Chapter 1090: Chapter 604: Formless Flesh_2
It was as if he could feel it constantly multiplying, until it swallowed the entire world.
Formless Flesh!
This thing was even more outrageous than the descriptions—an abominable mass of shattered organs, limbs, and bones jammed together!
It was basically the waste from the Ancestor’s research "coming to life" under some bizarre power; all those mutated organs and limbs were the proof of his insane Experiments.
Just seeing it from afar made Lance feel a kind of instinctive nausea rise up in his chest.
His brain kept screaming at him that this creeping, writhing, ever‑expanding... hair‑raising thing had to be destroyed!
But not now.
Lance involuntarily stepped back, pulling the firelight away and letting the darkness once again cover up that maddening scene.
This was a kind of mental contamination, or rather, what lay before him had already gone beyond the boundaries of human comprehension; an ordinary person would probably go insane from a single glance.
Just peeking at that thing, even Lance needed quite a while to suppress the urge for destruction roaring inside his mind.
This was why Lance had been drilling one idea into their heads.
Calm and rationality are humanity’s strongest weapons.
Only a will strong enough can stand against madness; otherwise you’ll run, break, or even surrender before the fight starts, and if that happens, no matter how powerful you are, it’s a joke.
Lance forced himself to calm down and once again sorted through the information he had so far.
He finally understood why the Pigmen hadn’t occupied the sewer section directly under the ruins, and instead dug through to the wilderness side.
The reason was simple: those Pigmen had been driven out by this Formless Flesh.
The fragments they’d found along the way were also traces left behind where the Formless Flesh had devoured them; as for all that Flesh and bone?
Don’t tell him you really thought this Formless Flesh grew this big by eating air?
They’d long since become part of it, truly blended until there was no distinction between them.
This was also why Lance was unwilling to deal with the Formless Flesh right now.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t win; no matter how much Flesh there was, for Lance it was just Sacrifice material.
But right now he was in the middle of purging the Pigmen; if he cleared out the Formless Flesh, he’d actually be opening a passage for the Pigmen to go deeper.
And he knew what lay beneath Hamlet—that was a Flesh Ancient God!
If some "Pork Trotter" really followed the script and charged into the depths, nobody knew what would happen; the Ancestor sure wouldn’t mind backing a "new Pigman" to fight against Hamlet.
Leaving the Formless Flesh to seal the sewers, then completely wiping out the Pigmen before planning how to deal with it—that was the most reasonable route for Hamlet at this stage.
But Lance still needed to evaluate the Formless Flesh; he wanted to see what the hell this thing actually was.
The organs covering this thing weren’t just for show; the firelight just now had already alerted the Formless Flesh, which seemed to possess an instinct to devour all organic matter. It squirmed, slow but determined, trying to crawl closer.
At that speed even an eighty‑year‑old could outrun it, but that was not to be underestimated; Lance could feel the power contained in that Flesh.
Once it got close, those twisted limbs could lash out at any time.
Since it was a test, damage was inevitable; Lance simply drew his musket and casually fired a shot.
With a crack of gunfire, a spray of blood burst from the Flesh a second later; from the torn wound he could see how soft the Formless Flesh was, like it was freshly grown.
But that wound vanished in an instant; he couldn’t even tell if the squirming had hidden it or if it had actually healed.
At that scale, a gunshot wound wasn’t even a mosquito bite; to see clearly he’d have to make a much bigger gash.
Just as Lance was about to act, there was a sudden commotion in the passage, instantly putting him on alert. He hurriedly pulled back to the side, and the torch went out with him.
Because he could clearly hear that this was not the sound of human movement.
Sure enough, within a few seconds, four Flesh Devourers suddenly burst out of the darkness—yes, four, which was the truly surprising part.
Two of them were bigger than their companions, and bony armor plates and Bone Spurs had grown along their backs.
Hidden in the dark, Lance recognized them as the Large Flesh Devourers evolved from the ones he’d seen earlier by constant devouring.
That shot must have alerted them. But how had they come so fast? And why were there so many?
And in the instant he was distracted by this thought, he saw the four Devourers charge straight at the Formless Flesh.
They didn’t even pause; their goal was completely obvious.
The moment they pounced, those millstone‑like, toothed mouthparts clamped down with a single bite; the outer rings of fangs tightened layer by layer and directly swallowed the Flesh.
The outer ring of sharp teeth bit hard into the Flesh, anchoring them there. The sight reminded Lance of leeches clinging to human skin.
With their special mouth structure they locked on and devoured Flesh; the only pity was that bones still took time to dissolve.
The big ones were even more savage; evolution had given them greater power and a far more terrifying bite. You could clearly hear bones being ground to pieces inside those mouthparts.
But as Lance had just thought, if the Formless Flesh were really that harmless, it wouldn’t have driven the Pigmen back like that.
They’d only caught it off guard with the first rush; soon those twisted masses of Flesh reacted.
The spines standing upright within the Formless Flesh suddenly whipped around, smashing down toward the Flesh Devourers.
Spine Power Sweep!
Under that immense strength, the bones on those spines were like steel; when they hit, they didn’t just smash bodies, they drove splintered bone straight into the flesh.
With a single blow, one Flesh Devourer had half its body crushed and finally couldn’t hold on, loosening its bite.
But it was the lucky one; another was far worse off.
A Pig head controlled by the Flesh suddenly rose out of the shifting mass, jaws gaping as it chomped down on one of them.
Swallowed whole, skin and all!
The power of that pig’s mouth, bristling with fangs, was in no way inferior to a Devourer’s; its thick, tough hide didn’t help much—one bite and the barrel‑thick body was snapped neatly into three sections.
One section still clung to the Flesh in its jaws, another thrashed on the ground like a severed Tail-Cut, and the last was in the pig’s mouth, where it was reversed and gulped down in a few bites.
The portion that was still biting the Flesh was quickly overwhelmed and absorbed by the squirming mass, becoming part of the Formless Flesh, which also meant it was dead.
A bit of counterattack from the Formless Flesh had already left one Devourer dead and another crippled—and that was just a tiny sliver of the endless Flesh, probably not even a toe.
But the other two evolved Large Devourers gritted through the assault from those mutated limbs.
The hardened carapace on their backs took the Spine Power Sweep head‑on without much trouble; when it collided with the bone, it made a dull thud, but didn’t crack at all, and the sharp bone tips that hit it were simply split open.
Even when the Pig head lunged in to bite, all that came out was a tooth‑aching crunch; a few fangs were chipped, and the effect was worse than the spines’ blows.
The spikes on the back armor even scraped and pierced the pig’s head in return. This thing might not be limited by its form, but it was still injured.
Now Lance understood why evolution had given them back armor and spikes: it was a survival mechanism tailored for this specific enemy.
Once their main body latched on with a bite, their vulnerable backs were exposed, and the contrast in the current clash showed just how effective the new defense was.
They just tanked everything with that back armor: no matter what you did, they just kept gulping down Flesh.
Problem solved, or so it looked.
The problem was, they’d only armored their backs; the rest of their bodies had no armor, while the Flesh itself had no fixed shape. If they didn’t go to it, it would come to them.
One Large Devourer had already taken several hits from the spine; even though the carapace hadn’t been pierced, the blunt force still transmitted through the armor into its skull.
The violent impacts left it dizzy; it was forced to stop devouring and retreat.
The other one had held out against the pig’s bite and stayed latched on—but that very "tenacity" would cost it its life.
The Formless Flesh shifted, surging up to engulf the Large Devourer and drag it into the Flesh...
