Chapter 128

Chapter 128

The crimson descended, and the streets grew noisy with voices.

It seemed the "Meat Banquet" intended to live up to its name, dragging an exceptionally large number of people into this inner world this time.

More terrifying was the fact that most hadn't yet realized what was happening.

In the southern district, a young woman was soaking in her bathtub when a stream of murky red liquid began bubbling up from the drain.

Her face paled. Thinking it was just backed-up sewer water, she climbed out in disgust and wrapped herself in a towel.

She grabbed her hairdryer, but a notification flashing on her phone screen caught her eye.

A message from her brother.

—Ting! You asleep?!

—Find a place to hide!! Now!!

—Signal's crap. Wait for me!! [12:03]

Her phone read 12:10.

Fang Ting’s brow furrowed.

She’d been attending university in another district, but the severity of the Pollution Disease overseas had forced her to return home early.

Her family had moved to G City, next to X City, years ago. They’d kept the old apartment here in X City because the market was terrible.

She’d come back for a coveted internship at the provincial TV station. Her family had objected, but Fang Ting hadn’t wanted to pass up the opportunity. X City was the capital, after all.

She turned on the faucet to wash her face. A gush of bright red liquid instantly surged out, making her slam the tap shut.

The liquid was slightly viscous. Both its smell and appearance were unmistakably… blood.

A knot of panic tightened in her chest. She tried calling her brother, but her phone showed no signal.

Fang Ting took a deep breath and scanned her messages. Her brother’s were the only ones sent after midnight.

He worked for the Special Operations Department, usually stationed in G City.

The bathroom light flickered suddenly, accompanied by a damp, rotting stench—like dead fish left to fester.

Heart hammering, Fang Ting threw on a robe, rushed into her bedroom, locked the door, and huddled in a corner under the blankets.

But the foul odor clung to the air. From the street below, screams began to rise.

Gathering her courage, she peered through the window.

On the street, monstrous figures of various shapes, each shrouded in a dark aura, chased down fleeing people with frenzied excitement. Those caught had their heads smashed open by a single fist, spilling blood and matter like overripe melons split on the pavement.

The butchers wrenched the heads from their "pigs," produced straws from their persons, plunged them into the skulls, and happily slurped up the contents.

Bathed in the light of the red moon, the scene was a surreal, waking nightmare.

Fang Ting clapped a hand over her mouth, retching dryly.

Was she going mad, or had the world itself fallen sick?

Too scared to turn on a light, she trembled in the corner, dialing her brother’s number over and over.

Her movements froze.

From under the bed, a shadowy figure with a serpent’s tail slid silently into view.

It flicked a long, forked tongue, hissing, a compact hatchet gripped in its hand.

This was the high-level pollutant that had taken up residence in Fang Ting’s home, its true form a sea snake.

Now, it was time to hunt.

Though the dark aura obscured the butcher’s face, the overwhelming scent of blood rolling off it filled Fang Ting with primal terror.

"Gege—Brother! Help!"

Her phone clattered to the floor. In a blind panic, she scrambled for the door, but the shadow behind her drew closer, its hiss filling the room.

The butcher loomed before her. Moonlight from the window cast its long, thin shadow across the floor. It grinned, raising its hatchet high for the kill.

Lu Yan’s arrow left the string at that exact moment.

The white-fletched shaft trailed a shower of beautiful, silvery sparks, like a fragment of the Milky Way.

The arrowhead plunged straight into the butcher’s forehead, piercing clean through its skull.

Dark blood gushed forth. The hatchet fell from its grip, cracking the floorboards.

Fang Ting stared, hand still pressed to her mouth, as the monster crumpled at her feet.

The serpent-tailed butcher’s face still wore a rictus of excitement, eyes wide and unblinking, but its breath was gone forever.

A moment later, Lu Yan climbed in through the window.

Fang Ting lived on the 11th floor. He’d scaled the wall by driving his sharp claws into the concrete, creating his own handholds.

He wrenched the arrow free from the butcher’s skull and returned it to his quiver. Then, with practiced efficiency, he slit open the serpent tail, extracted the gall bladder, and stored it in a portable medical case.

Parts of certain pollutants had potent medicinal properties. It was wasteful to leave them.

Fang Ting looked up, her face spattered with the butcher’s blood, expression dazed.

From her perspective, Lu Yan was a figure entirely shrouded in a black cloak. Like the butchers, he emitted that same dark aura, his face obscured, revealing only a glimpse of a scaled chin. Strangest of all, a small black doll hung from his pocket.

Lu Yan handed her the fallen hatchet without a word.

He could sense a white dot moving toward this location.

According to the inner world’s rules, butchers could sense the positions of the Awakened.

Whoever was coming, Lu Yan had no desire to meet them now. His current "dark aura" appearance would be difficult to explain, and a fight would be more trouble than it was worth.

He slipped back out the window, his form a ghostly blur as he sped toward the next target on his list.

Only one high-level butcher down. Many more to go.

---

Bai Qiushi chewed his gum—vanilla-flavored sedative. He liked it.

A few minutes ago, he’d been asleep in his quarters at the Prevention Center headquarters.

Then, the very atmosphere around him shifted.

He opened his eyes to find himself lying on a patch of grass, a blood-red moon hanging overhead. Under its hellish glow, the entire sky was stained a hazy crimson.

With decades on the job, Bai Qiushi had seen his share of strange sights.

But being forcibly dragged into another dimension was a first.

His codename was Cold Cicada. True to the name, he possessed a pair of semi-transparent, cicada-like wings.

Now, those wings gave a faint tremble, lifting him into the air.

He looked down. Dozens of pollutants, wreathed in dark aura and indistinct, were converging on his position.

His own skin emitted a faint, white luminescence, making him stand out in the darkness like a streetlamp.

The slaughterhouse spanned hundreds of kilometers, yet there were only a dozen or so Awakened inside.

At least, within the range of Bai Qiushi’s sight, he was the only one glowing white.

"Tch. What a pain."

In his hand was an elegant, slender dagger—a weapon forged for him by headquarters, named Cicada Wing.

Thin as a cicada’s wing, lethal with a single cut.

He rarely used it. Cleanup was always so messy.

But the situation was urgent. Bai Qiushi couldn’t afford to be picky.

This mission included Awakened of the healing and support varieties—not strong fighters, lacking self-preservation skills. If they died here, headquarters would lose its mind.

Bai Qiushi raised a hand. From the flat ground, an earthen wall erupted, enclosing the pollutants within a several-kilometer radius as if penning sheep.

A variant of his spatial talent: [Talent 89 - Rampart].

The slender dagger in his hand unfolded like a lotus flower, its blade separating into countless needle-like points—the stingers of the pollutant Frenzied Hornet. Collecting them had once left Bai Qiushi covered in bloody welts.

His liaison officer had complained many times that announcing move names mid-fight was incredibly cringey. Most pollutants couldn’t understand anyway.

But the corner of Bai Qiushi’s mouth lifted as he slowly enunciated four words: "Tor – rent – of – Blos – soms."

The lotus-petal blades shot out, scattering into a cloud of steel needles mid-air.

The needles pierced through the pollutants’ bodies like bullets, blooming into misty sprays of blood.

But not all were penetrated.

Higher-level pollutants were merely scored with bloody gashes. They let out stifled roars, struggling to leap up and pounce on the small figure of Bai Qiushi—he hadn’t had time to wear his platform shoes for this mission, leaving him looking rather petite.

Bai Qiushi raised his other hand. Instantly, the loose stones and debris on the ground trembled and rose into the air.

His palm flipped over and slammed downward, the words forced through gritted teeth: "Un – mov – ing – as – a – Moun – tain."

[Talent 392 - Crushing Weight].

Many low-level butchers were instantly pulverized into paste, their internal organs squeezed from their mouths like pressed sheets.

The high-level butchers felt an entire mountain slam onto their backs. They strained under the colossal weight, movements crippled.

But Bai Qiushi was already upon them, wings humming, Cicada Wing dagger flashing like a gust of wind. The blade slit their throats with effortless grace.

Soon, the area fell silent, devoid of pollutant roars.

Unleashing his talents at full power felt exhilarating, but the backlash was brutal.

A third eyeball began to swim faintly into view within Bai Qiushi’s eye socket.

A cicada has five eyes: two large compound eyes, each containing three smaller simple eyes arranged in a triangle.

Headquarters could predict the progression of Bai Qiushi’s illness by the number of eyes that appeared.

Two pairs were standard. A third pair was a critical warning.

He pulled two vials of specialized medicine from his pocket and downed them both in one go.

Clutching the side of his face, he gritted his teeth against the throbbing, painful swelling in his eye socket. Finally, in silence, he fanned his translucent wings and took to the air, scanning the crimson-drenched streets for signs of his team.

This slaughterhouse held more than just common butchers. It held S-Class pollutants like Lu Zhi… and Subject 01.

None of them stood a chance alone against those. Not without Tang Xian'an.

---

Odin walked the empty street, the scrape of his boots the only sound. He knew they were watching. Dozens of eyes, hidden in the gloom, tracking his every move.

His grip tightened on the long spear in his hand—Frost. In a pinch, it could serve as a crutch.

The raven perched on his shoulder let out a harsh "caw" and took flight, circling overhead.

"Go," Odin murmured, his voice a dry rasp.

[Talent 119 - Plague]

The birds were his messengers, carriers of a virulent decay. Against biological pollutants, they often yielded… unexpected results.

No butcher in this slaughterhouse was qualified to treat swine fever.

Each raven was a piece of his own flesh. Beneath his heavy plate armor, nearly forty percent of his body was simply… gone. A jagged fissure split his chest, wide enough to see the dark, pulsating muscle of his heart within.

One by one, more ravens burst from that terrible wound, a flurry of black wings and dried, leathery flesh taking to the bloody sky.

When the last one had flown, Odin fastened his armor again. The metal hung loosely on his gaunt frame. Without its weight, the next stiff breeze might have carried him away.

---

Subject 01 watched the black raven descend.

It dove toward him, eyes like burning coals.

He raised a hand and caught it mid-air. His fingers closed. The bird burst, not into blood and viscera, but into a crumpled sack of desiccated skin.

A dark, bruise-like stain immediately bloomed on his palm, tendrils of necrosis snaking rapidly up his forearm.

01’s lips curled in a cold sneer.

Without hesitation, he brought his blade down, severing the infected arm at the shoulder.

[Talent 29 - Phoenix]

From the clean, smooth stump, thick red tendrils of new flesh squirmed forth, pushing out like meat from a grinder. They writhed and wove together, knitting bone, muscle, and sinew into the shape of an arm. New skin flowed over it, pale and slightly mismatched, but just as powerful as the original.

With the Phoenix, death was a distant concept.

The severed limb on the ground, meanwhile, blackened rapidly before dissolving into a pool of foul-smelling sludge.

"Humans have the power to wound us," 01 remarked calmly to the figure beside him. "But that is all. They fear the Disease. They hold back. They fail to understand that the Awakened are merely a transitional phase. We… the pollutants… are evolution’s final form." He turned. "Come. It is time to gather the others. Numbers 3, 5, 6… or perhaps, 10."

07 stared down at the scorched earth at his feet, offering no reaction he could control. The purgatorial flames that were his curse licked uncontrollably from his form, scorching the very air around him.

01 didn’t seem to mind. He reached out and clapped a hand on 07’s shoulder. The flesh of his palm sizzled and melted away, revealing glistening tendon beneath.

Gu Zheng’s smile never wavered. "We mustn’t be late. I would hate for any of our family to be injured by the butchers here." His voice was a gentle, poisonous thing. "Isn’t that right, Number 7?"

07’s answer was a slow, hollow rasp. "Yes."