Chapter 176: Attack
“Forget it, I’ll do it,” Wu Heng said as he stepped out from the wall.
A straight beam of light appeared in his pale palm. The moment he pressed it against Pi Run’s forehead, his body was instantly pierced by golden threads and split into several pieces. Not a single drop of blood seeped from the cleanly cut surfaces.
“How many months along is the one in your belly?” Wu Heng lifted his eyes to look at Ruan Silian, whose expression was blank with shock. He said softly, “I can feel that they’re a little bigger than before… and a bit stronger too.”
“They just protected me,” Ruan Silian replied.
Wu Heng frowned very slightly.
Most people would find it hard to notice Wu Heng’s subtle changes in expression. Even if they did notice, they wouldn’t bother analyzing them—except for a very small number of people. Ruan Silian was one of them.
“Don’t worry. I won’t become complacent just because of something that shouldn’t exist in my body. I’ll pay closer attention.”
“What about the others?” Ruan Silian asked, without any displeasure in her expression.
Wu Heng lowered his head and licked the blood from his fingers.
“Their ability levels are too low. They can’t suppress the appetite of the poppy vine when it starts spreading.”
“Then they…”
“They followed Shen Miao,” Wu Heng said, leaning against the window, not missing the commotion downstairs.
Ruan Silian quickly wiped her hands clean. She didn’t even bother fixing her hair. “We should hurry and bring them back upstairs.”
Unhurried, Wu Heng said, “They can come up by themselves.”
“That’s good then.” Ruan Silian had thought something dangerous might have happened. If it wasn’t dangerous, then it didn’t matter—coming upstairs a little later would be fine.
But unexpectedly, Wu Heng hadn’t finished speaking. After pausing for quite a while, he finally added the rest of the sentence.
“If they can’t make it up… then forget it.”
Ruan Silian dragged out a long, “Uh… really? That’s okay?”
“I trust them, just like they trust me.”
“Isn’t that overestimating them a bit—or underestimating yourself?”
Wu Heng placed a hand against the window frame, watching the invading plants that had already grown silently outside the courtyard.
“Just polite talk.”
Ruan Silian could only smile. “Such sincere words, truly moving.”
Behind them, the corpse was gradually losing its warmth on the floor. Vines crept out from beneath Wu Heng’s feet, licking up the nearby blood until it was completely gone. Dragging strands of vine like green curtains, they wrapped several chunks of the body into a large cocoon. As the vines continuously writhed and tightened, the corpse was digested just like that.
The floor was left spotless—not even a single strand of hair remained. Most of the vines withdrew, leaving only hair-thin tendrils drifting in the air, feeding on the faint, metallic scent of blood that could be smelled but not seen.
“They ate everything… then the others…” Ruan Silian noticed that even the air had become less foul.
“It’s the same whether I eat it or they do,” Wu Heng said indifferently.
Ruan Silian stood beside him behind the window. After thinking for a moment, realization dawned on her. “No wonder you’re not worried about when they’ll come upstairs.”
“That’s not the reason,” Wu Heng said. He noticed the looks coming from Pi Run’s two female companions downstairs—their expressions were both shocked and confused. Ending the eye contact with them, he turned his head to look at Ruan Silian. “Don’t you also believe that a person has to fight for their own life?”
…
Dou Lu was mostly fine—just a bit of scraped skin. Ning Bizhen’s doctor was simply making a fuss, worrying endlessly and even hauling out a large medical kit.
Faced with someone who meant well despite fussing too much, Dou Lu suppressed the urgency in her heart. She turned to leave while muttering, “I’m really fine. It’s not like the past half year was for nothing—”
Her voice abruptly cut off as a sharp gust of wind slashed down from behind.
There was almost no chance to turn around. Several fierce strikes came at her one after another. Caught off guard, Dou Lu barely dodged them in panic. After steadying herself, she turned back—
The physician in the white coat had two pairs of dark-red insect legs, each nearly half a meter long, sprouting from his back, baring their claws and thrashing.
“Did Ning Bizhen send you?” Dou Lu immediately thought of Ning Bizhen. Without Ning Bizhen’s orders, why would these people try to kill her for no reason?
On the physician’s head, a human face overlapped with that of a parasitic insect. When he spoke, his voice carried a gritty rasp, as if too many teeth were constantly clashing inside his mouth.
“No,” he raised the red scythe in his hand, “those who are not of our kind are all food.”
For a parasite offspring with a large body and the support of a mother insect, killing a human girl should have been ridiculously easy. He sneered and swung the blade at her—but when he tried to put force behind it, his weapon seemed to meet a powerful resistance.
What’s going on?!
The air in front of him rippled. When he abruptly lifted his eyes, the human girl was gone.
At that moment, the edge of the scythe brushed against a faint golden glimmer. The instant that glimmer vanished, the blade suddenly dipped downward, then twisted back in a sweep. Blood sprayed from the physician’s neck.
The scythe fell to the ground. Dou Lu stepped out from within the blade itself and looked down at the blood on her hands.
“Before making a move, shouldn’t you figure out who the food actually is?”
But right now, she didn’t really feel like eating anymore.
If she didn’t eat, the vines would. They crawled up from the ground, finishing off the not-yet-dead corpse and even plucking out the energy core.
“Hey! That’s mine!”
Dou Lu had originally planned to go argue with the poppy vine about it, but she suddenly remembered that something more important was going on—Ruan Silian and that man had already gone upstairs a while ago.
She hurried up to the third floor and slapped the door open without even knocking. What she saw were the backs of Wu Heng and Ruan Silian. Aside from them, there was no one else in the room.
“Where’s Pi Run?! A’Ruan, are you okay?!”
“It’s already been dealt with. Everything’s fine.” Even though she had just been grabbed by the hair, cursed at, and nearly lost her life, Ruan Silian remained as gentle as ever. She showed not the slightest trace of blame toward the late-arriving Dou Lu and even noticed the blood on Dou Lu’s chin. “What happened to you…?”
“Damn it all—no wonder I just took one little fall and suddenly a doctor jumped out insisting on taking me away. Turns out he wanted to eat me!” Dou Lu glared at the back of Wu Heng’s head. “Survivors who haven’t been implanted with parasites are food for those bugs here in Hanzhou. I was wondering why they kept calling their own kind ‘lowly people.’ Calling them lowly people—ha! In truth, they just mean lowly livestock.”
“Alright, alright,” Ruan Silian soothed her, patting her back. “But are you okay?”
“Of course I’m fine. I wouldn’t be scared even if a thousand more showed up. They’re just too good at pretending—damn liars.”
After she finished speaking, the room fell silent.
But after no more than three seconds, Ruan Silian said nervously, “A’Heng, didn’t you just say the others followed Shen Miao? Then could Shen Miao also be… doing it to eat people?”
Wu Heng didn’t reply. The two people behind him also fell silent, quietly waiting for his answer.
…
The kitchen on the first floor was enormous. All kinds of mutated animal meat had already been processed and were piled in large chunks on long, cold-colored tables.
Lin Mengzhi followed behind Shen Miao. It seemed as if countless shadows were flickering before his eyes. He shook his head, while a buzzing filled his ears.
—Could appetite scream?
Xue Qi’s condition at the side wasn’t much better. “If I’d known… if I’d known, we should’ve let Wu Heng eat his fill first before giving us the small fry. When I was trapped in the reptile house, I didn’t even feel this hungry.”
“Right now I’m basically a mother donkey being lured along by a carrot,” Xue Zhi said.
Yang Ao and Yang Yu followed behind them nervously.
The only one in slightly better condition was Ying Liuquan.
It was actually Ying Liuquan—so much so that even he himself could hardly believe it.
And just as he was still shaking his head and sighing about how youth was truly the privilege of the young, a sharp streak of light suddenly shot out from ahead.
“Watch out!” Ying Liuquan grabbed a cleaver from the table and hurled it forward. He threw himself over his students, knocking them all to the ground, just as a massive crimson parasitic insect burst out from the wall and lunged forward—missing its target.
“Mr. Shen, what are you doing?” Ying Liuquan scrambled to his feet and demanded.
Shen Miao slowly turned around and stepped backward. From a hidden door behind him, a line of people wearing aprons filed out one after another.
“There’s still one main dish missing from the menu for Mr. Shen’s birthday banquet.”
Lin Mengzhi’s bones ached from hunger, and his tone turned impatient. “Then cook it, damn it!”
After he shouted, his expression suddenly changed.
The sharp, painful sensation that hunger had been causing throughout his body… seemed to be slowly easing.
The head chef was amused by the foolish creature before him, but that didn’t affect its edibility—otherwise humans wouldn’t have been insulting pig brains while eating them for so many years.
After a hearty burst of laughter, his expression suddenly turned dark and menacing. “You… will be today’s main course.”
…
Wu Heng hadn’t ignored Ruan Silian’s words; it was just that the time had come.
The parasitic eyes on his earlobes gleamed with a sharper excitement than before. Once thought to be mere decoration, he now understood—they saw exactly what Xie Chongyi saw.
Even though the building’s arc, once a rainbow of light tubes, was now blackened, careful observation revealed dark liquid pouring frenetically down from the rooftop beneath the boy.
The building, nearly a hundred floors high, had suffered significant damage during the earthquake, developing cracks along its structure. But as a landmark, Ning Bizhen had already repaired it, even cleaning the glass to a spotless shine.
Yet now, it was tightly wrapped in an unknown, seemingly living black liquid. The viscous substance flowed all the way to the base of the building before coming to a stop, as if waiting for someone’s command.
Xie Chongyi stood where Wu Heng had once stood, using the parasitic eyes to observe the environment Wu Heng now occupied.
The ring on the boy’s finger burned hot. The moment the bone spike pierced his skin and drew blood, he turned sharply and strode out of the room.
Meanwhile, Xie Chongyi sat leisurely atop the high rooftop, gazing down at the restless little parasites below.
“Let’s begin.”
In the pitch-black night, the black liquid spread outward at an eerie speed. The city, already shrouded in darkness, became an inferno-like scene once covered by the liquid. Tens of thousands of ability users across Hanzhou remained asleep, or perhaps offering prayers to Shen Miao—but tonight, no one would rest.
…
As Wu Heng went downstairs, he ran into Pi Run’s two female companions.
They were muttering curses under their breath.
“This damn guy probably got involved with someone again, huh?”
“Sooner or later, he’ll be drained dry and die!”
Though they didn’t say it aloud, both had likely assumed the girl Pi Run had been messing with was the same one who had gotten her clothes wet earlier—a delicate, ordinary human girl, perfectly suited to Pi Run’s tastes. Yet, as they rushed upstairs, they ran head-on into her and her companions.
Not her? Their footsteps paused slightly. They threw a slightly awkward yet polite smile over their shoulders and continued running upstairs.
Reaching the first floor, his hurried footsteps felt completely out of place amid the leisurely atmosphere around him—but Wu Heng didn’t care in the slightest.
The two long knives in his hands appeared. With a swift kick, he opened the door, and in the blink of an eye, he was behind Ning Bizhen, who had already sensed something was wrong.
Without giving anyone nearby even half a second to react, Wu Heng thrust his blade straight through Ning Bizhen’s heart.
Blood trickled drop by drop down the tip of the knife.
Caught completely off guard, Ning Bizhen slowly lowered his head, surrounded by incredulous gasps.
Wu Heng hadn’t expected Ning Bizhen to be so easy to kill. A first-time expression of both delight and surprise flickered across his face. Slowly, he withdrew the knife and stepped back two paces. Ning Bizhen’s body collapsed to the ground, utterly lifeless.
The boy lowered his eyes, his expression returning to its usual calm. He glanced upward at the guests who had yet to realize what had just occurred.
“Truly astonishing,” a voice said.
It was Ning Bizhen’s voice—but not coming from the body on the floor.
In the courtyard, an old man hunched over with a cane wobbled precariously. His body seemed frail and weak, yet his eyes shone with a brilliance not befitting someone of his age.
“So he is from Jingzhou,” the old man said, stroking his beard. “A feeble, innocent elder… dare you kill me?”
Wu Heng’s expression remained calm. He turned and threw his knife—the old man’s head fell to the ground instantly.
“No one can threaten me.”
As soon as he spoke, the earth around him cracked. Thousands of plant roots erupted in response. The castle that had served as the insect hive collapsed in an instant. Ning Bizhen himself reappeared amidst the ruins, smiling brightly as he looked down at the boy on the ground.