Ethan finally understood.
The unknown creatures attacking them must be something that only appears at the instant where light and darkness meet.
The moment he saw those things appear, Ethan immediately took out his bow and arrow.
Whoosh!
The split arrow shot out in an instant.
It then nailed itself one after another into the hard ground, looking nothing like it had pinned down any creature at all.
But what was strange was… As Ethan's split arrows shot out, the flames on the scarecrow's belly burned brighter and brighter, instantly lighting up the entire cave.
"It didn't get attacked?"
Ethan froze for a moment.
Meanwhile, the scarecrow stared desperately at its burning lower half and shouted, ["Phu! Phu! Phu! Put out the fire! My lower half is about to burn away!!"]
"Do you even have a lower half?"
Ethan joked with a grin.
The scarecrow flew into a rage, ["Ethan, get out here and put out the fire!"]
["It's one thing for you to hide and use me as bait!"]
["My body was carefully woven by the attendant lady! You're just going to stand there and watch it burn? That's too much!"]
["You bastard…"]
Splash!
However, before the scarecrow could finish cursing.
Ethan had already taken out a bucket of bathwater from the Witch's Tail Ring and poured it straight over the scarecrow's belly.
The moment the fire went out, just as everyone thought the cave would fall into darkness again, the scarecrow noticed that Ethan now had several torches in his hand.
Those torches were bundled together.
They instantly lit up the entire cave brightly. Only then did the scarecrow realize that Ethan hadn't rushed to put out the fire because he was busy lighting torches.
At that, it suddenly felt a little embarrassed.
Luckily… it was a scarecrow. Even if it blushed, no one could tell.
If it were a paper doll, that would be different.
People would probably see it.
'Hahaha!'
["My Lord, did you find something?"]
The scarecrow quickly changed the subject.
At this moment, Ethan didn't have time to pay attention to it at all. He just held up the torches and carefully examined the cave walls around him, looking at some faint murals.
The lines of those murals were rough, like drawings made by a child with a red crayon. The strokes were random and lacked structure, but you could basically tell they were outlines of animals or humans.
Originally, Ethan hadn't noticed these murals at all.
Because the paint had severely faded, leaving only a faint reddish color. On top of that, it was very close to the color of the cave walls, making them almost impossible to spot.
The reason Ethan discovered the murals now was mainly because of the split arrows he had just shot out.
At this moment. The main arrow of the split arrow was still firmly nailed into the ground, its feathers trembling nonstop.
And the smaller arrows it had split into hadn't disappeared either. They were still flashing again and again. Clearly, the monsters underground weren't dead, so the arrows wouldn't vanish.
This was the first time Ethan had seen such a situation.
He held up the torch and walked over to the split arrows. Only then did he see that what the arrows had nailed wasn't some monster at all, but the patterns from the murals.
Yes, that's right. The patterns on the cave walls had run onto the ground and were nailed down by the split arrows.
And those murals that originally had all kinds of shapes had now turned into long, sharp spike-like forms, like a casually drawn pointed mountain peak or long sharp thorns.
The direction of those spikes was toward the scarecrow's belly.
That meant, the target of the spike attack was indeed the scarecrow.
But with the lights on, these murals once again looked just like ordinary murals, with nothing strange about them at all.
Even the prompts had disappeared.
It was as if… the strange things on the ground and the cave walls were nothing more than normal murals.
If Ethan's split arrows hadn't nailed several of those spikes tightly to the ground, he probably wouldn't have realized that the problem lay with these murals.
How was he supposed to get rid of these things?
Ethan pulled out the main split arrow, but the murals still showed no movement at all.
["My Lord, what's going on?"]
The scarecrow was extremely curious, ["Tell me, I want to know too! You've been staring at the ground and the cave walls. What exactly are you looking at?"]
"The murals. The things that attacked us just now were these murals on the ground," Ethan rubbed his forehead, "But now there's a big problem. These murals seem to only appear at the instant where light and darkness meet."
"And when the firelight is fully bright or completely dark, they won't show themselves."
"So it's hard to deal with."
["Then why don't we just ignore them?",] The scarecrow straightened up its upper half and said, ["Also, you burned off my lower half. Shouldn't you fix me?"]
"Fine!"
Ethan didn't want to carry a scarecrow around in this kind of environment.
So he had to find a way to let it hop on its own. And at certain times, the scarecrow was still a pretty good piece of bait.
Ethan wasn't going to waste talent.
So… He took out a bamboo pole from his backpack.
Then he thrust it straight into the scarecrow's half-burned straw belly.
["Oooh~ Oooh~ Oooh~"]
The scarecrow let out another ghost-like scream.
Ethan ignored it and just lifted it up, "You hop on your own! Since we can't think of a way to deal with these things for now, let's ignore them and move on to the next stage first!"
After saying that, Ethan led the scarecrow forward.
But the further they went, the more something felt off, because it actually started raining inside the cave?
"This is a cave, right?"
Ethan looked up at the cave ceiling speechlessly and found that the top of the cave seemed endless, just a dark void like another black hole.
But from that black hole, tiny droplets of water were falling.
Maybe there was a waterfall or some kind of underground river above, causing water to splash down.
But before Ethan could finish his thought.
Splash!
A sudden heavy "downpour," or rather a column of water, poured down from above.
It instantly extinguished the torches in his hand. And at the moment the fire went out, the mermaid oil lamps around them began to glow faintly again.
"What the hell is this?"
Ethan's eyes widened. He quickly took out the split arrows again.
But this time, he didn't shoot right away. Instead, he took advantage of that instant where light and darkness met and stared at the cave walls. Sure enough, he saw countless red exclamation marks. He immediately focused on one of them and looked closely.
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