Floating Corpses

"Name?"

"..."

"Not talking, huh? Very well!"

"Your name is Daniel. You're seventy-nine years old, from Commus Town, and you and a group of townspeople worship an entity called the 'God of Abundance,' the 'Verdant Form.'"

"You think staying silent will let you get away with this?"

"Tell me, why did you shoot Gresham? He was a high-ranking member of your church. You should have had no reason to kill him."

The interrogator paused, then said meaningfully:

"After all, your return to youth is exactly what Gresham was working on. Shouldn't you have supported him?"

In a school classroom temporarily requisitioned for use, Ning Xiuyuan—or rather, the puppet man he controlled—sat in a chair with his hands cuffed behind him, undergoing interrogation.

The puppet man's expression was wooden, but Ning Xiuyuan himself, hiding in the puppet's home, wore an utterly strange expression.

When he left the hospital, a pistol had suddenly been pressed against his head.

Two men in black uniforms then rushed over, swiftly and skillfully pinning him to the ground and handcuffing him.

Ning Xiuyuan had thought he had encountered military police, but the truth was completely beyond his expectations.

He was escorted into the town's school and waited there until dawn before someone came to interrogate him.

The interrogator was none other than Ji Zijun, who had once acted like a timid young girl carefully trying to please her boyfriend in front of him.

Unlike before, she was no longer cautious and meek today.

She wore a black uniform with a pistol at her waist. Her cold expression made her look especially intimidating.

After pushing open the door to the Interrogation Room, she had gone straight to the point in blatant violation of procedure. The amount of information she revealed was enough to intimidate most malicious cultists.

Unfortunately, Ning Xiuyuan was not a cultist after all.

After a brief silence, he controlled the puppet and said, "Everything is the will of God!"

Ji Zijun's expression suddenly turned solemn, and her heart began pounding. "You can hear... the will of God? The God of Abundance?"

Ever since she had successfully calmed a potential Keter-class humanoid containment object last time, she had begun to make a name for herself at the site.

But she was unwilling to remain an unseen psychological counselor.

The fearless vigor of a young newcomer made her yearn for the front line, so she had come.

Unfortunately, a newcomer was still a newcomer. She had been assigned to the rear of the front line, responsible for interrogating a group of insignificant cultists.

As a result, she had never expected to catch another big fish.

In fact, it was not only her. The two field agents guarding the classroom door also suddenly turned serious.

Their fingers instinctively relaxed, then lightly rested on the triggers as they prepared to fire at any moment.

Ji Zijun's and the field agents' reactions made Ning Xiuyuan frown.

He had not expected a vague, all-purpose answer to provoke such a strong reaction.

Right, he had overlooked something. This was not the Church of Dawn.

In this context, his all-purpose answer expressed exactly what it meant on the surface!

"Of course. God loves all people. Gresham violated the doctrine, so he deserved to die!"

Ning Xiuyuan continued spinning his lies. Whatever. It was only a puppet, and it would not matter if it died.

"Doctrine?" Ji Zijun's expression turned odd. She tilted her head slightly as she listened to the information coming through her earpiece. After a while, she asked intently, "Did you monitor an Asian tourist before?"

Daniel nodded.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Ji Zijun's tone suddenly rose.

"Bang!"

The classroom door was flung open, and two field agents shoved a middle-aged man inside.

He was the third person to monitor Ning Xiuyuan, after Old Man Pika and Daniel. Later, Ning Xiuyuan had distracted him with two stray dogs and slipped out of the inn right under his nose.

The middle-aged man anxiously swept his gaze across the room, then suddenly froze when his eyes landed on 'Ning Xiuyuan's' face.

"Daniel, you... how?"

He stared incredulously at Daniel's youthful face. After a moment, he suddenly seemed to remember something, and his expression turned furious.

"I understand! I understand! That yellow-skinned devil has already been sacrificed to God by you, hasn't he? You deliberately tricked me into taking the night watch so you could get me away from Gresham!"

"Why? Why would you do this? Could it be... you want to become a priest?"

The middle-aged man began roaring furiously.

Daniel's return to youth could only mean one thing: he had offered a sacrifice to God and received a divine blessing.

The question was, where had that sacrifice come from?

In this small town where everyone knew one another inside out, the answer was obvious.

Daniel remained silent.

Far away, in a residential house on the edge of town, Ning Xiuyuan wore a stunned expression.

He had never expected that his attempt to cheat old age and make the puppet body younger and easier to control seemed to have caused the cultists to misunderstand something.

However, this happened to conceal the secret of his true body's disappearance.

"Say something!"

The middle-aged man roared unwillingly, but the two field agents immediately dragged him out.

Clearly, he had been brought here merely to confront Daniel and verify certain matters.

The classroom fell silent.

"Actually, we're not very interested in your shooting Gresham or even kidnapping a foreign tourist. What we're truly interested in is that you seem to know where the God of Abundance's altar is located?" Ji Zijun said meaningfully.

Daniel grew even more silent.

"Not talking? It doesn't matter. Silence is the best answer. We have only one request now: take our people inside so they can pay their respects to the great God of Abundance, the Verdant Form."

Ji Zijun recited the title "God of Abundance, Verdant Form" with a hint of mockery.

"All right!"

After a brief hesitation, Ning Xiuyuan nodded.

Even without anyone forcing him, he had actually planned to control the puppet and take a look inside.

"Good. You know how to read the situation!"

Ji Zijun snorted coldly and rose to leave, feeling somewhat disappointed. She had originally wanted to take this opportunity to conduct a proper interrogation under torture.

Naturally, she hated cultists who did not treat human lives as lives so much that her teeth itched.

She had never expected Daniel to agree so readily. What a shame.

Not far from the classroom, Ji Zijun met a clean-shaven, middle-aged man walking toward her.

He was Mr. Gaden, deputy director of the medical department at the NERC Site. Under normal circumstances, a senior member of his rank should not have appeared on the front line.

But this time, the situation was unusual.

A large-scale infection had broken out in Commus Town and was even spreading to the surrounding towns. Considering the cult organization that had suddenly appeared here, the Foundation had reason to suspect that this was an anomalous incident.

"Mr. Gaden, how is the infection in town?" Ji Zijun could not help asking.

"It's under control." Gaden nodded, though his expression was not relaxed.

"Is this... an anomalous incident?" Ji Zijun sensed something and asked cautiously.

"It's hard to say."

"Hmm?"

"The tracing team has determined that the source of the infection came from the tap water. We also discovered that the main water pipeline had been gnawed through by rats. The primary infectious disease in this outbreak was epidemic hemorrhagic fever, so the chain of logic is perfectly complete. But hemorrhagic fever wasn't the only disease involved. Do you know what the disease with the second-largest number of infections was?"

Ji Zijun shook her head.

Gaden's expression was meaningful. "Avian influenza."

Ji Zijun was stunned at first, then immediately understood. "Avian influenza? Rats? You mean this was done deliberately?"

Gaden shook his head. "That's why I said it's hard to say. Humans can contract avian influenza, and rats can contract it too. After all, it's an RNA virus. But having rats as the source of infection, while spreading and causing illness so quickly... this is the first time I've encountered anything like it. I heard that the evil god these people worship can grant special abilities to its believers. Perhaps this was the work of that killer doctor. Of course, maybe I'm overthinking it. It could all be a coincidence. In any case, we'll have to wait for the results of the front-line containment operation."

Ji Zijun nodded and quietly exhaled.

She knew that anything involving containment objects was always accompanied by strangeness and absurdity.

On the roof of a house not far from the two of them, several sparrows chirped noisily. Their black eyes reflected the figures of Ji Zijun and Gaden.

Hidden in the darkness, Ning Xiuyuan also let out a quiet breath.

At one in the afternoon, several Foundation personnel broke into the classroom where Daniel was being held and installed various electronic instruments on him.

A pair of invisible wireless earbuds was even inserted into his ear canals.

After the installation was complete, Daniel was escorted into a vehicle and taken to the cult's headquarters.

Besides two suspected cult members, the escort vehicle also contained six D-Class personnel wearing orange uniforms.

Of the six, four were men and two were women, and they varied in age. Some were refined and scholarly, some had faces covered in flesh, and some were frail with age.

They had clearly received instructions in advance. Once they boarded the vehicle, their eyes fell on the three people led by Daniel, repeatedly sizing them up.

This made the other two elderly men look uneasy.

As for Daniel?

Under Ning Xiuyuan's control, he simply put on a blank expression, appearing calm and mysterious.

"Screech—"

The escort vehicle came to a stop, and the rear doors opened.

"Ning Xiuyuan" was the first to jump out. His eyes involuntarily turned toward the cult's villa.

Above the villa, surrounded and half-hidden by verdant trees, more than a dozen corpses hovered alone in midair. Against the leaden-white sky, they appeared exceptionally clear.

They radiated a solitary, perverse beauty that only a devil's aesthetic could appreciate.

This was the art of death!

The second chapter will be a little later.