Chapter 166: The Rose Factory

Tang Erda took a deep breath, stood up with his sack and started picking roses again, quickly and neatly, and although he still looked a little unskilled and clumsy, the roses in the sack were still growing fast - at least faster than Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi working together. It looked much faster.

After all, he is a strong man who is good at physical work, and there is a difference between a child like Liu Jiayi and a social animal like Bai Liu who sits in front of a computer all day long and 996.

But when Tang Erda's sack was half full of dried leaf roses, there was a sudden rustling in the surrounding field of flowers - like some animal, creeping on the soil of the field, quickly pawing at his limbs again, or maybe more than that, moving towards him.

The sound of fine, slimy, dense, knuckles sinking into the dirt and pulling out made Tang Erda turn her head in an instant of alarm, a silver revolver appearing out of thin air in his hand, which he then clutched and held up.

Tang Erda moved cautiously around the spot where the odd noise had been made, thumbing the chamber slightly to cock the cartridge and holding the gun up to the churning rose bush.

The lush flowers shake and tremble, and something hidden in the earth comes closer and closer to Tang Erda, a strong smell like the decay of long-deposited dead leaves.

The shuddering continued closer and closer, eventually coming to a halt about half a metre from Tang Erda.

Tang Erda moves carefully, his body poised in a half-crouch, his other unarmed hand parted to cover the flowering branches of whichever creature is near him, while the hand holding the gun is steadily aimed at whichever tremor has stopped for the last time.

The thing seemed to know that Tang Erda was aiming her weapon at it, and it remained silent for a while, but eventually the scent of flower petals from Tang Erda's sack overcame it, and a hissing humanoid monster burst out of the mud.

Its body was covered in a soft scarlet mud, still dripping and dripping, and only the outline of a humanoid creature could be vaguely discerned, the flesh of its body all spread out in flaps, like a leaf that was branching out and dying black, while their bones were like the stems of plants, and the blackened flesh was splitting away from the bones in a withered manner, the skin as yellow as the dried leaves.

With each step the creature's dangling "blades" trembled, and as it did so, the mud finally dripped off its face, revealing a rough idea of its true nature - its eyes were sunken and blackened, and the flesh on the right side of its face had all but withered away, leaving no flesh but bone. But strangely enough, some white, dense, fleshy spines of bone were writhing on its cheekbones, as if they were about to grow in the next second.

The monster lifted its eyes that were about to fall off, and inside them was a pair of roses that had withered to the point of dying, and it opened its mouth, which had rotted down to the nostrils and the beds of its teeth, and made an eerie, hoarse sound with its white teeth, "I want perfume!!! Give me perfume!!!"

The fleshy sprouts writhing on its bones instantly elongated into long, flesh-coloured tentacles with air holes that stabbed towards Tang Erda, and the areas of its body that had not fallen off without flesh, but only bones, were instantly filled with these thumb-thick writhing tentacles.

Tang Erda is waiting for the monster to attack him first, and only after the monster has attacked him can he trigger the monster book.

[System Alert: Congratulations to player Tang Erda for triggering the Monster Book]

[The Rose Factory Monster Book Refresh - Dried Leaf Addicts (1/3)]

[Monster Name: Dried Leaf Addict (Drifter)

[Characteristics: The lowly stragglers gradually wither away after being denied access to low concentrations of perfume, but before withering away completely, these stragglers who are denied access to perfume to ease the withering first fall into the madness of a perfume addiction, a madness that makes them imagine they can do anything ......]

[The daring lowlife addicts have come to the flower fields that produce dried leaf roses to steal them in order to get the last pleasure before they wither and die, but unfortunately, these lowlife strays have a strong stench and cannot touch the roses in the flower fields, so they can only steal the roses that have already been picked by the flower pickers.

[Weakness: ????? (to be explored)]

[Attack: Stealing Roses (A+), attacking flower pickers with tentacles to steal the fruits of their labour]

The creature's tentacles were long and the sweeping sweep from all sides caused Tang Erda to retreat several steps, but he did not strike immediately.

According to the factory worker who had brought him here earlier, there must be more than one monster like the stragglers here in Hanada, and Tang Erda was prepared to bait this monster into attacking a few more times so as to get a feel for his opponent's full range of attacks.

He was agile enough that it wasn't hard to get around a level A+ monster, but that thought lasted just under a second.

On another occasion when the creature reached out to attack Tang Erda, he looked at the tentacle that had tumbled and brushed less than two centimetres in front of his eyeball - a tentacle that looked like the root of a plant, with intermittent scars that looked like something had fallen off.

It soon became clear to Tang Erda what the scars were - they were the marks of the joints left on the bones after the flesh and blood 'blades' had dried up and fallen off, and they were also on the tentacles that had grown from the bones.

--This mark is exactly the same as the one left on the rhizome of a dried-leaf rose after the leaves have withered and fallen from the ripe ones just picked by Tang Erda.

Tang Erda took a few steps back with a grimace on his face, realising what was happening, and immediately pulled out his gun and shot the creature in front of him.

The monster hissed and ambled to the ground, but it was too late, and more and more rose bushes shook.

Tang Erda felt himself stepping back on a soft, fleshy, writhing patch of earth, and he looked down to see countless root-like tentacles writhing and twisting around the soles of his feet like a pack of mating pythons, spreading from Tang Erda's soles all the way to every corner of the field of flowers that was beginning to undulate.

In the vast fields of roses, shadowed stragglers shake and crawl out of the mud, their faces and bodies covered with tentacles that commit themselves to the mud of the ground, and the twisting tentacles of these stragglers are connected to the roots and leaves of the roses in the fields of flowers, which grow more and more beautiful in the moonlight.

These [stragglers], which are parasites of the dried leaf roses, live in the ground of these roses.

They remain hidden in the earth, languishing, with their two rose-soaked eyeballs looking out at night, salivating and wild, just waiting for the full flowers with faded leaves to be plucked by the flower-pickers.

So much so that in the end even the bones were parasitised by these rose roots, and the body was covered with scars from the dried leaves that had fallen off.

The flower fields turned from soft crimson mud to a swamp of rotting flesh and blood - the slippery red mud on the surface was a heap of [leaves] that had fallen off these stragglers and had been trampled on, but the smell was so overpowered by the rich, strong fragrance of the roses that it was impossible to smell.

Growing out of the ground, the tentacled stragglers, their eyes open with roses framed in them, approached Tang Erda step by step as if they were puppets on strings in reverse, and Tang Erda's ankles became entangled in the tentacles that emerged from the ground.

A human face emerges from Tang Erda's feet, nearly two-thirds of it decayed and full of tentacles, and tentacles emerge from its open mouth, which shrink and wrap around Tang Erda's ankles, pulling him into the ground.

It slurred and gurgled with tentacles in its mouth.

"Give me the perfume!!!"

"Give me roses!"

The unearthly sound was like a chorus, coming from all directions, the moon shone brightly on the crimson ground, Tang Erda gritted his teeth and shot at the tentacles on his ankles, and the moment they broke off, a second petal of the rose in his eyes bloomed.

[System Alert: Player Tang Erda's spirit level has dropped to 78, please use perfume to restore your spirit level as soon as possible to prevent being alienated]

Following the fields of flowers in pure white moonlight, Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi are lying salty on the shore at the other end of the endless field of flowers.

The two men were motionless and staring straight up at the sky, except for their chests, which were still heaving from the intense physical activity, and they looked like two corpses that had just been carried here.

"I've been resting for five minutes, I should get up and pick flowers." Liu Jiayi said.

"Do you think the fact that we're taking a five-minute break and a ten-minute break has any impact on the fact that we can't finish the job?" Bai Liu asks calmly and rhetorically.

Liu Jiayi was silent for a moment: "...... doesn't seem to have one."

After all, they had only collected six kilograms so far and it looked unlikely that they would be able to complete the task of picking 40kg of roses before dawn.

Bai Liu faded: "Then we can rest a little longer."

Liu Jiayi: "......"

What is this groping mentality all about?!

"You're in a very depressed state of mind this time, Bai Liu." Liu Jiayi sat up and looked at the motionless Bai Liu. Liu Jiayi sat up and looked at the motionless Bai Liu, she hugged her chest and looked down at a certain salty fish lying next to her, "You are usually operating at your limit to pass the game, I don't believe you don't have ideas in your head to break the game."

Bai Liu looked up at Liu Jiayi with slanted eyes: "I don't believe you don't have it in your head either, so the reason we both don't act now should be the same."

Liu Jiayi is delicately silent for a long time.

Bai Liu turned his head back to the sky and continued, "The first is that it is indeed impossible for me and you to obtain 40kg of roses by regular labour, and without a way to get through this way, our labour is unrewarding, uneconomical and will speed up our contamination."

"After tallying the results of your and my first hour of labour, we can already be convinced that this approach won't work, so there's no point in continuing this pointless labour."