Zhang Anzai felt like if he were playing a tabletop role-playing game, a prompt would have popped up just now telling him he'd lost sanity points.
This inner room wasn't as large as the costume and prop room he'd just been in. It was more like a small walk-in freezer. Shelves stood along all four walls, with a few boxes piled on them, but there weren't many blind spots, and he could take it all in at a glance.
High up on the back wall was a thick window. A little moonlight fell into the room, mingling with the beam of his flashlight and illuminating the red liquid flowing toward his feet.
"This much blood..." Zhang Anzai used this abnormal detail to calm himself down.
The huge puddle in the room was about the amount of blood you'd get from draining a single person completely. And even after he opened the door, it was still flowing out.
He walked around the puddle and went inside. Sure enough, one of the oversized blood bags on the shelf had sprung a leak.
Zhang Anzai studied the torn opening carefully. "Were there rats in here?"
No one answered him in the silent inner room.
Still, if he listened carefully, he could hear faint, abnormal little noises, like cardboard boxes rustling. There were probably snakes, bugs, or ants in here.
Zhang Anzai helplessly opened his phone and checked the inventory list in the item shop. "Insecticide and rat poison should be in this storeroom too..."
He searched the nearby shelves, which were loaded with rouge, face powders, paints, and coatings. In the end, he found the rat poison in a corner.
After scattering a few pellets in the corner, Zhang Anzai turned and left the inner room.
The factory still seemed quiet. Keeping an eye out as he looked from side to side, Zhang Anzai walked to the corner and found a mop and bucket beside the sink in the bathroom.
Checking his phone ahead of time had turned out to be the right decision. His identity had been fleshed out quite thoroughly, and there were plenty of student notes in the memo app.
"Water-soluble blood bags... Wipe them with tissues or rinse them with clean water." Zhang Anzai returned to the inner room with the bucket and mop, feeling rather helpless. He cleaned up the blood that had seeped out and tossed the blood bag away while he was at it.
Carrying the bucket and mop back to the bathroom sink, Zhang Anzai rinsed them off, thinking helplessly, This is worse than being a security guard... Why do I have to do the janitor's job too?
What Zhang Anzai didn't seem to know was that, while he was gone, a small figure had silently entered the inner room.
The storeroom remained utterly quiet and a little chilly.
If you listened very carefully, you could only hear faint, intermittent sounds so slight that you might wonder if you were imagining them.
It was as though something had brushed against a cardboard box, as though sharp teeth had easily bitten through something.
The sounds were extremely faint, but the blood dripping onto the floor was real, as was the barely audible breathing.
As Zhang Anzai rinsed the mop with his head lowered, he stared blankly at the scene on the screen back in his main body.
"Fuck..." Zhang Anzai couldn't help swearing.
He'd lost 100 Employee Points because he had bought an item.
"[Human-Proxy Void Eye] (Allows you to take control of the surveillance cameras, video cameras, or other image-recording devices in an instance and transmit their footage to your computer screen for five minutes.)"
It cost 100 Employee Points, but it really did work. By taking control of the surveillance camera in the storeroom, Zhang Anzai had seen what happened there after he left.
The long-haired golden dog Mr. Li had trained immediately emerged from between the shelves in the large factory after Zhang Anzai left.
For some reason, the old dog's steps now seemed extremely awkward, as though it wasn't used to walking on four legs.
Though its movements were strange, the dog wasn't slow at all. It didn't act like an old dog in the slightest. It headed straight for a corner of the storeroom with startling resolve.
Without making a sound, it swallowed the rat in the corner. After chewing a couple of times, it gulped the rat down. Then it licked the blood off the floor, as if savoring it, and quickly left the storeroom.
But none of that was the problem. The problem was that the old dog had completely changed its appearance.
Its muzzle had grown much shorter, and the fur had vanished from its entire head. In its place was short, sparse, messy black hair at the back of its head.
Its eyes were vacant and unnaturally elongated. No matter how you looked at it, something was wrong.
Put simply, its dog's head had suddenly turned into a human head with the same bone structure as a dog's skull.
Its skin was deathly pale. Around its mouth and between its eyes, where human and canine features differed, the skin had been stretched long and thin. But in other places, folds of skin hung in bunches.
Its two human eyes had been forcibly pulled to either side of its head to match the dog's skull. The pupils darted about, alertly scanning their surroundings, but the eyes still looked utterly lifeless.
"What kind of monster is that?"
Zhang Anzai fought the urge to vomit into the sink.
To be honest, skin-changing wasn't all that unusual in folk tales.
Never mind the well-known Painted-Skin Ghost. In some places, people told stories of mountain cats, monkeys, and weasels putting on human skin and sneaking into villages to buy things.
Many monsters and spirits that couldn't take human form used human skin as a substitute. And that was before you even got to the infamous, wicked practices of maiming people and turning them into livestock, which cost a person all their virtue.
As it happened, the Mountain Peddler had once been a child kidnapper. Besides kidnapping children to sell, many child kidnappers committed atrocities like maiming their victims.
Zhang Anzai had never expected that, after encountering all sorts of bizarre ghostly things, he'd see this today. "Though this monster looks like a wild beast wearing human skin..."
He recalled the instance's name: Flaying Labyrinth.
That meant the events behind this instance were probably connected to skin.
Zhang Anzai switched most of his consciousness back to the instance and shook his head helplessly.
"This instance seems off too... That makes three abnormal instances in a row, counting the first two."
Zhang Anzai's luck really was something else. His abilities were clearly far above those of most rookies, yet every time he wound up in some high-difficulty nightmare of an instance.
"It makes no sense..." Zhang Anzai felt rather helpless. Apart from being smart and handsome, he hadn't done anything to make people resent him, yet the game system kept targeting him.
After washing the mop and bucket, Zhang Anzai picked up the Bronze Sword and prepared to continue his patrol. "Whatever. At least I spotted the problem early, so I can be prepared."
He swept his flashlight across the factory. The huge space was packed with countless props, piled up in chaotic heaps, yet it remained so quiet that there was no sign of where the strange Human-Skin Dog was hiding.
To avoid alerting it, Zhang Anzai could only glance around briefly before turning back to continue his patrol.
He had no idea that the tiny, hidden surveillance cameras scattered throughout the factory were capturing every detail of his condition.
"How does it feel?" Mr. Li took off his thick rubber gloves, smiling as he wiped the blood from his chin.
The eerie Human-Skin Dog squatted beside him and the workbench. Its fur soaked without concern in the blood flowing across the floor as it stared straight at the countless screens on the wall.
"Woof, he... is very cautious, and... woof! very calm."
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