Bang!
With a loud crash, the cabinet Shen Ge had locked burst open. The human head inside had undergone a earth-shaking transformation!
The upper part of the head had melted like “white wax,” with waxy oil trickling down the face. The mouth had transformed into the kind of fleshy, carnivorous, petal-like maw seen on the parasitized, and several long, thin, red tentacles were extending from it.
The moment the cabinet was forced open, the tentacles from the head’s mouth shot toward Shen Ge. Fortunately, he reacted quickly, leaning back to dodge, then rolling on the spot. Before the pool of blood spreading across the floor could reach him, he climbed onto an empty hospital bed nearby, escaping both the blood and the tentacles.
Within the dream world, Shen Ge possessed two main abilities: “Hypnosis” and “Materialization.” However, compared to Materialization, he preferred using Hypnosis.
This wasn’t about conserving the weird energy within him. The issue with Materialization – conjuring things from nothing – was that using it rashly, unless in a desperate situation, could easily draw Doctor Chen’s attention.
Hypnosis, on the other hand, was a reinforcement of his own attributes. Even if this suddenly enhanced physical ability or superhuman power was exposed, it would likely only lead Doctor Chen and the others to mistake it for a special effect of the Ancestral Weird’s cells inside him.
At that moment, the red tentacles from the head, having failed to coil around Shen Ge, suddenly changed direction and lashed towards the severed limbs in the pool of blood.
Several limbs were dragged back near the cabinet. The “white wax” on either side of the head’s face suddenly stretched, coalescing into a massive, blood-red maw that devoured the limbs.
Strangely enough, as the head devoured limbs on one side, on the other side, at the cleanly severed stumps of the human torso monster sitting on the central bed, white bubbles began to gurgle and rise. These bubbles quickly solidified into white wax, and then fully formed limbs grew back.
“Wow, so you can regenerate like that, huh?” Shen Ge knew he had to find a way out of the operating room quickly, or he would become this freak’s next meal.
Last time, the freak hadn’t “revived.” It had just produced an endless flood of plasma that filled the corridors, eventually merging with the strange infant inside the female freak. But in the end, Shen Ge had died at the hands of that plasma-infant hybrid, which had ended that particular dream world journey.
So now, Shen Ge faced two choices. The first was to follow the previous script and lure the plasma freak towards the female freak’s operating room.
Following this path would essentially mean progressing the “plot” exactly as in his first dream world visit. That first time, there had been no “infinite loop” scenario involving a non-death exit, and he had successfully woken up.
The problem was, the first time, the human torso freak hadn’t undergone this “revival.” Shen Ge couldn’t be sure if letting it merge with the strange infant counted as “changing the plot.”
Furthermore, judging by the current situation, the human torso freak’s strength seemed to surpass even the floor patroller’s. Even with “Hypnosis” plus “Materialization,” he might not be able to defeat it before his weird energy ran out.
Unless… he found an even stronger freak.
This was Shen Ge’s second planned option: lure the human torso freak to the big boss of Rongshan Mental Hospital – the Director himself – and see what kind of chaos those two could create.
Comparatively, Shen Ge was leaning towards the second option.
The first option, after all, involved following an “ending” that had already occurred. Even if he successfully woke up, this trip would have been for nothing.
He still didn’t have the “key” to enter the dream world at will. No one knew when his next entry would be. So, Shen Ge wasn’t willing to waste this opportunity.
The human torso freak didn’t give Shen Ge much time to think. Its body, previously just a massive torso, had now regenerated into a hulking figure, at least two meters tall excluding its head.
Meanwhile, the head on the other side was still continuously devouring limbs from the blood pool. Although the human torso freak wasn’t sprouting multiple heads and arms like some mythical monster as the head fed, it was clearly still growing. Its height had shot up from two meters to nearly three meters in the blink of an eye.
“Gulp.”
“Gulp.”
The bulging abdomen of the human torso freak began to pulsate like a heartbeat. With each throb came a strange, gurgling sound, the distinctive swallowing noise of a freak.
The human torso freak stepped through the blood pool with a sticky, squelching sound, its giant strides carrying it directly towards Shen Ge, who was cornered on the hospital bed.
Seeing this, Shen Ge seized the moment, hypnotizing himself to enhance his jumping power and agility. He took a running start and leaped, clearing the top of the human torso freak’s head. He landed on the central operating table in the middle of the room, then lunged forward again, moving with the practiced ease of someone on an obstacle course, and successfully reached the sliding door of the operating room.
He squeezed through the gap, pulled the door shut, tore off his patient gown, tied it tightly around the two door handles in a secure knot, and then ran towards the stairwell.
Whether he was going to find the female freak or the Director, he needed to go upstairs. But just as he reached the stairwell entrance, there was a deafening BANG. The operating room’s sliding door was blasted clean off its tracks. Then, the human torso freak, moving with giant strides like a “Biohazard Tyrant,” charged towards the stairwell.
Right as the human torso freak burst out of the operating room, a bizarre sight followed: a human head, its neck entirely composed of tentacles, crawled out like some kind of centipede monster.
“…”
Seeing this, Shen Ge was momentarily speechless, fighting the urge to yell, “Couldn’t you two have merged completely before coming out?”
But the human torso freak clearly wasn’t going to give him a chance to quip. It lunged forward, swinging a massive fist. Luckily, Shen Ge’s self-hypnosis was active, acting like a system “stat boost.” Unless he consciously deactivated it, the effect would last until his weird energy ran out.
Relying on his enhanced agility, Shen Ge lunged forward to dodge the blow, then kicked off the wall, propelling himself like a projectile towards the next floor.
Shen Ge was fast, but the spider-head thing and the human torso freak weren’t slow either. Moreover, with the operating room door smashed open, the pool of blood inside began to flood out into the corridor.
Fortunately, this time the human torso freak hadn’t “exploded.” The plasma wasn’t infinite, so after flowing out of the operating room, it simply drained down the stairwell.
But this also meant the lower two floors were definitely inaccessible. The two choices before Shen Ge were now mandatory; there was no turning back.
“If I die here, I’ll probably leave the dream world. Last time I left, I seemed to have taken the scalpel from this world with me… meaning… can things from here be taken out?”
“Are only specific things possible, or can everything be taken out?”
“No, according to the records in the Mirror Freak and the Freak Association archives, the dream world is a higher-level manifestation of Weird Space. And Weird Space is the纽带 connecting the countless endings of Earth 2 with Earth 3… Speaking of which, the ‘future’ that Sakurajima leads to is also one of those endings…”
And Shen Ge had brought back quite a lot from Sakurajima, not just research files on various “futures,” but also numerous weird energy guns and equipment.
So, does that mean everything in the dream world can be taken out?
As Shen Ge pondered this, his eyes fell on a door sign at the end of the corridor: “Storage Room” – three large characters. He couldn’t help but think back to his last trip, when he’d crawled through the ventilation duct in this very storage room and encountered a “strange hand.”
Thinking about the freaks in this dream world – the “Head,” the “Human Torso,” the “Strange Infant”… and now the “Strange Hand” he’d encountered later – he’d always felt there might be some kind of connection between them.
It was as if a complete person had been dismembered into many parts, and each part had undergone its own “aberration,” becoming an independent entity.
This train of thought inevitably led Shen Ge to the Ancestral Weird. According to clues gathered from various sources, only a portion of the Ancestral Weird was extracted from the infant’s body. Through “research” on these parts, the research team discovered the existence of weird energy, leading them to find the world’s first official Weird.
Later, after the Haiya Research Institute incident, the researchers “dismembered” this complete Weird for study. Could there be a connection between that and the dismembered freaks in the dream world?
Furthermore, the system’s main ability was “Devouring.” It not only let him devour various types of Weirds but also found the Ancestral Weird’s cells to be especially “nourishing.” Could this be the Ancestral Weird trying to retrieve its lost limbs?
At that moment, a bold idea flashed through Shen Ge’s mind. Driven by the thought that this trip couldn’t be a total waste, even if it meant dying, he charged into the storage room without hesitation.
“If I can bring the ‘Strange Hand’ – or even the ‘Head’ or ‘Human Torso’ – back to the real world for study, maybe I’ll find the answer!”
Based on his previous experience, the “Strange Hand” was nowhere near as powerful as the already-fully-aberrated “Head” and “Human Torso.” Choosing to go after it now was undoubtedly the most sensible option.
After rushing into the storage room, Shen Ge closed the door. Worried about exposure, he didn’t hesitate to use Materialization, conjuring several steel bars to barricade the door.
The storage room wasn’t large. Two metal shelves stood against the side walls, crammed with severed hands and feet that looked disturbingly real.
The commotion in the corridor outside hadn’t reached this point yet; the head freak and human torso freak were still some distance away. Last time, he hadn’t had a chance to look around carefully. This time, he planned to spend a couple of minutes investigating.
Given that when the head freak devoured limbs in the operating room, the human torso freak grew new ones, these severed limbs were clearly no ordinary props. They seemed more like “supplements” developed by the Freak Association’s researchers for their creations.
So, Shen Ge materialized a military knife and swung it at the limbs. They felt real to the touch, like actual skin. But when the knife cut a gash, no blood flowed. Beneath the half-centimeter thick skin was a plastic-like substance.
Shen Ge picked out two relatively small hands, materialized a backpack, and stuffed the limbs inside. Then his gaze swept towards the pile of body bags stacked in the corner.
He walked to the nearest body bag and slit it open with the knife. Inside was a cold corpse. Under the pale white skin, something black squirmed – reminiscent of the centipedes he’d seen wriggling in the intestines of the “corpses” before.
Shen Ge materialized a small bottle, sliced open the skin with his knife, fished out a couple of the wriggling black worms, and dropped them into the bottle. He sealed the lid and reinforced it with materialized steel strips.
Shen Ge didn’t seem like someone hiding from monsters in a storage room; he looked more like he was on a “shopping spree,” cutting a piece here, scooping something there, until his backpack was full.
He even found, among the pile of body bags, one containing a strange infant. He packed the whole thing. If it weren’t for his limited stamina and weird energy, he’d have loved to haul the entire contents of the storage room back for Li Xiang to study. Maybe it would provide a breakthrough in dealing with these freaks.
Thump!
Thump!
During Shen Ge’s “shopping spree,” the footsteps in the corridor grew closer. Sensing the human torso freak was nearly there, he quickly climbed up the shelves, located the ventilation duct, pried open the cover with his knife, and crawled inside.
No sooner had he gotten into the duct than a tremendous crash echoed from the storage room. The thick metal door was punched open by the human torso freak. But Shen Ge was long gone. The massive freak could only glare helplessly at the narrow duct – except it didn’t even have a head to glare with.
However, Shen Ge’s relief was short-lived. Within two minutes, he heard a rustling, scuttling sound inside the duct. The human torso freak couldn’t fit, but the head freak certainly could.
Beneath the head, dozens or hundreds of red, fleshy tentacles propelled it rapidly through the duct, even faster than Shen Ge could move.
Relying on vague memories, Shen Ge located the exit sealed with wire mesh. He kicked it open with a few powerful blows and jumped down into the file room below.
The moment he landed in the file room, he heard a faint, unusual noise from a table stacked high with folders. Then, a solitary “hand” jumped down from the table.
Instead of being alarmed, Shen Ge was delighted. He waved his hands, materializing an “insect net,” and smiled at the hand on the floor. “Well, well, look who’s being proactive. Didn’t even have to go looking for you; you came out all by yourself!”
The hand was missing everything above the wrist – no arm, let alone a body or head. Just a lone “hand.”
It stood on the open floor, its index and middle fingers pressed to the ground, raised up like a “head.” The next second, it launched itself fiercely at Shen Ge.
“Net’s got you!” Shen Ge, with his hypnotized agility, sidestepped and swung the net, successfully capturing the hand.
Rip! The net tore open under the hand’s assault, but it was too late. Shen Ge’s insect net was merely for “targeting”; the real focus was the metal pole.
The moment the hand ripped through the fabric, the tip of the metal pole in Shen Ge’s grip flowed like molten metal, instantly solidifying into a metal can that trapped the hand.
However, Shen Ge had clearly underestimated the hand’s strength. No sooner was it trapped than it tore the can apart, bending it out of shape, and squeezed out.
Although Shen Ge could “materialize” many things, the more durable the material, the more weird energy it consumed. Not only was he currently maintaining “Hypnosis,” but even if he wanted to expend more energy, he couldn’t materialize something like the “Weird Sleeping Bag” – an item specifically designed to contain freaks.
“Wait a minute!”
Shen Ge suddenly remembered that Rongshan Mental Hospital used these body bags to store experimental subjects and freak corpses. Didn’t that mean they might also have a “containment” effect?
And during his “shopping spree” in the storage room, he had specifically grabbed a body bag containing the corpse of a strange infant!
He quickly materialized another insect net, covering the hand. Then he altered the state of the metal pole, turning it into a can to trap the hand again. This time, before the hand could tear through the can, he quickly unzipped the body bag, wrapped the whole can inside, and successfully sealed the hand away.
The hand struggled violently inside the body bag, distorting its shape, but it couldn’t tear or puncture the material.
Shen Ge breathed a sigh of relief and stuffed the body bag into his backpack. But before he could fully relax, a deafening crash echoed. The ventilation duct opening was mangled and deformed, and a massive head crawled out from within!
