Chapter 205: Yūmi Island (Part 11)
Chapter 205: Yūmi Island (Part 11)
Boom!
The wall tore apart like paper. Dust flew everywhere as countless bricks shattered under the force of a powerful punch.
Fang Jing leaped forward and charged toward another wall. He threw another punch straight at it.
After smashing through ten rooms in a row, he stopped using his fists. Instead, he simply threw his body against the walls, relying on his superhuman physique to break through them one by one.
He was covered in dust, but his eyes shone with an unusual light. The earlier scream had guided him. He smashed through another wall and found the space suddenly opening up.
“This is… the cafeteria.”
It wasn’t a room, but the cafeteria on the first floor.
The cafeteria was also dark and gloomy. The moment Fang Jing stepped inside, he smelled a strong metallic scent of blood.
“No—!”
He heard someone scream. In the corner of the cafeteria, Kase Mi had fallen to the ground, her face paler than paper.
Right in front of Kase Mi was a white shadow.
He stared intently, finally confirming what was at the other end of his vision.
It wasn’t a clear shadow, but a white lump of flesh, resembling a child.
It might have been human once, but after twisting and melting, it lost its definite form. Though it was a completely deformed human body, it was still alive and writhing.
It was stretching out a slender wrist, trying to reach toward Kase Mi.
Seeing this, Fang Jing launched himself forward. He stomped down hard on the flesh lump with his foot. With a loud crash, the entire white mass was crushed to pieces.
Squelch! Like overripe fruit bursting, the flesh exploded, spraying foul, pus-filled liquid everywhere.
Half of Kase Mi’s face and body were splattered. She screamed and scrambled backward.
But Fang Jing paid no attention to her. His gaze shifted to a dark corner where a figure seemed to be huddled, but it was floating in mid-air.
Fang Jing narrowed his eyes. He could even see a pair of feet in slippers dangling in the air.
That height wasn’t something a person could just float up to.
Anyone else would have felt a chill run down their spine at that moment. But Fang Jing’s expression remained unchanged. He finally saw it clearly: it was a ventilation duct opening. The owner of those feet must have crawled in and gotten stuck.
The feet were still shaking and trembling, as if unable to move after being trapped.
He pushed off the ground with his toes, then dashed forward with bullet-like speed.
He reached up and grabbed one of the ankles with an iron grip, yanking hard.
Thump! A man’s corpse was pulled down—or rather, half a corpse, with only the upper body and two legs. Entrails sprayed out from the lower torso and scattered.
A strange shriek echoed through the air. A weird-looking creature that had been curled up in the vent leaped down.
The thing was a gray lump, looking like a small dwarf. It had a large head, large eyes, no hair, and an unusually smooth body.
It had been gnawing on a length of intestine, eating the corpse, but halfway through its meal, Fang Jing had yanked the body down.
This infuriated the little monster.
“Little Gray.”
Fang Jing immediately thought of the Greys mentioned in TV shows and UFO reports. This thing looked extremely strange. It landed on the ground, its gray head suddenly split open. Its skull, mouth, and nose opened up like petals, lunging toward Fang Jing’s position.
“Too slow.”
Fang Jing’s expression didn’t change. His left arm shot forward, and Corpse Poison flames instantly materialized and condensed. His five fingers slashed through the air, tearing the Little Gray to shreds.
The monster fell to the ground, and the Corpse Poison Curse quickly eroded its flesh, turning it into gray corpse fragments. Fang Jing then stomped on it, crushing it completely.
“This is… Kōsaka’s body.”
Fang Jing looked at the pants and slippers on the male corpse and immediately recognized him as Kōsaka from Yamaryo University.
A pair of broken glasses that slid out of the ventilation duct confirmed his guess.
So, Kōsaka must have been killed after they separated earlier.
He turned around and stared at Kase Mi, who was sitting on the floor.
“Hey! Woman, what happened after we separated?”
“Huh?”
Kase Mi was stunned by Fang Jing’s rapid actions. Her mouth hung slightly open, still unable to process the dizzying sequence of events.
“I’m asking you a question.”
Fang Jing’s tone grew a bit impatient. His voice changed slightly, altering the atmosphere around them.
“Talk.”
Kase Mi flinched as if frightened. She felt a dangerous aura emanating from Fang Jing. Instinctively, she hunched her shoulders and whispered, “Earlier, after we separated, everything went blurry suddenly. Only Sakuma and I were left where we stood. You and Kōsaka were gone.”
“The two of us wandered the corridors for half an hour. Then the flashlight died. In the blink of an eye, even Sakuma disappeared…”
“Luckily, I found Kōsaka’s phone on the floor. Using the phone’s light, I kept searching for a way out in the corridors. I didn’t dare smash into the rooms randomly; I just searched corridor after corridor for the others.”
Recalling her earlier experience, Kase Mi’s mind was a mess. She had been terrified. After Sakuma also disappeared, she groped around in the dark, calling the names of the three missing people while trying to find a way out.
“How did you find the cafeteria on the first floor?”
Fang Jing rubbed his chin. The timing didn’t add up. Kase Mi and Sakuma had wandered the maze-like corridors for half an hour, and then she had stumbled around in the dark herself.
That added up to at least forty minutes. But he hadn’t taken that long—meaning, this Mirror Image Space also had differences in time flow. He didn’t know if this difference was an illusion created in the brain or a distortion of localized space-time…
Fang Jing believed it was probably the former; otherwise, his brute-force method wouldn’t have found a way out. Of course, he couldn’t rule out another possibility: that the other three had triggered some mechanism, causing him to return to the first-floor cafeteria.
“I don’t know!”
Kase Mi shook her head with a bitter smile. She said she didn’t know what happened either. She was just chased by that white flesh lump along the way and inexplicably ended up here.
“Thump!”
A door at the back of the cafeteria was slammed open by a figure. Sakuma Bohei, his face covered in blood, stumbled in.
“Sakuma—! Are you okay?”
Kase Mi straightened up and asked nervously.
Sakuma Bohei slowly pushed himself up from the ground. Though his face was bloody, he didn’t seem seriously injured.
“You… run.”
“He’s fine, but you two are in trouble.”
Accompanied by the sound of leather shoes clicking on the floor, a familiar voice followed from outside the door.
At that moment, Kase Mi’s beautiful eyes widened in shock. She never expected the newcomer to be someone she knew very well.
“Associate Professor Tomatsu…”
Her throat moved, and she opened her mouth to ask loudly, “Why are you here? No, where were you just now?”
The plump, round-faced Associate Professor Tomatsu smiled and said, “Sorry, Kase Mi. I was busy dealing with some trash, so I couldn’t come sooner.”
As he spoke, two human heads rolled across the floor toward them. Kase Mi let out a high-pitched, loud scream. She desperately covered her mouth and backed away several steps.
She recognized them: they were two students from the same department. Their heads had been brutally severed, their blood-stained faces frozen in expressions of terror and fear.
“Time’s almost up. It’s time to send you all to the other world together!”
Tomatsu’s face revealed an unusually excited expression.
He had also taken off his shirt, revealing a tattoo that spread from his back all the way to his chest.
The tattoo was exceptionally eerie, a pale bluish pattern that coalesced into an “eyeball” design on Tomatsu’s abdomen.
“Squelch!”
Tomatsu’s spine, covered in tattoos, bent abnormally. Something swelled up from inside. His back made a tearing sound as if exploding, blooming open like a flower. Glowing tentacles radiated out from his back, one after another, writhing and dancing.
“Can you feel it? This is the power of the true god. Come, join us in the embrace of god! Hahaha!”
“Fool! Next, you’ll just be embracing the trash bin.”
Five fingers grabbed his face from above.
“Get back to the garbage dump!”
With a whooshing sound, Tomatsu only felt his head gripped by something. He growled, and the glowing tentacles stabbed forward.
These tentacles possessed immense strength, capable of crushing an adult’s wrist or tearing off a person’s head.
But his movements were too slow. In an instant he couldn’t react to, a tremendous force slammed him directly into a wall. With a loud crash, Tomatsu was hurled through a wall and out of the cafeteria, his head still pinned.
Amid the swirling dust, Fang Jing kicked away the bricks blocking his path and strode across.
He looked at Tomatsu, who had fallen to the ground, with the gaze of someone looking at a chicken waiting to be slaughtered.
“Cough! Cough!”
Tomatsu coughed a few times first. He stared at Fang Jing with confusion, then roared furiously, “What are you? Why are you obstructing me?”
“Then what are you?”
Fang Jing questioned him in a retorting tone.
“I… am, of course, Tomatsu.”
Tomatsu replied dismissively.
“No, you are not Tomatsu.”
Fang Jing replied flatly, “Or rather, what is it that’s parasitizing your body…?”
“…”
Tomatsu was silent for a moment, then soon burst into laughter.
“Interesting! Human, you’re amusing. You can see through to this extent. But it’s a pity, it’s too late. The descent of the ‘Divine Kingdom’ is coming. Next, my kin and I will be responsible for cleansing the trash from the earth. Yes, that’s you humans… you worthless weeds clinging to life. You must be cleaned up. Compared to being piled with garbage, this world is more suitable for our kin to rule.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying. Could you go die once first?”
“Are you, a fragile human, trying to make me laugh? No, this isn’t funny at all.”
Tomatsu grinned widely. The flower-like opening on his back expanded even more. Numerous glowing tentacles actively wriggled out, coiling and writhing like flexible snakes.
“How could you possibly understand what kind of power I have now? I have obtained an immortal body. I can exist eternally in this world. No power can harm me.”
“Fine, fine, fine!”
Fang Jing raised an eyebrow and responded impatiently.
“Take one punch from me without dying, then talk!”
He didn’t bother being polite! He activated the High Dragon Force. His powerful muscles trembled and twisted like flowing water, swelling and turning black.
Whoosh!
A fist like lightning shot out. Dark flames, Life Magnetic Field, and red raging aura all converged onto that single punch. A terrifying force accompanied the blow, directly stirring up waves of air in its path.
This astonishing strike, delivered as a simple straight punch, landed squarely on Tomatsu’s chest.
The next second, Tomatsu’s body, which had been standing there, exploded with a bang. Flesh and blood burst apart, shattering into countless fragments.