Li Ang used the tip of his Bāzhě Hénglán Shuo spear to gently tap the brick.

The metal tip touched the stone surface, making a crisp, pleasant sound.

"It seems that the demonic beast swallowed the brick after stealing it and has kept it in its stomach ever since."

Li Ang pondered for a moment and slowly said, "But, why?"

"Maybe the brick itself has special properties other than opening the Holy Mountain gate?"

Liu Wudai said calmly, "Like some natural treasures, swallowing them can allow monsters to evolve."

"Not really."

Li Ang shook his head. "This Shadow Demonic Beast has been in a near-zero metabolic dormant state for a long time under the influence of the Jisiki. Its stomach, naturally, hasn't activated its digestive function.

"Apart from a few strands of viscous, bloody filth on the surface of the brick, there are no signs of corrosion—even natural treasures shouldn't take effect without being digested, right?

"Unless this is radioactive material, and the radiation alone can cause the organism to mutate."

After advancing to demigod status, Li Ang's application of the biological mother template and his control over his own body have risen to a new level, and he can gradually feel the "feelings" of specific cells in a certain area.

Unlike the mysterious and obscure concept of "inner vision" in so-called Eastern mysticism, Li Ang feels that when his consciousness descends and immerses itself in his body,

it's like being able to scan his body with a microscope, in complete detail. He can directly command the merging, separation, differentiation, and even death of cells in an area.

This kind of control in the dark has not yet evolved to the level of a drop of blood rebirth, or the cells are me,

but it's already enough.

Expressed at the macro level, it means that Li Ang can freely adjust his body, and the transformation speed is several times faster than before. If his perception and physique attributes are raised a little higher, it is expected that there will be room for improvement.

At this moment, Li Ang placed his palm above the brick, without feeling anything unusual.

Gradually shortening the distance, until he completely touched the brick, there was still nothing abnormal.

Just as Li Ang and Liu Wudai were exploring the brick, the mountain of wreckage in the middle of the room collapsed again. After losing the maintenance of the Jisiki, a large number of wreckage quickly rotted into ash.

The entire hillside seemed to be hollowed out from the middle, collapsing and rising into a cloud of foul-smelling mist.

Since those wrecks had actually become fossils, Li Ang was not interested in collecting biological samples. He asked Liu Wudai to hold the brick and continued to dissect the corpse of the Shadow Demonic Beast.

"This corpse is very strange..."

Li Ang looked at the slashed tendons and flesh of the Shadow Demonic Beast, frowning. "Its various organs are like they were cut from dozens of different creatures and pieced back together."

"What do you mean?"

Liu Wudai frowned and asked, "Similar to Frankenstein's monster?"

*Frankenstein* is a science fiction novel written by the 19th-century British female writer Mary Shelley. Contrary to popular belief, Frankenstein is the biologist who created the stitched corpse monster, and the stitched corpse that is thought to be Frankenstein does not actually have a real name.

"A bit like that."

Li Ang nodded and said, "The source of the body's organs is very crude and not considered a very strong component.

"But the splicing technique is extremely clever, the coordination between the organs is excellent, there is no rejection reaction at all, and it is even more perfect than the creatures screened out by nature.

"Its creator is very powerful, very powerful."

Liu Wudai thought for a while and asked, "Could it be that there is no creator and it is just a special creature?

"I saw in the Special Affairs Bureau's files that there is a special kind of demon that looks like a blind snake when it is young. During its growth process, it can add all kinds of novel organs to itself by swallowing other creatures.

"This leads to each adult individual having huge differences in body shape other than the reproductive system due to different growth environments and past hunting targets.

"It is completely impossible to imagine that they are the same creature just by looking at their appearance."

"Is it a species unique to the Demon Imprisonment Cave?"

Li Ang raised his eyebrows with interest, but he was not considered a member of the Special Affairs Bureau, so he was embarrassed to ask further questions and said casually, "It shouldn't be.

"This Shadow Demonic Beast is most likely created artificially, rather than being a native species.

"Because it doesn't have a below."

Li Ang pointed between the legs of the Shadow Demonic Beast and said calmly, "And there are no obvious reproductive system organs on its body.

"Unless this thing can reproduce by spitting out eggs from its mouth like King Piccolo."

Liu Wudai thought for a while, "If it has a creator,

"how does its creator compare to your biological modification methods?"

"Different styles. I'm more of a pragmatist, as long as it can run and jump. This demonic beast body is much more refined. It looks stupid, big, black, and rough, but it is actually full of detail and artistic beauty."

Li Ang thought for a while and said honestly.

In fact, apart from debugging himself and the Zerg, the biological modification surgeries he did for Wugou Ronglu shop customers were not perfect.

In a short period of six months to a year, or as long as ten or twenty years, those surgical modifiers may find that there are problems with the coordination between the organ components and the body.

Or the body is aging, and the organ components absorb too much energy, causing the user to weaken further,

or the organ components cannot keep up with the body's strengthening level of the modifier.

Just like there is no need to make mobile phones too good or too durable, because users will replace them with new ones in a few years anyway,

mobile phones are made to be fragile, easily worn, and have a low battery, which will instead encourage users to continue buying new products—Li Ang, as an unscrupulous manufacturer, is well versed in the unspoken rules of the fast-moving consumer goods manufacturing industry,

He has never really exhausted his 100% heart and energy in the modification surgery for customers.

After all, a modification surgery only costs a few thousand game coins at most. What do you want a bicycle for?

Professor Li should be grateful for the surgery performed.

"If I had to compare, the creator of this demonic beast is probably on par with me in the field of biological modification."

Li Ang rubbed his palms, feeling a little itchy and eager to meet the creator of this demonic beast corpse. "Well... considering the murals we saw at the entrance of the dungeon before, maybe this thing came from the hand of a necromancer in this world."

"Uh... that..."

Ding Zisi, who was standing not far away, couldn't help but raise his hand and said, "If this demonic beast has its own creator, and its creator is very strong,

"shouldn't the focus now be on studying who its creator is and what threat he will pose to us?

"Why did he let the demonic beast steal the Holy Mountain gate brick, and why didn't he take the brick away, but instead let the demonic beast swallow the stone and stay in the dungeon for fifty years?"

"This..."

Li Ang said casually, "There are too many possibilities and too little information. There's no point in analyzing it.

"Maybe that necromancer wanted to imitate Dayu and make this world's team of heroes pass by his house three times without entering.

"Maybe that creator is not a necromancer, but a druid who once came to this island, was promiscuous everywhere, and had a wide range of interests,

"After a wild and chaotic party with multiple species of beast beauties, he gave birth to such a hybrid baby demonic beast,

"and then abandoned the baby and ran away, causing the latter to harbor resentment during its growth and specially squat in the dungeon, preparing to personally kill its father when it returns."

?

How did you come up with a Western fantasy family ethics drama that could be filmed for at least thirty episodes in less than a minute?

Ding Zisi stopped talking, suppressing his desire to complain with a wry smile.

Just as the three of them were chatting casually, Homeinheim's voice came from the walkie-talkie, "We're here."

Creak—

The wooden door at the deepest part of the room was pushed open, and the other three teammates appeared in sight.

David and Amberly looked fine, and there was no dust on their clothes.

Homeinheim was slightly more embarrassed. There were corrosive and charred marks on the surface of his windbreaker.

"The brick has been obtained."

Li Ang nodded to the three teammates, his eyes focused on the left side of Homeinheim's windbreaker. "Eh? Where's the brocade bag?"

When exploring the dungeon before, in order to prevent the brocade bag from emitting a smell that might alarm the monsters lurking in the dungeon, Homeinheim wrapped the three brocade bags with three special fabrics,

and tied them to the side of his windbreaker for him to keep.

But now, only two of the three brocade bags are left. The smallest one is missing, whether it was lost or discarded.

"Used it."

Homeinheim showed a wry smile and explained.

After he came into contact with the black mist, he was teleported to a huge maze-like room full of various traps.

Nail thorns, crossbow bolts, venom, flames, saw blades, sand, cold air...

Even though Homeinheim held the Book of Sand and mastered a long list of spells, he was still a little embarrassed in the low-free-energy environment where he had to save magic power.

When he finally escaped from the trap room and planned to join David and Amberly as soon as possible,

he encountered an attack by a red-black mud-like object in another room.

That mass of giant sludge was composed of countless blood and wreckage,

resembling both plants and animals. It was huge, extremely powerful, and had ridiculously high physical and magical resistance.

The magic released by Homeinheim could only splash a little sludge on it, which could be regenerated in an instant, causing little damage - in an ordinary script mission, it would be more than enough to be used as the final boss.

Helpless, Homeinheim thought of the three-armed strange man, Claude, he encountered in the forest, and the three cloth bags that Claude handed over according to the bet.

According to Claude, the first cloth bag was to be opened when encountering evil and filthy things.

Surrounded in the corner of the room by flesh and blood sludge, and not wanting to consume too much magic power or play his trump card early, Homeinheim opened the first brocade bag.

As a result, it released millions of lumens of brilliant light, directly burning the flesh and blood sludge until only a central mass remained, which Homeinheim easily ended, left that room, and successfully joined David and Amberly.

"According to the scene at the time, the first brocade bag should have contained some kind of consumable,"

Homeinheim said slowly, "I saw similar props in the game store last time, which can release a light intensity and positive attribute energy comparable to a miniature sun in a very short period of time."

"We later returned to that room to observe it and found that there was a small amount of blood seeping down from the cracks in the floor tiles on the ceiling."

David added, "According to the route we took, that room should be not far below this room - that flesh and blood sludge creature,

"should have been produced by the influence of the wreckage mountain in this room."

David glanced around the room and said his thoughts, which were similar to Li Ang's. He believed that this room was artificially arranged for the purpose of accumulating Jisiki.

Everyone exchanged information and planned to withdraw from the dungeon.

According to the exploration of Homeinheim and others just now, there should only be two creatures in the entire dungeon: the Shadow Demonic Beast and the flesh and blood sludge living in the room below the Shadow Demonic Beast.

In addition, there were no other living things in the dungeon, and the corpses of all native demonic beasts had turned into wreckage mountains.

Everyone endured the stench and searched the room.

After confirming that there were no treasures worth searching for in the entire dungeon, including the Shadow Demonic Beast's residence,

they withdrew from the room and headed towards the dungeon entrance they came from.

It is worth noting that the brick and the corpse of the Shadow Demonic Beast were both marked as [Mission Items] and could not be put into the backpack bar.

Therefore, the players stored the brick in a special container and kept it in David's care.

The corpse of the Shadow Demonic Beast was compressed into a square by Ding Zisi using the Special Affairs Bureau's standard storage net (a technological creation that appeared a long time ago and can flatten and reduce the volume of large objects. It has now been developed to the fifth generation).

The surface was covered with waterproof, leak-proof, and insulated cloth and carried on the back of the Kui Niu mecha.

The group headed towards the village.

The outside of the village was still covered with a layer of optical camouflage cloth. When Li Ang and others walked near the entrance of the village, the optical camouflage cloth was canceled by the village guards - the group of guards looked at the unharmed returning player team with incredible shock,

and it took them a while to react and quickly ran to lead the players back to report to the village chief. Along the way, village residents kept poking their heads out of the doors and windows of their houses, looking at Li Ang and others with curious, surprised, and respectful eyes.

This was normal, after all, according to the village chief and Ding Zisi's scan, the residents of this village were born with premature aging and it was difficult for them to live past the age of thirty.

The team of heroes appearing in the village was probably a memory from the generation before last.

Li Ang walked calmly on the streets of the village, occasionally spitting out rainbow spring water to add a "victorious momentum" special effect buff to himself.

Before long, he arrived in front of the village chief's residence.

"Please come in! Please come in quickly, brave heroes!"

The white-haired village chief invited the players into the house with a smile on his face.

"We've brought the Holy Mountain gate brick. This is it, right?"

Homeinheim didn't waste any time, asking David to open the container and place the brick on the wooden table. "If there are no problems, can you please give us the key to the Holy Mountain now?"

"No problem, no problem. According to my ancestors' records, it's not difficult to open the Holy Mountain gate. I guess you can use it by putting the brick back."

The village chief looked at the dusty group of players, licked his lips, and said hesitantly in a humble tone, "But before that, I have a presumptuous request. I don't know if I should say it..."