Free Web NovelChapter 366: Chapter 350: Let’s Follow That Man to the Village Ahead and See What’s Going On
Within the lavish manor,
A group of young people had been having the time of their lives, their laughter and cheers echoing in every corner.
However, when they rushed over together and saw the horrific scene on the ground,
the joyful atmosphere was instantly torn to shreds, as if by a giant, unseen hand.
In its place was a suffocating sense of dread.
Some of them saw the scene and couldn’t help but suck in a sharp breath.
The chill shot straight to their hearts, sending shivers down their spines.
Others screamed in terror.
The cry shattered the silence of the night sky,
ripping through the once-peaceful air and startling nearby birds into a panicked flutter of wings.
There were also the braver ones,
whose first instinct was to quickly pull out their phones to capture the hair-raising image and share it with others.
It was as if doing so could somehow lessen their own fear,
or perhaps serve as proof that they had witnessed such a bizarre event.
Then there were those who, simply by imagining the potential dire consequences,
instantly turned deathly pale.
In that moment, the oppressive atmosphere began to spread among the crowd like a slowly flowing black stream.
Even Qi Shulei, who had come with Sun Canxing,
was considered worldly and had seen a thing or two. But when she saw the scene on the ground,
she couldn’t help the look of astonishment on her face and blurted out, "What on earth happened here?"
There on the ground, barely illuminated by the dim yellow light of a streetlamp, lay a man of about fifty.
His sparse black hair was interwoven with white at the tips.
His exposed skin
resembled the bark of an old tree that had weathered countless seasons, crisscrossed with deep ravines.
It was withered, yet it held a tough, leathery quality.
He lay helplessly on his back, his eyes half-open.
The fear of the unknown and the despair in his gaze were like a bottomless black hole,
capturing the eyes of everyone who looked at him.
His lips were slightly parted, like a long-dried spring desperately trying to gulp down the thin air.
Each breath was as faint as a silken thread, so weak it seemed it might stop at any second.
It was accompanied by intermittent convulsions,
making him look like the sputtering stump of a candle in the wind, flickering and ready to be extinguished at any moment.
Even more horrifying, his body seemed to have become a natural breeding ground.
From the backs of his hands to his fingertips, from his face to his nostrils, and even on his neck,
a dense cluster of multicolored mushrooms sprouted from all his exposed skin.
These were no ordinary mushrooms; they weren’t still.
Instead, they writhed slowly with a bizarre, skin-crawling rhythm.
Each one possessed its own vibrant life,
intertwined with the host’s endless agony.
Their kaleidoscopic colors,
now appeared exceptionally sinister, like demonic flowers from Hell exuding a strange aura.
A low, suppressed groan escaped from deep within the man’s throat.
His voice was laced with unspeakable pain and struggle,
as if a pair of invisible hands were viciously tearing at his soul.
He desperately tried to break free from some unseen restraint, but it was utterly futile.
His neck began to swell abnormally due to some internal, incomprehensible force.
The veins and tendons were like suddenly awakened earthworms,
twisting and struggling
as they bulged beneath his skin,
a sinister omen of a more terrible catastrophe yet to come.
Just then, someone with trembling hands switched on a flashlight.
A powerful beam of light sliced through the darkness, aimed directly at the man’s face.
Under the blinding glare, the onlookers made a terrifying discovery.
Something was stirring deep inside the man’s throat.
The object slowly ascended like a slithering viper, stretching his neck wider and wider.
Finally, a similarly multicolored and bizarre mushroom slowly emerged from his gaping mouth,
like an ominous flower blooming wantonly in the desperate atmosphere.
The mushroom’s growth was astonishingly fast.
In the blink of an eye, it formed a brilliant, crown-like structure inside his mouth.
Its vibrant colors were particularly garish in that moment,
like an eerie flame burning in the dark, making hearts pound with fear.
As it fully formed, the man’s body began to shrivel at an incredible speed.
All the Life Force within his body
was rapidly devoured by this grotesque mushroom, like a starving wolf pouncing on its prey.
All that remained was an empty, withered husk,
lying silently like a puppet with its soul ripped out.
"Could this be some kind of virus?"
a young man asked, his voice trembling with deep fear.
"It feels less like a virus and more like some bizarre Evil Spirit at work,"
another person replied, their face filled with terror.
"We can’t be this unlucky, can we? We finally graduated, and now we run right into an Evil Spirit at our graduation party?"
someone complained in a tearful voice, already imagining the terrible fate that awaited them.
"So this is the work of a bizarre Evil Spirit’s power... It’s even more terrifying than what I read about in my textbooks,"
someone stammered, unconsciously taking a few steps back.
"Wait, we’re standing so close... It’s not contagious like a virus, is it?"
