54: Chapter 54 swallowed it... swallowed it in one gulp.

Liu Hui completely disregarded the slippery, jagged rocks underfoot, using both hands and feet as he desperately scrambled up the rock crevice slope where Su Qingxue was located.

As he climbed, he wailed hysterically.

"Snake! There's a snake!"

"Run! Nine hundred catties! There's a huge snake weighing at least nine hundred catties!"

Tumbling and crawling, he fell into the rock crevice, collapsing onto the ground like a puddle of mud.

Su Qingxue, Wang Qiang, and the others in the rock crevice were all scared out of their wits.

"Swallowed... Swallowed it in a single bite!"

Liu Hui pointed in the direction of the forest, snot and tears mixing with blood streaming down his face, his entire body trembling violently.

"Old Li is gone! Old Li has been eaten!"

"He was just talking to me a moment ago... and then a pitch-black tunnel dropped down from above... swallowing him whole right then and there! His bones were even crushed to pieces!"

Liu Hui's crying and shouting echoed across the empty cliffs, making one's scalp tingle.

Lin Fan stood up, gripping the tactical straight knife in his hand tightly, his gaze locked firmly on that patch of forest below that was still shaking violently.

The next second.

The air across the entire island seemed to congeal.

A terrifying inverted-triangular head slowly protruded from the dense treetops.

As thick as a water bucket? No, that body was simply thicker than a giant water vat!

Dark brown reticulated markings covered the palm-sized scales, gleaming under the dazzling sunlight.

It was too massive! So massive that it completely exceeded the limits of a normal human's cognitive understanding of living creatures.

Merely by thrusting out the front half of its body, that giant python had already crushed and snapped over a dozen surrounding large trees.

It raised its head, its dark yellow slit pupils exuding a suffocating aura of death, locking fiercely onto the crowd on the beach and in the rock crevices below.

"Hiss—"

A crimson, bifurcated tongue flicked out from its huge snout.

Just by lingering there, the terrifying sense of oppression coming from an apex predator of ancient times caused everyone present to hold their breath.

Zhao Na rolled her eyes back and fainted straight away from fright.

Standing on the high platform, Lin Fan watched this scene calmly.

On his retina, a row of crimson text was refreshing.

[Warning: High-risk mutated creature is approaching!]

[Species: Reticulated Python (Magnetic Field Radiation Mutated Subspecies)]

[Body Length: 21.8 meters]

[Body Weight: 542 kilograms]

[Status: Extremely excited. This creature has been awakened and attracted by the high concentration of putrid, bloody odors.]

[Hint: The current island magnetic field is abnormal, causing the local ecological chain to reorganize. The sizes of all apex predators exceed conventional biological cognition.]

Lin Fan narrowed his eyes, the veins on the back of his hand holding the straight knife bulging.

21.8 meters?! Over five hundred kilograms?!

This was by no means a python in the conventional sense; this size was already approaching the data of a prehistoric Titanoboa!

Swallowing an adult whole was truly as simple as eating spicy strips.

The temperature! The corpses!

Those few people who froze to death the day before yesterday, plus Old Zhao and Sister Liu who fell to their deaths on the beach last night.

As the sun came out today and temperatures rose rapidly, those dozen-odd corpses began to decompose at an accelerated rate.

The intense smell of blood and corpse stench drifted into the deep mountains along with the sea breeze, directly awakening and drawing out this mutated monster at the top of the food chain!

"What on earth is going on! Make it clear!"

Down in the rock crevice, Wang Qiang was pale with fear. He shouted in a deep voice, his voice trembling, yet it still overpowered Liu Hui's wails and cries.

Liu Hui tightly grasped Wang Qiang's trouser legs, his whole body twitching violently, his eyes fixed dead on that Mangrove Forest.

"We... We just walked to the edge of the beach..."

"Old Li said to go inside the forest and see if there was any fresh water or wild fruit."

"We hadn't even searched inside for two minutes when a fishy gust of wind blew over, and something pitch-black hung straight down from the tree... That was a mouth! A mouth bigger than a water vat!"

Su Qingxue in the rock crevice drew a sharp breath, her legs turning weak as she collapsed straight to the ground.

As a high-and-mighty female CEO who didn't even watch horror movies ordinarily, when had she ever seen such a living prehistoric monster?

"Old Li didn't even let out a scream before his upper body was pulled inside!"

"If I had walked ahead of Old Li, the one who died would have been me!"

Up on the Karst Cave platform.

Zhang Tao, Xiao Zhou, Lily, and the others were all frozen in place at this moment.

That twenty-one-meter reticulated python still coiled at the edge of the Mangrove Forest.

Its huge inverted-triangular head was raised high, its dark yellow slit pupils exuding a suffocating aura as they locked firmly onto the direction of the rock crevice below.

It did not continue to pursue Liu Hui.

The hunting of cold-blooded animals was never for slaughter, but for feeding.

Old Li's body of over a hundred catties had clearly replenished its first wave of hunger after waking up.

"Hiss—"

Its crimson tongue rapidly flicked in and out of the air as it captured scent molecules in the air.

Its neck, thicker than a water vat, twisted slowly. Its gaze swept across the rock crevice, then slowly lifted to glance at the Karst Cave where Lin Fan was located slightly above.

At that instant, everyone on the Karst Cave platform forgot to breathe, terrified that the giant python would come over and swallow them into its belly in one bite.

But they were overthinking it.

Before absolute size suppression, humans, these two-legged sheep, were nothing more than ubiquitous spicy strips.

The giant python seemed to have lost interest in those lively little prey up high, its attention completely drawn by those few corpses below that were about to completely decompose.

"Crack... Boom..."

The teeth-grating sound of trees snapping rang out once more.

The giant python's thick tail swept across the brush, leaving behind a terrifying indent nearly a meter wide and deep enough to reveal the soil.

It retreated deep into the dense forest.

Until that suffocating fishy stench was completely blown away by the sea breeze did the crowd on the Karst Cave platform snap back to their senses.

"Hoo... Hoo..."

Ragged breaths rose and fell one after another.

Xiao Zhou's legs went soft, and he collapsed straight to his knees on the gravel ground.

Lily and several other women hugged each other tightly, trembling in fear, not even daring to make a sound while crying.

Standing at the edge of the platform, Lin Fan slowly loosened his grip on the tactical straight knife.

In life, I cultivate no good karma, only loving to kill and set fires.

On this damned island with no rules, talking about morality is courting death.

Lin Fan turned around, his gaze sweeping past the crowd sitting limply on the ground and landing on Zhang Tao.

At this moment, Zhang Tao still maintained that posture of extreme terror from just now, his face as pale as paper.

"Zhang Tao."

Zhang Tao shuddered all over, raising his head, his eyes filled with lingering fear: "Fan... Brother Fan..."

Lin Fan walked up in front of him, looking down at him from above.

"You just said that you were going to go into the mountains by yourself to find wild fruit, and go into the sea to catch seafood?"

(Dear foster fathers, the weight of the giant snake has been modified due to feedback from some foster fathers. If there are any discrepancies in weight values later on, please remind the author. Thank you, dear foster fathers.)