Free Web Novel[System Notification: Player Li Gou has been burned by flames. Health -15, Mental Value -15. Due to severe fluctuations in Mental Value, Mental Value continues to decrease... Mental Value has dropped below 40.]
[System Warning: Player Li Gou is about to experience a large number of subconscious horror hallucinations! Please restore Mental Value immediately!]
Screaming amidst the raging flames, Li Gou couldn’t hear the system warnings at all.
And even if he had heard them, there was nothing he could do.
Every point he possessed had already been taken by Bai Liu. He simply didn’t have enough points left to purchase bleach.
But very soon, Li Gou suddenly felt the bomb strapped to his back become wet, clammy, and reeking of raw meat.
A drop of blood trickled down the back of his neck.
The blood was hot.
The surrounding flames were hot too.
Yet Li Gou still shuddered violently.
Warm liquid carrying the metallic smell of rust rapidly soaked through his back. Wet black hair tangled with blood slowly slid over his shoulder, swaying softly beside his face. Drop after drop of bright-red blood splashed against the tops of his feet.
Then a pair of pale hands wrapped gently around his throat from behind.
Written across the back of one hand in black marker were the words:
[College Entrance Exam Countdown: (blurred) Days!]
[Guoguo, keep going! Normal University is waiting for you!]
A little girl’s voice hummed softly beside his ear.
It wasn’t quite singing, not quite speaking.
“Where is the world filled with flowers?~ If it truly exists, I’ll definitely go there someday~”
It was “The Heart of a Brave Youth,” the choir song from Liu Guoguo’s senior-year assembly.
Every day, Li Gou had watched that girl pass by the alley outside his butcher shop while humming that song through her headphones.
She had been so clean.
So beautiful.
And all Li Gou had ever done was pry at that beauty with greasy eyes full of lust.
Until finally, he had taken a butcher knife and destroyed that fragile, innocent beauty over and over again.
Li Gou swallowed hard, his body turning rigid.
He didn’t dare look back. freёwebnovel.com
He could only mutter repeatedly under his breath:
“It’s a hallucination... it’s a hallucination...”
“I want to stand atop the highest mountain~”
The sweet voice interrupted his chanting.
The little girl giggled as she sang, but there was something indescribably eerie hidden beneath the cheerfulness.
Cold hands slowly tightened around Li Gou’s neck.
“I don’t care if it’s a cliff or an abyss~”
A face hacked apart into seven or eight uneven pieces suddenly peeked out beside Li Gou’s shoulder.
The bridge of the nose had collapsed inward.
Blood and flesh were split open.
Yet Liu Guoguo ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ still smiled at him with innocent sweetness.
“Uncle Li,” she said softly.
“Long time no see.”
“AHHHHHHHHH—!”
Li Gou collapsed completely.
He bolted forward wildly.
If Zhang Kui’s puppet strings hadn’t been dragging him onward, he would’ve completely lost all sense of direction. ƒreewebɳovel.com
As he ran, he desperately tried to shake Liu Guoguo off his back.
But although he was clearly inside a burning subway station, the surroundings suddenly twisted into the alley behind his butcher shop.
No matter where he ran, he could see Liu Guoguo’s blood-covered face smiling beside the butcher stall.
Approaching him.
Singing.
Li Gou ran in terror, but the Liu Guoguo clinging to his back suddenly grew enormous.
Still smiling sweetly, she grabbed his hands and feet, pinned the screaming Li Gou onto a chopping block, and began driving a butcher knife into his abdomen over and over again while humming her song.
She carved out his flesh.
His organs.
His bones.
Exactly the way he had once done to her.
“AHHHHHH—! IT HURTS!! STOP!! STOP CUTTING ME!!”
Li Gou screamed until his eyes nearly burst from their sockets.
But the moment he cried out again, Liu Guoguo seemed to find him annoying.
With a cheerful smile, she plunged the knife into his throat.
To the rhythm of her song, the blade slowly twisted inside his neck.
“That’s what cowards do~”
Fresh blood burst outward instantly.
Li Gou convulsed violently in agony. He had already lost control of his bladder, and his legs shook uncontrollably beneath him.
Yet even so, the puppet strings continued dragging him forward.
Coughing blood, Li Gou was hauled toward the reservoir step by step.
In his hallucinations, Liu Guoguo had already chopped his limbs apart.
Although none of it was real, the attacks projected from his own subconscious were so overwhelming that Li Gou couldn’t distinguish illusion from reality anymore.
His eyes became vacant.
He dragged himself through the burning station like a corpse, crawling through flames and drifting ash.
Liu Guoguo lay atop his back, slicing away his scalp inch by inch with the knife.
The pain was unbearable.
But Li Gou couldn’t even scream anymore.
He could only stare ahead blankly while tears streamed from his eyes and blood continuously welled up in his throat.
Inside the hallucination, his entire body was drenched in blood.
In reality, however, he was simply twitching on the ground like a dying dog, foam gathering at the corners of his mouth as his eyes rolled back.
Nothing had actually happened to him.
He was merely being tortured by the horror buried within his own mind.
When Li Gou killed people, he had never considered Liu Guoguo human.
To him, slaughtering her had been no different from butchering livestock.
Naturally, he had never felt guilt.
Originally, he never would have experienced hallucinations like these—because in the deepest part of his subconscious, he had never feared Liu Guoguo at all.
To him, she had only ever been a powerless little animal whose fate he could decide on a whim.
But Bai Liu had suddenly transformed Liu Guoguo from something powerless into someone capable of dragging him into hell.
And at last, fear awakened inside him.
For the first time, Li Gou finally realized what he had actually done.
So this...
...was what it meant to kill a person.
So Liu Guoguo really had been human.
And it really hurt this much.
Dragging himself forward with his elbows, Li Gou finally crawled to the reservoir inch by inch.
He gasped weakly for air.
Liu Guoguo clung to his back, her blood mixing with his own while strands of black hair curled around his throat.
Rationally, Li Gou knew the thing on his back was only a bomb.
But now—
That bomb had become Liu Guoguo.
The Liu Guoguo he had raped.
The Liu Guoguo he had butchered alive.
She lay happily against his back like a carefree little bird, singing softly into his ear where only he could hear:
“Maybe I have no talent~ But I still carry the innocence of dreams~”
“I’ll prove it with my whole life~”
“Maybe my hands and feet are clumsy~ But I’m willing to keep searching~”
“Even if blood stains my embrace~ I’ll keep running forward with the pride of a brave youth~”
Liu Guoguo had once been a beautiful, hardworking, gentle seventeen-year-old girl who loved pork dishes.
She had been preparing for the college entrance exams.
She was supposed to attend a good normal university and become a teacher.
She loved singing “The Heart of a Brave Youth.”
Whenever she smiled, she would tuck her long hair behind her ear.
Originally, nothing in the world should have been enough to destroy her completely.
Even after being assaulted, she could have cried.
Broken down.
Locked herself in her room.
But eventually—
She might still have healed.
Because none of it had been her fault.
She never should have had to spend the rest of her life paying for something done to her.
Originally, the entire incident could have become nothing more than a scar.
But that was only originally.
Li Gou closed his eyes as filthy tears streamed down his face.
He opened his mouth as though trying to say something.
But in the end, nothing came out except blood.
His eyes widened unwillingly.
Behind him, Liu Guoguo wrapped her arms around his neck. After finishing her song, she let out a light laugh and dragged him together with her into the reservoir.
Countless bubbles surged violently across the water’s surface.
Then—
BOOM.
The explosion erupted.
Li Gou’s body was blasted apart into countless fragments of flesh and shattered bone—
Exactly the same way Liu Guoguo once had been.
The reservoir walls cracked open.
Water burst violently through the breach.
For a brief moment, the crisp laughter of a young girl echoed faintly across the water like a cold, mocking sneer—
Then vanished completely.
[System Notification (All Players): Player Li Gou’s Health has reached zero. Death confirmed. Exiting game.]
***
Inside the train carriage, everyone was running for their lives.
Mu Shicheng carried Bai Liu at the front while Zhang Kui and the others desperately gathered mirror fragments behind them, all while being pursued by the Thief Brothers.
But they were reaching their limit.
Without Du Sanying luring the monsters away, everyone’s stamina, items, and numerical stats had been pushed to exhaustion. Meanwhile, the Thief Brothers—Didi and Gege—had become especially violent after losing their fragments.
If the chase continued much longer, and Didi fully charged his ultimate skill—
They would all be wiped out.
Clinging to a hanging strap while dodging through the carriage, Mu Shicheng breathed heavily and shouted toward Bai Liu:
“Bai Liu! I can’t hold them off much longer!”
Bai Liu looked calmly out the window.
Then he exhaled slowly and smiled.
“You don’t need to.”
“The water’s here.”
Water thundered down the subway stairways.
The sizzling sound of flames being extinguished mixed with the roar of flooding water. Steam instantly filled the entire station, swallowing the train in a hazy white mist.
The exploding passengers who had relentlessly pursued them were drenched by the rushing water, and the flames covering their bodies instantly died out.
Their charred feet began melting into the floodwater itself, sticking them in place at the bottom of the carriage.
They threw back their heads and wailed shrilly while clawing the air with shriveled hands—
But they could no longer move even a single step.
Steam pinned them in place like restraints.
Thief Didi, who had been charging after Bai Liu, was suddenly soaked through by the floodwater. He stumbled, crashed face-first into the floor, and instantly shrank into a heap of blackened charcoal-like remains while howling miserably.
Seeing this, Thief Gege immediately abandoned the chase and hurried back anxiously to help his brother.
But even after shrinking, Didi was still too large for him to carry.
The two brothers huddled together pitifully in the floodwater, chirping weakly at each other while trembling like drowned rats.
Mu Shicheng finally set Bai Liu down to rest.
Now that the Thief Brothers’ speed and attack power had been drastically reduced, catching them was almost impossible.
Mu Shicheng glanced sideways at Bai Liu.
His white shirt was soaked through with blood, his face pale with exhaustion.
Then Mu Shicheng looked back at the two crying brothers shivering in the floodwater and clicked his tongue complicatedly.
Who would’ve thought that those same monsters who had nearly wiped them all out earlier would eventually be crushed like this by Bai Liu—
A man who was barely clinging to life himself.
“Put on the diving gear,” Bai Liu reminded him calmly.
He lifted a diving mask over his own face. Thin white mist formed against the glass with every breath, leaving only his dark, steady eyes visible beneath it.
“The train’s about to move.”
“This section of the tunnel will probably collapse completely, and the water will rush in all at once.”
The train announcement echoed overhead:
“The train is preparing to depart. Passengers exiting, please do so promptly. Next stop—the final station, [Antique City].”
***
Author’s Note:
Tawil is finally about to appear!
The next instance transitions into the main storyline! Our background-character comrade Xiao Ta is finally getting more screen time after 300,000 words—please give him a round of applause!
6: So I actually have a partner.
Tawil: I exist in your heart (fish scales)... and around your waist (fish bone)...
6: Can I change partners? This one seems defective.
Tawil: ...?
Tawil’s setting is “cold iceberg handsome guy / pure-hearted pervert.” Which means that when he does questionable things, he genuinely doesn’t realize they’re questionable at all.
This is what we call “Schrödinger’s Smut.”
