Building My SSS-Rank Universal Empire: From Trash to Cosmic Overlord-Chapter 131: When it cleared

When the dust cleared, there was no Yeti. The ground had cracked, and a smoking hole extended downward into near darkness.

Vale saw dark stone and equipment that looked more like an alchemist’s room. He narrowed his eyes when he saw blue blood splattered everywhere. "You’re not dead."

"What are you talking about? You nearly killed me!" Serdan said as she walked closer to him, gingerly picking her way across the melted ground.

Vale didn’t reply to her. He waited until the others joined, and they all looked down at the new hole that led underground. Even Tiber and Slya had joined them after hearing the loud explosion.

Dlodus’s eyes were on Vale. ’No wonder he killed Alyndra... Can he still make such an attack after the first one? Something to know...’

"Are you going to go down there?" Slya asked.

"Yes. The monster isn’t dead yet anyway, and with this new place revealed, we are definitely going down," Vale said. Then he added, "But how can this not be a trap?"

Manefor looked at the underground. "The question is, why didn’t that type of attack kill the monster? Isn’t that strange? Even a Greater Beast shouldn’t survive it."

Dlodus smiled. "We all have tricks we can pull to save ourselves at the last minute, so why should the monster’s own be different? Think of it along those lines."

Everyone turned to him, and he shrugged.

Suddenly, Vale’s neck prickled as if hundreds of eyes were staring at him. He narrowed his eyes. "We have to get down there. We don’t know what that monster is planning."

They heard the warning in his voice and turned to the silent statues that lined the wall. A thought surfaced in their minds: ’What if the monster is planning to trigger them awake?’

"I’ll take us down," Serdan said.

Tiber shook his head. "We have to be protected while we go down. It’s a good way to attack us."

"I can still do that," she said. She positioned herself right over the hole and stretched her hand over it with her wooden rod, now glowing bright green.

Then she threw it down like an arrow. The rod shot through the air, lighting up the room briefly in green before its glow was snuffed out, and the room below returned to darkness.

Silence followed, until Slya raised her brows. "Ahem... what are you..."

"Sheeee," Serdan said. With her hand still outstretched, she gestured as if pulling something.

Suddenly, they heard the sound of cracking and breaking, the sound of groaning as the ground shifted. Then the cracking sounds grew louder, mixed with rustling cracks.

Everyone held their breath, waiting to see what was happening. Out of the darkness, a big tree with limbs as thick as human arms grew out, growing taller and bigger as they watched, green leaves rustling as it reached them and filled the opening with branches and greenery.

"That wasn’t what I was expecting," Slya said.

The branches around the hole bent with a flexibility that no normal plant could ever have and formed into a platform for them to stand on. As soon as they stepped onto it, the branches formed around them like a cradle.

With a groan and more cracking, the tree began to sink down slowly. It was as if they were watching it in reverse—like the tree was ’ungrowing,’ returning to its normal rod state.

By the time they reached the ground, the only thing that remained of the previous tree was a rod with coiling branches retreating into it after they stepped off the platform. Serdan picked up her rod as if it hadn’t just turned into a gigantic tree.

Light bloomed around them when Dlodus made a small silver orb float, dispelling the darkness.

"What is this place?" Slya muttered.

She wasn’t the only one filled with surprise and curiosity.

It was as if a forge and an alchemist’s workshop had been fused together. On one side were mortars, workbenches, and a furnace that burned with a steady blue light.

On the other, there were flasks, crystals, liquids in glass bottles, and various dried herbs hung up on stone racks.

Everything was oversized, not something a normal human could use. Judging by the scale, Vale guessed it must have been the Yeti’s work.

They didn’t explore individually. Instead, they formed a loose circle, each watching a side as they slowly walked around, trying to trace the blue blood.

’There must be thousands of pieces of equipment here... Just what exactly is going on?’ Vale thought. ’And we haven’t even explored half of the room!’

The others were just as confused. None of them had ever seen this in a ruin before. It made them all strangely alarmed; monsters usually hunt and wait for something to enter their ruins or territories.

’But this one seems to be doing something. Even for a Greater Beast, isn’t this one too much? Could it be the uniqueness of a ruin with a Rift Seed?’

As Vale thought this, Tiber suddenly hissed and spoke in a low voice. "What’s this?"

This caught everyone’s attention, and they turned his way. He was pointing to a workbench. On it was a giant metal mold, surrounded by a furnace burning with blue light. That wasn’t strange in itself, but the unfinished product inside the mold caught their attention.

It was one of the ice warrior statues from upstairs. The Yeti was the one making the hundreds of statues!

"This... I don’t understand what’s going on," Serdan said. It wasn’t unusual for monsters to create underlings, but the scale of this operation was unbelievable.

Vale turned and surveyed the room more intently. His eyes scanned the shelves, and he spotted something—several somethings—that sent a chill down his spine.

Wooden boxes. Ordinary at first glance, but it was the stickers on them that made him stiffen. It was a box of alchemical ingredients, and written on it was: Frost Night Flower.

It was written in a language. A language! Human language.

Vale’s gaze swept over the nearby shelves he had passed earlier. Sure enough, he spotted more items like that.

Somehow, the monsters had gotten their hands on ingredients that could only be made by humans. ’Monsters and humans working together now?’

Vale opened his mouth to say something, but a flash of blue light that suddenly flashed in the room made them tense.