Chapter 26.2: The Same Kind
There wasn’t just one snail inside the shop. A quick sweep of Wu Heng’s eyes revealed that the walls and even the ceiling were dotted with them. Each time their bellies squirmed, they made a squelching, gurgling sound—something that almost seemed like it was meant to tempt people with bad teeth into taking a bite.
Wu Heng’s hand hung loosely at his side. A supple vine slithered along the lower edge of a shelf, circling around until it found a solitary mutant snail.
The vine climbed up the snail’s shell like a snake, its tip searching, then drove straight and true into the breathing hole at the top of the shell.
A few seconds later, the snail’s soft, moist belly suddenly contracted inward. It shrank back into its shell—unaware that a green vine, sharp as a bamboo viper, had long since been waiting inside.
The vine returned to Wu Heng with a pale blue energy core.
Wu Heng probed it briefly and found it was water-elemental. He couldn’t use it for now, so he stored it away.
Xie Chongyi’s hand came to rest lightly on Wu Heng’s shoulder, guiding him out of the snail’s path.
“Snails don’t see well—they rely mostly on smell and touch. They should already have caught our scent. Let them search. We’ll leave.”
As he spoke, Xie Chongyi’s palm slid down to Wu Heng’s lower back. With an easy grip, he led Wu Heng outside.
Wu Heng nearly stumbled straight into Xie Chongyi’s arms. The boy’s faintly sweet, refreshing scent pricked at his senses, and for a split second Wu Heng’s pupils flickered, his dark irises bleeding red.
Xie Chongyi pulled Wu Heng under the counter of the customer service desk on the third floor.
“Wu Heng, what’s your plan?” the boy asked, his voice utterly flat.
“Leave here,” Wu Heng replied without hesitation.
“But there are many mutant creatures around.”
“Class Monitor, what exactly are you trying to say?”
After a moment, Xie Chongyi raised his hand and roughly ruffled Wu Heng’s hair. His lips brushed against Wu Heng’s ear as he murmured, “Don’t you want to take down the Reptile House?”
Wu Heng didn’t think there was anything wrong with how close they were, nor did he feel uncomfortable. He even leaned closer into the other’s arms, tilted his head back, and said,
“But I’m afraid of bugs.”
“What’s your ability?” Xie Chongyi’s lips trailed slowly down along the curve of Wu Heng’s ear, finally pausing at his neck. “Don’t tell me you’re just an ordinary person, Wu Heng. I can feel a strong energy fluctuation in you.”
Wu Heng blinked in surprise.
“Ah, really?”
Xie Chongyi’s night vision was unaffected by the darkness, so every bit of Wu Heng’s deliberate expression was perfectly clear to him. For the first time, the thought of tormenting someone to death crossed his mind.
Without a shred of hesitation, Xie Chongyi wrapped an arm around Wu Heng and shoved him out of the customer service center.
“Those katydids are all yours.”
“……”
Wu Heng didn’t curse. He just opened his mouth silently, thinking that sooner or later, he’d devour Xie Chongyi until not even bone dust was left.
For now, he would treat him as food worth protecting.
The katydids seemed to still be resting, chirping softly, unaware of the humans in the distance.
The boy crouched down, pressing his palm against the floor. Vines surged forward like a silent tide, sweeping toward the three massive stone pillars at the center.
They moved fast, making no sound at all. And since plants carried no trace of human presence, when one katydid fluttered its wings, the vines were already behind it.
Puchi—one katydid was instantly skewered through. The first strike clearly came from the main vine, and once it moved, the sound of katydids being pierced rang out one after another.
The swarm finally realized their prey had appeared. They beat their dazzling, eye-blinding wings, striking back with mandibles and scythe-sharp spines against the vines.
Wu Heng’s face was pale but his hands were black, as he drove the vines straight through their mandibles. A single vine, at most, could skewer seven or eight at once.
One by one, the katydids crashed heavily to the ground.
Watching the slaughter in the distance, Wu Heng sighed in relief—thankfully, he had obtained the mutated pothos energy core that afternoon. Without it, his Poppy ability would never have managed such a workload.
Xie Chongyi quietly watched Wu Heng.
Wu Heng had an incredibly bewitching face. Pale and clear, it carried no trace of aggression, always giving others the illusion that he could be trampled at will.
But beneath that face, his true nature was bloodthirsty.
A face that could not lure others to heaven, yet could so easily entice them into hell.
Xie Chongyi felt a lump in his throat. He knew it—he hadn’t misjudged Wu Heng.
They were the same kind.
—
The commotion outside stirred up the rest of the insects again. But the carpet of katydid corpses on the first floor misled them. Swarms surged from every direction toward the ground level, the thunder of their beating wings deafening, the buzzing making one’s scalp crawl.
Wu Heng sat beneath the counter, damp bangs clinging to his forehead, lips slightly parted, eyes a little unfocused.
Seeing him like this, Xie Chongyi’s fingers inexplicably itched.
“You’re a wood-type ability user?”
Wu Heng snapped back to himself.
“No.”
He denied Xie Chongyi’s guess but didn’t say what his ability actually was, and Xie Chongyi didn’t press further.
At that moment, a sound suddenly came from the customer service center’s entrance.
Hiss—
A long, dark, snake-like form slid in through the doorway. With it came the sound of heavy breathing and the stench of animal musk. Its tongue flicked as its head finally pushed inside.
It was a long-nosed lizard.
Most of its body couldn’t fit through—the creature was far too large, its forelimbs too thick and heavy. It could only wedge its head in to peer around.
The first thing it saw was Xie Chongyi.
Yet before it could make its next move, Xie Chongyi lifted his hand, fingers tightening slightly—
Crack.
The sound of bone snapping rang out.
Rip—
A few drops of blood splattered across Wu Heng’s face. He instinctively shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the mutated lizard had already been split cleanly down the middle, starting from its long snout and stopping only when the cleave reached its head.
Lowering his hand, Xie Chongyi said evenly,
“If they all came one by one to deliver their heads, that’d be ideal.”
After cutting out the energy core from the mutated lizard, Xie Chongyi and Wu Heng stepped out of the customer service center. Standing on the third floor and looking down, they saw countless mutated insects swarming around the heap of katydid corpses, feeding.
“We have to find the others first. Just the two of us can’t possibly wipe all of these things out.” Xie Chongyi grabbed Wu Heng’s arm and yanked him closer. “Can you not stay so far from me?”
Wu Heng had still been thinking that if Lin Mengzhi were here, he might’ve been able to roast a skewer of katydids to eat. Suddenly being pulled like this left him dumbfounded.
But since Xie Chongyi was taking the initiative—that was exactly what he wanted—Wu Heng lowered his voice and said, “Sorry. Class Monitor, you’re a good person.”
“Has your ability affected your eyesight?” Xie Chongyi made no effort to disguise himself in front of Wu Heng.
Wu Heng bit his lip, suddenly unable to take another step forward.
Xie Chongyi stopped as well—just in time to see an enormous spider inside the nearby shop. From the crack in the door, it spat out a strand of silk that coiled tightly around Wu Heng’s left leg.
The spider’s six crimson eyes gleamed, its massive, razor-sharp mandibles clicking together with a ka-da ka-da. It was nearly as large as an entire door. Muscular legs clamped firmly against the doorway, its swollen abdomen heaving. Inside the shop, the space was covered in blinding white webbing, and pairs of red eyes gradually emerged in the darkness.
“Cut the webbing. I’ll deal with it.”
Xie Chongyi raised his hand. The spider’s abdomen immediately collapsed in by a whole section, bursting open a hole the size of a soccer ball.
Behind him, Wu Heng hacked furiously at the silk with the kitchen knife—crunch, crunch.
Even the vines tried their hardest to help, straining with all their might until one of them snapped—yet the spider silk around Wu Heng’s leg still refused to give way.
Blood slowly seeped through the fabric of his pants; the silk was tightening.
Bang.
The spider inside collapsed with a crash.
Unlike the smell of mutated katydids, Wu Heng’s blood carried a sharp, raw tang that pierced straight into the senses of the spiders nesting in the shop. As if answering a signal, the whole nest stirred and poured out.
Several of them clamped onto the strands binding Wu Heng and began dragging him inside.
Wu Heng, caught off guard, toppled to the ground. The spiders seized the chance, reeling their threads in faster.
Pain tore through his leg until his face went deathly pale, cold sweat streaming down his cheeks like water.
He flung out a hand—vines writhed like snakes, surging into the shop. The spiders leapt nimbly to evade; though his strikes were landing, the vines were quickly ensnared in sticky silk.
Grinding his teeth, Wu Heng hacked through several of the entangled vines with swift strokes of his knife.
Just as he was about to be hauled completely into the shop, his body slammed hard into something solid.
Between him and the spiders—an invisible wall had appeared?
Xie Chongyi strode toward him. He crouched slightly, his expression like ice. Seeing how the silk had nearly severed Wu Heng’s leg, he drew a long breath, then brushed the hair from Wu Heng’s damp forehead with his fingers.
“I’ll go in. Be right back.”
Wu Heng barely managed to part his lips, but before he could utter a sound, Xie Chongyi had already passed through the barrier he’d made and stepped into the spiders’ lair.
Inside, webs thickened and multiplied. The mutated giants stirred at the disturbance, encircling him in a tightening ring.
Crash!
One spider was ripped straight from the wall, its body shattering on the floor into pieces, yellow ichor spilling everywhere.
Xie Chongyi spoke with unhurried calm:
“Evolving by luck doesn’t mean you get to stand on my head.”
The silk threads that sliced through the air never reached him. Mid-flight, the spitting spider exploded with a boom.
Three of their kind already dead, the rest of the spiders lost their cold restraint. En masse, they surged at Xie Chongyi.
He should have been their prey—yet with those sharp-cut features, the boy looked every bit the hunter.
He vaulted lightly onto the counter, boot slamming down to kick aside a charging mutant spider. His five fingers curled slowly into a fist—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—five spiders burst apart in succession, leaving the floor slick and glistening.
Sweat drenched his hair, sharpening the gleam of his brows and eyes. His expression grew almost feverishly bright, his strikes each more merciless than the last.
With a sharp crack, another spider’s belly burst wide, splattering its innards—and with it, a massive egg sac above tore open. A flood of bucket-sized eggs ruptured, spilling swarms of panicked little mutant spiders skittering straight toward him.
Xie Chongyi didn’t flinch. He simply stamped them flat, one by one.
“One… two… three…”
The shop was a whirlwind of carnage—spider legs flying, gouged-out eyes bouncing across the floor, heavy bodies hitting the ground only to be kicked aside, while the hissing of silk-spinners weakened to a thin rasp.
Outside.
All at once, the strands binding Wu Heng’s leg slackened.
The spider dragging him—was it dead?
Flat on the ground, Wu Heng couldn’t see what was happening inside. But the glass doors before him were smeared thick with yellow-white gore, plastered in streaks of spider entrails.
He forced himself upright, waiting, until at last he saw Xie Chongyi step through the shredded webs.
Overuse of power had drained the color from his face, leaving him ghost-pale. But his peach-blossom eyes were dark as ink, and when his gaze landed on Wu Heng, that icy, predatory mask softened into a sudden smile.
“Wu Heng,” he said, voice low and edged with exhilaration, “you don’t know how good that felt.”