Mysterious Man

"Not dead? I charge double for dealing with live people!" The driver remained completely calm despite the gun pointed at him.

"What is this place? Are we still in District 19?"

Yu Jing had already figured out the situation inside the vehicle. The corpses were packed in burlap sacks in the cold rear compartment, so the people from the research institute must have assigned him to dispose of the evidence.

"This is the border area between District 19 and District 18, 230 kilometers from District 19's Class-A central urban district. This is an uninhabited area. You can kill me, then dispose of the corpses here along with mine."

The driver's words made something tremble faintly inside Yu Jing.

Although the driver appeared to be a potbellied man, his movements were incredibly agile. Taking advantage of the brief lapse in Yu Jing's thoughts, he twisted his hands and tried to snatch back his pistol. But Yu Jing, who had already experienced death, reacted swiftly.

"Bang, bang, bang!" Three shots rang out in succession, the bullets punching through the driver's brow.

The seemingly ordinary young man had been that decisive. If Yu Jing had hesitated to pull the trigger, he would have been the one lying on the ground with bullets through his head.

After experiencing the bloody struggle between life and death in the slaughterhouse and losing a friend to the divide between life and death, Yu Jing no longer felt any guilt about killing the man before him. Strictly speaking, Yu Jing himself was already a "dead man."

"So cold!"

After slowly calming down, Yu Jing realized that he was completely naked and that the chill had already seeped into his body. He immediately reached out and stripped the driver's clothes off him to wear temporarily against the cold. Fortunately, there was no blood on them.

"Dispose of all the corpses and bury them here."

Yu Jing's thoughts were exceptionally calm. He temporarily set aside the question of why he had been resurrected and focused first on properly disposing of the corpses.

"Although this is the wilderness, if the corpses are discovered, the relevant authorities will definitely use every means available to find clues proving that I was here."

Staring at the driver's corpse, which had small bullet holes in its head, Yu Jing quickly walked over, seized its arm, and prepared to drag it to the nearest pit for burial.

As Yu Jing dragged the body, a strange sensation suddenly arose in his left arm. It was as if something inside his body were swimming through his flesh, spreading beneath his skin before finally breaking out through his fingertips.

In Yu Jing's field of vision, green plant vines grew from the tips of his five fingers and seeped beneath the skin of the driver's corpse.

"Gurgle, gurgle!"

As if sucking up nutrients, the green plants that had entered the driver's body siphoned up the flesh and blood that still retained some warmth.

The sight horrified Yu Jing. Before the absorption was complete, he immediately released his grip. Guided by his thoughts, the plants growing from his fingertips withdrew back into his body.

The driver's originally obese corpse had become thin and shriveled, as though it had been drained of nutrients.

"There are actually plants inside my arm? What's going on?"

Yu Jing looked at his right arm. Under the moonlight, some kind of green plant seemed to be writhing among his blood vessels. Yet from what he could sense, these moving things were not dangerous. Instead, the nutrients they had absorbed made his body feel more comfortable, as if they had replenished some of his warmth and driven away the cold.

Most importantly, withdrawing the plants had been entirely under Yu Jing's conscious control.

"Could it have happened back then? The earthquake in the Testing Area..."

Yu Jing's powers of observation and memory were far beyond ordinary. As he searched through the books of memory in his mind and recalled the Butcher's pursuit, he remembered that his palm seemed to have pressed against some sharp object on the ground. Combined with the earthquake during the final stage, he suspected that the plants hidden in his arm had come from something beyond the research institute's test.

As Yu Jing pondered this abnormal situation, beams of flashlight light shot toward him one after another from the wilderness.

Yu Jing had considered running, but he decided to observe first. If the police had traced the scene here, it would be better to stay put and cooperate with them. Waiting for the police to determine the truth would be the best option.

However, the people emerging from the woods with flashlights were not police officers. They were a group of men in immaculate suits.

"Not the police. Did the people from the research institute come to silence the witnesses?"

The moment Yu Jing saw the group, he picked up the driver's pistol from the ground and fled at full speed toward the other side of the woods, where no one should have been.

But the instant he turned around, a man nearly six feet three inches tall, wearing a black trench coat and a round hat, blocked his path. Yu Jing had clearly seen no one move just now. He had no idea when the man had appeared behind him.

"So it really is like this." The man spoke in a low, heavy voice.

When a pair of sharp eyes beneath the brim fixed on Yu Jing, his body trembled. His desire to flee vanished completely, as if he had fallen into a black swamp where the harder he struggled, the deeper he sank.

"In that case, I'll have to eliminate all the witnesses. If word gets out, my position will become very troublesome."

As the tall man muttered those words to himself, Yu Jing saw a shadow flash behind him. Then a series of miserable screams erupted alongside the sound of flesh being torn apart.

When Yu Jing turned around, a scene of utter carnage unfolded before him.

More than a dozen men in black now lay dead at the spots where they had been standing, their bodies separated from their heads. Yu Jing could not imagine how such a bloody scene had formed in less than two seconds. By comparison, escaping from the tall, mysterious man before him was completely impossible.

"Aren't you afraid?"

The Mysterious Man looked at Yu Jing and asked this as he stood there without trembling, his expression barely changing.

"Not really... Ah!"

Suddenly, the Mysterious Man's leather-gloved hand clamped around Yu Jing's neck and lifted him off the ground.

"Tell me the most important thing in your life!" As the Mysterious Man made his demand, the five fingers gripping Yu Jing's neck tightened relentlessly.

"Cough... What do you mean?" Yu Jing was in considerable discomfort and did not understand the man's demand.

But the Mysterious Man did not answer. As time passed, his grip grew tighter and tighter. If this continued, Yu Jing would die of suffocation.

"Curing my mother's illness."

When Yu Jing finished answering, the fingers that had nearly crushed his neck finally loosened. Yu Jing collapsed limply to the ground and began coughing hard.

"Your consciousness hasn't been taken over. Very good. Come with me."