Era of Magic and Martial Arts-Chapter 374 - 358: The Entire Zone 9?!!

[You are detained in a cold, cramped interrogation room. No one acknowledges you, nor lets you out, so you empty your mind and enter a state of cultivation where things and self are forgotten.]

[You begin cultivating the third layer of the Blood and Flesh Initial Solution True Skill.]

[In the first year, you sit cross-legged on the cold iron chair, and your skin exudes a honey-like amber viscous fluid.]

[When the first drop of fluid hits the ground, a peculiar fragrance of flesh spreads, and numerous transparent mycelium suddenly emerges from the cracks in the bricks of the interrogation room, eerily crawling up your ankles along the iron chair legs.]

[You are too absorbed in cultivation to notice the anomalies within the interrogation room.]

[Five years later, the mycelium has woven a second circulatory system beneath your skin, becoming one with you, with transparent tendrils rising and falling with your breath, transforming the iron rust of the interrogation chair into dark green pus.]

[After ten years, your ribs evolve into spiral bone spikes, eighteen of which pierce through your spine and interweave into a morbid white bone wheel behind you, slicing the air with a ghostly wailing screech.]

[At midnight every night, the bone wheel spins automatically, pulling the mycelium like a millstone.]

[One night, you suddenly open your eyes to see the mycelium violently thrashing.]

[Billions of mycelium twist into flesh-colored ropes, tearing open the floor tiles, and a jade-colored finger bone, half-decayed, is slowly pulled out, entwined with a segment of double-nine spiral DNA chain.]

[Inexplicably, you feel a deadly temptation as if everything within you is awakened, sending frantic waves of hunger towards you.]

[Your stomach clenches violently in your throat, the terrifying hunger causing you to crush four molars.]

[With tremendous willpower, you suppress the horror-driven impulse, continuing to circulate the Blood and Flesh Initial Solution True Skill.]

[After twenty years, your stomach transforms into an independent entity. It emerges from your throat during meditation, capturing and devouring the mycelium filling the room with barbed tendrils, eventually swallowing the finger bone whole.]

[After thirty-five years, the entire interrogation room morphs into a flesh embryo sac.]

[The network of veins pulsates like a living circuit on the walls, densely wrapping around deformities, with only half-exposed heads hanging out.]

[Most of these heads have smooth skin devoid of features, all identical, except for one face that receives special treatment, retaining the features it had in life. Upon careful observation, this face has a three-tenths resemblance to yours.]

[Fifty years have passed, the ceiling turns into a massive flesh blanket, continuously expanding outwards, with steel bars twisting into morbid white fangs within the proliferating tissue, and umbilical cord-like nerve bundles hanging from the ventilation ducts.]

[At seventy-five years, your eyeballs dissolve into two pools of blood. The viscous pools reflect half the city of Zone 9, where tens of thousands of rotting Calamity Corpses are cultivating in sync within the city’s ruins.]

[Their spines also grow morbid white bone wheels, maintaining a perfectly synchronized breathing pattern with you.]

[On the final day of ninety-nine years, your heart suddenly bursts forth, suspended and beating at the center of the bone wheel.]

[The surface of the dark red flesh sphere reveals tens of thousands of faces in torment, each chanting your true name, with sound waves creating terrifying ripples in the air.]

[Your Blood and Flesh Initial Solution True Skill begins to break through madly.]

[Fourth State!]

[Fifth State!]

[Sixth State!]

[Seventh State!]

[Eighth State!]

[Ninth State!]

[The Blood and Flesh Initial Solution True Skill seemingly loses all boundaries, evolving into a more grotesque and wicked demon skill, advancing rapidly to the Hundred States, Thousand States, Ten Thousand States.]

[At the blink of the hundredth year, you manipulate the bone wheel to sever the heart.]

[When the heart bursts open, it doesn’t spray blood but rather numerous faces shrieking in agony.]

[The stomach pouch emerges from your mouth, consuming all the faces with a crunch; you roar as you begin your final sprint, and the entire fleshy cavern abruptly contracts into a cocoon.]

[Amid the teeth-gritting squeeze, you feel every bone of yours restructuring into a more perfect form.]

[At the moment the cocoon shell is about to crack, countless white bones roll back towards the sky like a landslide-tsunami, and a pair of blood-red, eerily rotating eyeballs peer maliciously and resentfully through the cocoon’s crack at everything.]

[Warning! Gene chain fracture!]

[Overwhelmingly, bones shatter into fragments, and the cocoon shell reveals muffled sounds akin to watermelon bursting. Your final consciousness stays with the blood characters flashing wildly across the retina:]

[Breakthrough failed!]

[Deduct half of the Payment Points, and refund half of the Payment Points!] 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

[Calculation error, calculation error, calculation error...]

[Warning: Subject to unknown interference!]

[Error code: 0xc00000404b...]

[...System encounters unknown interference...]

[Warning: Your Blood and Flesh Initial Solution True Skill appears to undergo some unknown mutation. Will you accept this change?]

[System hint: If you choose to accept, the difficulty of breaking through this cultivation technique will significantly decrease, and the technique’s cap will greatly increase, but your body and mind will unavoidably be affected, gradually shifting towards....]

[Please make a choice: Accept—Yes/No?]

Feng Mu slowly opens his eyes, pupils deep-set with the weight of a century of time. That trace of weathered solitude seemed like it had traversed from the very end of time’s river.

In reality, only a few minutes had passed, but for Feng Mu, those few minutes were a century of true isolation.

In his memories, he witnessed Zone 9 falling under a fleshy fungal blanket, with mutated Calamity Corpses engulfing all vitality like a tide.

Those images were too real—the touch of fungus twining around steel bars, the stench of flesh caves, the screeches of spinning bone wheels..... Real enough that it didn’t seem like mere phantom cultivation memories.

So real that..... it seemed that he was the source of Zone 9’s calamity!

"If I choose to accept..."

Feng Mu squints his eyes, his fingertips unconsciously stroking the armrest of the interrogation chair,

"Will those images really play out in reality?"

His heart engaged in fierce combat. That terrifying yet malevolent power tempted him like a poppy flower. Even if it meant becoming an inhuman monster, he seemed ready to accept.

But the final scene in his memories left him repelled—his reason devoured by hunger, transforming into a skeleton driven by hunger, charging towards the heavens to meet his demise, only to ultimately fail?!!

"Did I devour that jade finger bone..." Feng Mu’s pupils slightly shrink, "or did that jade finger bone parasite me?"

The interrogation room’s lights flicker, casting mottled shadows on his face. Those shadows seemed to wriggle, like the fungus in his memories coming alive in reality.

Feng Mu lowers his head, his gaze deep and chilling, as if slicing through the flesh disguise of the ground:

"Ultimately, are the cultivation memories illusory? As long as I dig through the ground, confirm if a jade finger bone is buried beneath, verification will be achieved."

"If not, naturally all should cease. If yes, then, does it mean cultivation memories aren’t entirely illusory and, at times, represent prophecies given by Destiny?"