Tattoo

"Y-you... what did you say...?" The girl's face went pale as she repeatedly shook her head. "I don't understand what you mean. What... them?"

"Terrible acting." Sun Hang stepped forward, pressed the gun in his right hand beneath the girl's chin, and used his left hand to roll up the sleeve on her left arm.

At the spot corresponding to the ulcerated area on her right arm was a red tattoo.

At first glance, an ordinary person might think the tattoo was just a blotch of smeared ink, perhaps even mistake it for a bruise. But upon closer inspection, one would discover that the seemingly chaotic design was remarkably intricate—it overlapped more than twenty characters within an area of skin less than two centimeters wide, yet the stroke patterns of every character remained clearly distinguishable...

There was no way a cheap little tattoo parlor could have designed something like this.

These characters were writing and symbols never used by any civilization in human history. They connected and nested within one another, seemingly forming a bizarre incantation that could never be fully recited...

When Sun Hang rolled up the girl's left sleeve, she clearly intended to resist. But Sun Hang had already raised one leg and drove his knee hard into her lower abdomen. The pain instantly robbed her of the strength to fight back.

"When you were pulling at the sleeve on your right arm just now, you glanced at your other arm twice from the corner of your eye. Did you really think I wouldn't notice?" Sun Hang moved the gun away and smashed his elbow viciously into her ribs. The girl let out a scream, then slowly slid down the doorframe and collapsed onto the floor.

But Sun Hang still had her left arm in his grip, held high above her head.

Sun Hang holstered his pistol at the back of his waist, took out his phone, aimed the camera at the tattoo, and pressed the shutter.

Then he uploaded the photograph to the Investigation Bureau's internal search engine.

Before long, a whole pile of case files popped up on the search page.

Just as Sun Hang had expected, this tattoo design was on record within the Investigation Bureau.

In a case cracked seven years ago, a Cult Organization based in Jiangkou District, Tianfu City, had been eradicated.

This Cult Organization worshipped anomalies and secretly cultivated Anomaly Larvae within Tianfu City. Fortunately, citizens reported them in time. Of the 148 members, including the Cult Leader, nine were shot dead for violently resisting arrest during the operation, while the remaining 139 were all apprehended.

They should all still be imprisoned in the Special Prison for Anomalous Events at the northwest corner of Tianfu City.

The prison had been built atop an isolated mountain more than two hundred meters high, surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs. Only a single elevator allowed people to travel up and down the mountain. Beyond that, regular Xiazhou Federation military forces guarded both the inside and outside of the prison. The possibility of an escape was virtually zero.

Sun Hang gripped the girl's left arm with one hand while pinning her abnormally ulcerated right arm beneath his foot. Her head hung limply against her chest; she clearly had yet to recover from the blow.

Sun Hang lightly scrolled through the screen with his thumb. Beneath the written records were photographic materials taken by the investigators who had handled the case back then.

Those cultists all bore tattoos identical to the girl's. The tattoo's location depended on the believer's status within the cult—the higher their status, the closer the tattoo was to their heart.

As for the nearly eighty-year-old Cult Leader, his tattoo had been positioned on his left chest, directly above his heart.

There were also visual records of the Anomaly Larva cultivated by those cultists—it was a huge mass of flesh whose limbs and organs could not be distinguished. When investigators found it, the mass was soaking in the enormous ornamental fish tank at the Cult Leader's home.

Scattered fragments of human remains still lingered at the bottom of the tank.

At the end of the file was another photograph. It showed a large excavated pit filled with corpses. A rough estimate put the death toll at no fewer than one or two hundred.

Several lines of text accompanied the photograph—this pit lay directly beneath a newly built gathering site for the cult. Over four years, they had murdered nearly five hundred people to feed the Anomaly Larva. The remains left over after the anomaly had eaten were buried directly into the foundation and covered with concrete... Aside from the remains in this pit, large quantities of human bones fused with concrete had also been found in the foundations of several leading cultists' homes.

Most missing-person cases in Tianfu City over those four years had ultimately been traced back to these cultists. The Cult Leader and the principal leaders were executed immediately, while every remaining believer was sentenced to life imprisonment without exception.

As for the Anomaly Larva, it had been taken away and destroyed by the Tianfu City Anomaly Research Institute.

Following that sentence was a line in smaller print—Note: This Anomaly Larva was temporarily assigned the serial number Wu Yi Qi Jiu, but because it was destroyed before reaching maturity, the serial number was later revoked.

"Type Wu... a fungal anomaly?" Sun Hang looked again at the photograph. Its resolution was poor, and without close examination, it would have been easy to mistake the thing for a massive lump of flesh... But in reality, the "flesh" was formed from countless tangled hyphae. Broken strands of hyphae still clung to the bones at the bottom of the fish tank.

Sun Hang entered Anomaly Wu Yi Qi Jiu into the search bar. The results showed a giant fungus native to the dense forests of the Yundian Plateau, one with an extremely vivid coloration. It was clearly not the same species as the one in the cult leader's fish tank.

It seemed the operation back then hadn't uprooted this cult completely... Sun Hang calculated silently. Not only had they failed to catch everyone, they hadn't even wiped out all the anomalies the cult had raised...

The most crucial point was that during the arrest operation, Peacekeepers and investigators had examined every cultist. None had been found infected by an anomaly—precisely because of that, the enormous flesh mass had been judged an immature Anomaly Larva.

Yet the girl before him was undeniably infected.

"If I report this to the Investigation Bureau... they'll have their hands full."

Sun Hang crouched down, pinched the girl's cheeks between his thumb and forefinger, raised her head, and asked, "If you don't want to die, take me to your 'fellow believers'... and to that thing you're raising."

The girl looked at him and nodded weakly. "Okay..."

Sun Hang glanced at the gunshot wound in her leg and was surprised to find that it had stopped bleeding. The copper bullet had been forced out of the wound and fallen to the floor.

He drew a small knife and cut open the bullet hole in her jeans. The spot where the bullet should have struck had already been filled with newly grown flesh, leaving behind only a coin-sized scar.