"Sir! Sir, can you hear me?!" Cheng Ming raised his voice. He remembered that the old guard was a little hard of hearing, but not deaf to this extent.
Cheng Ming was practically shouting into the man's ear.
Yet the old guard showed no reaction at all.
Cheng Ming grew anxious and immediately reached out to pat the old guard's shoulder. But just then, the old guard suddenly tilted his head, and Cheng Ming's hand, which had been aimed at his shoulder, landed directly on his head.
What happened next was beyond Cheng Ming's expectations—the old guard's skull caved in like a cream cake from that light slap. Mangled flesh instantly smeared across Cheng Ming's palm, while an eyeball bounced through the crack in the guardhouse window and rolled into the nearby shrubbery.
Cheng Ming's eyes went wide. He froze in place as if struck by a paralysis spell, every hair on his back standing on end.
He wanted to pull his hand back, but his body refused to obey him.
The old guard slowly raised his head, glanced at Cheng Ming with his one remaining eye, then lowered his head again and resumed scrolling through short videos on his phone.
As though nothing had happened.
Only then did Cheng Ming seem like a drowning man who had just been dragged ashore. Air flooded into his lungs as he sucked in a sharp breath, then staggered backward more than a dozen steps before tripping over the curb of the landscaping strip and falling butt-first into a patch of sparse bushes.
Human instinct urged Cheng Ming to turn and run, to get as far away from this bizarre place polluted by Anomalies as possible. Yet the attachment in his heart kept dragging his gaze toward the inpatient building in the distance.