[Lu Family Courtyard] Property

The round watermelon actually made a humanlike gesture of clearing its throat. Then—

"Yaaah!" The watermelon's high-pitched, piercing scream tore through the night sky, stabbing into participant twenty-two's eardrums like countless fine needles.

Participant twenty-two felt his head explode with a buzz, and the composure he had barely managed to maintain shattered in an instant.

Terror surged through his limbs like a flood bursting through a dam, making every hair on his body stand on end.

An anomaly! This watermelon is an anomaly!

"Aaah!" Participant twenty-two erupted in a hysterical scream that was every bit as loud as the watermelon's.

In his panic, he suddenly remembered the weapon clutched against his chest. Hastily, he threw the steel pitchfork in his hands at the watermelon with all his might.

Bang! A dull impact was followed by the crisp sound of the watermelon bursting apart.

Ripe flesh and bright red juice splattered everywhere, spilling across the ground.

The shrill scream stopped abruptly. Participant twenty-two staggered back a few steps, then his limp legs gave out under his weight, and he fell to the ground with an ungainly thud.

"Ha, ha..." He gasped for breath, his chest heaving violently. It took him quite a while to recover from the suffocating terror.

He braced himself against the ground, trying to get up and retrieve his only weapon.

But then he froze. His right palm seemed to have been welded to the ground, unable to move at all.

He turned his head in horror, his heart suddenly tightening.

At some point, the watermelon field had "swallowed" his hand, and damp soil was spreading frantically up through the gaps between his fingers.

"No! Help me!" He let out an even more harrowing scream, but his voice sounded especially small in the open field.

The sandy ground where the watermelons grew had somehow turned into a swamp of thick black mud. Countless tendrils of earth reached out of the mud like twisted arms, gripping his limbs tightly and dragging him down bit by bit.

"Hee-hee. Hee-hee."

All across the field, watermelons turned their "heads" toward the terrified participant, revealing faces. Pairs of pitch-black eyes stared fixedly at him as they let out sharp, piercing laughter.

Number twenty-two's screams gradually weakened until they were barely audible.

His body had been completely swallowed by the swamp, leaving only his head exposed, his eyes bulging with extreme terror.

Then his head rapidly rounded and swelled, his skin turning a sickly dark green. In just a few breaths, he became a watermelon that retained his facial features.

At last, the terror frozen on his face slowly faded, and his mouth stretched into an eerie, radiant smile identical to those of the watermelons around him.

"Hee-hee."

Number twenty-two's field was not far from Ren Yi's, and there were no barriers in the vast fields to block an anomaly's perception.

Ren Yi silently "watched" the whole thing, never pausing in his watering or showing the slightest change of expression.

So [servants must not damage any of their master's property] referred to some of the anomalies encountered during work?

If they accidentally damaged property that did not belong to them, they would become "property" themselves to make up for their master's loss.

Ren Yi thoughtfully rubbed the rim of his bucket.

The anomaly here was clearly not the "watermelons." If each watermelon were an independent anomaly, there would be far too many of them.

The correct answer should be the "watermelon field."

It was the kind of inhuman anomaly his older brother had mentioned before, one that "only had to fit human understanding."

"Ah... ah... ah..." An intermittent scream came from beside his foot.

Ren Yi looked down and saw a watermelon straining its voice to scream. But on the side of its rind facing away from him, its features were twisted stiffly, and its eyes darted about from time to time, making it look especially guilty.

Ren Yi was speechless for a moment. Clearly, Aunt Lu Qing had probably spoken to these anomalies beforehand.

Unfortunately, the Watermelon Field anomaly's acting really left much to be desired.

With a splash, Ren Yi poured a bucket of water over it.

While watering it, he crouched down and gently patted its cool rind with his fingertips, lowering his voice to instruct it. "Scream louder. Just sound like the others."

He had already confirmed with Lu Qing that the livestream camera outside was fixed at a viewpoint behind them.

So as long as there were no other participants around, there was no problem with secretly making small gestures in front of himself.

"Yaaah—" The watermelon immediately adjusted itself upon receiving the instruction and began howling loudly, unusually obedient.

The screams of the surrounding watermelons rose and fell, intertwining into a piercing din.

Ren Yi listened for a while and somehow heard a bit of an off-key tune in it, so he simply began humming along softly.

All was peaceful on Ren Yi's side, but the other participants were not so lucky.

A single watermelon's scream was like a needle stabbing into them, but now the watermelons in the fields were all revealing their faces and screaming one after another.

Their screams were like countless sharp blades scraping repeatedly against the participants' brains.

But they had no choice. Under this mental torture, they could only steel themselves and work in the fields, making trip after trip to the center of the fields to carry water and pull weeds.

In their dazed states, quite a few participants accidentally kicked watermelons apart or snapped their vines. The next second, they were swallowed by fields that had suddenly turned into swamps, eventually becoming new "human-faced watermelons."

The livestream chat had long since erupted:

"Ahhh, my god above, what kind of hellish things are those?! My head hurts even through the screen. That's disgusting!"

"Stop howling, the person above! The noise in the livestream is loud enough already! They're just some watermelons, way weaker than mutated beasts. I'd cut them down one by one."

"Wait, are you stupid? Obviously, the people who damage the watermelons are the ones who die! And you want to cut them down one by one? Are you worried you won't die fast enough?"

"Holy shit, quick, look at that guy called 'Mo Ming' in the other livestream! How is he still in the mood to hum?"

"Is that the point? The point is, that expert looks like he's almost finished with his work."

Indeed, as the livestream showed, the sun had risen over the horizon before anyone realized it.

On Ren Yi's side, he had already carried water to irrigate the entire watermelon field once, and he had cut down the weeds and tossed them aside in bundles.

"Hahaha, that's an expert from our Holy City. You're awesome, expert! He's damn steady at his work!"

"Doing chores makes him an expert? I say you should stop calling it the Holy City and call it the Beast of Burden City instead."

"If you don't understand, don't talk shit. The faster he works, the sooner he can rest. Especially with this kind of mental-attack anomaly, every extra second of rest is a gain, and that way he can deal with the dangers to come."

"Wait, something's wrong. The expert doesn't seem to be planning to rest. He's walking toward the courtyard!"