An Zhe walked for a very long time.

Many nights and days later, the distance he had traversed on the map was merely the width of a human pinky nail, while the remaining distance to the Northern Base was the length of an entire finger. Since he had no human means of transportation, he didn’t know exactly how much longer it would take for him to get there.

At last, he noticed the damp and gloomy smell fade away and felt the soil beneath his feet firm up.

That evening, the sun sank down behind the distant unbroken chain of black mountains like a crimson eye blinking. The sunlight gradually disappeared, and as the dusk sky and aurora rose together, An Zhe tried hard to make out the writing and symbols on the map.

The dried-up river he had just walked across marked a border of the "Abyss", and after this border was a place named "Flatland 2". Flatland 2 had a three-star danger level and two-star pollution level, and it was home to large arthropod-class monsters and rodent-class animals. The land, no longer filled with mushrooms, was dominated by common low shrubbery instead.

Indeed, the Abyss's uneven terrain, the commonly-seen rifts, and the entangled shadows of towering trees that appeared late at night were all gone. One could take in the view of this place with a single glance—a flat and boundless twilight.

But An Zhe felt uneasy.

Flatland 2's dry air seemed unsuited for the survival of mushrooms and he could not find any soil from which he could absorb nutrients, so he could only recover his strength via human methods such as sleeping.

Thus, he walked for another very long time before finally finding a shallow depression in the ground where short green and yellow grasses were sparsely growing. He sat down with his arms wrapped around his knees and curled up in a suitable posture.

A mushroom usually spends the vast majority of its life sleeping, but this was the first time An Zhe fell asleep in a human posture.

A mushroom's sleep usually consists of staying quietly in a single place and waiting for time to pass, but it seemed that human sleep was different. Not long after he closed his eyes, infinite darkness came flooding forth like the tide, and An Zhe’s body became light.

Or to put it another way, it seemed like he was losing his body bit by bit.

At some point, the whistling wind entered his ears. It was the sound of the wind in the wilderness, which used to be his favorite thing.

But those sounds were now meaningless, for he had lost its spore when it was rolling around in a patch of wilderness it liked. There were some human voices amongst the wind. He couldn't remember those syllables very well, only recall a tiny portion of them. Even when turned into human language, they were fragmented phrases that he couldn't put together—

"Very... strange, very..."

"... How is it?"

"Take... samples... this place."

In the following moment, an indescribable pain radiated to every part of his body. The feeling was very light, but also very deep. A void appeared in his consciousness, unable to be filled for ever and ever, and he knew he had lost his most important thing from then on.

Fear spread throughout his body in that instant. From then on, fearing the sound of the wind, he lived in the cave.

His heart pounded, and a wave of fear suddenly washed over him—the same kind of fear as when he lost his spore.

An Zhe's eyes flew open, and he promptly realized that he was dreaming. Only humans could dream. In the following moment, he stopped breathing entirely.

He knew the source of that fear. A black creature stood in front of him.

Two blood-red compound eyes glowed faintly. An Zhe tensed up all over, and his gaze traveled down the huge creature. It had three pairs of slender and sharp sickle-like forelimbs, each as long as an adult human, that gleamed with a luster as cold as moonlight.

After realizing what it was, his body shuddered with a distant feeling that stemmed from the trembling of the first ancestor thousands of years back—the feeling that, as a mushroom, he would die from being bitten by termites.

Perhaps the predators in the "Abyss" would not spare a mushroom a single glance, but the arthropod-class monsters of Flatland 2 may view them as a rare delicacy.

Just as this thought occurred to An Zhe, he unconsciously rolled to one side!

With a dull sound that made even the earth tremble, the arthropod monster's sharp forelimb stabbed into the soil next to him—where he had just been lying.

An Zhe snatched up his backpack, turned over, and got to his feet before sprinting to the nearby shrubbery as the arthropod monster's rapid footsteps resounded in his ears. When the sound grew somewhat softer, An Zhe looked back. Beneath the aurora, he clearly saw the thing in its entirety at last. It was a massive black monster resembling an ant that had been magnified a few thousand times.

Luckily, its body looked overly cumbersome. The speed at which humans could run was superior, so as long as he could run into the shrubbery up ahead—

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He stumbled.

In that instant, the monster’s shadow enveloped him. Amidst the keen whistling of the wind, its forelimb swung towards his arm.

An Zhe's shirt sleeve suddenly became empty, causing the fabric to droop and the monster to cut nothing at all.

It paused, seemingly surprised by that.

At the same time, hyphae stretched out and grew again inside An Zhe's sleeve to form a complete human arm once more.

He dropped to the ground and rolled, narrowly avoiding the monster's next attack, then pushed off the ground and threw himself into the low shrubbery where two hardy shrubs shielded his body.

But that wasn't enough for him to escape this monster's eyes. An Zhe took a few hurried breaths, and his body began to transform. The outlines of his arms, fingers, and all other extremities became undefined and something heaved below the surface, turning more hyphae-like as he prepared to escape via a more agile means.

Right at that moment—

"Bang!"

A streak of white light flew through the air and struck the joint connecting the monster's head and thorax like a shooting star.

After the dull sound of the impact rang out, the white light silently exploded with a flare of red mixed in.

An Zhe lay in the shrubbery and watched, eyes wide open, as the huge thing broke into two parts and crashed to the ground.

The impact sent leaves flying into the air, falling over An Zhe.

The monster's head landed not more than half a meter away from him, its blood-red compound eyes still looking in his direction.

In the past, An Zhe had seen creatures in the "Abyss" who could still move even after being cut into thirds. Just as he thought to get a little further away from it, he suddenly heard sounds nearby.

"That was the last uranium shell. After harvesting the carcass, we're going back to the base." The man’s voice was rich.

"Arthropod-type carapaces aren't cheap. I didn't think we'd end up snagging some." Another male voice, reedier than the previous one.

After a short exchange, they stopped talking, and the sounds of their footsteps traveled over. It was the sound of thick-soled leather boots treading on the sand mixed with the rustling sound of friction.

Humans.

After An Ze’s death, An Zhe had not seen any humans for a long time. He furtively raised his head from the shrubbery.

The shrubbery rustled. He heard the first speaker quietly urge, "On your guard!"

In the following second, three pitch-black gun muzzles were aimed in his direction.

An Zhe looked at the men.

His muddled recollection of the night he lost his spore inexorably came to mind, but An Ze's existence had shown him the kindness and goodwill of humans. He thought over his current predicament, then said, "He-... hello."

Beneath the aurora’s illumination, the scene before him could be taken in at a glance: three humans clad in dark gray clothes, all male. Wrapped around their waists were wide brown belts with magazines for their guns tied to them. The man standing in the middle towered over the other, shorter two.

He had been the one speaking just now about uranium. His voice was very calm as he asked, "You human?"

An Zhe hesitated briefly. Thinking of the weapon that blew up the monster at its midsection, he said, "Yes."

"What're you called? What's your ID number? What about your teammates?"

"An Zhe. 3261170514. We got separated."

The man looked down at him with a frown. He had thick and dark eyebrows, clear black eyes, a high nose bridge, and thick lips. Unlike the wild beasts of the Abyss, the combination of these facial features didn’t make An Zhe feel a sense of peril, so he pursed his lips and returned the gaze.

Three seconds later, one of the men at that man's side—a short and dark-skinned man—loaded the gun once more with a click, the action full of implied threat. He looked at An Zhe and said, his voice low and words fast, "Take off your clothes."

An Zhe stood up from the shrubbery and undid the first button on his gray shirt, then the second, revealing the skin at his neckline. His skin was a smooth, milky white that looked a bit like the color of his hyphae.

Then he heard the third man whistle. That man had pallid skin tinted with a red flush and blond hair as well as many wrinkles on his face, which were signs of human aging. The man's eyes, gray-blue and turned up at the corners, were looking straight at him.

An Zhe lowered his head, undid the rest of the buttons, and took off his shirt.

The blue-eyed man walked closer to him, whistled a second time, and began to examine him from top to bottom.

This man's gaze was very sticky, similar to the saliva of the animals in the Abyss. After examining An Zhe once, he looped around to An Zhe's side.

Then he seized An Zhe's wrist and swiped the skin there with his fingers. With his thumb rubbing against An Zhe's wrist bone, he asked in a slightly piercing voice, "What's this?"

An Zhe looked down at the back of his hand and wrist. There were some random and irregular red marks there, which were scratches he had gotten from the shrubbery when he was dodging the monster's attacks earlier. He turned his head, using his gaze to indicate the shrubbery behind himself. "Leaves."

A brief silence followed. After a while, that man clicked his tongue and said, "You taking off the rest yourself, or shall I take it off for you?"

An Zhe didn’t move.

He knew more or less what they were doing, for there were similar scenes in An Ze's memories.

Genetic contamination would occur between monsters and monsters or between monsters and people. The method of tentatively verifying whether someone had been contaminated was to check for wounds.

However, the man behind him made him feel uncomfortable. When he was still a mushroom, the feeling he got when snakes slithered past his stem and cap was just like this.

He lifted his head and looked at the man in the middle. He had seen many ferocious beasts in the Abyss and was also able to roughly judge how much of a threat they posed. Right now, he intuited that this man was the least aggressive out of the three.

”Hosen." After a brief exchanged glance, that man spoke up again, his voice very grim. "Don't fall back into your old habits while we're out here."

Letting out a derisive laugh, Hosen examined An Zhe with an even more unrestrained gaze.

Three seconds later, that man said to An Zhe, "Come to the back with me."

An Zhe obediently followed him around the monster's head to the other side. Apart from the scratch marks left by the branches and leaves, he didn’t have any other wounds.

The man asked, "How long have you been separated from your teammates for?"

An Zhe thought for a while, then replied, "One day."

"You're very lucky."

"It seems that there aren't many monsters here."

"But there's no shortage of bugs." While the man's speech was always very curt, he seemed dependable.

An Zhe buttoned up his clothes, looked at the man, and asked in a soft voice, "Are you going back to the Northern Base?"

The man replied, "Yeah."

"Then... can you take me along?" An Zhe asked. "I have my own food and water."

"It's not up to me," the man said.

Just as the man finished speaking, he stepped out and looked at the other two men. "No wounds. Shall we take him along?"

Hosen smiled, looked at An Zhe with his arms crossed, and whistled a third time. Then he said, "Why not? It won't matter if we do."

Then he looked at the last man. "What do you think, scum?"

An Zhe looked over as well and directly met the dark-skinned man's dour gaze.