180: Chapter 180 Red Amber Forest

The black passage was extremely short.

After walking twenty-some steps, the chill was stripped away.

A scorching heat wave, mixed with the pungent smell of sulfur, rushed straight at their faces.

Tiny, dense beads of water constantly seeped from the stone walls on both sides.

As soon as the water droplets slid down half an inch, they turned into pungent white steam and evaporated completely.

Zhao Mengmeng pulled up a piece of animal hide to cover her nose and mouth.

She still could not suppress a cough from the choking fumes.

"Is there a volcano crater ahead?"

Lin Ye pressed his backhand against the rock wall beside him.

A burning pain, as if he were being cooked, shot through his palm.

"We cannot stop." Lin Ye pulled his hand back.

He unzipped his backpack and pulled out the remaining half-can of Black Rock Salt Crystals.

With the tip of his horizontal saber, he gouged out a small piece of dried sealed exotic beast meat and sliced it into two extremely thin pieces.

He pressed the salt crystals onto the meat slices and pushed them directly under his tongue.

In a high-heat environment, water loss kills faster than blood loss.

The salt could forcibly lock in the last of their physical strength.

Zhao Mengmeng caught the salt crystals he tossed to her and bit off a grain.

Her eyebrows knitted tightly together from the overwhelming saltiness.

"It's so salty my head is buzzing."

"Keep it in your mouth."

Red light expanded rapidly at the end of the passage.

Scalding white mist began to hiss and overflow from the gaps in the floor tiles.

Lin Ye hooked a piece of gravel with his toe and kicked it forward.

The stone had just fallen into the white mist.

Its surface instantly hissed, turning from gray to charred black.

Zhao Mengmeng stared at the charred stone.

"If you stepped on that, would your soles melt into glue?"

Lin Ye's Left Eye opened silently and wide.

In True Vision, the floor of the passage ahead was filled with rolling red waves.

The high-temperature steam was not spraying randomly.

The heat pressure was moving back and forth along hidden underground pipes at a frequency of three breaths.

Several black stone slabs with dim green glowing edges were scattered in the red waves.

Three on the left, two on the right, with a red fissure about to boil spanning across the middle.

"Step where I step."

Before he finished speaking, Lin Ye had already taken the first step.

Zhao Mengmeng followed closely behind.

Just as her ankle crossed the red fissure, the white mist below surged up.

The heat flow licked over her animal hide leggings, and the edges immediately curled and deformed.

Through the special soles, an unbearable scorching sensation still reached the soles of her feet.

"These floor tiles can fry a person!"

"Don't stop."

There were only two zhang left to the exit.

The underground heat pressure suddenly lost its rhythm.

On the retina of Lin Ye's Left Eye, the three green-glowing stone slabs ahead were instantly swallowed by intense red light.

The original route was ruined.

Zhao Mengmeng had already lifted her right foot.

Lin Ye suddenly turned around, grabbed her backpack strap with one hand, and yanked her hard toward the side and back.

He flipped his horizontal saber in his right hand and slammed the back of the blade heavily against the base of the wall on the right side of the passage.

A thin stone slab collapsed in response.

A black pipe as thick as an infant's arm was exposed inside the wall.

The heat on the surface of the pipe was strangely flowing back inside.

The gap existed only for this instant.

"Step on the pipe!"

"Won't this thing explode?"

"It will explode in three seconds, go!"

Zhao Mengmeng gritted her back teeth and accurately stepped the edge of her military boot onto the rounded pipe wall.

Leveraging this weak point of support, the two leaped three steps in a row.

The three stone slabs behind them that had been safe shattered in response.

The long-accumulated steam formed a pale, high-pressure water column that shot straight to the ceiling of the passage.

The boiling water exploded, turning into dense, scalding rain that poured down.

A few drops of water splashed onto Zhao Mengmeng's shoulder armor, and the bronze surface was instantly scorched with several shallow pits.

The two used the momentum to dash out of the passage and rolled to the side on the open ground.

The white mist behind them was sealed inside the door.

Lin Ye stood up, and a light screen flickered before his right eye.

[Ninth Floor: Red Amber Heat Forest]

Zhao Mengmeng knelt on one knee, and when she looked up and saw the scene in front of her, her fingers dug into the cracks in the ground.

There was no gray sand.

There was no underground river.

The entire underground space was filled with endless, dark red giant trees.

The thick trunks were formed entirely from translucent red resin.

Inside, eerie black patterns and huge, murky bubbles were sealed.

Branches intertwined and twisted, and red light flowed slowly deep within the resin.

The ground was layers of solidified resin and black rock crust.

In the distance of the forest, every few breaths, a hot spring would break through the surface and shoot into the sky.

White water mist shrouded the entire forest in a layer of high-pressure steam.

The falling water droplets hit the resin, making a harsh hissing sound.

The cloying, nauseating smell of resin mixed with the smell of sulfur, tightly blocking their respiratory tracts.

The Great Xia Live Stream room's chat exploded instantly.

[What kind of underworld primeval forest is this?! Are all these trees made of giant amber?]

[The ground is full of fountains, how are they supposed to walk here?]

[Just looking at it makes my throat feel like it's smoking! Can the grain seeds in Brother Eye's bag withstand such roasting?!]

Lin Ye stared at a seemingly flat patch of amber-colored open ground ahead.

In his Left Eye's vision, the red light beneath that open ground was expanding rapidly in cycles of nine breaths.

On the tenth breath.

He used the tip of his horizontal saber to pick up a piece of gravel from beside his feet and flicked it toward that open ground.

The stone landed with a dull clatter.

The open ground showed no abnormalities.

Zhao Mengmeng just started to speak.

The heat pressure blasted through the thin resin shell without warning.

Boiling spring water, mixed with milky white mineral foam, shot into the sky, reaching five meters high.

The gravel used to test the path was shattered on the spot.

Zhao Mengmeng gripped the crossbow stock tightly, her boot soles scraping half an inch backward.

"Landmines?"

"More dense than mines." Lin Ye held his horizontal saber horizontally in front of him.

The hot spring vent that had just erupted was quickly filled by flowing resin.

The surface returned to being flat, with no abnormalities.

This kind of camouflage was enough to instantly boil any living creature that stepped on it.

Lin Ye pulled out a few leftover pieces of Sand Spider shell.

He sliced them with his blade, turning them into a dozen sharp shards the size of a fingernail.

"Mark the path."

He used gravel to test the path.

Then, with the help of his Left Eye's limit-half-breath activation, he forcibly peered through the ground to see the gathering points of the red light.

Once a spot was identified, he would nail down a shell shard.

In this minefield where heat pressure ran wild, he was forced to carve out a barely passable path for survival.

The extremely high ambient temperature was rapidly draining their physical strength.

Zhao Mengmeng untied a piece of animal hide from her leggings and wrapped it tightly around the soles of her boots.

The special soles had already begun to soften; if they weren't insulated, they would stick to the resin.

"How much water is left?" Lin Ye asked.

"Half a pouch."

Zhao Mengmeng protected the water pouch at her waist and did not unscrew it.

"Save it to save our lives."

"Moisten your throat; if you get too dry, you'll easily get tracheal spasms." Lin Ye said in a deep voice.

Zhao Mengmeng stared at his lips, which had cracked into two bloody gashes, pulled out the stopper, and took a tiny sip.

She passed the water pouch back.

Lin Ye also just moistened his hot, dry lips.

The hot spring water was highly toxic, and the steam here even carried mineral toxins.

Before finding a non-toxic water source, this half-pouch of water was their life.

Lin Ye's gaze swept over a low red amber tree beside the path.

In the middle and lower sections of the trunk, there were a few bubbles glowing with a soft green light.

The gray spots were extremely faint.

He stepped closer and tapped the outer shell of the trunk with his horizontal saber.

The sound was crisp, slightly hollow.

The liquid bubble was two inches beneath the surface.

He pressed the tip of the blade against the amber shell and applied force with his wrist to drill slowly.

The hard resin was drilled through, and a pale red, viscous liquid slowly seeped out along the blade groove.

A light screen flickered.

[Red Amber Resin Liquid]

Lin Ye pulled out a hollow section of Sand Spider leg bone and caught a drop of the viscous liquid to smell it.

It was cloyingly sweet, with a hint of sourness.

"Used for hydration."

Zhao Mengmeng's throat immediately bobbed.

"Tree sap?"

Lin Ye inserted the bone tube into the hole, caught half a small tube, and pulled it out decisively.

He pulled out a prepared wad of animal hide and plugged the drill hole tightly.

If he let it flow for even a moment longer, the red light inside the trunk would detonate the liquid bubble due to the change in pressure.

The resin liquid was extremely viscous going down the throat, but his burning throat received a moment of relief.

Relying on the half-tube of resin liquid, the two suppressed the feeling of dehydration that was on the verge of collapse.

The view ahead was obscured by high-pressure steam.

In the last breath before his Left Eye closed, Lin Ye caught a glimpse of a moving dark red shape deep within the hot mist.

It was an enormously huge silhouette.

It was sliding silently along the scorching resin ground.

It was still far away.

Lin Ye did not hesitate at all and held his horizontal saber diagonally in front of him.

Zhao Mengmeng noticed his muscles tense up.

"Are we facing a tough opponent?"

Lin Ye stared into the heavy mist.

"There's a big one."

Just at this moment.

The giant bronze sundial door behind them let out a dull roar.

The thick door leaves locked shut, leaving no gap.

The heat wave of the Ninth Floor pressed down on them.