Chapter 60: Moon City

Chapter 60: Moon City

In the Forsaken Land of the Gods, during a night when lightning appeared at very low frequency.

Several human-like creatures cautiously approached a ball of flesh that had six legs and more than a dozen eyes.

They wore beast skins or simple garments whose original material could no longer be identified. By the illumination of a few lanterns, they moved through the deep, boundless darkness, their expressions extremely grave.

On some of their faces grew ten or twenty fleshy tumors. Some had two eyes almost squeezed together. Some had no nose at all; in its place was a black hole.

After a difficult fight, they resolved the monster relatively smoothly. Then they split into two groups: one keeping watch on the surroundings, the other harvesting the spoils.

During this process, the man whose face was covered in many tumors suddenly stopped while dissecting the monster’s corpse and collecting the edible parts.

“Adal, what is it?” the noseless woman asked in confusion.

The man called Adal slowly withdrew his right hand, revealing an item he had found on the monster.

It was a stone-carved amulet covered in many traces of corrosion.

“This is…” The man whose two eyes were nearly squeezed together seemed to understand the reason, but hesitated and did not finish.

Adal looked around and said, “Xin, Rus, this is something I gave my father when I was young.

“On the day I came of age, he felt he could no longer control himself. He chose to leave the city-state on his own and enter the depths of darkness…”

Xin and Rus fell silent at once. Both could understand Adal’s feelings.

In Moon City, this was something that happened often.

Because they lacked sufficiently safe food, they could only pick the fruits of mutated plants and gather the flesh of monsters to maintain survival.

This caused toxins and madness to accumulate in their bodies. Once their physical condition declined, they either died quickly or gradually lost control.

To avoid affecting those around them or causing destruction within the city-state, the latter, after sensing that something was wrong with their condition, would often arrange everything in advance. They would take a torch and a small amount of food, leave the defensive perimeter, and walk alone into the never-dispersing darkness, never to return.

Every resident of Moon City could imagine what their fate would be: either they would be killed by monsters, or they would become monsters. There was no other possibility.

After seven or eight seconds of silence, the noseless woman Xin hesitantly said to Adal, “Perhaps this was the monster that killed your father.”

“It was wearing a belt made of beast hide…” Adal’s voice gradually lowered. He raised the bone dagger in his hand and stabbed down with force, cutting out a piece of flesh that looked relatively normal.

In the silence, the members of the hunting team skillfully finished collecting their harvest. Then Rus, whose eyes were nearly squeezed together, suddenly spoke in a low voice.

“Among newborn children, there are more and more deformities…”

The cost of accumulating toxins and madness generation after generation was far more than a simple decline in average lifespan. Even people whose physical condition still remained normal would gradually show certain mutations—just like Adal, whose face had grown quite a few tumors.

Similarly, the accumulated toxins and madness might be passed down to descendants, causing deformed people to appear. Rus and Xin of the hunting team were examples of this.

Their lives were even shorter, and they were more likely to lose control and mutate.

Everyone present understood what the increasing number of deformed infants meant: perhaps, in no more than two or three generations, the residents of Moon City would lose control before their bodies fully matured and before they could produce a new generation.

In that case, even without external attack, Moon City would rapidly be destroyed, leaving…