Free Web NovelBefore Mu Ke could even react, Bai Liu grabbed the back of his collar and yanked the dazed boy upright with one hand. Then he turned, hooked that same arm around the armless Liu Huai, and half-supported him against his shoulder. The Siren’s Bone whip tightened in Bai Liu’s grip. His eyes remained startlingly calm and clear as he let out a shallow breath before inhaling again.
“Open the door, Mu Ke. The game isn’t over yet.”
Liu Huai’s paper-white face twitched slightly. He suddenly stopped Bai Liu, his unsteady gaze lingering on him for several seconds.
“Wait... Promise me something.” His voice trembled faintly. “If you survive, you’ll definitely save Jiayi?”
“I promise.”
Liu Huai slowly closed his eyes.
A pair of bracers materialized before him.
[System Notification: Item (Cynic Bracers). After the unrestrained stray dog is injured, he may rely on his own optimism to postpone the damage for 14 hours. However, if the player still has not cleared the game after 14 hours, all accumulated damage will be inflicted at once.]*
“I originally saved this for Jiayi to use after she escaped.” Liu Huai forced out a bitter smile. “But now... it looks like she won’t need it anymore.”
A healing-type Little Witch had no need for such a low-level item that merely delayed damage.
Liu Huai looked at Bai Liu again. The bitterness in his smile remained, but there was relief there too.
“I don’t even have hands left to use it.”
He paused.
“Take it, Bai Liu.”
Bai Liu didn’t waste time on unnecessary words. He accepted the bracers directly, then lifted his eyes toward Mu Ke, who stood frozen by the door.
Mu Ke looked back at him.
Seeing that Bai Liu’s expression hadn’t wavered in the slightest, Mu Ke drew in a deep breath of his own and pushed the door open with trembling hands.
It was currently 8:40 AM, Wednesday.
—
First-floor emergency stairwell.
A nurse stood several meters away from the entrance, her entire posture tense and fearful. She clearly didn’t dare approach. Swallowing hard, she pointed toward the pitch-black passage.
“It’s there. At the corner beneath the first floor, there’s an entrance to a tunnel. Follow it down and you’ll reach the welfare home church directly.”
She hurriedly shook her head.
“I’m not going any closer.”
But before she could finish speaking, Miao Gaojiang and Miao Feichi had already started walking toward the tunnel without hesitation.
Alarmed, the nurse quickly called after them.
“Patients aren’t allowed to leave the ward area before nine! I only brought you here to take a look, you can’t just—”
Miao Gaojiang silently turned around.
In just a few strides, the tall, broad-shouldered man reached her.
Then he grabbed her throat and twisted.
Crack.
The crisp sound of dislocated bones echoed through the corridor.
The nurse’s eyes widened in disbelief. Her pupils slowly dilated as her body crumpled limply to the floor.
“Dad?!”
Even Miao Feichi was stunned.
“Why did you kill an NPC?! It’s easy to trigger backlash effects!”
Miao Gaojiang’s chest rose and fell violently.
His eyes were bloodshot, yet his expression remained unnervingly blank. Sweat rolled continuously down the side of his face. The muscles in his shoulders twitched faintly, as though his body still hadn’t settled from the violent impulse.
The entire man radiated a suffocating aggression that he seemed to be forcibly suppressing.
After several deep breaths, he finally calmed down.
“We can’t waste time,” he said hoarsely after clearing his throat. “If we brought that nurse with us, we’d have to wait until nine. Those brats are definitely planning to escape. We need to get there before they do.”
Miao Feichi still found the explanation strange, but reluctantly accepted it.
He drew his twin blades and cautiously approached the entrance to the safety passage.
Just as he was about to enter the tunnel, Miao Gaojiang suddenly spoke in a low voice behind him.
“Don’t you think that nurse looked a lot like your mother?”
Miao Feichi paused.
Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at the young nurse’s corpse lying on the floor.
That face looked nothing like the woman who had given birth to him.
Frowning, he looked back at Miao Gaojiang strangely.
“What’s wrong with you, Dad? That NPC looked nothing like that dead woman.”
“Really...?”
Miao Gaojiang muttered absentmindedly.
He lowered his head and looked at the nurse’s face again.
But in his eyes, the youthful face on the floor had somehow become old, exhausted, and sickly pale. The woman was smiling at him strangely.
It was his wife’s face.
The face he saw every morning when he woke beside her.
Every time the nurse had spoken earlier, her mouth had stretched unnaturally wide in his vision, the jaw joints creaking with distorted cracking sounds. Her lips split wider and wider as she smiled at him, until he could clearly see the inside of her mouth.
There was no tongue.
Miao Gaojiang abruptly looked away.
He wiped the sweat from his temples and forced himself to regain composure before turning toward the tunnel entrance.
“Feichi. You take point. I’ll cover the rear.”
—
8:45 AM.
The explosion from the previous night had left the nurses too overwhelmed to continue patrolling every floor and controlling the patients.
Taking advantage of the chaos, Bai Liu and the others rushed down the elevator to the first floor—only to discover that the safety passage had already been cleared out once before them.
The corridor was a complete mess.
That was both good news and bad news.
Mu Ke visibly relaxed.
“At least we won’t have to fight those monsters head-on.”
Bai Liu’s gaze swept across the shredded remains of children scattered everywhere, along with syringes strewn across the floor. His eyes darkened slightly.
“Miao Gaojiang and the others already entered the tunnel.”
Liu Huai’s mental state was deteriorating rapidly, his body practically slipping from Bai Liu’s shoulder. Bai Liu adjusted his grip and hauled him back up before quickly moving forward with Mu Ke close behind. freēwēbηovel.c૦m
At the corner beneath the first floor sat a yellow medical waste bin overflowing with blood bags and used syringes.
Beside it was a crude restraint bed sized for children, likely used to pin them down during blood extraction procedures.
Apparently, the children brought here had their blood drawn on that bed before both their bodies and the used equipment were discarded together like garbage.
Those investors who consumed the children’s blood couldn’t even bear to witness the extraction process themselves. They merely allowed the nurses to handle these “raw materials” in a filthy, cramped corner before delivering the finished product to them.
The medical bin had already been kicked open violently.
Beneath it was a square opening resembling a cellar entrance.
The opening was tiny—roughly forty centimeters wide—clearly designed for children to crawl through. Fortunately, Bai Liu and the others were currently thin enough to squeeze through it as well.
Muddy footprints were scattered around the entrance, obviously left behind by Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang.
Bai Liu handed Liu Huai over to Mu Ke to support temporarily, stepped forward, grabbed the metal ring handle, and pulled open the cellar hatch.
The moment it opened, a wave of stale dust, damp soil, thick blood stench, and warm fungal rot surged upward from below.
The dried blood crusted along the wooden hatch flaked away in chunks, revealing swollen, mold-covered boards beneath.
Dust floated densely through the darkness like drifting spores.
Bai Liu held his breath.
Then he looked up at Mu Ke’s nervous expression and jumped down without hesitation, leaving Mu Ke no chance to stop him.
“I’ll go first. Don’t come down until I say it’s safe.”
Mu Ke anxiously peered downward.
Several seconds later, Bai Liu’s voice echoed faintly upward from below.
“It’s fine. Lower Liu Huai first, then come down yourself.”
Mu Ke carefully lowered the armless Liu Huai down into the tunnel before bracing himself against the narrow opening and climbing down after him.
He closed his eyes tightly and took a deep breath before letting go.
His body slid through a narrow, wet passage at an angle.
Then he landed.
The instant his feet touched the ground, Mu Ke froze.
The floor beneath him felt horrifyingly strange—soft, swollen, uneven. It squished underfoot like stepping into piles of rotten flesh. The air reeked of blood and mushrooms.
It felt like standing inside a giant fungal colony.
Mu Ke slowly opened his eyes.
Then he sucked in a sharp breath.
The walls of the tunnel were densely carpeted with mushrooms.
Every kind imaginable.
Large and small. Multicolored. Faintly fluorescent.
The entire tunnel resembled diseased human tissue—like infected stomach lining covered in swollen, glistening growths ready to burst apart at the slightest touch and spray corrosive fluid everywhere.
Blood-red filaments tangled through the fungal masses like wildly overgrown Blood Lingzhi mycelium.
The overwhelming odor of bodily secretions and fermentation filled the air. It smelled like mushrooms soaked in cheap alcohol and left to rot underground for decades.
Mu Ke nearly gagged.
Liu Huai wasn’t much better.
Only Bai Liu looked relatively unaffected.
Mu Ke covered his mouth, trying desperately not to vomit.
“How can mushrooms even grow like this?”
“It’s dark, damp, and full of corpses.” Bai Liu walked forward steadily. Mushrooms sank beneath his feet with every step, nearly swallowing his ankles. “That kind of environment is naturally perfect for fungal growth.”
His eyes swept over the tunnel walls.
“And if I’m right, there are also failed Blood Lingzhi samples discarded here by the investors.”
Mu Ke stared at him in shock.
“Discarded Blood Lingzhi?! Isn’t this stuff supposed to be extremely valuable?”
“Only Blood Lingzhi cultivated using the blood of children with ‘pure’ bloodlines is valuable.”
Bai Liu’s gaze lingered briefly on a black-red Blood Lingzhi embedded in the wall, pulsing faintly like a human heart.
“We’re currently in a timeline from ten years ago. Back then, the investors hadn’t perfected their screening system yet. Or at least, they were still in the early stages of it.”
“In a process like that, failed products are inevitable.”
“Some had poor medicinal effects. Others were outright toxic. Since the ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) investors couldn’t use them, they dumped them here.”
Bai Liu lifted his head and looked deeper into the tunnel.
“If I’m not mistaken, this place should correspond to the line in the nursery rhyme—”
“[Buried underground on Sunday.]”
The tunnel itself seemed alive.
It expanded and contracted faintly in rhythm with their breathing, like a living organ.
But on closer inspection, it was actually the countless Blood Lingzhi growths throbbing slowly beneath the walls.
Scattered across the floor were the corpses of Deformed Children, lying motionless with their eyes still open. Their phones lay abandoned nearby.
Bai Liu bent down and picked one up.
[System Notification: Since the owner is completely deceased, the phone has lost its energy source and can no longer be used.]*
Most of the Deformed Children had already been hacked apart by Miao Feichi’s twin blades. Severed remains were strewn everywhere among the fungal growths.
Several mushrooms had also been slashed apart or trampled flat.
Bai Liu lowered his eyes and followed the trail.
“Let’s move. They went this way.”
—
At the opposite end of the tunnel, Xiao Miao Gaojiang was panting heavily as he carried Xiao Mu Ke on his back.
A child’s body simply couldn’t compare to an adult’s physical endurance. Carrying two people nonstop while running through the tunnel—especially over such slippery ground—had nearly exhausted him.
His clothes were soaked through with sweat.
Xiao Mu Ke clung tightly to Bai Six’s blood bag as he anxiously checked the time again and again.
Bai Six had told them they absolutely had to arrive before nine o’clock.
Once nine arrived, all the investors would be released.
And if that happened, they would never escape.
What Xiao Mu Ke didn’t know was that two investors—Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang—had already entered the tunnel ahead of schedule and were rapidly closing in on them.
Watching the seconds tick away, Xiao Mu Ke grew increasingly tense.
“Hurry up, Miao Gaojiang! If it passes nine and the investors come out, we’re dead!”
“I don’t think we’ll even last until nine...”
Xiao Miao Gaojiang wiped sweat from his face and turned back nervously.
“I can hear footsteps behind us. Someone’s stepping on the mushrooms.”
“They’re moving fast.”
Xiao Mu Ke’s expression immediately darkened.
“How fast?”
He clenched his teeth.
“If we run back to the church now, can we still make it?”
Killing children was forbidden inside the church. It was the only safe zone.
Even though he had no idea how long they could actually survive there, Xiao Mu Ke still refused to give up.
At the very least, he had to deliver Bai Six’s blood bag.
Otherwise, that useless investor of his would probably die immediately.
The sound behind them grew louder and louder.
Wet footsteps splashed rapidly through pools of fungal fluid, approaching at terrifying speed like a snake slithering through dense mushroom clusters.
Miao Gaojiang swallowed hard, face pale with fear.
He took two steps backward and shook his head stiffly.
“...We won’t make it. They’ll catch us before we reach the church.”
“Then we can’t let them recognize us.”
Xiao Mu Ke lowered his voice.
Without Bai Six leading them, the child unexpectedly appeared far calmer than before.
“Miao Gaojiang, take out the spare infusion bags Bai Six gave us.”
“We’ll hang them on ourselves and pretend to be those flute-playing monster children. The tunnel lighting is too dim, and there are Deformed Children corpses everywhere. As long as nobody gets close enough to inspect us carefully, they won’t notice the difference.”
Xiao Mu Ke jumped down from Miao Gaojiang’s back and immediately began hanging infusion bags around both their necks.
Miao Gaojiang fumbled clumsily with his own, face pale as paper.
“Will this actually fool the investors?!”
“We don’t look anything like those Deformed Children!”
“Even if the disguise is poor, we still have to try.”
Xiao Mu Ke was breathing rapidly, but his face was expressionless. A frightening resolve had settled in his pitch-black eyes.
“I thought about it. Running back to the church is just waiting to die. The teachers should already be awake at this hour. If we run into one near the church, we’ll be locked up until Thursday’s pairing. If we can’t get out today, we’ll never get out.”
“We only get one gamble.”
Xiao Miao Gaojiang gritted his teeth and met Mu Ke’s eyes for a second.
Finally, he nodded.
The footsteps drew closer.
The plump mushrooms squelched beneath the adults’ feet, sounding like overripe fruit being squeezed until the juice burst out. The noise echoed strangely through the passage.
The smell of rot and blood grew thicker.
Xiao Mu Ke took a deep breath and whispered, “Don’t make a sound. Lie under the mushroom clusters and pretend to be a corpse. Got it?”
He hurriedly found a place to hide Bai Six’s blood bag, then tore up a few mushrooms and messily covered it.
After that, he inhaled sharply and lay face down among the fungal growths.
Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang finally reached this section of the tunnel.
Miao Feichi shook the blood from his blades, frowning as he looked around.
“What was that sound? I thought I heard someone talking just now. It didn’t sound like those kids we killed earlier. It sounded like two living people talking.”
With his high agility, Miao Feichi was extremely sensitive to sound.
But after scanning the area once, he found no suspicious movement.
Miao Gaojiang quickly urged him on.
“Stop looking. Let’s go. This place is obviously those Deformed Children’s nest.”
The farther they walked, the more certain Miao Gaojiang became.
The passage was narrow, dark, and filled with mushrooms. One end led to the church, while the other led to the emergency passage where children’s corpses and medical waste were discarded. The nurse had told them this passage had been abandoned after the number of investors increased and the investors began selecting children through the pairing system.
But after Miao Gaojiang and the others entered the abandoned tunnel, they found more than just Deformed Children near the entrance. Deeper inside, they could clearly see traces of the children’s activity.
That proved these children usually lived in this abandoned passage.
Thinking of the Deformed Children who disappeared during the day, Miao Gaojiang’s expression darkened.
“The Deformed Children’s active period should be from 9:00 PM to 9:00 AM. The rest of the time, they stay in this tunnel.”
“Feichi, stop wasting time. It’s almost nine. We need to get out quickly, or those monster children will return to their nest and trap us here.”
Hearing Miao Gaojiang’s warning, Miao Feichi glanced down at the time.
8:51 AM.
It was indeed almost nine.
They had no time to waste here.
He withdrew his searching gaze, gripped his twin blades, and continued forward with lingering suspicion.
His unease came from two things.
First, ever since waking up after the explosion, Miao Gaojiang had been unusually irritable. His father was normally a very steady person, and this made Miao Feichi vaguely uneasy.
Second—
Miao Feichi’s gaze swept over two child corpses lying face down among the mushrooms.
He had seen plenty of children’s corpses along the way through this tunnel. Logically, two more shouldn’t have attracted his attention.
After all, the investors didn’t allow inauspicious places like crematoriums or morgues inside this hospital.
The hospital had nowhere to process children’s corpses, so those nurses had turned this emergency passage into a medical waste tunnel for discarded bodies. Meanwhile, the fungi inside survived by decomposing the corpses, breeding even more mushrooms capable of breaking down flesh.
It was practically an excellent ecological waste disposal tunnel.
But these two corpses gave him a faint sense of wrongness.
As if they didn’t belong here.
A player like Miao Feichi, whose agility was high but whose intelligence was merely average, usually trusted the instincts he had developed inside games. Under normal circumstances, he would have asked his more intelligent father to examine it.
But Miao Gaojiang’s current condition was clearly poor.
And if this tunnel really was the daytime resting nest of the Deformed Children, then time was indeed tight.
In the end, Miao Feichi withdrew his gaze and walked a few steps forward.
Hearing them continue onward, Mu Ke slowly released a breath of relief in his heart.
But before that breath could fully settle, Miao Feichi suddenly stopped.
His head turned back.
The joints in his neck clicked softly as they loosened and reset.
Then he looked back at the two “corpses” with a feverish, terrifying, almost ecstatic gaze.
A small patch of moisture had spread across one “corpse’s” shoulder.
Miao Feichi stared at that damp patch and slowly licked his lips.
The moment Miao Gaojiang saw that look, he knew Miao Feichi’s craving for meat had flared up again.
Just as he was about to painfully stop whatever his son was about to do, he heard Miao Feichi speak in an unnaturally soft voice that trembled with excitement.
“Dad, these two kids’ clothes are wet.”
“They’re sweating.”
“I can smell fresh sweat.”
“They’re alive. They’re children who escaped.”
Living children trying to escape at this hour—
Miao Gaojiang froze for only a second before his gaze sharpened.
He reacted almost immediately.
“These are the children from Bai Liu’s group of players!”
Damn it!
Xiao Mu Ke’s heart went cold.
Several thoughts flashed rapidly through his mind. In the next instant, he grabbed the blood bag in his arms, sprang up from the ground without saying a word, and ran madly toward the hospital-side exit.
Xiao Miao Gaojiang also scrambled up from the mushroom patch, his face pale as he ran after Mu Ke.
Miao Feichi let out a low, savage laugh.
With a sharp metallic hiss, he drew his twin blades.
“Damn brats. You nearly blew me to death last night. If I don’t drain your blood and eat your flesh today, I’ll lose all face even if I clear this game.”
Then he narrowed his eyes and suddenly whistled.
“Well, would you look at that. Effortless reward. Today, you even delivered the blood yourselves.”
“Dad, your child is there too.”
Seeing his own child, Miao Gaojiang finally let out a breath of relief.
His expression calmed.
“I see him. Feichi, be careful when you kill him. Avoid the major arteries. Don’t waste the blood.”
“OK.”
Miao Feichi rested the curved blades against his elbows and casually wiped away the mushroom slime and blood.
He licked his bloodless lips, his eyes flashing with crimson, bloodthirsty light.
“Once I kill you, this game will basically be over.”
Xiao Mu Ke ran with all his strength.
His heart had never hurt like this before.
He could clearly feel an amount of blood far beyond what his heart could bear being poured into it like a bomb, then detonating with a heavy thump as his heart slammed violently in his chest. That vivid red blood passed through his ventricles and atria, rushing into every blood vessel in his limbs, bringing sharp pain and numbness to his hands and feet.
He tried desperately to gulp down air.
But the air seemed blocked by some invisible, wind-like membrane. His lungs burned as though they couldn’t absorb even a trace of oxygen.
Mu Ke had never run this fast before.
For most of his limited life, he had crouched with his head raised to look at other people, because that posture made it easier for blood to flow back to his heart.
He had never used his legs like this.
Never run with the feeling that his body might burst apart in the next second.
Never imagined that a tiny insect like him could turn into the wind.
Clutching the blood bag drawn from Bai Liu’s body, Mu Ke felt as though he might vomit blood into it at any moment.
Physiological tears filled his eyes.
He ran and suffocated like a noble cat born with a congenital defect, suddenly forced by a predator to awaken the instinct to flee from its greenhouse.
Mu Ke knew his knees were weakening.
He knew his mind was going blank from lack of oxygen.
But his legs continued moving mechanically.
Don’t stop.
You have to live, Mu Ke.
Bai Six had said it weakly in his arms, as though praying, begging, and calmly stating something that had to be done.
Mu Ke, you must save my investor.
You must live, Mu Ke.
You must.
You must—
Mu Ke’s vision began to blur.
It wasn’t because he was crying.
It was because the extreme exertion had started to make his eyesight fail.
Blood began to drip from his nose, falling onto the backs of the hands tightly clutching the blood bag to his chest. freewebnσvel.cѳm
But he no longer noticed any of it.
Mu Ke only kept running, his eyes empty, completely unaware that Miao Feichi had already caught up behind him.
Miao Feichi gripped his twin blades, looking almost speechless as he watched Xiao Mu Ke run desperately.
“Damn. You really can run, brat. I almost didn’t catch you.”
He raised his twin blades, cold light flashing along their edges.
On the tunnel wall, his thin, swaying shadow looked like a reaper holding a scythe.
Miao Feichi aimed at Xiao Mu Ke’s shoulder and slashed down hard.
Xiao Mu Ke’s vision went black.
Dizziness swallowed him whole.
Then he felt himself caught in a gust of wind rushing in from the other exit—powerful, yet impossibly light.
Someone supported the back of his head and pulled him into a chest covered by a patient gown.
His ears rang for a long time before he finally felt warmth transfer to his forehead.
Someone had saved him.
He was now pressed against his savior’s heart.
That person’s heartbeat was completely different from his own.
It was calm and steady, each beat falling like water droplets striking stone on some remote cliff no one had ever reached.
Nothing could disrupt its rhythm.
Even though this person was now holding back a curved blade powerful enough to kill him, it still wasn’t enough to disturb the tempo of his breathing or heartbeat.
[System Notification: Player Bai Liu has used Mu Shicheng’s personal skill (Thief’s Stealth). Movement speed +3700. Stamina rapidly decreasing...]
[System Notification: Player Bai Liu has used Mu Shicheng’s personal skill (Thief’s Black Fingers) to block player Miao Feichi’s attack.]
“Fuck, it’s you again, Bai Liu!”
Miao Feichi exploded instantly.
He gritted his teeth and pressed his blade downward.
“Liu Huai has no hands left, and now you’ve delivered yourself to me. Let’s see who can help you today!”
Miao Feichi screamed sharply, his twin blades dancing wildly.
Silver blade-light flashed into a blur inside the tunnel.
Bai Liu threw Xiao Mu Ke behind him, then pushed his shoulder, signaling him to keep running forward.
At the same time, he tilted his body and avoided Miao Feichi’s strike aimed viciously at his other shoulder.
Miao Feichi was repeating the same tactic.
Since he didn’t know how much health Bai Liu had left, he wanted to end the fight quickly by severing Bai Liu’s arms.
Using his high movement speed, Bai Liu sidestepped Miao Feichi’s fully charged attack. Then he turned and used Thief’s Black Fingers to clash rapidly with Miao Feichi several times.
He fought while retreating, doing everything he could to keep Miao Feichi’s blades from touching him.
But how could Miao Feichi possibly let Bai Liu go so easily?
His attacks grew fiercer and fiercer.
It looked as though Bai Liu was about to fail to hold on.
Xiao Mu Ke had already run several steps away.
His heart was still pounding violently, nowhere near calm.
As he ran, he suddenly turned back to look at the investor who had saved him and was still fighting.
This was an investor who would save children.
[He won’t kill you, because he is a strange good person. He will save you.]
Xiao Mu Ke suddenly began laughing through his tears.
He stumbled forward on unsteady limbs, tears streaming down his small face like overflowing emotion.
He really saved me.
Xiao Bai Six, your investor really is too strange.
He clearly isn’t a good person—
He caused your death, but he saved me.
I don’t understand what he’s trying to do.
Just like I don’t understand what you were trying to do.
Clearly, neither of you are good people.
But in the end, both of you risked everything to save me.
We only met on Sunday.
And by Wednesday, you and your investor both seem like you’re about to die for me.
I don’t want this.
Xiao Mu Ke stopped running.
He wanted to turn back.
But someone hiding among the mushrooms suddenly grabbed him.
He almost screamed in fright, only for the other person to swiftly cover his mouth.
The other person lowered his voice and looked at him strangely.
“...Why are you running back?! Are you trying to throw your life away? Don’t go back and cause trouble for him!”
Xiao Mu Ke’s face was wet and sticky with tears.
He clutched the blood bag in his arms and sobbed as he looked at him.
“But I don’t want to watch him die for me. I promised Bai Six I would definitely save him.”
Mu Ke fell silent for a while.
His breathing was very light.
Then he said, “I don’t want to see him die either.”
“But he also promised me he wouldn’t die.”
“So we believe him.”
“And wait.”
Mu Ke and Liu Huai were hidden around a bend in the tunnel.
Neither of them had much combat power left, so Bai Liu had ordered them to hide while he went out alone to face the enemy.
At first, Mu Ke had protested fiercely.
He had even said that Bai Liu’s combat ability of 0.5 wasn’t much better than his own.
This was probably the first time Mu Ke had ever retorted to Bai Liu with a hint of sarcasm.
But under Bai Liu’s gaze, he quickly stopped talking, his face flushing red.
He did not apologize.
Soon after, Bai Liu proposed a plan that could temporarily restrain Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang.
That plan barely convinced Mu Ke.
“This tunnel is the daytime resting place of the Deformed Child monsters,” Bai Liu said. “Once nine o’clock arrives, they’ll return from outside.”
“If they encounter intruders like us, those little monsters will definitely attack.”
“But they locate people by tracking phones.”
“And we—”
Mu Ke instantly understood.
“—We have two phones that can avoid being tracked!”
“The ones we took from those Deformed Children!”
“As long as our phones stay connected on a call, they won’t be able to find us.”
“They’ll attack Miao Feichi and the others instead!”
Bai Liu nodded.
“This kind of attack probably won’t hold them back for long, but it’ll buy us enough time to escape with Xiao Mu Ke. We absolutely can’t go toward the hospital side. After nine o’clock, the investors and nurses there will start moving around, and it’ll become too dangerous.”
“We can only head toward the church. That place is a safe zone for children.”
Mu Ke drew in a deep breath and looked directly at Bai Liu.
His posture leaned forward slightly, and even his tone carried a faint edge of aggression.
“Fine. Your plan sounds flawless, Bai Liu.”
“But I have one question.”
“We only stole two phones from the Deformed Children.”
“But there are three of us.”
“That means one person’s phone won’t stay connected.”
“And that person will be attacked just like Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang.”
Mu Ke stared straight at Bai Liu.
“So who are you planning to sacrifice?”
Bai Liu met Mu Ke’s gaze briefly before lowering his eyes.
“Once we find Xiao Mu Ke, we’ll have a third phone. He can call my phone to keep the line occupied. Or we can pick up a phone from one of the dead Deformed Children. Or I can steal another one.”
“There’s always a solution.”
“Don’t try to fool me.”
Mu Ke refuted him calmly, though his chest was already rising and falling unevenly.
“A child’s phone can’t make outgoing calls after nine o’clock.”
“A dead Deformed Child’s phone can’t be used.”
“And as for stealing one...”
Mu Ke’s gaze fell on Bai Liu’s severed arm.
His breathing grew hurried.
“You only have one usable arm left. If you try to steal a phone, you won’t be able to defend yourself. And there’s nobody left on our side who can coordinate with you anymore. Liu Huai is delirious, and I have zero combat ability.”
“The methods you mentioned are impossible.”
“So in the end, we only have two usable phones.”
Mu Ke looked straight into Bai Liu’s eyes.
“Which means one person among us will definitely have their phone ring.”
“Bai Liu... who is it?”
Bai Liu looked at him quietly.
His eyes were calm.
Too calm.
Like a lake so clear that the bottom was visible at a glance.
“Didn’t you already guess, Mu Ke?”
“That person is me.”
Mu Ke slowly exhaled.
He clasped his hands tightly together, forcing himself to stay calm.
“I don’t agree, Bai Liu.”
“I refuse.”
“Your health is only 0.5. Liu Huai and I don’t have any combat power left either. We have no way to protect you once your phone starts ringing.”
“No one can protect you.”
“You’ll really die.”
Mu Ke spoke each word slowly and deliberately.
But Bai Liu’s expression didn’t change at all.
Mu Ke’s voice finally tightened into something almost pleading.
“...Don’t do this, okay, Bai Liu?”
Bai Liu paused for a moment.
Then he suddenly laughed softly.
“Who said nobody’s protecting me?”
Mu Ke froze.
“...Who else could possibly protect you?”
Bai Liu spread his hands and shrugged indifferently.
“I can protect myself.”
In the end, however, Bai Liu still convinced Mu Ke.
With an extremely dangerous plan.
Mu Ke closed his eyes, cutting off the memory.
Then he lowered his head and looked at the watch on his wrist—the one he had picked up from the ruins after the explosion the previous night.
The second hand ticked slowly forward.
Finally—
It pointed directly at zero.
Nine o’clock.
Mu Ke’s breathing, which had only just steadied, instantly became hurried again.
He took out his phone and dialed Liu Huai’s number, ensuring Liu Huai’s phone remained occupied so the returning Deformed Children wouldn’t detect it through their calls.
But after that, Mu Ke simply held the remaining child’s phone in his hand without moving.
He looked up toward Bai Liu, who was still fighting Miao Feichi in the distance, and tightened his grip around the phone.
His finger hovered uncertainly above the keypad.
Who should he call?
Finally, Mu Ke leaned against the wall, shut his eyes tightly, and dialed his own number with trembling fingers.
The phone was answered before it could even ring once.
Now both phones were occupied.
Mu Ke leaned weakly against the wall, gritting his teeth with his eyes closed, not daring to look at what would happen next.
If things didn’t unfold exactly the way Bai Liu predicted—
Then Bai Liu would definitely die.
Rustling sounds suddenly echoed from both ends of the tunnel.
It sounded like countless rats scurrying across the ground.
The noise came from every direction at once, like a swarm of creatures crawling out from underground after smelling blood.
A heavier stench of rot and blood filled the air.
The sound was getting closer.
Yet strangely, Mu Ke couldn’t see anything approaching.
Only the rustling continued moving past him and deeper into the tunnel.
Xiao Mu Ke, still in his arms, tugged nervously at his sleeve and pointed upward with a strange expression.
Mu Ke looked up.
Then his breathing stopped.
The ceiling of the tunnel was densely covered with Deformed Children.
Some had pointed heads.
Some had square skulls.
Some had grotesquely twisted limbs.
Some had bones protruding through their skin.
Some were deathly pale.
Some had mouths far too large for their faces.
Others had eyes growing near their temples.
The disabled and malformed crouched low against the ceiling.
Their bodies were covered in infusion bags, and they clung upside down above the tunnel like enormous nocturnal bats, swaying gently as they crawled forward.
Their eyes glowed eerie green.
They looked like mutant vampire bats.
The tunnel lighting was extremely dim, and the children blended perfectly into the mushroom clusters around them. Their infusion bags were the same mottled colors as the fungi.
For a moment, Mu Ke hadn’t even realized the children were moving across the ceiling.
“Feichi, it’s already nine.” Miao Gaojiang lowered his voice sharply. “I hear movement. Those Deformed Children are back.”
“Forget Bai Liu. Killing him doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Catch the children first.”
“And don’t provoke those monsters. There are too many of them. If they surround us, they’ll drain our health—”
Before he could finish speaking, Bai Liu abruptly drew the glowing snow-white Siren’s Bone whip and lashed it viciously upward toward the ceiling.
The Siren’s Bone whip didn’t possess much offensive power.
It couldn’t seriously injure the Deformed Children.
But its judgment value was extremely high.
The instant the whip struck, it immediately pulled all aggro and attention toward Bai Liu.
Sure enough, every rustling Deformed Child froze simultaneously.
Their glowing green eyes snapped open.
Then they all stared downward at the investors beneath them.
[System Notification: Player Bai Liu has enraged the Deformed Children returning to the tunnel to sleep. They have decided to severely punish this bad person!]
“Fuck! Bai Liu, are you insane?!” Miao Feichi’s face changed instantly as he looked up at the overwhelming number of monster children. “Those Deformed Child monsters will attack you too!”
“How many of these things are there?!”
“How many children did this hospital actually kill?!”
The children tilted their heads back and released shrill screams.
Like disturbed bats, they crawled rapidly across the tunnel walls, extending sharp claws and swarming downward in dense waves toward Miao Feichi and Bai Liu.
Inside such a dark tunnel, vision alone was useless.
Just like bats relied on echolocation, these blood-drinking Deformed Children—who had lived in the tunnel for years—had developed similarly degraded eyesight.
They relied on sound to hunt.
At the same moment, the phones belonging to Miao Feichi, Miao Gaojiang, and Bai Liu all rang simultaneously.
Like bats smelling fresh blood, the children instantly raised the massive syringes in their hands and rushed toward the ringing sounds.
They laughed innocently.
“Gegege...”
Their expressions were bizarrely pure.
Yet in their tiny hands were syringes large enough to pierce straight through a human skull.
They waved them excitedly while attacking relentlessly.
And their strength was terrifyingly high.
Bai Liu pinned the phone between his shoulder and chin.
Without hesitation, he answered the first call.
A sharp childlike giggle immediately sounded from the other end.
“Mister Investor, I found you!”
A Deformed Child suddenly burst from the swarm.
He smiled at Bai Liu with a strange mixture of innocence and malice while raising an enormous syringe and lunging toward him.
Bai Liu whipped him away.
But from that point onward, the child clung tightly to him, circling him greedily like a child obsessed with candy, searching for an opportunity to stab the syringe into Bai Liu’s neck and suck out an entire tube of fresh blood.
At the same time—
Bai Liu’s phone rang again.
Expressionless, he answered.
Once more, the voice of a Deformed Child shrieked through the phone.
“Found you!”
“Blood!”
“I want blood, Mister Investor!”
Another child covered in slime suddenly lunged from the wall.
Seeing the thing about to bite into Bai Liu’s shoulder, Bai Liu narrowly blocked it with Thief’s Black Fingers before sending it flying with the whip.
Bai Liu’s face had already turned deathly pale.
He bit open a stamina recovery pack hanging near his mouth and drained it in one gulp.
Then, while dealing with the two monster children surrounding him, he answered a third call during the split-second opening between attacks.
“Blood!!”
“Give me blood!!”
“Kill you!!!”
The Deformed Children shrieked and laughed madly around him.
More and more gathered.
Bai Liu’s face was white enough to look almost transparent.
Though he still hadn’t suffered direct injury, it was obvious he was reaching his limit.
The only reason he was still holding on at all was because the Siren’s Bone whip possessed overwhelming judgment priority.
But as more and more calls connected, it became increasingly clear—
Sooner or later, Bai Liu would collapse.
Even Miao Feichi was stunned by Bai Liu’s suicidal behavior.
“Is he fucking crazy?!”
“Why does he keep answering the calls?!”
“Every time he answers, that Deformed Child permanently locks onto him! He’ll never shake them off!”
Even Miao Gaojiang found it incomprehensible.
Answering the calls did reduce the efficiency of the monsters’ group attacks.
But the drawback was equally obvious—
You would be relentlessly hunted by the monsters afterward.
Experienced players like Miao Gaojiang and Miao Feichi would never choose such a method.
Their years of game experience had taught them that being permanently targeted by monsters was one of the most troublesome situations imaginable.
Miao Gaojiang’s defense was high enough to endure it.
But Miao Feichi’s health was already being chipped away by repeated attacks from the children.
And more importantly—
Miao Gaojiang no longer wanted to waste time fighting Bai Liu.
“I already caught my child. The one who escaped was Mu Ke—”
Miao Gaojiang tightly gripped Xiao Miao Gaojiang’s hand and roared through clenched teeth:
“Feichi, break through first!”
“Forget Bai Liu and that kid!”
Miao Feichi reluctantly glanced backward.
But when he saw Bai Liu nearly drowning beneath the tide of monster children, he sneered coldly.
“Fine.”
“You’re going to die in this tunnel anyway.”
“The only difference is whether I kill you myself.”
He raised his twin blades, hacking through the Deformed Children surrounding him as he followed after Miao Gaojiang.
Behind them, Bai Liu was gradually swallowed by the swarm.
Just as Miao Feichi thought they were about to escape successfully—
Bai Liu suddenly laughed.
He answered another incoming call.
For the first time, a relieved smile appeared on his face, as though everything had finally unfolded exactly according to plan.
“I’ve finally waited for your call.”
The voice on the other end was slightly hoarse.
But calm as ever.
“It’s me.”
Something suddenly burst forward at terrifying speed from the church-side exit of the tunnel.
It stepped directly across the piled-up bodies of the Deformed Children as though walking on level ground.
Like a divine wind rushing from the church itself to save the world, it kicked aside the densely packed children surrounding Bai Liu and landed lightly in front of him.
The gust generated by the sprint blew against blood-soaked clothes before gradually settling.
A person had descended into the battlefield.
No—
Calling him a person no longer felt entirely correct.
It would be more accurate to say:
A little monster had fallen from the sky.
He landed within Bai Liu’s encirclement like a drifting willow leaf.
Then he stood there calmly before Bai Liu, like a guardian deity that had not yet fully taken shape.
Hidden in the darkness, Xiao Mu Ke stared at the newcomer without blinking.
He almost forgot how to breathe.
Forgot how to blink.
All his attention focused entirely on the child standing before Bai Liu.
His expression was so intense it looked as though he might burst into tears at any second.
Bai Liu seemed perfectly synchronized with him.
Without even looking back, he casually tossed the Siren’s Bone whip over.
Then he stood back-to-back with the child and extended Thief’s Black Fingers.
The child was only tall enough to reach Bai Liu’s shoulder.
He turned slightly, revealing a pale profile stained with blood.
Wet hair clung to his cheeks.
The backs of his hands and his bare feet were covered in blue-black needle marks left behind by endless blood draws.
His lips were dry and darkened.
Black blood stained the front of his clothes where he had vomited earlier.
The ends of his hair were still wet from the church baptismal pool, hanging damply against his thin, bony shoulders.
Xiao Bai Six held a phone.
Bai Liu held one too.
At the same time, Bai Liu could hear Xiao Bai Six speaking both through the phone and directly beside him.
The overlapping voices merged together like some beautiful multilayered symphony.
“Good morning, Mister Investor.”
“It seems I’m not late.”
Bai Six flicked the bone whip lightly.
He had no heartbeat.
No breath.
Even his voice carried a strange hoarse stillness.
“Working for you even after death...”
“I’ll have to double my rates now, Mister Investor.”
“Two hundred yuan per minute.”
Bai Liu laughed lazily.
“Fine.”
“Charge whatever you want.”
“All my money is yours.”
[System Notification: Player Bai Liu’s sub-identity line died from blood loss. The corpse was discarded inside the tunnel and underwent mutation. Mutation process complete—]
[—Player Bai Liu’s sub-identity line has become a Deformed Child in the Monster Book.]
