Chapter Eighty-Five: Come Find Me!

A factory.

Most of the grounds were shrouded in dense fog. There were no beasts or birds here, as though this were a netherworldly furnace of hell; even beneath the blazing sun, it still gave off a bone-deep chill.

A head emerged around the corner.

It was a female corpse-creature, her entire body a bruised blue-black, her lips smeared with blood. The thick, dark blood made her look even stranger and more terrifying.

It was searching for food, but there was no trace of living flesh left nearby.

Yet just then, it suddenly stopped. It sniffed the air, as if catching some intoxicating scent. Its dull white eyes swept the surroundings, trying to locate the source.

A fleeting shadow flashed by.

So fast it was astonishing. Before the corpse-creature could react, a long blade was already pressed beneath its throat.

Cold light flickered.

The corpse-creature's neck was slit open at once, and foul black blood gushed out.

Kill value +1

235/500

A day passed in the blink of an eye. After a brief night's rest, Van Li set out again on the next leg of his journey.

Luck or misfortune, he could not tell, but along the way he encountered only ordinary corpses. Since killing the corpse dog yesterday, nearly an entire day had gone by, and he had only accumulated thirty-five points of kill value.

At this point, the ground Van Li had entered used to be a factory in peacetime. With major cities plagued by severe smog and strict requirements for energy conservation and emissions reduction, many factories had gradually relocated and begun construction in the smaller surrounding cities and counties.

The factory had brought some business opportunities to the county town and drawn many people here for work. At its peak, he had heard there were more than a thousand employees.

That was also why Van Li had chosen this place. A large factory with a thousand people meant, by sheer numbers alone, that there should be no shortage of corpses that had mutated and evolved into monster forms.

Van Li still remembered clearly that only minutes ago the weather had been fair and bright, yet not long after stepping into the factory, fog had unexpectedly enveloped the area, drastically reducing visibility.

Mist piled thickly all around, and with no sun in sight, the place felt oppressively stifling.

The factory was vast, yet it seemed as though not a single living person remained. The surrounding silence was terrifying, as if he had accidentally wandered into a ghost realm, with his world and that place forming two twisted spaces.

Van Li walked forward with his blade in hand, then suddenly halted, because he could faintly make out a blurry figure not far ahead.

Mist clung to the figure's body, its features impossible to discern. All he could see was that it was making a beckoning motion, as though greeting him.

"Are you human?"

Van Li stood still and asked it.

But the figure seemed not to hear him at all. It kept waving, as if urging him to come closer.

Whoosh...

A chill breeze passed by, and Van Li seemed to hear faint hallucinated sounds in his ear, fragmented and indistinct, yet somehow strangely familiar, leaving him with an urge to step forward and make out exactly what they were.

"Was this what Yang Shuo experienced before?"

Van Li muttered to himself.

The surrounding fog, the unanswered question, and the blurry figure endlessly beckoning at him—all signs pointed to one conclusion: the figure before him was not human, but a corpse that had mutated.

It was the same ability as that mutant below the building. From Yang Shuo's later recollection, he had originally been by the window when he suddenly saw a human figure, and then familiar voices had appeared by his ear, like old acquaintances calling out to him.

Not only that, the thing also seemed capable of flashing short distances. If you ignored it when it beckoned, it would slowly approach, and if Van Li had not arrived in time that day, that evolved creature might well have entered the room and slaughtered everything inside.

Fog fiend.

One was still sealed in the monster handbook.

The current situation was almost exactly the same as Yang Shuo's description, except that the sounds by his ear were not very clear, like a radio channel with no signal, making one want to switch it off and enjoy some peace and quiet.

So the strength of this creature's ability depended on the signal in one's ears? If so, this one in front of him was even weaker than the fog fiend in front of the building. After all, the voices he heard were only broken sentences, with occasional bursts of static.

So it wasn't a monster?

Van Li let out a breath, though he felt considerably better than before. After all, this was the first existence beyond an ordinary corpse that he had encountered since leaving home. Even if it was a little weaker, it still meant an increase in kill value, and he could also add another sealed entity to the monster handbook.

Every beginning is hard, but now that an evolved creature had appeared, could monsters still be far behind?

The static beside his ear grew clearer. Van Li was still puzzled when he suddenly felt the blurry figure move a little closer. No wonder the sound had become clearer; their distance had shortened.

"Come on..."

"Come find me..."

The hallucinated voices beside his ear finally took shape. Van Li could hear what the other side was saying. The figure shrouded in mist still kept waving patiently, trying to draw him closer.

However, without needing it to keep urging him, Van Li was already prepared to do exactly that. He strode forward, samurai blade in hand, stepping on the concrete floor as he walked straight toward the figure that kept beckoning him over.

This was the first rare corpse he had encountered in this period of time, and he naturally did not want even the slightest mistake.

"Don't move. I'll come to you right now!" Van Li said again, then kept moving, rapidly closing the distance between them.

The voices beside his ear vanished. Van Li seemed to have found the source of the problem: corpses had no intelligence, only the most primitive hunter's instincts. The sounds were very likely hallucinations born from fear in his heart. Yet now, instead of being terrified by the strange environment and the unfamiliar shadow, Van Li was striding forward with such boldness that he had, by some bizarre twist of fate, shut those sounds out.

The distance drew closer and closer.

The blurry figure no longer waved. It seemed not to have expected that this time, the prey would come to it of its own accord.

Closer.

When Van Li took another step, the previously blurred shape was already fully within his field of vision.

It was about five feet two, with a gaunt, hideous face that looked starved beyond reason. There was no hair on its body at all. Its mouth was filled with two rows of teeth arranged like needles, and its fingers were also abnormal, each more than a handspan long, hanging down along either side of its legs.

Whether by appearance or by aura, it was clear that this was no ordinary corpse, but an evolved creature.

Evolved creatures differed from corpses. Though they possessed no intellect, they had certain peculiar behaviors: the Cryer crouched in place and wept, the Titan charged recklessly, and this fog fiend seemed to be accustomed to using its arms and hallucinated voices to lure prey closer before hunting and devouring them.

With only about three yards between them, Van Li's fear resistance allowed him to completely ignore the other's ugliness. Holding the blade in his right hand, he made the same beckoning gesture with his left and said, "Come on, come find me!"