Chapter 23

Chapter 023

Zhou Qimeng was certain no sane person could possibly imagine the horror he’d just faced.

After parting ways with Lu Yan, he’d made his way to Longnu Lake. The setting sun cast a shimmering, golden path across the water’s surface—deceptively beautiful, deceptively peaceful.

People spoke of living off the water, but the villagers of Longnu were different. Scanning the horizon, he couldn’t see a single fishing boat.

Not a problem for him. He felled a tree, hollowed it out. The crude log’s buoyancy would be enough.

He tied a line to a contamination detector and tossed it over the side with a plunk.

The numbers crackled through his earpiece.

"Contamination level 70… 500… 1800… 4900…"

In under a minute, the readings skyrocketed to a figure that stole the breath from his lungs.

Panic, cold and sharp. This is bad. When the detector hit 6300, he abandoned all thought of further exploration. He let the line go, grabbed his roughly carved paddle, and pushed off from the eerie stillness.

He knew the basics of rowing. The lake had no hidden currents, no reefs. The shore was only a few dozen meters away. It should have been simple.

His first stroke met resistance—a thick, tangled mass, like waterweed. He couldn’t move.

Looking down, he saw the water beneath his log had darkened, grown deeper in hue than the surrounding lake.

Not the water. Something beneath it.

The log flipped.

A clump of inky-black hair had wrapped around the stern and heaved.

Icy lake water—reeking of rust and old blood—flooded his mouth and nose. He was a strong swimmer, fit enough to make the shore even now. But that same hair coiled around his ankle, an unyielding anchor dragging him down into the depths.

The world beneath the surface was a nightmare carnival.

He saw them then. Infants with needle-sharp fangs and coiling serpent tails. All girls. Some larger, some smaller. Their eyes were vacant, pupils swallowed by milky-white film. They swarmed around him like piranhas, giggling with a sound that was all wrong for this place, a chorus of tiny, hungry mouths.

Above their heads, a tag flickered: Longnu. Classification: Aberration. Contamination: 300.

And behind them, a woman. A serpent-tailed giantess, her form so vast its end vanished into the murk. A ridge of sharp spines ran down her back. More of the infant-serpents clung there, a grotesque parody of a mother and her children. Her eyes were the same chilling, pupil-less white.

Longnu - Perfect Evolution. Contamination: ???

These were not deities. Not spirits. They were women. Come to collect a debt.

Zhou Qimeng didn’t hesitate. The knife at his belt flashed, severing the hair around his ankle. He kicked for the surface with every ounce of strength he possessed.

But how does a man outswim what lives in the water?

Soon, small, burning punctures dotted his skin—the bites of the little Longnu. His blood seeped into the lake, a signal flare for the frenzy.

He fled. They pursued. In this element, he stood no chance.

The giant Longnu moved with languid, terrifying grace. A cat toying with a mouse.

He knew the stories. Fear-seasoned flesh was a delicacy to their kind.

Stay calm. A useless command. His heart hammered against his ribs, adrenaline screaming through his veins, demanding flight where there was none.

Despair, thick and cold as the water. His strength was halved here. Beating her was impossible.

Her grotesquely long, taloned hand reached for his head.

But perhaps the prolonged exposure was enough. A shimmering question mark materialized above the giantess’s head in his vision.

His talent was available.

A last, desperate gamble. With no time to think, he poured his will into a single, absurd line of text: "Zhou Qimeng is my father."

The reaching hand froze mid-air.

A shriek of pure, undiluted hatred erupted from the swarm of little Longnu. They turned on him as one, a silver-fanged tide.

He swam. Faster than he ever had in his life. Fabric tore. Tiny mouths ripped strips of flesh from his limbs. Blooms of crimson exploded around him.

He half-swam, half-crawled onto the muddy bank. One persistent infant launched itself from the water, a silvery arc. He met it with a savage kick, sending it tumbling back into the bloody froth.

---

Zhou Qimeng huddled under a blanket, shivering from cold, shock, and pain. He leaned miserably against Lu Yan in the RV, recounting his ordeal.

The detective, white-knuckling the steering wheel, fought a craving for a cigarette. "We have to report this to the Center. That original poster… something was off about them, too. Needs looking into."

Lu Yan’s phone vibrated. A text from Chen Shisi.

"Our boss overused his ability. Side effect is… mental regression. Please bear with him. My apologies."

The Center’s internal manuals mentioned it. Many Awakened suffered side effects after pushing their limits—physical, mental, or both. Lu Yan, having never strained his own, didn’t know his price yet.

[You needn't worry. Unless you ask questions far beyond your current level, side effects are irrelevant for you.]

[Across the globe, you are the only one who uses their gift as casually as breathing.]

[Oh, and for what it's worth… as strange as it sounds, Chen Shisi isn't lying to you.]

Zhou Qimeng nuzzled Lu Yan’s side, voice trembling. "Doctor Lu… that woman was terrifying. Her claws… so long, so thick, so hard…"

Lu Yan patted his head, expression neutral. "It's over. You're safe."

They’d arrived in daylight. Less than six hours later, they were leaving.

But the mountain forest at night was different. A thick, soupy fog had risen, visibility dropping to mere meters.

The detective drove cautiously, the RV crawling along the serpentine road that seemed to have no end.

Lu Yan frowned, remembering Old Wang’s story. The one about the sick man whose car circled for three days only to return to the lake.

Four hours passed. Sweat beaded on the detective’s forehead.

"This isn't right. The trip in wasn't this long. Even driving slow at night… it shouldn't take four hours!"

Zhou Qimeng had been coaxed to sleep. The remaining three felt a growing, inexplicable agitation. Chen Shisi’s mood had turned foul; he’d just smashed a Switch console after failing a game level.

"Stop the car," Lu Yan said, his voice calm, cutting through the tension. "We wait for daylight. No one goes outside tonight."

"Alright… Wait, is that the exit up ahead?" The detective’s voice lifted with hope. He pressed the accelerator.

Lu Yan glanced at the clock on the table. The hour hand clicked precisely to twelve.

The RV emerged from the winding mountain road onto a flat stretch, the trees thinning on either side.

Lu Yan’s expression hardened. "Stop! Now!"

Before them lay a vast lake.

Gone was the daytime calm. The water churned like a boiling cauldron, bubbles breaking the surface with violent pops.

A powerful floodlight stood on the shore, casting a harsh, white circle.

Within that circle, a group of men knelt by the water’s edge. They formed a ring, their bodies bowed repeatedly toward the seething lake. All of them, regardless of age—from twenty to seventy—were grotesquely, impossibly pregnant.

Their eyes were empty. In the stark light, the skin of their distended bellies appeared semi-transparent, revealing the twisted, shadowy forms of male fetuses within.

Their movements were clumsy, hampered by their immense burdens, yet their foreheads touched the earth with a terrible, practiced piety.

From the water came the sound of girls giggling. In the dead of night, it was a sound to freeze the soul.

Chen Shisi sucked in a sharp breath. "What… what are they?"

They were men. But not quite men anymore. They needed no food, no water, yet they could not die—not unless offered to the lake. They would persist, like the lake itself.

Lu Yan counted over seventy of them.

After the final kowtow, the oldest man—the village chief—shakily rose to his feet. His voice, cracked and reedy, pierced the night. "We beseech the Longnu to choose her offering!"

Every other kneeling man flinched, faces etched with pure terror.

The four in the RV held their breath.

From the crowd, a middle-aged man suddenly screamed. He clutched his belly, writhing on the ground in agony. From within, tiny, sharp nails scored the taut skin from the inside. The flesh parted. A male infant, slick with translucent, yellowish amniotic fluid, forced its way out.

It lay in the grass beside its… father?… for only a moment before its tiny chest stilled. Its entire existence seemed only to have been for this moment of inflicted pain.

The ritual did not stop.

The other pregnant men lifted their now-unconscious comrade and hurled him into the boiling lake.

A scream was cut short. A frenzy of small, silvery forms converged. The water churned violently, then bloomed into a spreading, pale pink cloud.

The furious, bubbling surface of Longnu Lake gradually stilled.

The village chief’s voice trembled as he spoke. "It is done. This month's offering has been made. Go home."

Chen Shisi’s fists clenched. "That pollutant is a real piece of work."

Lu Yan was silent for a long moment. Then, weaving together what the system had revealed with his own deductions, he explained the grim background of this place. Careful not to reveal his source, he simply said he’d pieced it together from clues on the way back.

Chen Shisi’s knuckles whitened again. "Fuck. They got exactly what they deserved."

One of the villagers switched off the powerful floodlight overhead.

The pregnant men, their faces ashen and numb, began shuffling back toward the village like a procession of zombies.

Throughout it all, the RV remained hidden in the small grove of trees, not advancing an inch.

The detective tried to reverse, his movements cautious, but the engine only coughed and died. It had been drenched, soaked through by the pervasive damp.

The air itself seemed heavier, wetter, clinging to the skin.

The system’s voice dropped to a whisper in his mind. [… She’s coming ashore. The Longnu. She’s known you were here all along.]

From within the blanket of white fog came the sound of water—a heavy, cascading rush, as if something massive was rising from the depths.

Lu Yan shook Zhou Qimeng awake. The man had been sleeping on his lap, drooling slightly. Lu Yan’s patience had run out.

Bleary-eyed, Zhou Qimeng mumbled, "Are we there?"

The detective was pale, his hands and feet ice-cold. He cracked the driver’s door open, his voice a hushed, urgent hiss. "We run. Different directions."

Lu Yan looked at Zhou Qimeng. "Your talent. Can you use it? Even if you can’t, force it. Give all four of us a new… attribute."

Zhou Qimeng sat up, rubbing his eyes. "What attribute?"

Lu Yan’s answer was utterly serious, his gaze unwavering. "Female."