepest root network of the hunting ground.

When the evening light began to dim, he expanded his reconnaissance range to the current maximum.

The three-point reconnaissance network plus the newly infected fourth Infected Grey Rat—four mobile cameras covered the entire core area from the water source to the Wooden Cabin and the transportation route.

Just as he was about to save the fifth infection quota for the next Carrion Crow, Fear Perception suddenly popped up a new signal at the edge of the hunting ground.

Ninety meters away from his main body, on the transportation route, was a person.

It wasn't the two previous gatherers, nor the combat type like Xu He.

The pace was very slow, with an extremely brief pause before each step landed, as if probing the ground with his toes.

The route he walked was not a straight line, but looking closely, the spot stepped on with every step was the safest patch of soil.

He didn't step into the dense root network area, didn't step into the loose soil traps, and even bypassed the place where the Infected Grey Rat had just crawled.

He wasn't probing the road; he was listening to the road.

"Old Chen!"

The young gatherer's voice surfaced from the memory of the conversation before dusk.

"He suddenly stood up during last night's watch and said something was drinking water in the forest... He said that tree isn't hungry, it's picky..."

The direction this person was walking was the Wooden Cabin.

He came alone.