Chapter 260: Wooden Cabin (11)
The trees with human faces were not limited to the one beside Everly.
As far as the eye could see, every tree in the forest that had sprouted tentacles now revealed grotesque human faces on its trunk after the goat-hoofed monster’s roar subsided.
These faces varied—male and female, old and young—but they all shared one thing in common: their eyes, when turned toward the living intruders, were filled with extreme malice. Their mouths moved continuously, chanting over and over prayers related to the cult.
Everly had sharp observational skills, and she quickly made a new discovery: every tree that bore a human face also had, at its roots, a cluster of dried-out black vines.
She had previously been puzzled as to why the vines from the altar were attaching themselves to the surrounding trees.
If the vines could draw energy from trees, then given how abundant the forest was, there would be no need for such elaborate cognitive contamination traps to capture humans. They could simply parasitize the trees directly. The fact that the cultists did not do this suggested that the energy derived from ordinary trees did not meet their requirements. But if that was the case, then what purpose did those black vines penetrating the roots of the trees serve?
Only now, as trees began to grow tentacles and human faces that defied all natural law—unleashing their malice toward the group in full—did Everly finally find the answer.
It was because the trees in this forest were not entirely “trees.” Some of them were, in essence, cultists who had been turned into trees. And since they were human, they could naturally provide the kind of energy the goat-hoofed monster required.
From this, Everly also recalled the sensation of being watched in the forest during the daytime, as well as the occasional white shadows and black hands she had glimpsed beneath the trees. The black hands resembled the tentacles in color, and the gazes she had felt… all of them had come from within the forest itself.