“No—this—how is this possible? No way.” Staring at the “corpse” that looked exactly like him, Wang Han was completely dumbfounded.
He was right here, alive—so why was there a “body” that looked identical to him?
Wang Han took a closer look at the corpse and noticed a few differences. He himself was wearing hospital patient pajamas, while the “body” was dressed in the security uniform he wore on the job.
“How—who is this person?” Wang Han still couldn’t wrap his head around it. He fixed his eyes on Shen Ge, hoping for an answer.
Shen Ge didn’t say a word. Instead, he walked over to the third bed and yanked off the white sheet covering it. “Wang Han, don’t you get it yet?”
The “corpse” under the sheet was completely disfigured—its head crushed flat, and its body riddled with bloody holes. But from the clothes it wore, it was unmistakably the uniform of the hospital’s security staff.
“Wait—he—could he be… the security driver who drove me home last night?” Wang Han recalled that when he crawled out of the wrecked car the night before, lightning flashes had illuminated the scene, revealing the mangled security guard. Putting together the wounds and the uniform, it all clicked.
Then Shen Ge pulled the sheet off the bed next to it, revealing the security guard who had jumped from the vehicle earlier—similarly mutilated, a gruesome sight.
Wang Han stood frozen, his mind seemingly grinding to a halt. His gaze drifted back to the corpse that looked just like him.
The crash injuries from the cliff fall. The leg pierced by the twisted, deformed door panel. The various wounds across his body. And the cheek that had been bitten by those bugs.
“Hold on—”
Could it be…
A horrifying thought suddenly flashed through Wang Han’s mind: what if he had actually died the moment his car went over that cliff?
And this was… a ghost?
Or maybe some kind of clone?
Wang Han shook his head vigorously, trying to banish those awful thoughts. He scolded himself for watching too many horror movies. Aside from that sweet, naive rookie at the headquarters in Dajing, who actually took Shen Tan’s whole spiel about “watching horror movies to improve your psychological tolerance for oddities” seriously?
Huh?
Huh, huh?
“What was that…? It felt like a fragment of memory that wasn’t mine suddenly flashed through my head?” Wang Han was taken aback.
But strangely, when he tried to recall the image and memory that had zipped by just a moment ago, he couldn’t grasp it at all.
All he could remember was one phrase: Shen Tan.
“Shen Tan? Who’s that? That name feels so familiar—is it one of the hospital staff?” Wang Han racked his brain but came up empty.
Shen Ge, however, paid no attention to the dazed Wang Han. He returned to the first corpse and used the scalpel to cut open Ma Chao’s “stomach.” With a wet splurch, the moment the stomach was sliced open, a massive lump of bloody, rotting flesh gushed out—and embedded in that pile of decay was a face that was half-melted.
Shen Ge reached out to pull out that half-decomposed face, but before his fingers could touch the stomach, more and more rotten flesh surged from the opened organ. The stomach was like a bottomless pit, spewing out enormous amounts of decaying meat, slowly swallowing the other internal organs and the rest of the body.
Blood bubbles rose from the rotting mass, and faint pop-pop-pop sounds of them bursting could be heard. As more and more rotten flesh poured out, it quickly filled the entire bed.
“Uh… I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” Shen Ge turned back to look at Wang Han.
“?”
Wang Han was completely baffled by the question. But the next second, he saw the grotesque changes in that stomach and felt a wave of dread. “I only want the good news!”
“The good news is we might be leaving ahead of schedule,” Shen Ge said.
Wang Han was confused. “What do you mean?”
“Death isn’t necessarily the end, Wang Han. There’s not much I can do for you. You have to overcome your fear on your own if you want to wake up.” With that, Shen Ge actually dove headfirst into that pile of rotting flesh and was swallowed up in the blink of an eye.
Wang Han tried to reach out and grab him, but he was standing by the third bed, while Shen Ge was near the door—too far to close the distance in time.
“Shen Ge!” Wang Han cried out in desperation.
One, because Shen Ge being devoured like that couldn’t mean anything good; and two, based on what Shen Ge had just said, he clearly knew how to get out of there.
But the way Shen Ge had phrased it was so cryptic that Wang Han was completely lost. What did “overcome your fear to wake up” mean? And what was this “leave ahead of schedule” business?
“Dammit! I should’ve just listened to the bad news too,” Wang Han grumbled as he sprinted for the door. But the rotting flesh kept spreading, and in no time, the entire morgue was smothered in that nauseating mass of meat.
“Will all you riddle-speakers just get out of Gotham already?!” Wang Han roared.
Huh?
Now where did that line come from? It sounded awfully familiar—hadn’t he heard someone complain like that before?
Right then, another memory flickered in Wang Han’s mind, just like before. But again, when he tried to focus on it, it slipped away.
And he didn’t have much time to think. The rotting flesh was spreading faster and faster—he had to get out of there now.
BAM!
Wang Han crashed through the door and into the corridor. The flesh-monster behind him was closing in fast. He wanted to run upstairs, but the stairwell was pitch black, as if shrouded in some eerie dark mist. He didn’t dare go any further, so he turned and bolted toward the end of the hallway.
The door at the far end was locked. Wang Han slammed into it again and again. He could see the rotting monster oozing out of the morgue, and panic began to set in—but this was his only way out. He gritted his teeth and kept ramming.
BAM!
BAM!
The flesh-monster was getting closer, and Wang Han’s anxiety grew with every second.
CRASH—
The door finally burst open and slammed against the wall cabinet beside it with a loud bang. Wang Han tumbled into the room, landing on a pile of severed limbs and dismembered arms.
He didn’t have time to dwell on the horrific, nauseating sight. He scrambled to his feet, slammed the door shut, and shoved a cabinet in front of it to block the flesh-monster from breaking in.
But that also trapped him inside the room. He looked around and realized it was some kind of storage space—and the limbs on the floor weren’t real; they were just prosthetic models.
“What the hell did Shen Ge mean by that? ‘We might be leaving ahead of schedule’—wouldn’t that be a good thing? And what’s with ‘death isn’t necessarily the end’ and ‘overcome your fear to wake up’… Dammit, if I ever see that riddle-spewing Shen Ge again, I’m punching him in the face!” Wang Han cursed.
THUMP!
THUMP!
The door shook with heavy impacts. He didn’t need to look to know that the rotting monster had oozed its way over and was ramming against it. Wang Han was anxious, but his temper flared too. “Screw it! If I had my full gear, I’d wipe the floor with you, you pathetic oddity! I’d beat the crap out of you until you couldn’t even recognize yourself!”
Huh?
Wait.
???
Wang Han suddenly noticed more and more strange memories popping into his head, as if a flood of information was pouring out, leaving his mind in chaos.
“What the hell is happening to me?” The pounding at the door grew louder, and Wang Han could only panic helplessly. But he wasn’t about to just wait around to die. He started rummaging through the room, looking for a way out.
He picked up a prosthetic hand and used it like a club, tapping and poking around the room, searching for hidden passages or mechanisms.
Unfortunately, he turned the place upside down and found nothing—except a ventilation grate on the wall beside the cabinet.
“A vent?”
Maybe he could crawl through it!
Wang Han dragged the cabinet over, climbed up, and tried to squeeze into the vent. But it was narrow—even a child would have trouble crawling through, let alone a grown man.
Meanwhile, from under the door, disgusting rotting flesh had already started “squeezing” into the room, slowly spreading toward the pile of prosthetic limbs.
Wang Han didn’t have time to hesitate. He used the cabinet to climb toward the vent, forcing his body through with all his might. His head made it, but his body had to scrunch up. At that moment, he wished he could perform some kind of bone-contortion technique.
Creeeak.
Creeeak.
To his surprise, the ventilation duct started to warp under the pressure of his body. It seemed to stretch slightly—just enough for him to crawl forward with difficulty.
Wang Han pushed ahead, but the further he went, the more wrong it felt. The metal that should have been hard and solid was becoming soft and squishy, giving him the eerie sensation of crawling through a monster’s intestines.
“Heh. I’m not actually about to have Shen Tan’s prediction come true, am I? The old ‘day trip inside a giant oddity’s belly’ special?” Wang Han muttered to himself.
The moment the words left his mouth, he froze. A strange image appeared in his mind—a group of people eating and drinking in a cafeteria, surrounding a young man with flattery, praising him for single-handedly taking down a Stage 4 giant oddity and saving an entire city.
The young man just smiled and called it luck, saying he’d only managed to win because he’d accidentally fallen into the oddity’s stomach and destroyed it from the inside.
Wang Han thought the young man looked familiar—like a “grown-up version” of the ten-year-old Shen Ge.
But Wang Han was just Shen Ge’s caretaker. Even though he’d been looking after the boy for months, at most the kid would be discharged, or his assignment would change. There was no way he’d see Shen Ge as an adult.
What’s more, the scene in his mind was a lively cafeteria—a group of people laughing and chatting over food and drinks. Among them were several familiar faces.
Ma Chao, instructors, soldiers, Doctor Chen—many people he’d seen at the hospital. And they all seemed chummy with the adult Shen Ge.
“Dammit, Shen Tan, I envy you. You joined the department years after me, and just a few months ago you were still a rookie. But after that Yuzhou incident, you became the best in our department. Come on, let me toast you—you’re awesome, and I, Wang Han, admit I’m not your match!” Wang Han raised his glass to Shen Ge.
Shen Ge raised his own glass in return, wearing that familiar habitual smile. “You think I wanted to crawl into an oddity’s stomach? Fine then—I wish you the same ‘day trip inside a giant oddity’s belly’ luck, so you can get promoted and become a team leader soon!”
“Haha, thanks for the good wishes!”
“Cheers!”
The image froze at the moment Wang Han tilted his head back and downed his drink in one gulp. Shen Ge did the same, draining his glass—then collapsed onto the table amid everyone’s teasing.
“Hahaha, Shen Tan! I may not match you in dealing with oddities, but my tolerance for booze is way better than yours!” Wang Han, still stuck in the ventilation duct, suddenly burst into wild laughter like a madman.
Mid-laugh, he froze. Memories began flooding back with clarity—one familiar face after another flashing through his mind.
“I’m Wang Han. Deputy captain of the Third Oddity Response Squad, Special Tactics Division, Rong City, Great Tian Dynasty!” Wang Han’s memory sharpened, and suddenly everything came back to him.
He slapped his forehead, trying to clear his head.
Had everything over the past few days been a dream?
Why was he here?
“I remember now. At the banquet on the eve of the Asia-wide Oddity Research Conference, I stepped out to use the restroom and ran into an oddity incident. The female delegate and her security team were swallowed by a black mist in the corridor. I hid in the bathroom, smashed the glass, and then… my consciousness faded.”
“So—this is all a hallucination caused by oddity energy?”
No, it wasn’t that simple.
Wang Han forced himself to calm down and reviewed everything that had happened over the past few days. It all felt far too real to be just a simple dream.
But before he could sort things out, he heard a rustling sound from the direction of the vent opening behind him, along with bangs and clatters from the room. He didn’t need to look to know that the rotting flesh-monster had broken through the door and entered the room.
Given its speed of movement and spread, it was only a matter of time before it filled the entire room and squeezed into the ventilation duct.
Wang Han could only try to crawl forward. Now that his memories were fully restored, even without oddity-energy gear, the shift in his willpower and mindset was a powerful weapon in itself.
As he crawled, he mulled over the events of the past few days. The most shocking part was undoubtedly becoming Shen Ge’s “caretaker.”
“Are these just false memories generated by oddity energy?” Wang Han frowned. As one of the few people who got along well with Shen Ge, he was vaguely aware of some of Shen Ge’s “secrets.”
The reason Shen Ge sometimes seemed mentally off was because he actually did have a history of mental illness. That was classified information within the Special Tactics Division, known only to the director and a few of the “veterans.” Wang Han had only learned some details by chance when investigating the “Luo Yueying Oddity Incident” at Dong’an Lake and coming across the old ruins of Rongshan Mental Hospital, where he overheard Shen Ge mention a few things.
Though Wang Han and Shen Ge were fairly close, he wasn’t the type to pry into old wounds. He’d filed it away and forgotten about it—never expecting to become a participant in something like this because of an oddity incident.
“Wait, that doesn’t add up. Why would this oddity space be tied to Shen Tan’s childhood experiences? And the past few days felt so real—like they were actually my own memories!” Wang Han’s head felt like it was about to explode. That stretch of experience had been so vivid, yet it couldn’t possibly have been his own past.
Because he clearly remembered that before joining the Special Tactics Division, he really had worked as a “security guard”—but in reality, he was a bouncer at a bar.
Wait!
Suddenly, Wang Han realized a crucial detail. In the memory fragment that had awakened him—the scene of drinking in the Rong City branch cafeteria—he had spotted someone who didn’t belong to the Rong City branch:
Doctor Chen!
Why was he at the Rong City branch?
