Chapter 257: Chapter 245: We Shrank
"Yeah, but I don’t think this place is that simple. Have you noticed? Something seems different since we landed on the volcano." Lex Cross looked at his own hands, then at Flora Bloom’s, with the nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
Every rock was enormous, its texture so fine and clear it was as if they were looking through a magnifying glass. Even a single blade of grass on the volcano’s slope was dozens of times larger than the two of them.
"Wait!" Flora Bloom suddenly began to inspect her hands meticulously, looking at them from the left, from the right, turning them over and over. Then she looked up at the sky.
She had never seen such a vast and towering sky. It was as if her very existence had shrunk to a single speck of dust. From the perspective of a dust mote gazing at the heavens, she suddenly felt incredibly small.
"Don’t you feel like... something’s not right with us?" Flora Bloom asked Lex Cross tentatively.
Lex Cross nodded. "We’ve shrunk."
Realization dawned on Flora Bloom. "I knew something felt off! How could the sky look so vast from this angle? Look over there!" Flora Bloom pointed to a tree on the crater’s rim.
The tree trunk was massive, a hundred times the size of Flora Bloom’s current body. She took out her axe, chopped away a few layers of wood from the trunk, and peeled back the bark to look.
"This tree is at most ten or twenty years old; it’s impossible for it to be this huge. It seems we really have shrunk, haven’t we?"
"OOH! OOH! OOH! OOH! OOH!"
"GAK! OOH! OOH! GAK! GAK!"
Suddenly, a flurry of strange, chattering animal cries echoed from behind the volcano. Accompanied by a ground-shaking tremor, Flora Bloom and Lex Cross climbed the tree—now enormous to them—and hid among its dense leaves and branches.
A troop of black-furred apes, two to three times their size, had appeared from out of nowhere. They chattered and screeched at each other, beating their chests and stamping their feet, looking extremely ferocious.
Watching the apes, Flora Bloom and Lex Cross were suddenly reminded of the three-eyed, black-furred one they’d seen at the secret realm’s exit, the one connected to the tunnel beneath Morgan Sterling’s villa.
Aside from lacking a third eye on their foreheads, their other physical features were nearly identical: the same long black fur, the same powerful limbs and massive bodies.
The troop of black-furred apes ambled around the mountainside for a bit, hooting and hollering. They seemed to be conversing, pointing at several nearby spots, before leaving the mountainside together as a group.
Only after the apes had completely vanished from sight did the two of them slowly climb down from the tree.
"What were they saying?" Flora Bloom asked softly.
Lex Cross narrowed his eyes, looking at the empty air to the side. Flora Bloom followed his gaze, and in the next second, The Crown Prince and Raccoon materialized.
’Damn, even with my powerful spiritual power, I can never sense the energy fluctuations when The Crown Prince and Raccoon are invisible. How does Lex Cross know?’
"Boss, Five, Saul Sterling, and Nolan Jennings were captured by that troop of apes." The Crown Prince and Raccoon had quickly turned invisible the moment they landed, which was the only reason they weren’t captured too.
"There are a ton of those apes. Their nest is behind the volcano, hidden by some really tall clumps of grass. We didn’t dare to rush in, so we came to find you first."
To get to the area behind the volcano, the only way was to first go to the mountainside, where a small path led around back. Just as the four of them were about to head for the path, the Golden Crow hiding in the strands of hair behind Flora Bloom’s ear suddenly flew out and, without a second thought, dove into the volcano’s crater.
Its small, dark body plunged into the crater and quickly vanished into the thick black smoke.
"Golden Crow!"
Flora Bloom couldn’t grab the Golden Crow in time and could only watch as it plunged toward the lava.
"Don’t worry about the Golden Crow. The Golden Crow clan is naturally drawn to fire. Any Fire Energy is insignificant to them," Lex Cross’s deep voice soothed Flora Bloom.
"Hmph. Even though I have a master-servant contract with this scruffy crow, the little guy doesn’t listen at all!" Flora Bloom frowned, stood on her tiptoes, and peered into the crater. The thick black smoke was choking, but it seemed to contain a dense Fire Element Energy.
"Oh well, as long as it doesn’t die, I’ll just let it be!"
The four of them quickly made their way down to the small path on the mountainside and began walking slowly toward the back of the volcano.
"What exactly is this place? Why did our bodies shrink? And why are those black-furred apes here?" Ever since realizing she had shrunk, Flora Bloom was filled with questions about everything.
’The three-eyed black-furred ape that attacked Saul Sterling in the wetland park seems to be the same species as this troop. But where did this troop come from? And if they are the same species, why aren’t they together?’
’The cosmic phenomena that accompanied the appearance of the secret realms had been an unsolved mystery in her past life, too. Both the nine great secret realms and the anomalous zones around them eventually became forbidden grounds for humanity. Those who ventured into the secret realms either never returned or, if they did, would disappear again shortly after. Thus, the secret realms and anomalous zones gained a reputation as places where intruders were certain to die. After that, no one dared to venture in again.’
From their current position on the mountainside, they could actually see the entirety of Morhaven. Turning her head back, she exclaimed, "Lex Cross, look! Isn’t that our yacht?"
Flora Bloom’s heart sank. The yacht’s hull was shattered, and it was grounded at the base of the Eye of Earthly Fire volcano. Or rather than the base, it was in a valley on the part of the volcano that had risen above sea level.
Flora Bloom and the other three quickly headed from the mountainside path toward the yacht, but the closer they got, the heavier their hearts became.
From the mountainside, the yacht had just looked wrecked, nothing more. But now, as they tried to approach it, the four of them learned the hard way what it means for a destination to look deceptively close. Furthermore, when they finally managed to run all the way to the yacht, they discovered that the four of them weren’t even as big as a single small piece of sheet metal that had broken off it.
The yacht, which was originally only about ten or so times taller than them, was now nearly a thousand times their size.
"It seems the magnetic field in this place shrinks living creatures by a hundred or a thousand times, but it doesn’t affect inanimate objects," Flora Bloom analyzed with a frown. ’This yacht was reinforced by my father, Caleb Bloom, and Sherman Lynch. Not even a single piece of metal from the hull should have come off this easily. For the bottom to be in pieces and the hull so shattered, what kind of devastating force or impact could have caused this?’
"Cynthia and the others must be in some kind of danger! We have to find them, quickly!"
Lex Cross squeezed Flora Bloom’s hand. "This volcano doesn’t belong to this world."
The Crown Prince and Raccoon were startled, then a look of delight appeared on their faces. "Boss? Are you saying this volcano is from another universe?"
Lex Cross neither denied nor confirmed it. "Not necessarily. This volcano clearly has its own independent spatial magnetic field and time flow. That’s why our arrival prompted it to change our bodies."
"A volcano of this size appearing so suddenly is definitely because a spatial point in this world has become unstable. Whether this volcano arrived from another universe through a spatial rift, or if it tunneled in from a parallel dimension, is still uncertain."
Lex Cross suddenly looked at Flora Bloom with worry. "But one thing I can be sure of is that no matter where it came from, it means this world’s space is no longer stable."
