I’m Trapped in a Cube - Chapter 35

At the high wall.

A soldier stood straight, reporting to Captain Su how he’d discovered the suspected Theseus Cell escape tunnel.

“This area is where the Tree-Breaking Sheep are active. They eat tree hearts and minerals.”

“After the riot ended, I took my squad on routine patrol. Normally, we never see anything like this here.”

“But today, we found blood and remains everywhere in the forest.”

“We followed the blood to this spot and found this hole. It looks like it leads straight outside the wall.”

He seemed a bit nauseous, quickly taking a sip of water.

Captain Su squatted, checked the blood, and touched it with his bandaged hand.

“Still fresh?”

“Yes,” the soldier replied.

Captain Su stood and asked, “Do the Tree-Breaking Sheep have any natural enemies?”

The soldier thought for a moment, “They do, but predators only go after the old, weak, sick, or stragglers. We’ve never seen such a brutal slaughter. Yesterday, everything was normal. It’s unlikely a predator did this.”

Captain Su shook his head, “It could be ‘overkilling’ behavior.”

The soldier was puzzled, “Huh? ‘Overkilling’?”

“It’s when something kills way more prey than it needs, in extremely cruel ways, but doesn’t eat or store them. Like a cat playing with a mouse,” Captain Su explained.

The soldier thought for a while, then shook his head, pulling out his electronic screen to show the captain a picture.

It was a hideous-looking goat.

Like a low-quality AI-generated image, the goat had two huge horns, like chainsaws stuck straight into its head, gleaming with metallic light.

Its fur was a grayish metallic color, coarse and wiry like twisted iron, and its eyes glowed red like cameras.

“An electronic goat?”

“This is a Tree-Breaking Sheep,” the soldier explained, seeing Captain Su’s skeptical look. “So most predators don’t dare mess with them.”

Captain Su nodded, understanding.

He walked to the slaughter site and dug up some coarse gray hair and a broken chainsaw.

The soldier followed, continuing, “Like I said before even their natural enemies only dare ambush the old, weak, or sick. No one attacks the whole herd.”

“And their meat is tough, so big predators won’t risk injury for them.”

Captain Su nodded, “Let’s check the tunnel.”

Back at the tunnel, its strange shape made everyone uneasy.

The entrance wasn’t large, round, about the height of a person, set on a small slope, connecting inside and outside vertically.

Worst of all were the white, oval, worm-like flesh nodules constantly wriggling on the tunnel walls, like bee pupae.

Each nodule had a black dot at the tip, like an eye sensing the light.

When the group arrived, all the nodules turned toward the entrance.

A nightmare for anyone with trypophobia.

Li Luo wasn’t scared. She picked up a branch and poked it in. Mo Ling wanted to stop her but couldn’t.

Luckily, when the nodules touched the branch, they just pushed it inward.

Seeing this, Li Luo let go, and the nodules pushed the branch deeper into the tunnel.

Everyone looked confused.

They tried other things-stones, leaves, knives…

The tunnel accepted everything, pushing it inside, seemingly without any self-awareness.

Li Luo checked the database, but found nothing similar.

Mo Ling looked deep into the tunnel, but all he saw were more identical nodules, stretching on and on.

“Did you bring the probe?” Captain Su asked the soldiers.

A spider-shaped probe was put into the tunnel, and the nodules pushed it deeper.

Everyone watched the probe’s feed anxiously.

The tunnel twisted and turned, always lined with those nodules. After a few bends, the signal got weak.

They could barely track the probe’s position, and as it moved, the screen auto-generated a 3D map.

The soldier looked closely and exclaimed, “It doesn’t go out the wall, it goes down!”

But the tunnel wasn’t finished; the probe kept going, pushed faster and faster by the nodules.

The image grew blurry.

Just as everyone thought the feed would cut out, the probe suddenly hit a black shadow coming head-on.

Crunch!

The shadow spun the probe 180 degrees, then rushed upward.

The screen went black.

The probe’s signal vanished, and the 3D map stopped halfway.

Everyone exchanged glances, then quickly reacted.

“Guard the entrance!” Captain Su shouted.

The soldiers aimed their weapons at the tunnel, some setting traps.

They formed a circle, waiting for the shadow to emerge.

The nodules swayed like seaweed, then began to contract.

The flesh rolled, and a gray, sticky-furred ball was pushed out, landing on the ground.

They’d expected a monster, but it was just a ball of fur?

The soldiers were stunned.

The ball uncurled-it was a Tree-Breaking Sheep lamb.

Though small, its muscles were perfectly developed, and the chainsaw horns on its head were sharp and tough, like a strong ram.

The strange little sheep stood up and stepped right into a trap.

Baa!

It bleated and fell.

The soldiers, ready to attack, hesitated.

But Mo Ling noticed something wrong-

There was a Red Rope Worm in the lamb’s brain!

While the soldiers hesitated, Mo Ling attacked, stripping the chainsaw horns from the lamb’s head.

Blood gushed from its head, and trapped by the snare, it was stuck.

Seeing it couldn’t resist, the soldiers put down their weapons and tossed out a capsule.

The capsule burst in midair, deploying a hard alloy net that trapped the lamb, finally relaxing everyone.

But Mo Ling stayed tense-because in his vision, the lamb’s flesh was healing rapidly, and strange metallic liquid was surging inside.

Suddenly, the liquid burst out, ripping through the net, and shot at a nearby soldier.

Mo Ling tried to teleport the liquid, but it was too fast.

With a slash, the liquid cut across.

The soldier, still frozen in shock, was sliced in half!

The others quickly attacked.

The lamb, now frightened, flashed a look of terror, then cut off its own trapped limb with a flash of white light, kicked off with one leg, and leapt back into the tunnel.

Mo Ling followed it with his vision, creating bloody holes in its body, but the lamb’s healing only grew faster!

Even decapitating it, it regenerated quickly.

Mo Ling calmed down, remembering the nature of the Red Rope Worm, and stopped attacking.

“What was up with this lamb?”