[I smelled something revolting. It felt like digging a sock out of a pile of corpses, then leaving it in a dung heap to ferment for seven days and nights.]
[Fortunately, I held it in.]
[Just then, a Heartless ran out of the shadows.]
[It carried the key item needed to pass the assessment.]
Heartless?
The information from his heart made Xu Ye pause.
It was a term he had never heard before.
Could it be an Aberrant? Surely they wouldn't go that far? Of the hundreds of people here, how many have ever seen an Aberrant? Plenty of them are ordinary people, too. They're releasing an Aberrant just to test us?
Xu Ye drew a small breath.
Sure, Xu Ye himself had encountered so many pollution incidents right after becoming an Awakened.
But that was because of the Eternal Church.
By contrast, even the recruits here who had been Awakened the longest had only been so for six months. Some had never even seen an Aberrant, let alone encountered one.
"Ye, what's that?"
At Lu Mingwang's words, all eight hundred people fell silent.
At the edge of the field, on the side closest to Xu Ye's group, a strangely shaped creature crawled out of the shadows.
Its limbs were longer than an ordinary person's, and its blue skin looked completely dehydrated, clinging to straight bones.
Its head, torso, and limbs were all humanoid, but a gaping hole pierced its chest. Its heart was missing, and putrid fluid kept seeping from the opening.
Its thick, alloy-like tail was covered in sharp metal spikes. As it swayed from side to side, the spikes stood up one by one, gleaming eerily under the red moonlight.
"A Heartless."
As everyone stood frozen in terror, Xu Ye heard a girl's voice.
He looked toward