Rebirth: Leading Families to Survive in the Apocalypse

Chapter 258: Chapter 258 Si Tian Ruyue
 

At dawn, after a heavy rain, North Mountain looked even more luxuriously green.

However, the rain didn’t make the air feel fresher for Si Tian and Zhong Ruyue; instead, there was an omnipresent scent of rust.

Zhong Ruyue’s belly had grown bigger by the day, and Si Tian would go up the mountain daily to pick fresh fruits for her, believing that these purely natural fruits would contain abundant vitamins and could make up for the lack of vegetables in her diet.

When he was about to leave, he noticed that the sedum plants outside the stone house had grown much larger, transforming from the size of a palm-sized potted plant to the size of a full-grown cabbage?!

The previously delicate and tender tendrils had also become much fatter. Si Tian squatted down and observed them for a while, remembering what the hunters who came to the mountain had said, he decided to uproot these plants when he returned today. They had grown so much overnight, and they looked quite unsettling. Although the plants inside the house were still relatively small, if they too grew larger, they might even affect the indoor air quality.

After greeting Ruyue, Si Tian headed down the mountain.

The mountain path was difficult to navigate after the rain. The two had already made a frequently traveled path for descending the mountain. Si Tian intended to follow that path, but to his surprise, he found that the path was gone!

No, it wasn’t that the path was gone, but the narrow earthen trail they had made was now completely covered with densely packed plants.

It hadn’t been like this when he went down the mountain yesterday. How could so many leaves have sprouted after just one rain—and in a single night at that?

Luckily, he was wearing a set of waterproof gear today, so he wasn’t worried even if the leaves were wet and dripping with water. He pushed aside one plant after another, heading towards the forest where the fruit trees were.

As he walked, Si Tian began to feel that something was amiss. The routes he had become familiar with were gradually becoming unrecognizable, and the plants and trees he knew had also changed compared to the previous day.

Especially the bracken, which was the most common fern on the mountain before. Most of them were under one meter tall, but now many had grown as tall as small trees!

The edges of these plants had some irregular lacerations before, but they weren’t enough to cut the skin. However, now those parts had turned into dark-green spikes.

Si Tian touched one with his hand, and it pierced his finger, drawing blood!

What on earth was happening?

Driven by intense curiosity, he continued walking and observing. Although there were countless species of plants on North Mountain, and he had always been confident in recognizing almost all of them, he was now feeling lost. Were these really the same plants he knew before?

Finally, he reached the area with the fruit-bearing trees. Thankfully, these trees didn’t seem to have changed much, and the fruits hanging from them were as delightful as ever.

He picked up the homemade bamboo pruning pole he had left there for convenience, as he used it every time he went down to pick fruit, and no one else would take it anyway.

The bamboo pruning pole successfully snipped off a branch full of fruit. Just as he bent down to pick up the branch, he felt a sudden pain on his back and then saw a fruit roll to a stop beside him.

He sighed with relief; it turned out a fruit had fallen from the tree and hit him, but such a small fruit could still hurt quite a bit when it fell.

As the second and third fruits started falling and hitting him, he realized something was not right. He noticed that the fruits seemed to target wherever he went. It wasn’t until he stepped back a few meters, out of the tree’s range, that the falling fruits stopped. As soon as he took a step forward, the fruit attacks resumed.

This made him laugh a little. Could it be that the tree had become sentient?

Sentient, sentient?

He repeated the word to himself a few times, and suddenly it was as if he had remembered something—he started running back in the direction he had come from like mad!

As a speed element ability user, Si Tian should have been able to run fast, but with so many obstacles on the mountain, he had to slow down. Yet he was too worried about Ruyue, and his speedy movement caused his sturdy gear to get ripped by the hard plant leaves in several places.

Along the way, a vine even suddenly wrapped around his ankle. Fortunately, he always carried a dagger with him, which he used to cut the vine and escape. Looking at the pale red liquid on the dagger, he didn’t have time to be shocked and continued running towards the mountaintop.

Finally, he had climbed to the summit of the mountain, and there, their stone house still stood as silent and tranquil as ever. He sighed with relief and slowly walked back.

“Ruyue, I’m back,” Si Tian called out from a distance.

No response.

His heart skipped a beat as he pushed open the bamboo door and looked inside to find Zhong Ruyue sitting upright on the bed, facing him.

“Why aren’t you answering me? You know…”

Si Tian looked at Zhong Ruyue, and she wasn’t ignoring him; her mouth was opening and closing as if saying something, but no sound came out.

Si Tian frowned, Zhong Ruyue’s lip movements seemed to be saying: Run.@@novelbin@@

Run?

Si Tian looked behind himself, but there was nothing there.

“Is your throat uncomfortable?”

Finally, Si Tian took all the fruit out of his pocket and walked forward.

A stench of blood filled his nostrils.

Si Tian looked in horror at the pool of blood flowing from beneath Zhong Ruyue and at the dense mass of tentacles behind her, which connected to several giant sedum plants on the wall that had turned dark red!

“Ruyue, Ruyue, don’t scare me,” he pleaded.

Si Tian pulled out a dagger and started to chop at the tentacles. One by one, they were severed, but Zhong Ruyue’s back was already drenched in blood!

“Don’t worry about me, run,”

It seemed that Zhong Ruyue had used all her strength just to utter those words.

“No, Ruyue, don’t fall asleep, I’m going to get the first aid kit,”

Just as Si Tian was about to stand up, he felt a numbness in his neck, and after a surge of pain, he found he no longer had the strength to stand.

Sedum, a perennial herbaceous carnivorous plant, has glandular hairs on its leaves that secrete a dew-like sticky liquid to trap insects. The leaves then secrete protease to digest the prey, and the helpless insects are gradually absorbed.

Information about sedum flashed through his mind, and suddenly, he felt like an insect caught by an uncountable number of sticky tendrils reaching for him from behind.

The more he tried to break free, the more he realized he had no strength left to do so.

He finally understood why Ruyue had told him to run just moments ago.

Because now he was in pain too, he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t muster the strength to make a sound.

He even tried to summon the Special Ability within his body, but he found that it was futile…