Start with everyday skills and grind your way to immortality.

Nevertheless, it was impossible to return the way we came at this point.

Not to mention Wang Meng wouldn't agree, even he himself couldn't possibly agree.

So the most important thing now is to find a way to keep going.

Is there a road ahead?

Wang Meng leaned against a blood-stained rock, panting heavily.

Although he couldn't see the horrifying bloodstains, the strong, almost unbearable smell of rust told him what had happened there.

"have."

Chen Qian succinctly reassured the troops, saying, "As long as they are not all dead, there will always be a way out."

He took a deep breath, forcing himself to ignore the fresh bloodstains around him, and began to wander around the rugged pile of rocks.

The terrain here is extremely complex, with crisscrossing fissures, resembling a giant maze.

Some cracks were as wide as doorways, their depths unfathomable. Others were as narrow as a thread, from which gusts of cold wind blew.

Choosing the wrong path will lead to utter ruin.

Chen Qian kept looking around, constantly calculating with his hands using the Five Elements divination method.

However, the divination results were a chaotic mess, sometimes indicating great peace and other times indicating emptiness, making them completely unreliable.

Although divination cannot provide answers regarding survival strategies, we can look at it from another angle.

Predicting small things can greatly increase the probability of success.

He turned and came to a narrow path on the right that was covered with gravel.

Is it windy along this road?

Move your fingertips again.

[Void]

It's a dead end, or a place where the air doesn't circulate.

exclude!

Chen Qian was like a meticulous mine-clearing engineer, cautiously probing forward little by little in this death maze using this extremely tedious yet highly effective method.

"Is the stone under your feet loose?"

【Xiaoji】

When I stepped on it, it didn't budge at all.

"Is there a smell of blood ahead?"

[Lingering]

Chen Qian immediately stopped and walked around the seemingly safe shadow.

……

With each accurate small-scale divination, his experience points were jumping wildly, and Chen Qian's forehead was covered with fine beads of sweat.

This intense mental concentration is even more exhausting than the fighting just now.

But the light in his eyes grew brighter and brighter.

He discovered that after breaking down the grand destiny into countless tiny multiple-choice questions, this beginner-level divination technique was frighteningly accurate!

What was originally a dead end in the maze gradually transformed in his eyes into a map filled with red crosses and green lines.

"What are you doing?"

Wang Meng followed behind, watching Chen Qian sometimes touching stones, sometimes staring blankly at the air, and sometimes inexplicably taking detours. He couldn't help but feel annoyed.

"Shut up and follow me."

Chen Qian didn't turn his head, his voice cold and hard.

He stopped again in front of an inconspicuous, low-lying hole.

The cave entrance was covered in moss, making it look eerie and slippery, with even a few drops of undried blood splattered on the edge of the entrance.

If it were an ordinary person, they would definitely avoid it at all costs.

But this is one of the slightly better choices among many options.

"Walk."

The walls were slippery, and in some places you had to press your face against the ground to barely get through.

Chen Qian climbed very slowly, using his elbows and knees to find precise footing with each step, trying not to make a sound.

But Wang Meng behind him was not so good.

He was already as big and strong as a bear, and with both arms broken, he could only wriggle like a worm using the strength of his legs and waist.

The broken arm bone inevitably scraped against the narrow rock face.

"Uh... Hmph..."

Suppressed groans of pain and heavy breathing echoed through the deathly silent passageway, sounding particularly jarring.

"Don't make a sound."

Chen Qian stopped what he was doing, turned around and gave him a cold glance, his eyes like knives.

Wang Meng was covered in cold sweat, biting his lip tightly, his eyes filled with resentment and helplessness, and could only try to slow down his movements.

The deeper you climb, the stronger the nauseating smell of rust becomes.

Chen Qian saw that the crevices in the rocks beneath him were no longer filled with dry dust, but with large puddles of dark red silt.

When you reach out and touch it, it's sticky and stringy.

It was all blood!

Moreover, the blood plasma, which was not completely dried, covered the bottom and sides of the entire passage, as if a huge corpse had just been dragged through it.

"Brother Chen... Brother Chen..."

Wang Meng, standing behind him, had clearly smelled the odor as well; his voice was trembling.

"This place is weird...it's too eerie! Shall we turn back? Huh? Let's take another route, this is definitely a dead end!"

Chen Qian did not turn around, but continued to move forward, his voice extremely soft but as cold as the stone on the rock wall.

"If it's not safe here, is it safe outside?"

He gripped a protruding rock with his fingers and pulled his body forward with force.

"In this godforsaken place, what chance do we have? If we really run into trouble, it's just bad luck, we'll just have to accept it."

After crawling for about the time it takes to brew a cup of tea, a fork in the road suddenly appeared ahead.

Two identical cracks, like the forked tongue of a snake, lead to the dark depths on the left and right sides respectively.

Chen Qian stopped, his brows furrowed.

He stretched out his left hand and quickly began to calculate.

Useless!

Chen Qian's heart sank; the divination indicated that there was nothing good on either side.

He took a deep breath and pricked up his ears.

A faint, putrid smell wafted from the passageway on the right.

The passage on the left... although the stench of blood was stronger, there was a faint, extremely weak flow of air, carrying a hint of damp earth.

Chen Qian made a decisive decision: "Go to the left!"

The crack on the left is narrower than the one before.

Chen Qian was thin, and although it was difficult for him, he managed to slide over by shrinking his frame.

But when it was Wang Meng's turn, trouble came.

"It's stuck...stuck!"

Wang Meng had barely squeezed half his body in when he let out a suppressed growl.

It's too narrow here!

His broad shoulders and broken, unretractable arm were like a wedge, firmly wedged between the rock walls.

The rough rocks rubbed against the flesh at the site of his broken bone, the excruciating pain almost causing him to faint.

"Come over here!" Chen Qian whispered from the front.

"I can't get past this! Ah... I really can't get past this!"

Wang Meng's face contorted in pain as he desperately twisted his body, trying to find a better angle.

Because of the pain, the sound became louder without my noticing, and was amplified countless times in this small space.

"Sizzle... sizzle..."

A very faint yet very strange sound.

Suddenly from behind them.

It looked like countless wet feet stepping on mud, or like some kind of mollusk crawling rapidly.

and……

The sound is rapidly approaching!

What was that sound?

Wang Meng froze, his scalp tingling instantly.

Chen Qian's heart pounded wildly; the thing was moving at an astonishing speed.

There might be more than one!

"They're here! Let's go!"

Chen Qian let out a low roar and tried to rush forward using both his hands and feet.

"Pull me up! Help me out!"

Wang Meng panicked completely.

The fear of being trapped in a crevice and waiting to die broke him.

Ignoring the pain, and even disregarding the need to lower his voice, he screamed hysterically:

"Chen Qian! You said you'd collaborate! Pull me up!"

The roar echoed loudly in the passageway.

"Zzzzz!!!"

The thing behind them clearly heard the sound and instantly became sharp and urgent!

A foul stench had already reached Wang Meng's heels!

Chen Qian turned around.

In his field of vision, he saw Wang Meng's face, distorted with fear, and his hands reaching out to him in a desperate plea for help.

but……

He could already imagine what was behind Wang Meng!

Pull him?

In this situation, it's impossible to pull it!

Even if they manage to pull it, with two people crammed together, neither of them can escape!

Chen Qian's eyes turned extremely cold in that instant, without the slightest hesitation.

"Master Wang."

"cooperate?"

"You risked your life to block the road for me, to hold them back..."

"This is the best kind of collaboration!"

Chen Qian abruptly turned his head away, refusing to look at him again.

He kicked off the rock face with both legs and crawled forward frantically like a startled lizard.

"Chen Qian! You beast! I'll haunt you even as a ghost! Ah!!!"

Behind him came Wang Meng's desperate curses, followed by the muffled sound of sharp teeth tearing through flesh and blood, and an extremely shrill scream.

In this space, barely wide enough for one person to turn sideways, Wang Meng's burly body was firmly stuck, like a plug.

Blocked from the front and back, and surrounded by walls on the left and right, he possessed immense strength but had no space to exert it.

"Click..."

The sounds of chewing and bones cracking, mixed with screams, echoed through the narrow passageway.