This was a bit too much.
The smile on the woman’s face faded slightly after the sudden attack. In those cold eyes, a cruel killing intent seeped out.
With a cut on her abdomen, the woman was no longer laughing.
Zhou Qi’an immediately controlled his cane to strike out, creating a slight distance as he sprinted upwards.
He didn’t dare to look back the entire time.
A hair-raising scratching sound came from the ceiling. The sound grew closer. Zhou Qi’an flicked his eyes upward slightly and could already see half of the woman’s head in pursuit.
For a moment, it almost drove him mad.
“It’s so itchy.” As he ran, the itching from the wound continued to spread.
Zhou Qi’an would rather suffer the corrosion of the flesh-mound monsters. Pain was better than the itch coming from his internal organs. In the short distance he ran, he had already thought about using his dagger to stop the itch several times.
Rushing to the top of the stairs first, Zhou Qi’an finally arrived back at his location in reality.
Suddenly, a shocking cold air hit him in the face.
In the space where a sun had been hanging, there was no sun at all. Floating there was only a lump of flesh resembling a heart.
The flesh was yellowish-brown, slightly turbid and transparent, with strange patterns on its surface like cursed talismans. This piece of flesh was not plump, but had the dry feeling of firewood. It floated at a medium height, the source of all the strange black light.
The entire space was like a giant freezer, freezing this piece of flesh. A layer of frost could be felt in the air.
From the first glance, Zhou Qi’an’s steps uncontrollably moved towards it, wishing he could pluck it down and claim it as his own.
He ran in a daze, the itch in his organs at its peak, and his head in excruciating pain.
As if split into three parts, each part of Zhou Qi’an was pulling against the others.
The closer he got, the clearer he could see.
He had seen something similar… in his dreams! He had seen it more than once.
In that blood-red world, his mother and his superior were gnawing on it. But in the dream, it was only a small piece, and the patterns on it were far less intricate, as if it had been diluted somehow.
The ball of flesh emitting black light in front of him was more like a pure source of pollution.
“Put it down!”
The woman chasing from behind was half a beat slower than Zhou Qi’an. Seeing him approach the ball of flesh, the soft flesh in her throat squeezed out a sound far beyond what a human could accept.
His eardrums stung, but Zhou Qi’an persisted in approaching the ball of flesh at a speed unimaginable to ordinary people. He stumbled toward it, and finally, stood beneath the ball of flesh.
Looking up, there was a nameplate hanging on the ball of flesh, which read:
Recovered from Xianlai Lake in year X, month X.
Its shape is like flesh, resembling a wooden stake, extremely elastic. Conforms to ancient records: Rouzhi (肉芝) is shaped like flesh, attached to large rocks, with both a head and a tail, a living creature.
Identified as—
Taisui.
“Taisui.”
Zhou Qi’an held his breath, his pupils suddenly dilated. In his shock, he suddenly turned around.
Stimulated by his low murmur, the woman was pouncing with a flying leap.
In that critical moment, Zhou Qi’an actually began to unconsciously make comparisons first. Her youth that didn’t match her age, her extraordinary strength, and her hallucinogenic laughter—it wasn’t hard to deduce that Dr. Z must have eaten the Taisui flesh back then.
The woman who ate the Taisui flesh gained extraordinary power.
This series of formulaic elements could also be applied to his mother and his superior.
Thinking of the countless dreams he had, where they were gnawing on something similar, Zhou Qi’an took a deep breath. “Is it because they ate the Taisui flesh?”
He wanted to observe further.
However, this piece of flesh seemed to have a demonic quality. Whether it was him or Dr. Z, their minds would fall into varying degrees of chaos when they got close.
Dr. Z’s chaos manifested in her slowed movements; otherwise, at her previous speed, she would have already pounced on him. Zhou Qi’an, on the other hand, was trembling uncontrollably. An indescribable sense of panic was seeping from his soul. Fear also slowed his speed considerably.
For a moment, the world began to turn blood-red.
He saw his mother, fallen by a trash can, blood flowing from her body, spreading endlessly toward his feet. His mother was staring at him with eyes that would not close in death.
“No, it’s not real.”
The blood increased, soon reaching his calves, then his waist.
“Wake up.”
Zhou Qi’an bit the tip of his tongue, struggling against his own body. The only thing that kept him lucid was the itching in his internal organs.
The system’s prompt suddenly sounded, its quality utterly distorted:
[You have discovered a piece of wild Taisui flesh, brought to the Cyclamen Research Institute for study.]
[It is the ‘heart’ of the Cyclamen Hospital, the ‘sun’ that maintains all life here in defiance of natural laws, and the breeding ground for the virus that Dr. Z cannot leave.]
Zhou Qi’an became slightly more lucid. Even the university student doesn’t use parallelism as well as you do.
[Please immediately carry the Taisui flesh to the wilderness and throw it into the swamp. The Taisui flesh will be sucked to the bottom of the earth and will be very difficult to find again.]
[How can a Taisui flesh that cannot be found not be considered sealed?]
Long before the prompt began, Zhou Qi’an had already taken action.
Reaching out as if to pluck the moon, he stretched his arm, and with a light jump, touched the Taisui flesh.
An indescribable chill seeped into his bone marrow, so cold his body was about to go stiff. Yet his other hand couldn’t help but continue to embrace it.
Countless fine threads extending from the terraced fields below formed an invisible resistance in the air, constantly preventing him from taking this piece of Taisui flesh.
His whole head became drowsy.
Eat it, eat it… A voice from nowhere was bewitching him. The more Zhou Qi’an wanted to break free, the stronger the irrational thoughts became.
Eat it, and you can live forever, possess infinite power.
“Give it back…” The woman was furious, her fury reaching a peak and turning into a giggle.
The ethereal and illusory laughter brought a double pressure on his nerves.
“I can’t…” Zhou Qi’an’s head was spinning. In this state, let alone reaching the wilderness, he could barely walk out of the hospital, or down the spiral staircase!
Touching this piece of flesh, he wanted to eat it, yet felt a physiological revulsion. Zhou Qi’an instinctively dodged the black shadow in front of him, but his foot was tripped by something, and another bloody gash appeared on his body.
He struggled to see clearly and found that at the corner of the stairs, the remaining blood faces had caught up.
One of them seemed to be one that had suddenly disappeared earlier.
This meant that a player outside was already about to fail. The others probably couldn’t last much longer. Just as this thought emerged, another blood face appeared out of thin air.
The blood faces, the woman… it was impossible to break through two consecutive lines of defense. The wound on his arm was still bleeding, and the boiling itch inside him was about to drive him mad.
If he didn’t act now, the elephant seal would probably appear as well.
“Damn it.”
The Whaler’s Association’s seemingly reasonable escape routes, even with the paths given, all led to hell in practice.
The blood faces began to approach on their own initiative.
The sounds of hee-hee-hee and ge-ge-ge intertwined in the air. Zhou Qi’an was forced back a few steps.
“Don’t come any closer!” The woman did not allow any existence to approach the Taisui flesh.
However, the blood faces seemed not to hear at all. The Taisui flesh above Zhou Qi’an’s head was madly attracting them.
The next second, amidst the woman’s high-decibel shriek, a golden light suddenly enveloped the entire space.
Zhou Qi’an took out the sacred artifact but did not use it. Relying on the artifact’s own power to intimidate these monsters, he jumped again, trying to pluck the Taisui flesh.
Perhaps it was the artifact’s boost, but he could barely suppress the desire to devour it.
This time, Zhou Qi’an took down the Taisui flesh from mid-air in one go.
[You have successfully obtained the Taisui flesh]
[This is a piece of flesh rich in immense power. If you choose to consume it, you can immediately achieve complete individual evolution]
“To hell with evolution.”
Zhou Qi’an gritted his teeth.
Other players might have been tempted. It was normal for a 5.5-star instance to bestow a huge benefit. But Zhou Qi’an only felt lingering fear. The consequences of evolving by eating the Taisui flesh had been vividly demonstrated by his mother.
[Teleporting out of the dream…]
The system prompt continued:
[Congratulations, you have successfully escaped the dream]
[Please proceed to the swamp as soon as possible]
[Friendly reminder, consuming just a few bites will allow the player to achieve complete evolution]
[Friendly reminder, consuming the Taisui flesh does not affect the completion of the main mission]
Over and over again, the prompt repeated in his mind like a brainwashing mantra.
The feeling of teleportation was not pleasant.
Zhou Qi’an forced himself to endure it. Until the world before his eyes blurred, and after a dizzying spell, his body shook violently. The feeling of his soul and body separating disappeared. Beneath his feet was the extraction liquid with a strong floral scent.
Not far away was the test tube that had held the extraction liquid, rolled on the ground.
…His legs were so numb they didn’t feel like his own.
Zhou Qi’an belatedly realized he was still in the state he was in before entering the dream, sitting cross-legged on the ground, only now with a mysterious piece of Taisui flesh in his arms.
The teleportation was over. He had returned to reality.
And he had brought the Taisui flesh back to reality!
However, before Zhou Qi’an could breathe a sigh of relief, a foul stench, the complete opposite of the floral fragrance, drifted from ahead.
“Give it back—”
Zhou Qi’an looked up, his expression changing drastically.
He wasn’t the only one who had been forcibly teleported out of the dream. Dr. Z and those blood faces were here too.
Grass.
What was the difference between this and the dangerous situation in the dream?
The blood faces and the woman all rushed over. In reality, their speed was even faster.
Zhou Qi’an’s gaze inadvertently swept over the greenhouse below, then looked at the frenzied blood faces. A thought suddenly popped into his drowsy head.
“Life is a gamble.”
As he forced himself to stand up and retreat, he quickly scanned the game store and locked onto a certain item.
With almost no hesitation, the moment the purchase was successful, Zhou Qi’an forcefully threw a small-scale explosive weapon forward.
The weapon was not aimed at the woman, but at the ground.
With a loud ‘BOOM’.
The heatwave dispersed some of the yin energy. The proximity was so close it almost shattered his eardrums, and his heart contracted violently.
Thick black smoke stood between the woman and Zhou Qi’an, obscuring each other’s state. On the ground, the sturdy tempered glass instantly showed snowflake-like cracks. Zhou Qi’an staggered back a few steps before steadying himself.
The huge impact made his head hurt even more. The world before his eyes was like a blood-colored mosaic. Zhou Qi’an could only rely on his senses to take out the sacred artifact and thrust it forcefully at the spot on the ground where the cracking sound was coming from.
CRACK! With a sharp, forceful thrust, the glass at the center of the explosion point completely shattered. Zhou Qi’an fell through on the spot.
“White sash!”
The white sash whipped its master hard in mid-air, forcefully pulling Zhou Qi’an away from his original landing direction, allowing him to land successfully on the safe open space at the top of the terraced fields, instead of going down to become fertilizer for the flowers.
The fully evolved legs eliminated the shock of landing.
His mind was like paste. Relying on the last shred of his will, Zhou Qi’an staggered out of the main entrance of the greenhouse.
His vision was blurry. He could only vaguely feel a huge, malevolent shadow standing outside the door.
Zhou Qi’an gritted his teeth and blinked hard to regain some vision. When he looked up, he saw the familiar yet sinister face of the rabbit.
“Eat!” He handed over the piece of flesh in his arms.
The staff were essentially monsters too. Any existence that came near the Taisui flesh would find it hard to resist its temptation. Even the patients of the special inpatient department had previously defied Dr. Z’s will to swarm him. He didn’t believe Mr. Si could resist.
Zhou Qi’an stared intently at the rabbit-man’s abdomen.
Anyway, the main mission was to seal the heart. Sinking it into the swamp was just one form of sealing it.
There was more than one way to seal it.
Use your stomach to seal the Taisui! Mr. Si
