Garden of Eden || Apocalypse Paradise #2 [Complete]

169: A Bitter Journey Through Culture

'Green Melon and Bai Xiaoke must be anxious and angry now.' Lin Sanjiu thought. The only sound she could hear from within the tree roots was a constant gurgling sound. When Lin Sanjiu opened her eyes, she realized that it wasn't pitch-dark like she imagined. Instead, everything was foggy white. Occasionally, a large mass of thin roots would pass by quickly.

Although she felt a little guilty for making her companions worried, Lin Sanjiu couldn't resist her hunger and started searching for the half-eaten cup noodles from her card inventory. The items that she converted into cards would be preserved in the same state before they were converted. As a result, when she converted the cup noodles back to their original steaming hot form, the fragrance of seafood wafted into her nose. Before she left, Lin Sanjiu hung a backpack full of food, enough for half a month, on the waist of the robot doll so she wasn't worried that the three people outside would starve.

Judging from her body condition, another day had passed since she entered the network of tree roots. When she was first sucked into the root, Lin Sanjiu had the same awful experiences that the others described. Sticky, viscous slime mixed with numerous uncuttable tiny roots assaulted her face like thick sheets of wet paper. She felt a slight itchy feeling in her ears, eyes, and nose and knew that the roots were trying to burrow into her body.

By then, she had been cut off from the air outside. To get oxygen, she had to inhale deeply to snatch the pockets of oxygen within the slime. Inadvertently, this action also created an unimpeded path for the thin roots. Soon, she felt an intense, burning pain in her lungs. She wondered if something had already burrowed into them.

Thankfully, those things lost interest in her immediately.

As the uncomfortable sensations—the suffocation, burning pain, dampness, and odd itchiness— gradually ebbed, she moved her eyes and watched as a thin, long white root peeked out from her nostril. This was accompanied by an unbearable itch before the white root finally swam out from her nose and disappeared into the surrounding white slime.

Noting her ability to suck hot noodles into her mouth calmly after personally witnessing her body in that condition, Lin Sanjiu felt that she grew psychologically stronger once again.

The reason she could eat her noodles was all thanks to the capsule she kept during the Lunar New Year Tournament.

She converted her capsule into a card to escape from the match back then. As the various events unfolded, she stored more and more items, so she nearly forgot that she had the capsule with her.

If it wasn't for that thought—"It'd be nice if I could place myself in a box"—that drifted into her hazy mind when she was having difficulties breathing, Lin Sanjiu would still be suffering right now.

It was a pleasant surprise for her to discover that the slightly corrosive nature of the slime wasn't quite effective against the capsule. After drifting along for quite a long time, the walls of the capsules looked alright, with only a few tiny scratches.

Maybe the roots felt that this capsule with Lin Sanjiu had no nutritional value. As she drifted through the slime, Lin Sanjiu noticed that the slime attempted to push her capsule outward two to three times.

It wasn't easy getting inside, so she wasn't about to let the tree roots 'vomit' her out. Once she realized that her capsule was shaking, she would store her capsule back in her body before taking out her saber. Each time, she would stab her saber into the thick white epidermis to secure her position. After doing that a few times, perhaps being able to sense pain, the roots seemed to acknowledge that they could not remove that foreign object. Hence, they had no choice but to accept it into the slime again and transport it with the other nutrients toward an unknown direction.