The Open Door

After handing in the Blood Corpse's mutation organ, Lin Ye returned to the doorway. The Blood Corpse had pushed the door open, and a mahogany chest sat inside the open room.

He opened the chest. Inside lay a blood-red, straight-bladed saber with a blade about a meter long and no guard. Though it was a saber, it looked more like a long, single-edged sword.

Its hilt was solid black, and it had no scabbard.

"Wow, great. I needed a longer weapon."

Lin Ye carefully gripped the hilt and picked it up off the ground. The red blade was neither particularly heavy nor light; its weight was just right.

There was only one item in the treasure chest, possibly because of the Cat Tail Talisman.

Lin Ye tested the red blade on the Blood Corpse. It sliced through the Blood Corpse's flesh with very little resistance.

After chopping the Blood Corpse to pieces, Lin Ye continued exploring the Red Maze. With this weapon, he was confident he could upgrade the Shelter today, provided he could find enough Blood Corpses.

As Lin Ye happily explored the maze, he came across a Red Room with its door standing open.

He cautiously poked his head in for a look.

That single glance made Lin Ye involuntarily take a step back.

It was hard to describe the state of the room. If he had to put it into words, there was one that fit:

A nest.

Inside was a nest of flesh and blood.

The floor, walls, and ceiling-every part of the room was coated in writhing flesh. All kinds of remains were piled up and fused together, forming some new kind of creature.

Most conspicuous among them was a dismembered man, scattered throughout the room and mixed in with the other things.

Holy shit... what the hell is that?

Even Lin Ye, who had weathered plenty of storms, was startled by the sight inside the room. It was something abnormal, something beyond reason.

Before Lin Ye could react any further, the monster inside the room noticed him and attacked first.

The entire corridor began to shake. Heaps of flesh squeezed out of the room and lunged at Lin Ye with howls.

Lin Ye turned and ran. By any measure, this monster was beyond his ability to handle.

"Don't run!"

"Help!"

"Have you eaten?"

"Hello..."

All kinds of voices came from the flesh. The loudest belonged to the man's head. Even connected by only a few strips of flesh, it was still crying loudly for help.

Lin Ye couldn't save it. He was the one who wanted to call for help.

The monster wasn't particularly fast, but it certainly wasn't slow either. At full speed, Lin Ye could outpace it somewhat, but he couldn't keep sprinting forever. At most, he could hold on for another few minutes before his strength gave out.

Once the monster behind him caught up, it would be his turn to be dismembered.

Lin Ye tried to put some distance between himself and the monster, but even with half a corridor between them and him out of sight, the monster showed no intention of stopping. It kept chasing him, as though it wouldn't stop until one of them was dead.

Lin Ye could actually hide in a room, but that would leave him no way out. If the monster blocked the doorway, he would be finished.

So all he could do now was run forward and hope to find a passage out of this place.

Half a minute later, Lin Ye began to slow down. He could still keep going, but if he ran much longer, he would have no strength left to fight back.

Lin Ye took the Cross Necklace out of his backpack and put it around his neck. He didn't know whether it had any side effects, but he urgently needed perception to identify the monster's mutated parts.

The moment he put on the necklace, Lin Ye was stunned. A flood of chaotic information he had never sensed before poured into his brain. For that instant, he felt as though he had ascended from a lower dimension into a higher one.

But the sensation lasted only briefly. Soon, Lin Ye returned to normal, as though those extraordinary senses had been nothing but an illusion.

Still, a trace of the sensation remained. Combining it with his previous simulation experience, he followed that feeling and fumbled his way back to a faint extraordinary sense.

He could sense his body moving vigorously: his taut muscles, his heart contracting too quickly, and his brain firing sparks.

His life was burning fiercely, but it paled beside the monster pursuing him.

If Lin Ye was a burning torch, the monster behind him was flowing lava. There was a fundamental difference between them.

Lin Ye slowed his steps. He needed to get closer to the monster so he could sense it more clearly.

Since he couldn't escape, he could only find a way to kill it.

Based on what Lin Ye could sense, a reckless frontal confrontation offered no chance of victory.

His chance lay in those ten bullets. Only by hitting the monster's vital spots with them would he have any chance of surviving.

Lin Ye pretended to be exhausted and let the monster close the distance. Twenty meters... fifteen meters... ten meters... nine meters...

When the monster was eight meters from Lin Ye, it suddenly paused. Then several sounds of something cutting through the air came from behind him.

Thud, thud, thud, thud!

Lin Ye sensed something wrong the moment the monster paused. Before the sounds rang out, he dropped flat, using his momentum to scramble and roll around the corner at the end of the corridor.

Bullet-like pieces of flesh struck the wall, leaving blood-red marks.

Had Lin Ye reacted a little slower, had he lacked that perceptive ability, those flesh bullets would already have torn him apart.

After rounding the corner, Lin Ye got to his feet. Rather than turn and keep running, he pressed himself against the inside of the corner, drew the pistols tucked into his waistband, and waited for the monster to approach.

He was too close to the monster now, with no safe distance between them. If he kept running, only two outcomes remained: either the monster would shoot him to pieces, or it would catch up and dismember him while he dodged the flesh bullets.

This corner was therefore his only chance to win.

Lin Ye closed his eyes. His perception spread outward like invisible feelers, and time seemed to stretch endlessly.

Four meters.

Lin Ye raised both pistols, their muzzles pointed at the wall, tracking the points where the energy inside the monster was most intense.

Three meters.

Two primary points, four secondary points.

Two meters.

Ten bullets. Two for each primary point, one for each secondary point, and two in reserve.

One meter.

The muzzles needed to move twice. He could use the recoil to shift them.

Zero.

Fire!

The moment the monster crashed around the corner, Lin Ye snapped his eyes open, his eyelids stretched to their widest and his pupils contracted to pinpoints. His fingers twitched, and the bullets punched into the monster like awls.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!

The muzzles were less than twenty centimeters from the monster's surface. At that distance, Lin Ye would never miss.

Without checking the results, Lin Ye was already retreating as he fired. As he backed away, he put another two shots into the monster.

Bang, bang!

Those two shots were meant to disrupt the monster's overall balance. Lin Ye couldn't quite say why he had fired them; he had simply felt that adding two shots that way would be better.

Those two shots worked even better than Lin Ye expected. The monster had still been struggling to attack him, but the final two shots brought it down.

The monster lay sprawled on the ground, struggling for a long time without managing to get back up.

Lin Ye watched it struggle from a distance until it stopped moving entirely. He waited another ten minutes, and only after sensing that it was truly dead did he approach its corpse.

Just then, Lin Ye's vision suddenly went black. A stabbing pain shot through his brain, his stomach churned, and nearly digested food surged into his mouth along with stomach acid.

"Cough! Fuck!"

Lin Ye dropped to the ground and retched, only feeling somewhat better after emptying his stomach.

But his vision was still dark, and the stabbing pain in his brain grew increasingly intense.

Lin Ye hurriedly removed the Cross Necklace. As the special sense faded, the stabbing pain in his brain gradually eased.