Thanks for Asking, I'm on Terra, and I'm a Parasite

Still without a head.

"Phew..."

My mental state didn't seem to have changed.

Then the problem was...

Zuo Jian froze as a pale golden shape drifted past his hand.

It was a ginkgo leaf.

Was he leaning against that ginkgo tree right now?

"That tree actually existed all along? I thought it was just from before—"

He turned his head, then froze completely at the sight behind him.

The towering ginkgo was no longer purely golden.

Half its trunk and leaves had transformed into grotesque flesh.

Where the branches should have sprouted leaves, masses of flesh had fused together, resembling half a human brain.

The trunk was covered in densely packed eyeballs, and sticky tentacles occasionally sprouted from within, crawling toward the branches that hadn't yet been assimilated.

"Damn it, how did this happen? This place is only a space constructed by my subconscious..."

"Wait... subconscious..."

Zuo Jian suddenly understood something.

"Is this... an anchor point?"

He recalled a certain theory.

Everyone had a part of their heart that would never change, a place that held the most important objects or scenery from their life.

No matter how terrible your mental state became, it would help stabilize you and keep you from collapsing easily.

Such things were often called—Mental Anchors.

His anchor was this ginkgo tree beneath the setting sun.

Then what if this anchor was corroded by that flesh?

"What is this?"

The moment he observed the ginkgo.

A mirror beside the tree, as though cast from gold, caught his attention.

He stepped closer and found several cracks had already appeared across its surface.

Different scenes cycled through the mirror again and again.

A circular saw, blue blood, a dance, a plaster statue.

And then...

He watched as the final image turned into a cramped little house.

A young white-haired girl swayed as she carried a tiny stool toward a plaster statue.

She set down the stool, picked up a hammer and chisel from beside it, and struck again and again with boundless hope.

"Laurentina?"

Zuo Jian realized this was her Mental Anchor.

But why had it cracked?

The Church of the Deep?!

If he wasn't mistaken, then without him, the repeated torment from those scum would have shattered this anchor that had become a mirror, causing her to collapse?

What kind of psychological trauma would that inflict on her?

Then, as Zuo Jian thought about it, he suddenly remembered his own anchor.

Would they corrode Laurentina too, besides corroding him?

"Squelch!"

His finger bones plunged straight into the flesh, forcibly tearing it from the ginkgo tree.

"I am... human!"

"How could I possibly let a biological instinct steal my mind?!"

(I spent the whole day in bed and felt a little better...)

(Then I scrolled on my phone for a while and saw news about Girls' Frontline 2. I'd been playing Monster Hunter nonstop before this and hadn't paid attention to anything online.)

(I only took one look, and I was just ???)

(Thanks. An eighteen-year-old account and over ten thousand games later, I've become a prison player.)

(The illness didn't beat me, but you nearly sent me off. Yuzhong, I'll fly-kick you?)

(Damn it, if I hadn't gotten sick and played Monster Hunter every day, I never would've seen the Girls' Frontline 2 news!)

Zuo Jian, help me!!

"Damn it..."

Zuo Jian leaned against the tree, looking at the flesh that had nearly been completely stripped away.

Nearly every piece he tore off came with murmuring whispers echoing in his ears.

He couldn't make out those chaotic voices, nor did he want to.

He clearly had no skin, yet the instant his finger bones pierced the flesh, a burning pain kept flooding through him.

And...

"Is the parasitic part too active? Every time it reconstructs, spreads, or changes its flesh, it keeps corroding my Mental Anchor."

He stood and looked at the battered ginkgo.

Faint bloody marks still remained on the bare half of it.

There was still a solution.

He just needed to return here every so often and deal with the flesh that kept spreading over it.

But he'd have to control how often he changed freely... Should he tell Laurentina?

...No.

She was just a kid. Did she really need to worry about something like this for an adult like him?

According to Laurentina, she had already lost her so-called homeland. Her only remaining connection was searching the land for her surviving companions.

Like a lone boat drifting upon an endless sea.

Lost, unable to see any kind of future.

Perhaps she would never find her companions and would spend the rest of her life on this unfamiliar land, with no sense of belonging.

...But now, she had found a companion aboard this little boat, and she had inevitably become dependent on him.

Perhaps in the future, she would meet more people and find more companions.

The future would no longer be uncertain, and there would no longer be loneliness around her.

But for now...

By her side,

there was only him.

Loneliness and confusion, magnified by the pain of misfortune, were enough to drive anyone mad.

Especially since Laurentina was, in truth, just an innocent girl.

He wouldn't make her suffer pointless worry.

"At worst, I'll come back here from time to time and clean it up."

Zuo Jian turned to look at the damaged tree.

"What is this? I sound like some middle-aged guy raising a kid, even though I'm only... how old again?"

"Ah, what a failure my previous life was. I worked so much overtime that I forgot how many birthdays I'd had. Looks like I really am middle-aged."

With a sigh, he rose to his feet and prepared to let his consciousness rise and wake up once more.

?

In a daze, he seemed to sense a new passage forming.

It was as if there had originally been only one door in the room, and behind it was Laurentina.

But now, another door was slowly taking shape...

Zuo Jian roughly guessed where this door led.

Had the flesh that had transformed into hunting hounds and gone out to hunt returned?

There was no need to deal with them for now. He just needed to let them maintain their disguises.

After issuing a simple command, he stopped paying attention to them.

..

"A little girl?"

Laurentina frowned at the slender figure emerging from the shadows.

"N-No, don't hit me. I'm not like them. I know you're not actually a bad person."

The other girl hurriedly waved her hands to show what she meant.

"Oh?"

Laurentina looked the skinny girl up and down.

"How do you know I'm not a bad person?"

"Your eyes. There's... no malice in your eyes."

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The girl before her was completely different from everyone else.

Or rather, completely different from this rather abnormal city.

She could communicate normally, making Laurentina realize that her Iberian hadn't somehow gone wrong.

At the same time, her thinking wasn't as crude as those two guys Laurentina had just knocked to the ground.

"I just wanted to teach... educate the brat behind you a little."

"Teach Bench a lesson? Why?"

"He took something of mine."

"What?!"

The girl froze, then turned and sternly looked at the child behind her, the one called Bench.

"Bench, what did you take? You can't just take other people's things!"

"Waaah, Wood Frame, it hurts. Shiny, hard."

The child called Bench whimpered as he handed the metal clothing ornament he couldn't bite through to the girl.

"Whoa, it's covered in drool. I'm sorry. Bench is still young, he doesn't know what he shouldn't take. I'm sorry, it's all covered in drool."

Wood Frame? Was that this girl's name? It was simple and casual enough. And that brat was called Bench?

Did the residents here all have such... wild names?