Fang Ming and Nannan quickly followed along the railway tracks, but soon, the path ahead forked again, this time into three diverging routes.
"Nannan, can you sense that person's spiritual fluctuations?"
"There are no lingering spiritual traces." Nannan sensed the three paths and shook her head helplessly.
"No traces?" Fang Ming frowned. How was this possible? He was just an ordinary miner; how could he evade Nannan's tracking?
With this thought, Fang Ming took out his diary. The content had already updated.
"I encountered an ordinary miner and followed him."
Another short sentence.
It seemed simple enough to find the miner's escape route. Fang Ming had a sudden inspiration. He went to one of the tracks, touched it with his hand, and then touched the other two tracks.
"We go this way," Fang Ming said, pointing to the left track.
"Fang Ming, how did you know?" Nannan asked curiously.
Fang Ming explained, "When a mining cart moves at high speed, it creates friction with the tracks. The tracks it passes over will be warmer than the others for a short period."
"The temperature of this left track is significantly higher than the other two, so the mining cart must have gone down this path."
Nannan's eyes sparkled with admiration, "Fang Ming, you're so amazing."
Fang Ming smiled, "It's nothing, just some simple physics knowledge."
"Let's go." Fang Ming patted Nannan's head, and the two entered the mine tunnel on the left.
"Clang! Clang! Clang!" A series of hammering sounds echoed from ahead.
Fang Ming soon saw the back of a miner, with a "工" (worker) mark on the back of his clothes.
The miner was squatting on the ground, repeatedly hammering the wall with a pickaxe, causing pieces of rock to crumble.
"Why isn't there anything? Why isn't there anything..." the miner muttered incessantly.
Let's go take a look.
Fang Ming and Nannan cautiously approached the miner from behind and said, "Hello, excuse me..."
Upon hearing the sound, the miner's head suddenly twisted 180 degrees. His entire face was a bloody mess as if it had been smashed by something, yet his body continued to mechanically hammer the wall.
"Holy shit!" Fang Ming was startled and instinctively took a step back.
However, he quickly regained his composure, cursing inwardly. After encountering so many powerful resentful spirits, he was actually scared by a low-level evil spirit today. It was too embarrassing.
That's right, this miner was a low-level evil spirit, likely one that had only just formed.
Without a word, Nannan sent out several strands of her hair from thin air. They instantly pierced the miner's body, and in the blink of an eye, it was drained dry into a shriveled corpse.
"This is strange. Why would such a weak evil spirit appear here?" Fang Ming squatted down to examine the spirit.
It was very ordinary, incredibly ordinary.
"Let's go."
After this harmless interlude, Fang Ming continued to lead Nannan deeper into the mine.
After they left, the drained corpse of the evil spirit slowly rehydrated. Then, it mechanically began hammering the wall again, still muttering about searching for something.
If Nannan had seen this, she would have been greatly shocked. She was absolutely certain that the miner was dead, so why had he come back to life?
The depth of the mine was unknown. Fang Ming and Nannan walked while flipping through the diary, but the diary only contained the same sentence: "I've been following the tracks of the mining cart."
There was no other content, and the diary couldn't even predict the time.
This made Fang Ming a bit helpless. This inner world was too bizarre. They should have just gotten on the mining cart and gone with the miner from the start.
Suddenly, Fang Ming thought of a way to deduce the diary's prediction time.
He went to the wall, transformed his arm into a claw, and dug a pit into the stone.
Then he opened the diary again. As expected, the content on the diary had finally changed.
"I made a mark on the wall, and five minutes later, I made another mark." Fang Ming propped his chin on his hand, looking at the diary. Only two marks were mentioned, with an interval of five minutes. This meant the diary's predicted time was between five and ten minutes, and more precise testing was needed.
Fang Ming walked for another minute and made another mark. The diary's content quickly changed again.
Finally, Fang Ming tested that the diary's predicted time was around eight minutes, from which he could deduce the power level of the resentful spirit behind this world.
A冥煞 (Ming Sha, Nether Fiend), and a top-tier one at that.
If it evolved to the second stage, it might have a chance to fight. Of course, this was under the premise that the 冥煞's abilities were very ordinary. After testing the diary's predicted time, Fang Ming accelerated his pace with Nannan, checking the diary every eight minutes to ensure there were no safety hazards within that timeframe.
At such full acceleration, soon, the sounds of clanging grew closer, and a dazzling light shone in from the cave entrance.
"We're out?"
Fang Ming's heart leaped with joy. He sped up again, leading Nannan to the cave entrance and then stopping to look out.
The end of the mine tunnel was a vast cavern. Countless mine tunnels were distributed on the cavern walls. Tracks extended from the mine tunnels and converged below the cavern, where all the mining carts stopped in the center.
Mining carts filled with ore were stopped below the cavern. Countless miners mechanically moved the ore from the carts and threw it into the furnaces placed around them.
Fierce flames erupted from the furnaces, illuminating the entire cavern.
"They're all low-level evil spirits?" Fang Ming cautiously peered down, observing the situation below.
These miners had varying degrees of missing limbs or wounds. Strictly speaking, they were all dead.
This was different from any inner world he had experienced before. In other worlds, no matter from what angle you looked at it, the beings inside were "alive." Even the villagers in Baimu Village only turned into evil spirits at night; they couldn't be evil spirits all the time. "Is it because it's always dark here and there's no sun?" Fang Ming pondered the situation. He suddenly remembered the miner he met on the cart; was he dead as well?
"Fang Ming, what do we do next?" Nannan asked.
"Let me think." Fang Ming gritted his teeth, constantly contemplating his next plan.
He didn't know if his parents were in this world, as he wasn't sure if he had found the correct world. If this wasn't the place his diary had casually written about, it would be troublesome.
However, if this was the world his parents were in, then they must be somewhere in this world. But another problem arose.
According to the miner on the cart, the mine could be exited in the beginning. So, were his parents outside or inside?
Damn it!
Fang Ming scratched his head. Everything was filled with uncertainty, and he didn't dare to make any rash moves. It was incredibly frustrating.
"Let's go down and see what's going on with these miners." In the end, Fang Ming decided to go down and investigate. Instead of making wild guesses here, it was better to try.
Fang Ming and Nannan leaped down. From their mine tunnel, the drop was at least ten meters, but it was a piece of cake for the two of them.
"Bang!" Fang Ming landed steadily, while Nannan hovered in mid-air.
Fang Ming looked at her with envy, wishing he could fly one day.
But now was not the time to worry about these things, as the miners had been attracted by the sound and were all looking this way.
On their variously shaped faces, their expressions were blank.
Suddenly, they all let out a unified roar and charged forward like zombies in a movie. The sight would surely terrify an ordinary person.
But Fang Ming and Nannan remained expressionless.
They were just a bunch of weakling evil spirits, calling them ants would be an exaggeration.
"Nannan, let me." Fang Ming stopped Nannan's movement. His body began to transform rapidly, turning into a monster with a snake's tail and a human torso, dozens of meters tall.
Fine scales covered his body, his white hair reached his waist, and two sharp horns were nearly two meters long. His hands turned into sharp claws, and crimson tattoos appeared on his body, finally converging into a strange rune on his chest.
This was the first time Fang Ming had transformed into this state after becoming a fierce evil spirit. Powerful, incredibly powerful. He even felt he had gained a special ability.
"Annihilation."
Fang Ming extended a claw towards the miners in front of him.
The tattoos on his body instantly lit up, quickly illuminating the rune on his chest.
A strange aura emanated from Fang Ming and surged forward. Any miner touched by it instantly decomposed into wisps of white mist, leaving no trace of their bones.
Even Nannan behind him felt a strange sense of fear and instinctively took two steps back.
In Fang Ming's current state, she felt a sense of unfamiliarity for the first time, as if she were facing a higher-level being. In other words, it was like an ordinary person facing a god, a gap in power!
Fang Ming, however, didn't notice any of this. He was happily admiring the effect of his ability. Although he was only facing weak evil spirits, the power it displayed was still impressive.
These miners were either stubborn or simply lacked any consciousness, only knowing to attack intruders.
Within a few minutes, thousands of miners were drawn into Fang Ming's attack range and disappeared into wisps of white mist.