Suddenly, the black hole at the end of the passage expanded, emitting a powerful suction.
Dai Xiaomei and Zhou Niannian screamed and instantly flattened into paper figures under the suction.
The two paper figures swayed and drifted towards the end of the passage.
"Hey, Niannian, you've turned into a paper figure."
"Haha, so have you, Dai Xiaomei!"
"It's like in Tom and Jerry cartoons, where the cat gets flattened by a hammer and turns into a paper figure."
"Interesting, very interesting."
As they spoke, their figures vanished.
Jiang Fan and Yao naturally wouldn't let them go in alone and quickly followed.
The black hole's gravity returned, and Jiang Fan and Yao's bodies also began to distort.
They expected to turn into paper figures too, but contrary to Zhou Niannian and Dai Xiaomei, their bodies not only didn't shrink but expanded.
In an instant, they both became two large meat balls and rolled into the black hole.
Jiang Fan felt a thousand needles pricking his body, an indescribable discomfort.
His body in the black hole would expand and contract.
Suddenly, a bright light appeared, and a strange scene unfolded before Jiang Fan's eyes.
A strong force suddenly pulled him, and Jiang Fan fell from the air, fortunately not too hard.
The others also tumbled down around him, this black hole was too inconsiderate to make people descend from the sky.
Before him lay a vast expanse of earth, predominantly red with patches of charred black.
The ground was covered by a layer of completely weathered sand, primarily composed of red mudstone and conglomerate.
Numerous scorched basalt rocks stood like small mountains.
There were pits everywhere, emitting steaming hot air, like giant cauldrons.
The entire landscape appeared to be draped in a red and black veil.
The viewers in the livestream were losing their minds.
"My god, so much basalt, you only find this much basalt in Earth's oceanic crust and on the moon's volcanoes!"
"And so many volcanic craters, are you sure this is underground?"
"This is clearly a wilderness, how can there be a wilderness underground?"
"Perhaps this was the true battlefield where Chiyou and the Yanhuang Emperors fought."
On the wilderness, Jiang Fan and the others were filled with uncertainty, wondering what on earth this place was.
He turned back to look for the black hole that had teleported them, but it was long gone.
"This... have we been teleported to another planet?" Dai Xiaomei said with a mournful face.
"This place looks a bit like the moon, we should still be on Earth."
She sat on the ground, already a bit scared and hesitant to move forward.
However, before she could sit for ten seconds, Dai Xiaomei jumped up with a yelp.
"It's so hot, so hot, so hot! Is there a hot spring underground here?"
To prove her theory, Dai Xiaomei picked up a rock and vigorously dug a hole in the ground.
The hole kept emitting hot air, and as Dai Xiaomei dug intensely for a while, the heat grew stronger.
Jiang Fan suddenly pulled Dai Xiaomei's arm.
"Danger!"
Dai Xiaomei froze. Suddenly, a stream of bright red magma spurted from the ground, reaching a person's height.
"My goodness!"
Dai Xiaomei screamed. If Jiang Fan hadn't pulled her back, she would have been hit by the magma.
Jiang Fan stared at the ground, what was going on? He had heard of hot springs, but this was the first time he had seen magma erupt.
On this planet, only one thing could erupt magma: volcanoes.
This pit was clearly not on the scale of a volcano, which meant the magma was very, very close to the surface.
It was already a miracle that the ground hadn't cracked due to the magma's surge.
In the distance, Zhou Niannian walked a few steps and suddenly stopped, shouting.
"My feet, my feet!"
She had taken off her shoes earlier to hit Jiang Fan and was barefoot.
At this moment, her feet had been scorched red by the high temperature of the ground.
Yao was looking at his shoe soles; the rubber soles had already begun to melt.
"Journey to the West" describes the Flaming Mountains: "These Flaming Mountains have no summer, and are hot all year round. Even those with heads of bronze and brains of iron would be melted into juice if they tried to cross."
In Jiang Fan's view, this terrifying place was no less dangerous than the Flaming Mountains.
The viewers in the livestream were aghast at the terrifying scene.
"What kind of place is this? It feels like magma could erupt at any moment."
"This is practically like exploring the Earth's core."
"The Earth's core might even be cooler than this."
"If we don't leave soon, we'll be roasted alive."
Jiang Fan and the others also realized the immense danger lurking here.
"Let's go quickly. This might not even be the real scene."
"If we stay any longer, the ground might collapse entirely, and all the volcanoes could erupt."
The thought of the entire land erupting in volcanoes turned Zhou Niannian and Dai Xiaomei pale.
In movies, volcanic eruptions turned hundreds of miles around into ashes, and people were roasted alive.
They no longer cared about the heat and started running, keeping up with Jiang Fan's pace.
Along the way, they saw a few lizards. Even the lizards that could survive in the dry desert couldn't withstand the heat here and had been roasted into dried lizards.
The experts in the livestream room were muttering softly.
"The passage just now was truly a spatial portal, how magical."
"This is my first time seeing something like this, I always thought they only existed in cartoons."
"Speaking of which, are they still underground, or have they been teleported elsewhere?"
"The officials should have the coordinates, let them send us the coordinates."
The netizens found it both amusing and frustrating, realizing these esteemed professors hadn't grasped the situation.
They informed Professor Zhang that the officials had abandoned the livestream.
For some reason, this livestream wasn't restricted by the official platform's code and was still broadcasting.
Jiang Fan and the others were thousands or even tens of thousands of meters underground, and no one could find them.
"No, that's impossible."
The experts saw that onlookers had appeared from somewhere and were following Jiang Fan and the others.
"With these cameras, why worry about not finding the coordinates?"
At this moment, a senior netizen remarked, "I think the onlookers' technology is too advanced. These devices are probably not manufactured by the officials; they can't control them at all."
"Perhaps they found and borrowed them from somewhere in the underground world."
Hearing the netizen's words, the experts fell into despair.
Professor Zhang, still clinging to a sliver of hope, said, "They should be able to see our bullet comments, right?"
The netizen's final words utterly extinguished Professor Zhang's hope.
"No, we can't. There's no way to communicate, otherwise we would have communicated with Jiang Shen long ago."
Meanwhile, Jiang Fan was directing his team to move quickly.
They nimbly navigated through one volcanic crater after another. Zhou Niannian and Dai Xiaomei were dizzy from the heat and strongly demanded water.
Jiang Fan didn't refuse. He took out the bamboo tube he carried and suddenly froze.