Chapter 76: Deadly Singing

Chapter 76: Deadly Singing

Hearing the Hanged Man’s words, Klein’s heart suddenly skipped. He had a bad premonition.

He did not stubbornly cling to his persona. Setting down the lantern, he took two pieces of notepaper from his pocket, crumpled them into balls, and stuffed them into his left and right ears respectively.

Seeing Gehrman Sparrow act directly without asking questions, Alger could not help breathing in relief. Inwardly, he sighed that working with an experienced person was truly easy and convenient. Even an adventurer known for madness would listen to reasonable words and know what ought to be done and what ought not.

He was just about to throw the still slightly warm dead rat toward the Illusory Chime Tree to lure it into capturing it when he suddenly saw the bushes and weeds beside them shake. A yellow tiger with black stripes emerged.

Amid the beautiful tinkling of chimes, the tiger walked step by step toward the strange tree ahead. Its movements were normal, but its gaze was vacant, carrying an indescribable eeriness.

Seeing this, Alger lowered his arm and temporarily gave up his attempt to throw out the dead rat. Enduring the intense headache, he calmly watched the yellow, black-striped tiger walk toward the Illusory Chime Tree amid the increasingly urgent and loud melodious sounds.

It crouched, raised its right paw, and, with a sharp snap, extended its claws, cutting itself across the neck.

Blood gurgled out. Yet the tiger seemed to have lost all sense of pain, continuing to drag its paw and lengthen the wound, making it deeper and longer. Then, bit by bit, it began peeling off its own fur, revealing a blood-drenched, “naked” body that was difficult to look at.

The wind chimes gradually quieted. Those branches suddenly came alive, spreading downward, one after another stabbing into the tiger’s body that had lost its fur’s protection, a sight too gruesome to endure.

Alger, who had long since prepared himself, immediately drew the short blade at his waist, opened his mouth, and sang hoarsely:

“Break, break, break,
“O Sea, on thy cold gray stones!
“Break, break, break,
“O Sea, at the foot of thy crags!” (Note 1)

His singing was rough and heroic, yet completely off-key. It violated the normal cognition of humans and living beings, and it came with a metallic, noise-like rumbling. It was filled with a power that made people irritable, nauseous, and head-splittingly miserable.

All the branches of the Illusory Chime Tree trembled at the same time and withdrew together, as if trying to curl into themselves. The beautiful bell-like sounds that rang out afterward slightly diluted that terrifying noise.

Although Klein, standing beside Alger, had blocked his ears with paper balls and proactively restrained his spirituality, a vein on his forehead still bulged at that moment. The urge to kill the singer and destroy everything before his eyes instantly rose within him.

Moreover, he felt as if his mind were being torn apart. The muscles and blood vessels under his skin began faintly wriggling on their own.

Other people sing for money. Mr. Hanged Man sings for lives!

Klein used internal ridicule to fight against the agitation in his heart.

“Break! Break! Break!”

Every word Alger burst out gradually approached the sound of waves pounding against reefs. One silver-white bolt of lightning after another fell, as though they were rounds of applause.

Silver-white light rose one after another, all striking the surface of the Illusory Chime Tree. They blasted the strange tree until it trembled uncontrollably, blasted the swaying of its branches into stiff confusion, making it unable to produce an orderly hypnotic sound.

Alger seized this chance. He dropped the dead rat, stretched forward with the short blade in his hand.

The sound of wind suddenly rose. Invisible blades whistled forward, slicing at the branch at the very top of the Illusory Chime Tree, the one closest to the trunk.

Crack!

The fist-sized, colorless, semi-transparent fruit fell straight down, only to be swept up by a strong gust of wind and fly into Alger’s palm. The tree, its surface filled with eye-like cracks, subsequently froze. The remaining branches all drooped at once, losing vitality.

As expected, as long as one collects and understands the correct intelligence in advance, extraordinary plants with relatively low intelligence are easier to handle than animals of the same level…

Alger took out the metal tube he had prepared and stored away the fruit of the Illusory Chime Tree.

Then he turned sideways and looked at Gehrman Sparrow.

“We continue…”

His words abruptly stopped. The phrase corresponding to “forward” vanished in his throat.

At that moment, he saw that Gehrman Sparrow’s cold face was slightly distorted. The whites of his eyes beside his brown pupils were faintly dyed red, as if he might erupt at any moment and attack him.

Alger’s spirit instantly tightened. He slowly inhaled and completed what he had just been saying.

“We continue forward.”

“Let’s go.” Gehrman Sparrow answered in a low, hoarse voice. He was the first to circle around the withered Illusory Chime Tree and walk toward the depths of the black forest.

He did not collect the bark, branches, or other spiritually rich materials, because they would definitely encounter many more extraordinary creatures later, and he did not possess a so-called storage divine artifact. Naturally, he had to reserve space for more valuable harvests.

Besides, carrying too many heavy things would clearly hinder the Clown’s agility.

What a pity. Those are lifeless materials, without their own blood, and cannot enter Groselle’s Travels… I could have a marionette carry them in, but that would be very troublesome and detrimental to the later exploration…

Klein silently sighed while calming his emotions and breaking free from the lingering effects of the Hanged Man’s singing.

That was the most awful and most stimulating singing he had heard across both halves of his life!

If the Hanged Man had continued another minute or two, Klein could not guarantee that he would still have controlled the impulse to beat him up.

Blocking my ears with paper balls and restraining my spirituality can only weaken the effect. It cannot truly isolate it… Even the deaf could hear this, because it contains spiritual-level “communication”… This should be Ocean Songster’s hardest ability to defend against. Add in Lightning Strike, which is definitely impossible to dodge once it appears and can only be avoided in advance, and this Sequence 5 is also quite strong… However, why does Mr. Hanged Man’s singing feel completely different from that elven singer Shatas’s…

As Klein summarized and analyzed the experience from just now, he also felt a little puzzled.

At that moment, Alger, walking beside him with the lantern, could not help considering a question.

“If even Gehrman Sparrow cannot tolerate my singing for long, how exactly am I supposed to act as an Ocean Songster…”

In silence, the two quickly advanced between huge trees covered in snake-scale-like bark, approaching those ancient ruins.

With a Navigator beside him, Klein saved the energy needed for dowsing his way forward. He focused entirely on guarding against attacks that might suddenly appear around them.

In the pitch-black, silent environment with the flavor of a horror story, the two traveled for an unknown length of time before discovering that the trees in the black forest had begun thinning in a regular, gradual manner.

This was different from the situation earlier when they had encountered that demigod-level Feathered Serpent. There, the trees had suddenly become sparse, making the change seem abrupt. Here, the thinning happened progressively, giving one the illusion that they were about to leave the black forest.

“Past this area is the edge of those ancient ruins,” Alger said, breaking the silence.

After a pause, he casually added, “Based on my experience, the closer we get to that place, the more dangerous it becomes. The demigod-level traces of extraordinary creatures that I discovered earlier were all found nearby. But the strange thing is that the edge of those ancient ruins contains absolutely no signs left behind by extraordinary creatures. As for the depths, I do not know.”

Most likely, there is an even more terrifying existence inside those ancient ruins. That area is its “territory,” so other creatures do not dare approach…

Klein muttered inwardly.

He had a premonition about the danger level of this exploration, and he had performed a corresponding divination above the gray fog beforehand. The revelation had been that there would be twists and problems, but the possibility of safely leaving was not small.

After the Hanged Man finished speaking, Klein laughed softly.

“You should know what my guess is.”

He said nothing more and stepped into the area where weeds grew thickly and trees were sparse.

Alger walked silently beside him, increasingly convinced that his judgment of Gehrman Sparrow was correct:

Both calm and mad.

After advancing several dozen meters, they suddenly saw, at the end of the lantern light, a pair of deep-blue eyes.

It was a black baboon crouching on a tree branch. Its fur was naturally curled, and black crystals had grown from its head, piece after piece. Those crystals grew upward, clustering into a strange crown without any clear pattern.

The moment Klein and Alger saw the black baboon, they simultaneously felt an impulse to lower their heads. They seemed to not dare look directly at it, feeling that it was the ruler of this forest—their lord.

Lord…

Using the intense headache brought by the Whip of the Mind ring, Alger shook free of the effect and hurriedly stepped left, trying to move out of the direct front and leave this unknown extraordinary creature to Gehrman Sparrow.

This was their previous agreement.

Yet although he had clearly stepped left, the final result was that he walked forward instead. His legs became uneven and limping, as if he suddenly needed a cane.

Subconsciously, Alger drew his short blade and sent sharp Wind Blades whistling toward the black curly-haired baboon.

At that moment, the baboon split its mouth open, revealing a smile.

The Wind Blades in midair abruptly changed direction. Some veered left, some drifted right, some floated upward, and some sank downward. They perfectly avoided their target.

Seeing this, Klein gave up his plan to approach normally. The glove on his left palm instantly turned transparent, and his body turned incorporeal with it.

Alger stopped his stress-triggered action and watched Gehrman Sparrow’s figure, wearing the half-top silk hat, abruptly appear behind the black curly-haired baboon. The distance between the two parties was less than five meters.

Immediately afterward, the black curly-haired baboon’s body abruptly stiffened, as if it had lost most of its control. It even struggled to raise its hand, half trying to gouge out its own eyes and half trying to distort something.

And taking advantage of its sluggishness, Gehrman Sparrow had already raised the iron-black revolver in his right hand and aimed its deep, dark muzzle at the creature’s head.

Then, with no expression whatsoever, the mad adventurer pulled the trigger.

Note 1: Excerpt adapted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break.”