Chapter 581 True Face

Chapter 581: The True Face

"Damn it, I'm out of range of my ability."

"Grab the vines!" Le Shiya's voice instantly drowned out Chi Yan's frustrated muttering.

Then Chi Yan watched in surprise as Tian Yue and the others—who'd been hesitating—immediately grabbed the vines and stopped their fall.

When they had started falling earlier, they thought they were done for, but they hadn't expected Su Bai's Blood Vine to pull in its thorns and spread downward along the collapsing path, becoming their only lifeline after the fall.

Chi Yan glanced at Su Bai out of the corner of his eye, his feelings getting even more complicated. He never thought he'd run into a "game scene collapse" a second time—and both times, Su Bai was at the center of it.

And even after experiencing it twice, Chi Yan still couldn't see through Su Bai. In fact, because of this second time, Su Bai seemed even harder to read.

But now, there was another person he couldn't see through...

"What did you just do?" Chi Yan looked at Le Shiya in surprise. "That was a control ability."

He said it like a fact. He didn't buy that the little girl could make those four half-conscious people fall in line just by yelling.

"But then again, if you didn't have a trump card like that hidden away, a little kid like you wouldn't have survived this long in the nightmare world just by being a messenger." Chi Yan gripped the Blood Vine tightly, thought it over, and let it slide.

Le Shiya didn't argue. She just pressed her lips together, like she was weighing something, but in the end, she silently nodded, owning up to it.

"No one will blame you. There really hasn't been a chance for a control ability to come in handy along the way." Chi Yan himself had a control ability and felt that he, as a guide, had been mostly useless, relying on Su Bai to carry us the whole way.

"Actually, I did use it." Le Shiya looked apologetically at Su Bai's gray eyes. "When I first entered the game, I tried to use my ability to get big brother to team up with me, but it failed."

Su Bai recalled Le Shiya's enthusiastic invitation when they first met. Even he hadn't noticed her using her ability at all—maybe the girl's power was just too weak to affect him.

"So I knew big brother must be really strong, which is why I shamelessly stuck to his side." After saying that, Le Shiya let out a breath, like she was unburdening a secret she'd been holding in, and she felt much lighter.

"Later, after Sister Xie taught us that method, I had a sneaky idea the first time I sorted out my power." She continued in a low voice. "So when my narcolepsy hit just now, I just controlled myself—told myself 'no way am I falling asleep'—and it actually worked."

"Kids in the nightmare world really are something else, huh." Even Su Bai had to admit. "Meditation" was just a method for him to sort out his power now, but for human players experiencing it for the first time, even if they couldn't control the flow of power, they could still improve their control by watching how the power flowed.

But if Le Shiya kept following this line of thought, her ability would develop in an even more formidable direction.

"Think about how the Red Moon Association picks its test subjects." Although Wu Hang was still being held by Su Bai with one arm, he used a puzzle piece to send a message to Su Bai. "Eerie Entities can't distinguish human age. Since they were chosen as test subjects, they must possess the power the Red Moon Association values. This power mostly appears in young adults, but sometimes it exists in the elderly and children as well."

"Is it the one we've been researching recently?" What came to Su Bai's mind was the "life force" they'd taken from the No. 444 bus, though that name was just a temporary label.

"Not sure yet." Wu Hang replied slowly, a hint of anticipation in his tone. He turned his head, his gaze falling on a distant direction. "But I think... if we can devour 'that,' maybe our research can go further. After all, it is the 'Life Mother Tree,' isn't it?"

Su Bai followed Wu Hang's gaze. The surrounding buildings had completely collapsed, and "its" true face was now starkly revealed beneath a light barrier that isolated the outside world.

When he heard "Life Mother Tree," Su Bai's mind conjured an image of a towering, lush divine tree, sunlight filtering through its leaves, its fruits crystal clear, nurturing the endless hope of the human world.

Perhaps the "Life Mother Tree" had once been like that.

But now...

What appeared before Su Bai was a grotesque tree over twenty stories tall. Its trunk was not a majestic pillar but a tangled mass of twisted, withered branches woven together, like countless venomous snakes writhing in a tight knot—dry, jagged, and diseased. The intertwining branches squirmed, stretched, and coiled around each other, finally coming together into that massive, eerie trunk.

Coupled with the countless flesh-colored "fruits" wrapped around infants, the "it" before him was the largest and ugliest tree Su Bai had ever seen in both his lives.

"Humans, you can't escape!"

The Blood Vine tightly wrapped around "its" branches began to be attacked by countless withered limbs, causing it to shake violently. Each tremor sent the people on the vine swinging wildly, like an out-of-control swing, threatening to fling them off and smash them into the ground.

Without the "restraint" of the building, "its" power was finally unleashed further, becoming wanton and frenzied.