Epic of Caterpillar

Things such as the beast-kin originating from Ova, a Great Goddess that is now my ally and the daughter of the Supreme Goddess of Life and Origin, or knowing about how other races came to be like Vampires, who were the descendants of Agatheina when she turned into a Vampire through a cultivation technique of sorts, and so on.

Everything was always interesting, and now that I was thrown into a new "world" which is in fact just hell itself, I found myself delving into this mysterious ruins, finding paintings in the walls depicting a long-lost history about something I had never seen before. I couldn\'t help btu feel intrigued, but gaining as much power as I have, I had lost most interest into investigating and finding out the truth behind things because "they won\'t be important anyways".

I felt like I had simply become more of a puppet to my own plot, the plot of my story as of now, the story I have been writing since I was reincarnated, but now that I think about it, this shit is indeed interesting. Even if it won\'t give me any power, I should really just go for it and investigate what the heck happened here and what\'s up with these black-haired lizard people.

When we got inside the temple ruins the first thing, I saw was more paintings, this time they were more peculiar, colorful, and interesting, they always changed and showed undecipherable letters, they were telling some kind of story, or some kind of message which I had yet to grasp.

However, through my power of deciphering, I had deciphered what it said and read it while I saw the paintings.

The first picture we found showed the people walking into a giant tree and offering them living people, which the tree\'s tentacles grabbed and devoured into a massive maw they possessed. After that, the tree grew strange fruits shaped as something like horrendous wailing faces, which the people picked up and ate, filling their bellies and also seemingly growing stronger.

"This is the tale of Ormurant, the ancient people of the dark tree of death… Armurath VI offers the young and virginal woman to the Death Tree, who happily devours it and produces the Death Fruit, where they obtain power and nourishment…" I read, as I saw the paintings change once more. Everyone around me was silent while I read, as if I was telling some sort of tale.

The next paintings, as we walked forward, showed the people eating more fruit and accumulating it in big quantities, while they threw more innocents at the giant tree, which continuously ate them, the people offered were always beautiful in some way, and the tree made more fruits, which they harvested…

"The Ormurant saw the wonderfulness of the trees and continued to feed it with beautiful people, which was the Death Tree\'s favorite. After a while, they had accumulated a lot of fruits, and were able to fight against starvation…"

The next couple of paintings showed the people accumulating more fruits and then building a civilization of sorts, they were all living around this tree.

"The people of Ormurant had come from the outside world, the desertic lands which had no food nor shelter for them, the Great Death Tree feed them and offered shelter in exchange for a delicious offering each weekend, the Ormurant didn\'t hesitated to sacrifice their own to sustain their greater population… Like this, they prospered through ages as they reproduced faster than they sacrificed people."

However, shit changed with the last couple of paintings, the people suddenly began to fall sick, showing as if they were growing dark tattoos across their bodies, their hands began to turn slimy and black like oil, and their faces disfigured. This was known as the Death Tree Curse…

"The people of Ormurant were greedy, however, they asked too much of the glorious tree and ended receiving a punishment, being cursed and slowly turning into black sludge…"

After that, another set of even creepier paintings showed up, showcasing the people now turning into strange tree-like creatures, some even began to plant themselves in the ground willingly, slowly growing an external black layer and losing all emotions in the process, they began to plant themselves as trees…

"However, the curse was more than they believed, as they had too late realized that they should had never meddled with the Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, the true identity of the Death Tree, the mother of a Thousand Young had descended into this dimensional plane into this Avatar through a Spawn, as it had revealed such truth to the last remaining citizens… the people… slowly turned into her children, being embraced by her eternal motherly love… What?!"

I was left speechless, and everyone just stopped walking around and looked at me with surprise.

What the heck was this?! It was way stranger than we thought!

However, I continued walking and seeing more paintings, it showed the people slowly turning into more trees, gigantic, grotesque, with many eyes and tentacles, until the last one painted himself doing these paintings, even he was turning into one, and later on planted himself… the entire civilization was lost due to this, due to meddling with an entity which they should had never meddled with.

"T-The… trees… they were all people?" asked Zehe.

"Yeah… all the trees we saw used to be people, the Ormurant…" I said.

And then, we saw the end of the corridor leading outside, where a massive tree greeted our sight.