Xiang Yi had no intention of leading them astray.
Besides, the Blood Crystals were only about a hundred meters from the industrial elevator. If the mine tunnels below weren't so winding and the lighting so poor, you might have been able to spot them straight from the elevator entrance.
Not that Xiang Yi was about to mention any of that. He kept his mouth shut and walked quietly at the front of the group.
As the others followed him through the decontamination chamber and onto the industrial elevator, and the platform began its slow descent, his mind was already turning things over.
The team leader's earlier "move fast" had cleared up something that had been nagging at him — something he'd been worried about but hadn't quite worked out.
Evidently, once a person was converted into a Blood Crystal, it didn't stay put for long. The resulting Blood Crystal was likely carried deeper into the mine by the Blood Crystal Abnormalities.
That was why someone needed to report the location immediately and bring a team back down.
Which explained why the guard had opened the door the moment he'd said what he said.
"How much farther?"
Xiang Yi gestured ahead. "Not far. Two more turns and you should be able to see it."
One of the lab coats frowned. "That close?"
The team leader immediately waved a hand, cutting him off.
The lab coat gave a small nod and reached over to switch on a device he was carrying — roughly the size of a human head, with two antenna sticking out of it. It looked like some kind of signal emitter.
The moment it powered on, Xiang Yi was hit with a wave of unbearable irritation. An intense, visceral revulsion toward the device surged through him out of nowhere.
"What the hell?" he thought, his gaze snapping to the machine involuntarily.
"Turn it off."
Before Xiang Yi could think too hard about it, the team leader had already ordered the lab coat to shut the device down. Then he turned to Xiang Yi. "How long ago did those three clusters of Blood Crystal appear?"
Xiang Yi mentally translated that as how long ago did Brother Long and the other two die, and answered, "Shouldn't be too long. I bolted the second I saw the Blood Crystals."
"Then we wait a bit."
The team leader raised a hand, signaling the eight-man squad to halt.
He then dug through the pile of equipment they'd brought and pulled out a six-legged Spider-shaped Robot, deploying it and guiding it forward along the tunnel.
Xiang Yi's eyes lit up. He was genuinely fascinated by the machine, but he didn't dare make any obvious moves — he just tilted his head slightly to get a look at the feed on the controller's screen.
The team leader didn't bother hiding it from him and let him look.
Someone behind the leader muttered, "We're already getting signal interference at this distance. That thing's not going to be very useful, is it?"
The team leader waved it off. "It'll be fine. This range should be enough. If not, we move up a few steps."
That exchange answered another question that had been bugging Xiang Yi — why a place with such advanced technology still had zero signal underground in this particular mine.
It was either something inherent to the mine itself, or it was caused by the Blood Crystal Abnormalities.
The Spider-shaped Robot quickly covered several dozen meters and disappeared fully into the tunnel.
The footage it transmitted grew progressively grainier as it pushed deeper, static crawling across the feed.
Even so, it had already located the bodies of Brother Long and the other two — along with one and a half agonized faces.
One and a half, because Kun's face — the one lying deepest in the tunnel — was already gone, completely buried under a dense, blood-red gritty substance. It looked nothing like the clear, glittering Blood Crystals. It was rough and coarse, almost sandy.
"Covered" wasn't quite the right word for it, though — because the blood-red grit was seeping out from inside Kun's body.
And it wasn't just his face. His entire body was steadily leaking blood, which solidified in the air the same way the rest of the flesh had — transforming into that same blood-red grit.
Brother Long's face was already half-gone. Only Brother Long's younger brother, who had managed a few stumbling steps toward the exit, still had anything resembling a human face left.
The remaining three glassy, vacant eyes stared blankly toward the mouth of the tunnel, their twisted expressions making it perfectly clear how much agony they'd been in when they died.
"Pheew——"
One of the lab coats let out a low whistle and clapped Xiang Yi on the shoulder.
"You're a cold one, aren't you? That's our quota sorted for a good while. When the time comes, sign an agreement, keep your mouth shut, and we're square."
Xiang Yi said nothing. He just nodded quietly.
Less said, the better. If anyone started asking how he'd taken down three people, he'd have to cobble together some story on the spot.
The team leader paid no attention to any of that, his eyes fixed on the feed coming back from the robot.
The three bodies were being swallowed by the blood-red grit at a visible rate, dissolving into a churned mass of flesh and bloody sand.
It was the kind of sight that even Xiang Yi — no stranger to death — found hard to stomach. But his curiosity about these creatures kept him from looking away. He forced himself to keep watching the controller screen in the team leader's hands.
Then, suddenly, the blood-red grit began to shudder violently. A tiny, worm-like thing — barely visible to the naked eye, only identifiable after the team leader zoomed in on the feed — burrowed its way out of one of the granules.
Its emergence seemed to act as a trigger. One after another, more worm-like things began wriggling free from the grit — or rather, hatching.
They didn't disperse immediately. Instead, they bored back into the sections of flesh that were still intact, tunneling through it, enabling more of the Blood Crystal Maggots encased in the grit to be born.
Xiang Yi closed his eyes and let out a slow breath.
His trypophobia was absolutely screaming at him.
The team leader's expression, on the other hand, hadn't shifted at all. He'd clearly seen this kind of thing plenty of times before.
More and more Blood Crystal Maggots hatched. The granules they had emerged from turned transparent, taking on the clear, glittering appearance of the Blood Crystals Xiang Yi had seen earlier.
The Blood Crystal Maggots also began attacking each other, devouring and digesting their own kind.
Each one that consumed another grew larger, and they excreted a fluid form of Blood Crystal in the process.
The fluid clung to the original "eggs," filling in the gaps between them, then hardened rapidly, forming dense clusters of crystals.
Once a sufficient number of Blood Crystal Maggots had grown to about the width of a finger, the team leader raised a hand and gestured backward.
The lab coat who had spoken up earlier immediately understood. He switched on the device the team leader had ordered shut down before.
The same wave of agitation hit Xiang Yi again — and at the same moment, the Blood Crystal Maggots swarming over the three bodies in the tunnel, or rather, the three clusters of Blood Crystals, seemed to sense something too. They erupted from within the crystals in a frenzy and fled into the darkness at the far end of the tunnel.
It was the device driving the Blood Crystal Abnormalities away.
Xiang Yi's gaze locked back onto the machine.
He didn't understand the mechanics behind it, but he felt like he understood the principle — because that gnawing anxiety, that gut-deep revulsion, wasn't something he could be wrong about.
He glanced around at the others. No one else seemed bothered by the device in the slightest.
There had to be a reason for that. Was it Spiritual Energy?
Xiang Yi turned it over for a moment and concluded that Spiritual Energy was the most likely explanation.
As far as he could tell, the biggest difference between him and everyone else here was that they didn't possess that force — the one he suspected was called Spiritual Energy.
And yet Blood Crystal Worms had a chance of possessing exactly that.
This wasn't just idle speculation on Xiang Yi's part.
If he'd come across Blood Crystal Worms under any other circumstances, he probably would have written them off as a strange-looking organism and not thought much more about it.
But Blood Crystal Worms were classified under a category called Abnormalities — and that had to mean something.
The most likely explanation was that Abnormalities were entities with a deep connection to Spiritual Power.
Which meant that equipment designed to counter Abnormalities would, to some degree, also affect someone like him — someone who carried Spiritual Power.