章 30: Chapter 30: Into the Night
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[The God of Death and Reincarnation's Teasing, completion 1/16. Please die in fifteen more different ways before the task ends.]
The moment the information surfaced in Zhou Baiyu's mind, he felt a bit of soreness in his neck.
Then he felt like a light bulb that had been swallowed into someone's mouth... stuck at a certain spot and couldn't come out.
With no other choice, Zhou Baiyu had to use his completely restored legs to push his head...
forcibly out from the wall.
"Huff... huff..."
Back from the dead.
Zhou Baiyu breathed heavily, as if he had been holding his breath for a long time.
After a while, Zhou Baiyu calmed down.
"Strange, no corpse whipping?"
Originally, Zhou Baiyu thought of... using his undying body to engage in a war of attrition.
But unexpectedly, the Hunter had left, which actually worked in his favor.
He let dust and bloodstains fall on his body, and he still looked very eerie. It was as if he had taken a brutal beating.
At that moment, Zhou Baiyu was on the second floor. Looking out through the window by the stairs...
he noticed that the sky was noticeably darker.
"The time has barely passed... why has the daylight already dimmed?"
There was something odd about the waning light.
His original plan was to go to the first floor, asking from door to door, identifying "the person who is most desperate and most hateful of the world" through observation and leading questions.
But since he was already on the second floor, he might as well start there.
So, Zhou Baiyu knocked on a door.
There were two apartments on the second floor, Unit A to the left, Unit B to the right.
Zhou Baiyu knocked on Unit A's door.
"You... how are you still alive! I'm not disabled! Didn't you just die?" a hoarse voice of an old man came from inside the door.
Zhou Baiyu was not surprised.
With all the noise from before, it was possible that the residents on the second floor were scared, but it wouldn't be surprising if they had peeked through the peephole out of curiosity to see what was happening outside.
"I'm not dead, but I'm about to be... My hand is broken... is it possible for me to come in and rest?"
Through it all, Zhou Baiyu kept one hand still the entire time.
He was pretending to be handicapped.
With the hand he had used to knock, he held his other hand, his whole appearance weak and feeble. The dust and blood on him accentuated his feeble image.
Zhou Baiyu's words could easily stir emotions within people.
But he knew very well... the person inside would not show pity.
"Your hand... is broken?"
The voice of the old man was trembling with excitement, remembering the greed in the eyes of the person on the first floor.
Tying it back to what the Blood Hunter had said about not wanting disabled prey...
Zhou Baiyu's sixth sense was piecing together a lot of information.
"Yes... I'm in great pain, can I come in to bandage it up?"
"Of... of course!"
Zhou Baiyu even heard the sound of the old man swallowing saliva.
The door opened abruptly.
But this time, Zhou Baiyu decided to wait patiently to confirm his suspicions.
He limped in, holding his hand.
An old man opened the door.
Although he was old enough that his wrinkled skin could crush a mosquito, the greed in his eyes was intense.
So intense that it was undisguised.
Even though Zhou Baiyu respected the elderly and loved the young, he was well aware—some people just get worse with age.
The people in this building were all excessively thin, which was abnormal in itself, and the greed in their eyes kept him always on alert.
"I'll get you a glass of water."
"Thank you."
In the aged room, filled with numerous jars and bottles, there was a stench coming from the kitchen.
There were no mice, but there were lots of cockroaches.
During daylight, these creatures usually hid away, but if they were present in huge numbers, they would also show up during the day.
Zhou Baiyu sat on a worn-out sofa, even feeling underneath the cushion small creatures that were being squashed and making a crunching noise.
The old man quickly brought in a cup of extremely turbid water.
"The water here... eh, has always been dirty. But it's all we can drink. Want some hot water instead?"
This statement was, in fact, the truth.
Because when Zhou Baiyu focused his gaze, he noticed the annotation on the water.
[Item Name: Doomsday Intestinal Soothing Liquid.]
[Specialty: Extremely soothing for the bowels, effectively easing constipation with ten times the effect of Waltheria indica, and increasing Corruption values by a factor of ten compared to Ganges water and water from a certain island's nuclear waste.]
[Introduction: In the pre-apocalyptic era, humanity's resources were extremely scarce. While the old man has nefarious intentions, he didn't plan to tamper with the water... In fact, it's by drinking this stuff every day that they've become neither human nor ghost.]
True to its name, Doomsday juice, a cup filled with various bacteria, clean and sanitary.
Although this cup of water posed no problem, Zhou Baiyu still noticed something off with the old man.
His gaze sharp as a knife, he stared at the old man's other hand:
"It's a kitchen knife, right? You want to kill me because my hand is crippled, correct?"
The old man was taken aback, then gripped the kitchen knife even tighter, his eyes bloodshot as if a wolf had spotted its prey.
The next moment, he lunged with the knife:
"Meat!"
"Man! I want to eat meat!"
Zhou Baiyu pulled a face and, with a quick sidestep, easily dodged the old man's knife.
"Aye, but I was tricking you! How could I possibly be a cripple?"
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he swiftly grasped the emaciated old man and slammed him against the wall with one hand.
A series of actions performed fluently and unchivalrously, the ambushed old man had no time to react.
Zhou Baiyu said:
"Guess what would happen if I were to break your arm?"
This hit the old man's deepest fear:
"No... don't... I didn't mean to hurt you... I, I was just on guard... don't maim me!"
Seeing the old man so terrified, Zhou Baiyu was convinced that in this building, and not just this building—
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Once disfigured, something terrible would happen.
And the people around, it seemed, were all eagerly awaiting someone's disfigurement.
Zhou Baiyu didn't know how the upcoming Gu-building horror would unfold.
But his intuition told him that he was about to find a crucial clue:
"If you answer the question, I won't do anything to you, otherwise, I'll break your hand. And let everyone know," he said.
"Ask, just ask... cough, cough, cough... I'll tell you everything! Everything!"
"Good. What exactly happens when someone is disfigured?"
The old man was clearly startled, doubting Zhou Baiyu's identity.
Zhou Baiyu said no more. In the presence of the attendant, who was physically fit enough to conquer seductresses, the old man's frail arms and legs were no match at all.
With a slight increase of force, the old man cried out in pain:
"I'll say it... I'll say it!"
"Disfigurement is a disease! A disease! Everyone who is disfigured must be sacrificed to that lord!"
"Once someone is disfigured, we will find a way... to... offer him up as a sacrifice..."
"That lord... needs more disfigured bodies... will give us... meat, eat... meat..."
The old man's expression became extremely bizarre.
His skin, stretched thin to the extreme, began to slowly swell. Purple veins surfaced on his face.
In the end... the old man suddenly revealed a sinister smile:
"All must die... haha, meat... meat..."
Zhou Baiyu was startled, "What's wrong with you?"
Bang! A loud noise erupted.
Zhou Baiyu reacted quickly, managing to dodge in time, rolling to the other side of the living room.
But a foul smell assaulted his nose.
When Zhou Baiyu looked back at the old man... there was no longer anything recognizable on his neck.
A piece of blood-red homework paper... appeared on the kitchen cabinet door.
Zhou Baiyu stared at the homework paper, a strange question forming in his mind.
"Why is there no annotation? Could it be alive?"
The homework paper remained stuck to the cabinet door.
Zhou Baiyu looked closely and found it to be a page of composition.
It was a child's account of a loving life with his mother and father, who still held hope for life even in the apocalypse.
But there were also some horrifying sentences in the essay—
"My mother's headaches are getting worse. Aunt Liu from the sixth floor was called disfigured by others because of her headache.
Disfigurement is something terrible. My mother's headache was actually just a mild one.
Later, Aunt Liu disappeared, but the next day, everyone was happy, we were all very hungry, yet we received supplies from somewhere else.
But I miss Aunt Liu.
I am afraid my mother will also disappear. Everyone's gaze when looking at my mother became even more strange.
Their standards for disfigurement... are getting lower and lower.
I'm scared my mother will leave me, the supplies that came after Aunt Liu disappeared, suddenly made me feel sick!
Dad said it wouldn't happen, he said he surely could make mom better.
I believe in dad. Will he come back tonight? Tonight is my twelfth birthday."
This description sent chills down Zhou Baiyu's spine.
The disfigured would be sacrificed... the greed evident in the eyes of the starving... and the "supplies" brought by "that lord."
And at the start—when the remark looked at this building, the item name was "Restaurant."
All of this information was already spelling out the answer in plain sight.
"Bad, the sky is getting darker... The night of Gu-building horror is probably much longer than the day! Thus, nightfall is much earlier than I expected!"
As Zhou Baiyu entered the second household, as he began to understand the strangeness of the building more and more—
Time seemed to flow irregularly. The distortion of rules was also a manifestation of corruption.
This was the first time Zhou Baiyu had witnessed an object—
or rather, all objects within a building, rapidly mutating under the influence of corruption.
This was the true driving force behind the apocalypse, not seductresses or other demonic creatures, nor the monsters people thought.
But something that perhaps the pioneers to this day did not understand—Corruption Gu.
The previous Gu-building was just a strange building number 92, posing no danger.
But as the daylight suddenly dimmed... the true Gu-building began to emerge.
On the homework paper, the writing started to twist.
The writing pasted on the cabinet door all turned red.
It was no longer a child's composition, but a monotonous repetition of one word, death.
Hundreds of "death" characters filled an entire page.
The whole building began to change rapidly. Black lines that Zhou Baiyu saw in version 2.21 started appearing on the walls.
The night of horror had arrived. Once night fell, all sorts of bizarre creatures would be born.
Yet, Zhou Baiyu became extremely calm:
"It's not that daytime is uniformly getting shorter... rather, it suddenly gets shorter every time after I communicate with someone in the room."
"This version is accessible only to newcomers and support professions, but the monsters are definitely not something that new players and support professions can face."
"This is an absolute novice funeral zone. But... the trickier it is, the more evident the method to clear it becomes! Just find that clue!"
Zhou Baiyu stared at the homework paper, suddenly realizing the key; all the information seemed to leap up!
"I see... the clue is right here!"
But just as he was gazing at the full page of the word "death" on the homework paper.
An eye crawled out of the top stroke of the "death" character.
A full page of hundreds of "death" words, meant hundreds of eyes staring at Zhou Baiyu.
The whole sheet of paper seemed to come alive.
Bang!
Zhou Baiyu's head exploded, leading to his second death.
With Zhou Baiyu's death, the whole building started to distort rapidly.
Countless voyeurs, through the perspective of the Snow Monster, witnessed an indescribably terrifying scene.
"This is not a D-level corruption area at all... Daytime is indeed D-level corruption, but the level of corruption at night... feels comparable to A-level?"
Although not participating in the challenge, the voyeurs were still stunned by the mass of grotesque flesh in the Snow Monster's perspective!
The difficulty level of Gu-building horror in the minds of the people... was raised once again!
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