The scorched wheel whipped past Lu Feng's cheek with a roar, kicking up a blast of wild wind.
In a flash, the roaring truck slammed head-on over that stunned face, lifting her mutated body along with it, and drove hard toward the opposite wall in a savage crash!
A terrifying shockwave like an earthquake rippled through the underground garage, shaking loose a shower of dust. Yet this was far from over. The truck, half its front end embedded into the concrete, jerked violently in reverse, dragging that mangled pulp of flesh and blood back with it.
Zhu Hong dropped to the ground, trying to push herself up, but headlights illuminated her shattered face once more.
The truck peeled out in a burnout drift, its massive frame pivoting with the agility of a cat as the cargo bed slammed heavy against the wall. Directly facing her now were two rows of massive tires, casting monstrous shadows over her form.
The wheels spun, surged, and crushed down.
A sickening, hair-raising crunch sounded in relentless succession, quickly drowned out by the shriek of rubber grinding against non-slip floor coating. It sounded like a woodchipper running at full throttle.
Gore splattered outward between the churning wheels, along with shards of bone and shreds of viscera.
Replaying in full everything they had done to the dead back in that basement!
Inch by inch, piece by piece, thoroughly dismembering the man-eating monstrosity!
Until the shredded tire tore completely away from the axle.
The blazing headlights slowly dimmed and died.
The upbeat hymn came to a close.
[Reserve spiritus depleted—protocol ended—duration: 4 seconds.]
Drowning in grogginess, Ji Jue gasped for breath, on the verge of being swallowed by the dark.
He had already been at his limit at the one-second mark. Little did he expect that just as his spiritus was about to run dry, the watch chimed again, alerting him that active aberrant spiritus remained inside the dead serpent's mangled remains on the ground.
He was practically moved to tears.
Drained once, and it could still be tapped for this long... What brand of power bank was this?
How could the build quality be so damn good?
Yet amidst the dead silence, beneath the crushed front of the truck, a groan arose, accompanied by the sharp screech of tearing metal... Under the shattered brake pads and wheel hubs, from within that mangled lump of flesh, a twisted, splintered limb slowly rose.
Beneath the remnants of hair, that pulverized face bore no trace of its former coquettish charm. All that remained was a sickening fury and ferocity.
It took Ji Jue's breath away completely.
She was... still alive!
"So sweet... so sweet... I can't take it... Your scent, it's so sweet, so sweet—"
Things resembling eyeballs shuddered, glaring fixedly toward Ji Jue. Tendrils wriggled out of her entrails, screaming and screeching hysterically.
Lips reduced to fragments of bone opened and closed, letting out shrill, manic laughter. "Haha, ha, hahaha, hahahaha! You're both fucking going to—"
A spine-chilling regeneration began once more. Or rather than a recovery, it was more like a haphazard stitching and gluing together. Amidst eerie sounds mingling weeping and laughter, Zhu Hong's multiple arms squirmed, tearing through steel as she crawled out bit by bit...
Only a crisp sound came clinking forward.
From Lu Feng's hand.
The round object, its pin pulled, bounced deftly across the ground, tumbled playfully along, and finally landed right on her face, proudly showing off its pineapple-patterned grid.
Freezing her frenzied, hideous expression in an instant.
And thus, it offered up the final firework.
Fire and explosion swallowed everything.
After the deafening blast, the wrecked front of the truck was engulfed in flames. Amidst the incinerated flesh, not a sound remained.
Lu Feng kept his pistol raised warily, aiming toward that spot.
Until, after a long silence, no other sound emerged from within.
"Dead?"
He gave Ji Jue a suspicious look. Ji Jue squirmed and dragged himself up from the ground, propping himself against the wall while using the watch to siphon some aberrant spiritus from the two monstrosities to replenish his reserves. Only then did he creep forward with utmost caution until the watch finally chimed: Active external aberrant spiritus detected. Absorb?
He finally breathed a sigh of relief, soaked in cold sweat.
Dead.
Dead as a doornail.
If she wasn't dead, they would have been. Ji Jue was completely out of tricks; had she possessed even a breath left to move, he would have had no choice but to bare his neck and offer her an all-you-can-eat buffet.
A pity he'd never get to see such upgraded headlights again at no extra charge.
"Wait!"
At the thought, Ji Jue's expression suddenly turned grave. "If word of this gets out, will people say our repair shop murders clients for their money?"
Lu Feng sorely wished he could kick this bastard to death. "Just fucking move! If someone comes and sees this scene, we're both utterly screwed."
Supporting each other, the two limped toward the exit, though Ji Jue's chuckling gave Lu Feng the creeps.
"Stop laughing, Brother Feng," Ji Jue couldn't help sighing. "You're laughing so much my legs are shaking."
Lu Feng glared in irritation. "Wasn't that you laughing?"
"I..."
Ji Jue started to retort, but when they looked at each other, they realized neither had the slightest trace of a smile on their face—only a growing, drained pallor.
Beneath the flickering lights, through the blood-drenched garage littered with corpses, a chilly draft swept past, carrying a raspy laughter that made their skin crawl.
Steeped in admiration and appreciation.
As if having just watched an animal show, offering respect and applause to the playthings inside the cage.
Drip.
In the pool of blood, invisible raindrops seemed to fall, stirring up ripples. An unseen rain veiled everything, until finally, everywhere the eye could see across the crimson puddle swelled with eerie waves rising one after another.
Within the ripples, an eye slowly opened. Then a second, a third, a fourth.
Countless eyes opened from the pool of blood, gazing upon the final survivors of the struggle with curiosity and delight—as though examining brand-new toys.
The two froze in their tracks.
Lu Feng swallowed hard. "Little Ji..."
"Yeah?"
"That move from before... could you do it... one more time..."
"Gone. All gone."
Ji Jue's face twitched. "Even if I found something to commit suicide with again, the truck is gone!"
The only truck had already been totaled by him. Even if he activated the survival protocol, what could he do? Snap his fingers and conjure an Autobot from Cybertron?
At this moment, pop-ups blanketed his vision once more.
[Active external aberrant spiritus detected. Signs of corruption emerging.]
[Warning: External aberrant spiritus activity index rising; contamination threshold reached.]
[Warning: Contamination source approaching rapidly. Corruption contamination defense initiating... Initiation failed. Error. Error. Error—]
[Error.]
Ji Jue was about to burst a blood vessel. He desperately wanted to pull out that meme of a husky pointing a paw and demand of this lousy watch: Aside from reporting errors, what else can you fucking do?!
Completely forgetting who had just relied on Watch Bro's spiritus siphoning and emergency survival protocol to cling to life until now.
Alas, calling it Watch Bro or Watch Grandpa wouldn't do any good now.
Amidst the raspy laughter, a hunched silhouette slowly rose from the pool of blood.
Emaciated and short, it looked practically like a dried corpse of skin and bones. Yet when those pitch-black eyes swept over them, a chill struck straight to their souls.
Thus, the blurred silhouette strolled through the blood, bent down, and picked up the remaining head from Zhu Hong's remnants. Examining the expression frozen in her final moment, a finger slowly trailed across the cracks dripping with ferocity and despair.
Only a soft chuckle:
"As a 'Womb,' your aptitude was barely passable at best. Though given time, through that greed and viciousness, it might not have been impossible to bear some poisonous, evil fruit.
"A pity that, at most, this was your limit.
"I had given up hope, yet never did I expect an unexpected pleasant surprise today—"
Those pitch-black eyes turned toward the two intruders tip-toeing backward. Looking at Ji Jue, what seemed like a smile curved on that blurred face, brimming with joy and appreciation:
"Truly a fine, exquisite gem."
A thirsty, covetous gaze verging on drooling.
Just being looked at by those eyes made Ji Jue start shivering uncontrollably.
Fuck, a pervert!
Every other villain who entered the stage threw their head back laughing hahaha, then casually crushed whatever opponents dared kill their lackeys. But this guy? He looked at an attractive young boy like Ji Jue and started beaming with flushed cheeks and racing pulses, utterly obsessed...
It was downright fucking terrifying!
At that moment, the churning pool of blood surged upward, weaving into an eerie nine-fingered giant hand that swept violently toward Ji Jue and Lu Feng, turning Ji Jue's face stark white:
"Bro, I don't sell my ass! You've got the wrong guy!"
The bloody hand froze.
On that corpse-like face, the smile seemed to stiffen for a split second, making Ji Jue all the more convinced and enlightened: Fuck, you really ARE after my ass!
'Unfortunately,' that wasn't it—
He hadn't even paid attention to what Ji Jue was babbling.
Amidst the blinking of countless eyes, what they looked at was beneath Ji Jue's feet, where a glimmer of crystalline light was slowly emerging within the spreading pool of blood... growing like a sprouting seed.
A translucent crystal flower bloomed out from the concrete and stone.
Like a nail, it drove into the pool of blood, keeping it from advancing even an inch further.
For a moment, time itself seemed to freeze.
Everything locked up in this sudden turn of events.
Echoing through the air was only a distant, drawn-out sigh.
"Finally... caught you!"
Aboveground, in front of the noisy, chaotic nightclub, the figure leaning against a motorcycle smoking let out a soft sigh, flicked away the cigarette ash, and turned, long hair fluttering in the wind.
Flashing neon lit up her cheeks and the cruel smile playing at the corners of her lips.
She raised a hand, across the long distance and barriers of multiple concrete floors, vaguely encompassing the hunched silhouette down in the blood, and then—clenched her fingers tight!
BOOM!!!
The earth shook, and the building groaned with a deafening rumble. Inside the stifling, foul garage, countless blade-sharp crystals sprouted out of thin air, branching out, converging into towering trees that shot upward and drove downward.
Impaling!
Effortlessly tearing through physical barriers and the crimson retaliation, it crushed the innumerable giant eyes along with the pool of blood into powder. Then, the thunderous cracking of collapsing floors resounded in continuous succession as that tall, slender silhouette plummeted straight down.
In an instant, she plunged into the bottommost level of the garage.
Through the flickering dim light and swirling dust, a none-too-gentle smiling face emerged, gazing down at the dried corpse in the blood: "These days, pieces of shit from the Dragon Cult like you still dare show your heads in Yacheng?"
"Transcendent Rank—"
At this moment, the mockery and excitement vanished completely from the dried corpse's blurred face, replaced by pure vigilance as if facing a mortal foe.
The sprawling garage was now flooded with surging crimson and countless magnificent crystal trees, brilliant crystal light and scarlet gore colliding and tearing at each other in a death match.
The gale kicked up alone was enough to blow Ji Jue and Lu Feng away as they ducked to save their skins.
Amidst the howling wind and flying debris, the terrified pair lay flat on the ground. Exchanging a glance, their eyes turned in unison toward... the exit.
Lu Feng crawled forward on his belly, while Ji Jue squirmed and wriggled along behind him.
Though they had no idea what was happening, if they didn't run now, what were they going to do—stand there clapping and wait for two monsters fighting to casually crush them like bugs?
Yet there was none of the expected epic showdown spanning three hundred rounds.
Rather, it was over almost as soon as it began.
The instant the boundless crimson erupted, the dried corpse abruptly dissolved and vanished without a trace—fucking running faster than Ji Jue and Lu Feng!
Not an ounce of dignity or poise befitting an expert.
Pathetic!
Muttering curses in his head, Ji Jue stopped squirming. The two brothers stared at the black leather boots standing before them, slowly raised their heads, and were met with Wen Wen's face.
Tilting her head, she lit another White Star, blew out a wisp of smoke, and asked with a half-smile, "Yo, where might the two of you be heading?"
Truly unexpected.
Facing the spreading threat of Bloodthirst Syndrome, the Security Bureau monitored police dispatch reports across all districts, ready to inspect and deploy at a moment's notice whenever unusual circumstances or cases arose.
After Tong Hua pinpointed the attackers' whereabouts, Wen Wen had rushed over thinking she was already too late and might end up making a wasted trip.
Who could have guessed she would witness such a spectacle?
All one could say was that the world was full of wonders.
Facing such a "warm, peaceful" smile, Lu Feng's expression twitched. With his other hand, he quietly took the soft, black gelatinous lump he had just pulled from his pack and shoved it back inside, pushing it even deeper.
Unfortunately, Lu Feng was terrible with words, so he could only nudge Ji Jue beside him, prodding him to quickly crack a joke or two to cut the awkward tension.
After stammering for half a day, Ji Jue managed to force a polite, professional smile. "Big Sister, when did you arrive?"
"Hmm, let me think."
Wen Wen rubbed her chin as if pondering, but soon burst out laughing. "Right around when you said you bust your ass being an overachiever your whole life, not to end up turning into something like that..."
"Don't, please don't! I'm begging you!"
Ji Jue felt his whole body tense up. Even though those exact bullshit words had come out of his own mouth just now, his toes curled so hard in secondhand embarrassment he felt like this shitty garage owed him a three-bedroom apartment.
"Thank you, Big Sister, for saving us from misery!"
He coughed repeatedly and finally scrambled up from the ground, cupping his fists. "Rest assured, neither of us brothers will ever breathe a word about what happened today to cause you any trouble. As the mountains don't turn but rivers do, our paths will surely cross again. Some other day—"
Before he could finish, he grabbed Lu Feng and prepared to bolt.
Regrettably, he failed to make a getaway once more.
A badge was flipped open before his eyes.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Wen Wen, Director of the Operations Division for Beishan at the Yacheng Security Bureau. To put it simply, I'm the beat cop in charge of Beishan District."
With that, she clamped a hand down on each of their shoulders and offered a 'warm' invitation:
"Why don't we find a place to chat?"
* * *
Half an hour later, the motorcycle and Ji Jue's little moped were dumped by the curb.
The Yacheng night market was a lively, bustling outdoor food stall, packed with people coming and going.
Thud!
A pitcher of draft beer and a towering mound of Dongcheng skewers slammed down in front of them.
"Come on, bottoms up—"
Wen Wen was the first to raise her beer mug, throwing her head back and chugging it down in heavy gulps. Finishing it in one shot, she let out a hearty burp and began munching on edamame.
No interrogation room, no "leniency for confession" banners, and no good cop, bad cop routines.
Dumbfounded, Ji Jue and Lu Feng stared at each other.
"Uh..." Ji Jue ventured to ask, "Didn't you say you wanted to ask..."
Before he could finish, a mug of beer was shoved into his hand. With a loud clink of glasses, Wen Wen shook her head dismissively. "It's past working hours. Why rush to do overtime? Drink!"
Ji Jue opened his mouth, then shut it.
At this point, saying he couldn't drink alcohol at all was completely out of the question!
In a haze, before he knew it, beer gave way to red wine, red wine gave way to liquor, and after downing who knows how many glasses, Ji Jue slumped face-down on the table, feeling only that this big sister's alcohol tolerance was truly as bottomless as her cleavage.
And after that, there was no after that.
He passed out cold.
Chapter 14