Virtual Aberrations

After thinking it over, Lu Ban picked up the Lan Lan Lu toy lying on the ground.

From the monster's perspective, it was its excrement, but from Lu Ban's perspective, it was just an ordinary, comical toy.

Lu Ban sniffed it. It didn't have any strange odor.

"Should I try tasting it?"

In the end, he didn't go through with it.

He had already reached a conclusion from its smell, so there was no need for any further testing.

"If this thing is what remains after the monster absorbs fear, then at the very beginning..."

Lu Ban remembered his first mission. Beforehand, he had checked under the bed, and there had been a toy like this one.

He had properly thrown it into the sorting bin, but after the midnight game of counting heartbeats, the thing had appeared under the bed again—and it looked as if it had crawled there.

At first, Lu Ban had thought this strange thing might have crawled back from the trash bin to find him. But now it seemed that the monster had absorbed his fear, which was why it had excreted another one.

This excrement seemed to change according to the type of fear it consumed. Some people might excrete spiders and insects, while others might produce exams covered in zeroes. Perhaps even credit card bills or their mothers' feather dusters could appear.

"Is this the kind of monster one encounters at Mortal difficulty?"

Lu Ban thought that a creature like this created fear and devoured fear, yet depended on humans and wouldn't kill them. If so, Fellow Traveler and The Alley of No Return probably worked on similar principles.

Having figured that out, Lu Ban felt that the exploration progress for this mission was probably already around eighty or ninety percent.

As for