The Mutated Desert Worm

By the underground river, the Moon Magic Fern suddenly shook violently.

"Poof!"

The Moon Magic Fern opened its sphere, as if vomiting something out. In the darkness, a figure traced an arc as it fell, splashing into the underground river.

Stan Tito swam out of the river, crawled onto the bank, and looked at the Moon Magic Fern.

He chuckled softly, wiping water from his face and rubbing his eyes.

He felt both a sense of narrow escape and amusement at the way he had escaped.

He had gradually deceived the Moon Magic Fern with illusions, making it believe the stone bowl was him, then making it treat him as a foreign object and expel him.

The Moon Magic Fern was still diligently guarding the "stone bowl" it thought it had imprisoned, while the real Stan Tito had escaped disguised as a foreign object.

He quickly left, but soon turned back.

He dug out a fist-sized nodule from the Moon Magic Fern's fleshy vines, intending to use it as a medium for casting illusions.

He felt this thing was far more powerful than the Sun Cup.

Although the Moon Magic Fern twisted its vines, showing discomfort, without its master controlling it, it eventually allowed Stan Tito to dig out a piece of its "flesh."

All the way up, Stan Tito carefully clutched the spell-casting medium.

However, the expected enemies and battles never appeared. The passage, which should have been heavily guarded, was now completely empty.

Stan Tito even found many hastily discarded weapons and objects in the passage, indicating that the guards had fled in panic.

He picked up a bone spear and a stone hammer. "Something's amiss," he muttered. "Could Henir's army have arrived?"

This was the first thought that came to his mind. In his view, the most likely reason for the Samo Kingdom's guards to flee in such panic was that Henir's army had reached the capital, Anho.

As he went further, he discovered more unusual things.

At the exit, he saw several corpses.

Or rather, he couldn't tell if they were corpses or just piles of rotten flesh. From this rotten flesh grew various unreasonably combined organs, bone hands and insect feet joined together, bone armor and insect shells pieced together.

When he pried the rotten flesh with his bone spear, he even found three grimacing heads of different sizes on the other side, their bone armor fallen off and flesh mangled.

The sight was truly nauseating.

"Hiss!"

Stan Tito considered himself quite worldly, but he had never seen such beings before.

"What kind of monster is this?"

"No, this is... a Trilobite Person?"

"He was a guard of the Samo royal court."

He noticed the remaining bone armor on one of the heads, which bore the brand of a royal court guard.

His steps became hurried as he ran towards the exit.

Sunlight gradually poured in from the exit, making Stan Tito, who had been in darkness for so long, uncomfortable.

He squinted as he walked out of the darkness, looking towards the city of Anho.

"Boom!"

He was greeted by a huge rock falling from the sky, smashing a building just tens of meters away from him. Debris and dust flew towards him.

Terrifying beams crisscrossed like a grid, sweeping from all directions, accompanied by miserable, despairing screams.

As his eyes slowly adjusted to the strong light, his vision gradually cleared.

He saw a city being slowly destroyed, and corpses littering the streets.

A terrifying beast was rampaging through the city, twisting and thrashing its body, destroying buildings one after another, smashing and throwing rocks of various sizes with its tentacles.

It had hundreds of eyeballs all over its body, all rolling around, shooting out wave after wave of beams.

Anyone touched by the beams would instantly turn into the rotten flesh Stan Tito had just seen.

Groups of Trilobite Men mutated into horrifying monsters, then died miserably.

It wasn't at all like the war scene of Henir's invasion that he had imagined, but more like a natural disaster, or as those screaming in despair called it:

Divine punishment sent down by Yinsai.

The people of the Samo Kingdom had never seen anything so terrifying. The Desert Worm, once their proud guardian and the foundation of the kingdom's power, had now become a grim reaper, harvesting lives and bringing disaster.

"The Desert Worm?"

"How did it become like this?"

Countless people fled along the streets towards the distance. Stan Tito also rushed down, avoiding the mutation beams as he approached the Desert Worm, which had swollen beyond recognition.

"Roar!"

The Desert Worm let out another painful roar. Faces of Yinsai people appeared on its body, and countless eyeballs reflected various figures.

Stan Tito heard Princess Saliman's voice: "End it!"

"End it, please stop."

The mad king's face also appeared: "Henir!"

"Kill Henir, we must not let him go."

"The kingdom is ours, Yinsai is ours."

Among the mythical blood of wisdom power devoured by the beast, the two with the strongest bloodline and will were the Samo king and Princess Saliman. Their individual influence on the Desert Worm was the strongest.

But the most terrifying were the wills of the many priests of the kingdom's priest group who had been devoured after suffering great pain. Those chaotic, mad wills, having endured extreme torment, conflicted and twisted with each other, finally transforming into a desire to destroy and devour everything.

"Princess Saliman?"

"And the king?"

"What on earth happened?"

Stan Tito looked at those faces and heard the familiar voices.

Although he didn't know exactly what had happened, he knew that all these changes must be related to the king and Princess Saliman.

Looking at the city being ravaged and trampled by the beast, he felt he should do something.

But first, he needed to uncover how the Desert Worm had transformed into this monstrosity.

The desire to kill and devour filled the Desert Worm's will. It kept attacking the most densely populated areas.

Thousands upon thousands of people were driven to run wildly towards the distance. They were completely terrified, only wanting to get away from the terrible beast.

In their panicked flight, they were finally trapped against the city walls.

This was a dead end.

They couldn't climb over the walls; there was nowhere to run.

They could only hide their bodies in the corners of buildings, avoiding the waves of deadly, cursed beams sweeping by.

After one round of mutation light swept by, most people survived by hiding behind buildings, except for those in the main streets.

But as the Desert Worm approached, they would eventually have nowhere to go but death.

Seeing the Trilobite Men on the street turning into monsters and dying one by one, witnessing their horrifying deaths, the others hiding in the buildings completely broke down.

"I don't want to die, I don't want to die like this!"

"Why are we suffering such a terrible curse?"

"This is the wrath of God. The Ruhe beast has come to punish us on behalf of God."

"King!" they cried out in anguish. "What have you done? Why has Anho been struck by such divine wrath?"

Among the crowd were many nobles who recognized the mad king's face constantly appearing on the beast's body.

At this moment, the figure that had been chasing the Desert Worm from afar finally arrived.

Stan Tito leaped from a rooftop onto the Desert Worm's body, pressing his hand against one of its eyeballs.

"Divine Technique: Realm of Illusion."

Holding the nodule of the Moon Magic Fern, he used all his strength to open an illusory realm.

Layers of dreamlike light spread out, seeping into the Desert Worm's eyeballs. The illusion cast using the Moon Magic Fern was several times more powerful than before.

He was imitating the epic stories recorded by the Tito family, learning from the ancient divine messenger Polo to use illusions to temporarily pull the Desert Worm's consciousness into an illusory dream.

But clearly, a being like the Desert Worm was far beyond what his illusions could control or influence.

The eyeball was still shaking violently, and even hundreds of eyeballs turned to look at Stan Tito at once, releasing their will of death and violence towards him without restraint.

At the same time, strange light surged with the Desert Worm's contracting pupils.

The next wave of mutation light was about to erupt.

In desperation, Stan Tito shouted.

"Saliman!"

The Desert Worm's movements halted for a moment, and a glimmer of recognition appeared in its frenzied pupils. It gazed at Stan Tito with sorrow.

The beast suddenly spoke in the language of the Trilobite Men, using a voice familiar to Stan Tito.

"S-Stan!" it stammered, the voice strained and barely recognizable.

Although Stan Tito had already guessed, hearing this response, he still showed a shocked expression.

"It really is you?"

And with that, Stan Tito's Realm of Illusion succeeded.

He finally managed to pull the Desert Worm into the illusion before the mutation beams could be released.

The people of the Samo Kingdom under the city walls also noticed this scene. They immediately changed from hiding from the mutation light to fleeing for their lives.

"Stop, it's stopped."

"Run quickly!"

"Run to the streets, run outside the city."

"Hurry!"

Stan Tito exerted all his effort to delve deeper into the beast's consciousness, trying to find the being he was looking for.

He gradually cut off his sense of reality, falling into a dark, empty realm of consciousness.

He finally understood the truth he wanted to know, and what had happened before.