Slime Evolution

Chapter 465 - Request

Lisa looked away for a moment, the hairs on her neck standing on end.

"Why?" she asked. "Why are creatures with such great mental strength, who should have far greater intelligence than their peers, acting so stupidly?! Why would they act like this?"

Lohan didn’t have an immediate answer, but something about that scene felt wrong in a more specific way than simple cruelty.

Those creatures moved as if under some kind of compulsion, with no control over their own behavior, and the sweet, sickening smell he’d caught in the corridor was growing stronger and stronger in there.

He focused his enhanced senses, filtering the chamber’s air, separating the components one by one.

There was the smell of heated stone, the smell of dried blood and necrotic wounds, and underneath it all, a subtle chemical layer, sugary and heavy, that seemed to stick to the back of his mind as he analyzed it.

The more he concentrated, the clearer that smell became.

It was then that he noticed the large creature’s body more closely.

Its skin was covered in a thick, viscous layer of some transparent liquid, and scattered across that layer were small, solid, shiny splinters that reflected the reddish glow of the surrounding fissures.

’That’s horn,’ he realized, his stomach clenching with disgust. ’Splinters of her horn, mixed with something.’

He analyzed the smell once more, comparing it with what he knew of other creatures and pheromones he’d digested throughout his journey. The chemical structure was unmistakable once he finally isolated it.

"Pheromones," he said, his voice carrying a cold anger. "Someone smeared pheromones on her body, mixed with the horn dust. That’s what’s driving the offspring like this."

Lisa stared at him, horrified.

"You mean this was done on purpose?"

"It makes sense," Lohan replied, connecting the dots one by one. "This isn’t a hunting cave. It’s a breeding ground."

As if those words had been a signal, the large creature at the center of the platform shuddered, its thin body twisting in a slow, painful convulsion, and its mouth opened in a sound neither of them could hear, but which Lohan felt vibrating inside his own consciousness.

Between its hind legs, a small, round, shiny mass appeared, then another, and another, dropping onto the stone with a wet, dull sound.

They were eggs, the size of a human head, covered in a translucent reddish membrane, and as soon as they touched the ground, the smaller creatures rushed over them, pushing them toward the center of the platform, where the temperature was higher.

Lohan watched, unable to look away, as the process played out in a matter of seconds.

The eggshells cracked with absurd speed, fueled by the heat and by the environment loaded with pheromones, and from inside each one emerged a small, slimy, disoriented creature, with a gleam of madness in its eyes from the very first instant.

[Newborn Whisper of the Abyss, Level 11]

That information appeared in his perception, and he felt his stomach sink.

Level 11, from birth, with no time to grow, with no thinking mind developing, with only pure instinct and compulsion.

The newborns were already joining the group, rushing at their mother or fighting among themselves, completely dominated by the air saturated with that substance.

"It’s an experience farm," Lohan said, his voice almost devoid of emotion. "They force her to lay eggs constantly, and the offspring are born already at Level 11, with no intelligence and no resistance at all, just waiting to be killed by Players who want to level up fast."

"That explains why they have such high level Players with such low Bases," Lisa murmured, her voice trembling with anger. "They’re using this to level up the entire guild."

Lohan didn’t answer, because with every second he watched that scene, the disgust inside him grew, a heavy, bitter feeling he hadn’t felt this intensely in a long time.

He had seen a lot of cruelty in Elysium and in the two real worlds he’d lived in, he had killed, devoured, destroyed, but there was something especially repugnant about that cold, calculated way of exploiting a living creature, of turning it into a machine for producing experience.

His eyes, technically speaking, weren’t real eyes, but even so he felt the urge to look away from it.

It was then that a voice appeared inside his head.

It was a female voice, weak and hoarse, completely devoid of life, as if every word cost an immense amount of effort to form.

"Do you really feel disgusted?" the voice said, carrying a tone of empty, weary scorn. "Even after doing this to me?"

Lohan froze, and beneath him, he felt Lisa tense up too, which meant she had heard the same thing.

The voice didn’t come from the smaller creatures, nor from any other point in the cave. That came from the large creature bound at the center of the platform, blind, mutilated, covered in that viscous substance and surrounded by its own offspring, who still swarmed over it in a frenzy that never ended.

She was speaking to them.

"It wasn’t me," Lohan replied, the words coming out before he had time to think of anything else. "I never did this to you. I just got here."

There was a long, heavy silence inside his mind, and then, for the first time, the voice lost some of that dead tone, something like uncertain surprise creeping into it.

"It... wasn’t you?" she asked, slowly, as if testing her own ability to believe that. "You’re not one of them?"

"I killed them," Lisa replied, her tone firm and low. "All of the ones guarding the entrance. They won’t be back anytime soon."

In Lohan’s perception, something shifted in the creature, a subtle tension running through its thin body, and he felt, through that strange connection, something that should no longer be felt after so long in that situation: a small trace of hope.

’She’s going to ask us to save her,’ Lohan thought, his own heart tightening in a way he didn’t expect. ’She’s going to ask us to get her out of here.’

He was already starting to calculate how to do it, how to free a creature of that size without hurting it even more, how to deal with the offspring surrounding it, how long it would take to undo those chains.

But when the voice came back, it carried something completely different from what he expected.

"Then, please," she said, softly, her voice trembling with an exhaustion that went far beyond the physical. "Kill me."