Chapter 9
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Lou Yan’s head throbbed, as if there were needles stirring in his mind, dizziness overpowering him in waves. His consciousness was torn between wakefulness and unconsciousness, cold sweat pouring out, blurring Lou Yan’s vision.
His rationality gradually became contaminated by the anomaly. Lou Yan looked at the huge and terrifying monster on the wall, and an inexplicable admiration arose in his heart.
How powerful the anomaly was.
If I could become its nourishment, become a part of it, how great would that be…
Kill me!
Please, quickly kill me!
Bloodshot veins appeared in Lou Yan’s eyes, and he showed an abnormal fanaticism. In a daze, he dropped the flashlight and approached the monster, murmuring to himself, “I’m willing to become your nourishment… Kill me… Kill me…”
He approached the monster like a pilgrim, disregarding his own safety. The strong fishy smell hit him, and Lou Yan stepped into the black water piled in front of the monster.
The black water splashed onto Lou Yan’s face.
The nauseating smell made Lou Yan instinctively retch twice, and his consciousness briefly returned. Lou Yan’s face darkened as he took out the fruit knife without hesitation and made a cut on himself.
Blood sprayed out, and the intense pain made Lou Yan more awake.
Blood gushed from his thigh, and Lou Yan, pale from the loss of blood, bandaged the wound hastily. After dealing with it, he looked up at the monster close by, gritting his teeth.
The fishy smell surged up his throat, and the smell of blood and the stench of black water made his stomach churn. Lou Yan pinched into the flesh with his fingers, his heart surging with waves of shock and fear, but he instead coldly laughed.
“How could I beg you to kill me,” Lou Yan’s face flashed with ruthlessness, and he made another long cut on his arm with the fruit knife, “I’m not one of those insane cultists who worship the anomaly.”
Slowly cutting into the flesh was the most painful, and Lou Yan was using the most painful method to hurt himself, using pain to maintain his rationality and clarity. His breathing became rapid as he suppressed the rising and frantic thoughts of self-sacrifice.
A voice that sounded like Lou Yan’s own but exceptionally eerie echoed in Lou Yan’s ears.
“How powerful the anomaly is. If you can become an anomaly, you will become as powerful as it, and you can kill Fu Xuezhou.”
Shut up.
I don’t just want to kill Fu Xuezhou, I want to kill all the anomalies. Even if I fuse with the anomaly, I will never become the anomaly itself.
“But aren’t you longing for such power? Don’t resist your true self, become a part of the anomaly. Isn’t that good?”
Get lost!
Lou Yan approached the monster step by step. All his attention was focused on resisting the mental contamination brought by the anomaly. The remaining rationality only remembered the sentence the Seize Life Phone had told him before and another sentence, “I am human.”
【Fusing with the anomaly requires you to find an anomaly, be devoured by it, and when you are about to be devoured, swallow the heart of the anomaly in reverse】
The black water under his feet became deeper and gradually covered his feet. When Lou Yan walked in front of the monster, his body was already soaked in his own blood, and the pain from the blood loss made his face pale, his eyes losing focus.
In the chaos, Lou Yan looked up and stared at the terrifying behemoth.
The behemoth looked even more terrifying up close.
It seemed to be a lump of flesh lying here, where it was impossible to distinguish between body and limbs. White bone spurs seemed to be parasites growing on it, densely covering it from head to toe. At first glance, it looked like a black mountain covered with white bone flowers, not beautiful but horrifying.
“Drip, drip.”
Black water dripped from the bone spurs, dripping into the “river” on the ground.
Lou Yan looked up from below and finally found the place where the monster’s facial features were similar.
Eyes, nose, mouth.
Even though it didn’t resemble a human, the monster barely had some semblance of human features. It was so huge that if this thing stood up, the entire building would tremble. Fortunately, the monster seemed to be asleep. Its eyes were tightly closed, and its flesh moved up and down together, exhaling breath with a fishy smell. Even when Lou Yan approached it, it remained motionless, showing no signs of waking up.
Lou Yan breathed a sigh of relief.
Seeing that his thoughts were about to plunge into chaos again, Lou Yan once again used the knife to reopen the wounds on his arm. The arm, which had just stopped bleeding, began to flow with fresh blood again. However, this time, Lou Yan unexpectedly smelled a sweet and enticing aroma from his own blood.
His throat involuntarily moved up and down, and he brought the fruit knife to his lips in a trance. His tongue extended, licking away the crimson blood from the blade.
Tasting the blood, Lou Yan couldn’t help but reveal a satisfied and sinister smile. But the next moment, the awakened Lou Yan froze with a smile on his face. He looked at his reflection in the knife, the corners of his lips stained with blood, his eyes glowing with eerie red light, appearing as if he had been enchanted by the anomaly.
The awakening effect brought by self-harm was weakening… Lou Yan put down the fruit knife with an unpleasant expression. He couldn’t waste any more time; he needed to quickly find the heart of the monster in front of him.
The heart of the anomaly had no fixed location. The more powerful the anomaly, the more it would move its heart to the safest corner of its body. But Lou Yan no longer had the time or rationality to consider where the heart of the monster in front of him might be. He made a decision based on instinct and climbed onto the monster’s body towards its chest.
The monster had human-like features, so its heart might be in its chest… Lou Yan thought hazily, with only remnants of his rationality supporting him as he climbed up.
The flesh of the monster was like quicksand, sinking deeper with each step Lou Yan took. Lou Yan used both hands and feet, constantly pulling out and climbing up, until he reached the chest of the monster, exhausted.
Hurry…
Lou Yan reached out his hands laboriously, tremblingly inserting them into the bloody flesh of the monster. He plunged his arms halfway into it at once. The black flesh of the monster rippled like water waves, and Lou Yan’s hands stirred inside the monster’s body, trying to find its heart. Because of his constant movement, Lou Yan accelerated his descent into the monster’s body. In just a moment, half of his body was already enveloped by the monster’s flesh.
Lou Yan’s eyes were hollow, and his movements gradually became numb. He was like a person sinking into the mud, the more he struggled, the faster he sank. Soon, only the upper half of Lou Yan’s body remained outside the monster’s body.
Suddenly, the flesh trembled, and the monster moved suddenly.
Unprepared for the movement, Lou Yan subconsciously looked up and met a pair of huge red eyes.
The monster opened its eyes and stared quietly at Lou Yan.
“…”
The shock made Lou Yan wake up suddenly from his daze. His hands subconsciously tried to break free from the entanglement of the monster’s flesh to protect himself, but when he reached out his hand, Lou Yan touched a hot and jumping piece of meat!
This is?!
Lou Yan’s heart suddenly beat faster. In disbelief, he grasped the piece of meat, using all his remaining strength to pull it out of the monster’s body.
As the blood and flesh splattered, Lou Yan freed himself from the bondage, lifting up a palm-sized, still pulsating heart. Black blood slid down from Lou Yan’s arm, pulling out thick blood threads.
This was the heart of the anomaly!
Surprisingly, the monster did not make any other movements. It just watched quietly as Lou Yan acted, then opened its stinking mouth and mumbled, “Wuu, ah, yee…”
Meaningless mutterings, as if saying something.
Lou Yan’s spiritual power was once again contaminated by the muttering, and he felt a deadly dizziness. His shoulders began to sink into the monster’s body, first his neck, then his chin. Lou Yan struggled to maintain his last shred of consciousness and awkwardly quickly swallowed the heart in his hand, with great difficulty.
As soon as he finished eating, Lou Yan’s head sank into the monster’s body. His arms, raised as if seeking help, struggled weakly in the air. The last finger slowly sank into the flesh and disappeared without a trace.
So unwilling.
Lou Yan closed his eyes tightly, feeling suffocated and unconsciousness creeping in. His last thought was, Am I going to die?
Even after a second chance at life, nothing changed… Lou Yan.
In the deserted floor, only the fleshy monster remained.
The monster hung its head low, its blood-red eyes slowly closing, continuing to mutter indistinctly, “Ah… yee… wuu…”
***
Pain.
So much pain.
Lou Yan writhed in agony, biting down hard on his teeth, his hands tightly gripping the ground. The pain seemed even worse than when he had cut himself with the knife earlier; it felt like his soul was being torn apart and then roasted in a fire. Lou Yan was in so much pain that he couldn’t even muster the strength to cry out.
After who knows how long, the feeling of pain finally began to slowly fade away.
Lou Yan was covered in sweat, as if he had just emerged from water. He curled up on the ground, his body convulsing uncontrollably, gasping for breath.
After a few more minutes, Lou Yan finally managed to prop himself up from the ground, staggering and looking around in confusion.
The dropped flashlight was still on, illuminating the direction of the monster, but the monster that had been sitting against the wall had disappeared, leaving only black sticky liquid all over the floor.
“What happened?”
Lou Yan was utterly at a loss. He lowered his head and reached out his hand to clench his fist, feeling a completely unfamiliar but extremely dangerous force filling his body. This force was incompatible with his body but forcibly merged with it, as if waiting to break free…
Was this the power of the anomaly?
Had he succeeded?!
Lou Yan looked around in a circle.
In addition to the restless power within him, there was also a noticeable change in his physical fitness. His senses were much stronger than when he was an ordinary person; he could even see the fingerprints on his palms in this dark night and the slow-moving black water on the ground… His hearing was the same; he could hear the sound of the wind, the sound of water, and even the sound of the wind flipping through the waste paper downstairs.
Lou Yan suddenly remembered something and rolled up his sleeves. He saw that his arms were smooth and slender, without any traces of wounds ever existing.
“Could it be…?”
Lou Yan’s eyes flickered as he checked for other wounds on his body, only to find that apart from the small scratches he had just painfully scraped out, there were no other injuries.
The self-inflicted wounds had already healed.
A huge surprise overwhelmed him, and Lou Yan burst into laughter, “Did I really succeed in merging with the anomaly? Hahaha.”
Glancing at the panel in his mind, he noticed a slight change in the information displayed.
【Talent Holder: Lou Yan】
【Awakened Ability: Crisis Perception】
【Mental Power: 10/50】
The panel did not display the power of the anomaly, but his mental power had doubled and more, undoubtedly a pleasant surprise!
Having narrowly escaped death, Lou Yan’s heart was filled with indescribable joy. He laughed heartily for a while, but the laughter gradually faded, and he looked at his hands with a complex expression.
His heart beat slowly, “Thump, thump,” Lou Yan closed his eyes and listened to the sound of his heart beating, but he thought of the anomaly heart he had just swallowed.
A human heart beats, and so does an anomaly heart. The heart beating in his body now, was it still a human heart?
Am I… still human?
A strange feeling suddenly rose in his heart, and Lou Yan couldn’t help but think, couldn’t help but ponder.
He had merged with a world-ending level of a terrifying anomaly, and the anomaly power was hidden within his body, ready to transform him into a monster at any moment. Was he still considered a true human in this state?
Or was he a strange existence, half human and half anomaly?
It seemed that he could no longer be called “human.”
Lou Yan also knew that such thoughts were futile, but it seemed that only through these thoughts could he still maintain a semblance of “human” thinking.
Lost in his endless thoughts, his ears suddenly twitched.
“Who?”
Lou Yan abruptly opened his eyes, his gaze sharp as he looked towards a cement pillar in the distance.
It was silent around the cement pillar, nothing out of the ordinary. Only a few pieces of tattered yellowed paper fluttered in the wind, as if Lou Yan had misheard.
Lou Yan narrowed his eyes, stepping closer to the cement pillar with caution, each step filled with danger. “I’ve heard your footsteps. Do you still want to hide?”
“Found out, huh.”
A hoarse male voice sounded, and a slender figure emerged from behind the cement pillar.
The man was about six feet tall, very tall. He wore a shabby gray coat, his messy hair falling to his shoulders, and a gray hat on his head that covered half of his face, making it impossible to see his specific features. He looked like a destitute vagrant.
Lou Yan asked coldly, “Who are you?”
“I mean no harm, there’s no need to be so tense,” the man raised his hands and chuckled a few times, his voice hoarse and unpleasant, “My name is Duan Zege, nice to meet you, friend.”
Author’s note:
Interviewer: Brother Lou, how does it feel to eat a heart?
Brother Lou: …
Hey, hey, Brother Lou, why did you run away? Why are you puking!
Next chapter preview: That scumbag! The man that Brother Lou can’t forget (bushi) is going to show up!
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