Song Zang became even less willing to move.
Although he could not see, his perception was extremely sensitive.
Before Yin Chen spoke, there truly had been nothing at all inside this strange dark space. Song Zang felt as though he were trapped inside a vacuum hole in a dead universe, boundless and endless. Danger clearly existed, yet it was unfathomably deep.
But after he heard Yin Chen’s voice, all the dangers lurking around him seemed to be suddenly laid out in the open.
Song Zang’s heart tightened violently. The crushing pressure made it even harder to breathe. Certain people, certain terrifying existences, were secretly observing him. Countless eyes hid in the darkness and stared openly, studying him without blinking until goosebumps rose all over Song Zang’s skin.
And Yin Chen’s “presence” seemed to loom vaguely above Song Zang’s head, vast enough to blot out the sky. The cold pressure spilling from him without intention was terrifyingly obvious.
Good. Yin Chen had not suffered some catastrophic accident.
But the aura radiating from Yin Chen right now… was extremely frightening.
Song Zang felt both reassured and nervous. His heart hammered, and even he could not identify the complexity of that feeling. He lowered his eyes and pressed his lips together, not daring to speak casually or summon the system screen in case he interrupted whatever Yin Chen was about to do.
The most awkward part was that Song Zang still was not wearing any clothes.
If the gazes secretly studying him belonged to highly intelligent beings, and they had maliciously engineered this entire chain of events just to drag him into a strange world of absolute darkness…
Then standing here without clothes gave him absolutely no presence at all! Song Zang could barely imagine how embarrassing that scene would be. He almost blacked out from secondhand shame.
Far too embarrassing. He had originally planned the ending of the instance beautifully. Alone, he would invade a forbidden zone ordinary people could never reach, display his skills inside the meatball’s wet, bloody chamber, kill the Boss with one punch, then before being teleported away, demand that Yin Chen praise him properly.
Instead, Yin Chen had missed the cool part entirely. What Yin Chen had arrived in time to see was Song Zang standing □□ in a dark world like he had been put in timeout.
Elio’s Notes: The Chinese source contains `□□` in three passages in this chapter. All three gaps have been preserved exactly rather than reconstructed.
Damn it.
No matter what happened next, after all this was over he absolutely intended to cling to Yin Chen and cry until his tears flooded the entire cafe. Damn it. Song Zang would not be that easy to coax.
While Song Zang’s emotions churned, changes in this world became increasingly obvious.
Faint light slowly appeared at the edge of the darkness. It was only the palest thread of white, yet it instantly lit Song Zang’s vision.
It remained extremely dim, but that was enough for Song Zang. He could now make out the vague silhouettes of every living thing.
His instincts had not been wrong. Yin Chen’s current form truly did blot out the sky… somewhat familiar, yet extraordinarily strange.
Song Zang widened his eyes and studied him carefully. At an inappropriate moment, he even curled his lips slightly. The stir-fried squid he had personally cooked tonight had been extremely on-theme.
Pain stung behind his eyes, but only pain. Song Zang did not shed blood tears, and his vision remained healthy. He stopped looking away and forced himself to take in Yin Chen’s form inch by inch.
Honestly, even now he still could not identify precisely what Yin Chen actually was.
Searching through his memories, Song Zang could find only one particularly unusual kind of existence that barely matched.
A microscopic particle Collective formed by countless consciousnesses.
When severely injured, it could lose control of its explosively terrifying power and abruptly mutate into all kinds of bizarre monstrous forms.
Perhaps those forms were not truly indescribable or incomprehensible. Perhaps Song Zang’s human cognition was simply too limited to deeply recognize the structural principles behind them.
Risking mental contamination, Song Zang kept his gaze fixed on Yin Chen. No matter how he looked, he could only vaguely identify… a gigantic semitransparent marine-like organism with tentacles and soft limbs.
Of course, Yin Chen’s tentacles were nowhere near as disgusting as the ones from the Lance Empire.
Song Zang thought Yin Chen looked exceptionally beautiful. Every part of him struck Song Zang’s aesthetic preferences perfectly.
His jelly-smooth, soft, slick outer skin was pale and tender. Its translucence gave off faint light, while the writhing organs hidden beneath were completely visible, every line of flesh perfectly clear.
The dense suckers along the inner surfaces of the soft tentacles were all suffused with dreamy pale-pink color, resembling the soft, springy paw pads of little animals.
Unfortunately, there were far too many suckers. Song Zang could never pinch them all in one lifetime.
Although transparent mucus flowed wetly all over Yin Chen’s body, his entire presence was completely different from those filthy monsters. He still looked clean and beautiful, like a hazy god born inside a utopian world.
What made Song Zang’s emotions surge even more was that Yin Chen had hundreds of eyes on his head, while several of the tentacles currently in use also contained scattered eyes.
Inside the crystal-clear, colorless compound eyes, icy blue-white flames flickered and flowed in unison.
At least five hundred of those compound eyes were locked tightly on Song Zang. If Song Zang’s defenses were not strong enough, hundreds of suffocating gazes like that would have burned countless bone-deep holes through his entire body.
The remaining eyes watched the surroundings, covering three hundred and sixty degrees with ease and not a single blind spot.
Very exciting, and very erotic.
If Yin Chen had revealed this strange form under safe circumstances, Song Zang would only have become wildly excited. He would have wanted to spend the rest of his life living on the monster’s soft, slippery belly, rolling around until he fell asleep and never woke up.
But right now… Song Zang suspected Yin Chen was injured, or that he could no longer suppress his emotional fluctuations and could not contain the terrifying power inside him. Either possibility made Song Zang’s heart tighten.
Unfortunately, he had no idea what exactly was happening and truly did not dare move recklessly. The only thing he could do for Yin Chen was temporarily pretend to be weak and draw attention.
Song Zang sniffled. His eyes abruptly reddened. Panic and helplessness gathered in his wet dark eyes, his long lashes trembling as he pitifully bit his lower lip, face especially pale.
Yin Chen seemed to become even angrier.
The edges of the world, previously leaking only faint light, were forcibly torn open by wet tentacles into dozens of far more brutal openings.
Blinding light erupted from every direction. Song Zang could barely open his eyes. Through the blur, he saw a thin sheet of human skin floating in midair and laughing freely, eyes filled with obsession toward Song Zang.
Yes. Obsession toward Song Zang.
It looked a little like Xu Ming, but also seemed mixed with the appearances of thousands upon thousands of unfamiliar faces. Human yet not human, it gave Song Zang the eerie discomfort of the uncanny valley.
It was speaking. Its tone sounded faintly similar to Yin Chen’s, but the words it produced were strange and obscure. Song Zang could not understand a single sentence.
An alien language? Song Zang narrowed his eyes and listened carefully, then was horrified to realize Yin Chen seemed to be speaking an alien language too, and the two of them were arguing.
Song Zang could barely understand Yin Chen’s words, but the human skin’s replies reached him as meaningless noise.
“You should never have dragged him into this. Every one of you deserves to die.”
“#￥*#%…”
“There’s no possibility he’ll become an idiot. You underestimated him.”
What did that mean?
Who was calling him stupid?!
Song Zang tried extremely hard to eavesdrop, yet still only understood fragments.
Several hundred of Yin Chen’s compound eyes moved. Realizing Song Zang looked confused, Yin Chen silently extended one relatively thin tentacle toward him. It moved with wet, sticky friction sounds.
He had finally realized that Song Zang not wearing clothes was a problem. The tentacle wrapped tightly around Song Zang’s naked body layer after layer, leaving no gaps at all. Song Zang froze, then quickly took the opportunity to inspect the structure of the tentacle from close range.
Semitransparent, swaying, jelly-like. From a distance it looked perfectly smooth, but its structure was actually much more complicated than he had imagined. Many tiny, soft hairs wriggled quietly within the skin. They were equally translucent and beautiful, reflecting the harsh white light.
The wet tip of the tentacle rested on Song Zang’s head and rubbed him firmly. One side of the moist surface tightened quietly as nearly invisible hairs slowly lengthened and gently crawled deep into Song Zang’s ear canals.
Because the hairs were coated in sticky fluid, their touch was wet enough to remain cool and soothing rather than unbearably itchy. Song Zang bit his lip. His breathing quickened, and the damp redness at the corners of his eyes deepened.
What was this supposed to mean? Wasn’t this way too stimulating? Had he accidentally wandered into some kind of inappropriate play scenario…?
Reality proved that only Song Zang’s thoughts were filthy.
The blurred, obscure alien voices abruptly became clear in Song Zang’s ears.
So these subtly tactile wet hairs could function as translators. Unbelievable. His baby was adorable.
Song Zang’s emotions churned. He bit down on his lip and resisted speaking, minimizing his presence as he quietly listened.
The argument continued, and Song Zang finally understood the rough sequence of events.
The human skin whose face strongly resembled Xu Ming was the mastermind who had secretly designed the setup and deliberately drawn Song Zang into the dark world.
It wanted Song Zang to suffer severe mental shock and become intellectually disabled.
“Xu Ming’s” plan was not only aimed at Yin Chen. It wanted to snatch a mentally disabled Song Zang away from Yin Chen and claim him for itself.
Because it loved Song Zang.
True love.
It was simply that the way it expressed love… was horribly twisted and deranged.
Song Zang’s mouth twitched. He kept listening and heard the human skin writhing as it spoke in a strange voice. “One failure represents countless possible future successes, 01. There will always come a time when you cannot free yourself.
“Humans are not as powerful as you believe. The limits of their biological functions are obvious. The Creator has already lowered iron chains upon these fragile lambs. Earth has medical miracles, but they are too shallow.
“Yes, a dead brain belonging to a vegetative patient does possess the possibility of revival. But we both know that if the lucky person who successfully awakens later falls into a second long sleep because of an accident…
“That broken, rotting, fragile brain will never receive a third chance to wake. How beautiful.”
Beautiful? Song Zang narrowed his eyes slightly. He more or less understood.
“Xu Ming” was threatening Yin Chen, arrogantly declaring that it would continue finding ways to make Song Zang become mentally disabled through accidents.
As long as this healthy human brain were destroyed once or twice, then not even the greatest doctor could restore Song Zang’s mind.
From the implications in its words, Song Zang even dared make a bold inference: at some point in the past, he must have already suffered catastrophic brain trauma. That meant such damage could not happen again. A second injury would dramatically reduce the effectiveness of any treatment.
Yin Chen gave no response to that arrogant judgment from above.
He remained silent.
That brief silence meant a far more terrifying retaliation was about to begin.
He separated two writhing tentacles and wrapped Song Zang safely beneath them, then unhurriedly extended a third. In an instant, it pierced straight through the thin glowing human skin and tore, crushed, and ground it into pulp.
Song Zang’s breathing grew difficult as Yin Chen’s icy voice traveled sentence by sentence through the vibrating hairs directly into his brain.
“The one with a moral sense is me, and also not me.
“I don’t care about the revival plan.
“All of you die. You too.”
Tentacles vast enough to block out the sky shot in every direction and abruptly pierced the dark world completely through. White light erupted before Song Zang’s eyes. The blurry unfamiliar space in his vision was instantly punctured into a gigantic honeycomb riddled with holes, dense with complex ghostly light that should never have existed, teetering on the verge of collapse.
Light was one of the primary carriers of information. Before Song Zang could fully see the details of this world, he was forced to watch hundreds of millions of worlds flow before his eyes, containing blurred figures of birds and beasts, ghosts and monsters, living people and dead people struggling desperately to survive.
Song Zang forced himself to remain calm and relied on instinct to search for the most familiar images.
He saw Little Cao lying battered on a stretcher, staring in astonishment while loudly telling General Sun something over the phone.
It was not only him. Every NPC around him looked equally shocked, as though witnessing some unbelievable miraculous scene.
Chen Jing Sheng and the others had already been successfully teleported out.
The little girl left behind by the players stood calmly in place, holding the cat with one arm while waving toward the place where everyone had disappeared.
Yin Chen’s beautiful wet tentacles rapidly searched toward the very center of Happiness Community and dug out every pale bone beneath the ground before wrapping them together. The bulging tentacle bent at an unnatural angle and squeezed hard, producing wet, slippery sounds as fluid splashed.
In the blink of an eye, every cold, confused dead spirit was swallowed by the suckers and transformed into dark streams of energy that traveled through Yin Chen’s semitransparent soft body back into him. He did not even spare the broken fragments of bone where the spirits had resided.
At the same time, a deep-blue light clearly unrelated to Yin Chen came rushing desperately from another direction.
It avoided the mucus on the tentacles with everything it had, absolutely refusing any contact with Yin Chen. It flew into the shelter where Little Cao was located and covered every major NPC who had not been touched by the tentacles with blue light, winding around them and bundling them up.
The confused NPCs shouted in panic, then watched helplessly as the world tore open into a gigantic fissure.
Every one of them was thrown into the fissure at once and sealed safely inside.
The busy blue light moved extremely fast. After throwing everyone into the fissure, it fled without a trace too, and the opening instantly closed again without leaving a gap.
What was this? An emergency evacuation of core NPCs?
Song Zang was deeply confused because he recognized at a glance that the familiar ghostly blue light absolutely came from the Infinite Game system.
The game system was rescuing every surviving NPC. And it was afraid of Yin Chen, constantly looping around his tentacles, not daring touch him at all, focused only on desperately salvaging important data…
Case basically solved.
Yin Chen intended to destroy this instance world.
No.
Perhaps not only this world.
When a massive tentacle covered in dust sped up because it could not shake off the dirt and rubble, furiously digging deeper into Happiness Community, Song Zang’s trembling gaze turned toward another familiar source of light.
He saw an extremely familiar jade-faced immortal lord.
A golden branch crown rested on his head. His features were handsome and elegant. He reclined lazily on a soft couch, bare snow-white feet disappearing into the clouds.
The immortal’s refined-looking couch floated grandly above the Ninth Heaven. The exquisite bronze mirror before him rippled and displayed warm scenes from the mortal world: farmland, green oxen, private schools filled with the scent of books, smoke rising from cooking fires… The immortal extended a scarlet tongue and licked his soft lips.
From layer after layer of cloud, He extended a smooth, elegant, snow-white arm and casually scooped several snacks from the mortal world, putting them into His mouth without concern.
Crunch.
Squish.
Blood sprayed. It quietly ran from the corner of the immortal’s mouth before He wiped it away with obvious satisfaction.
That was the immortal from the ancient-village world!
Song Zang held his breath and watched. As expected, before the immortal could finish today’s fresh snacks, a translucent tentacle brutally pierced straight through Him.
Not only Him. Every immortal in the ethereal immortal realm had their chests pierced by that tentacle in the next instant. It happened so fast it was terrifying. Song Zang’s eyes could barely follow.
The handsome and beautiful immortals were strung together neatly like skewered meat, then Yin Chen openly and maliciously used them as a spiked club and swung them around at will.
From the □□ above to the underworld below, every plant, creature, and object inside that virtual instance world was broken down and rotted by the tentacle, transformed into soft nourishment, and drawn into the countless pale-pink suckers. That world was destroyed the fastest. The game system did not even have time to appear and attempt a rescue.
What exactly did Yin Chen want to do?
Why was he doing this?
How many worlds’ worth of power did he need to absorb before it was enough?
What kind of existence could be several times stronger than the Infinite Game system and force Yin Chen into such a terrifyingly destructive course of action?
Song Zang worried about him and became genuinely anxious, but he soon received a partial answer.
Inside the dark world riddled with holes, countless microscopic particles revealed themselves. More than half rushed directly toward Yin Chen, launching suicidal attacks without concern for the consequences, only to be crushed and flung away one after another as casually as Yin Chen swatting flies.
But there were always agile mosquitoes capable of slipping past those attempts and rapidly surrounding Song Zang.
The particles floating before him were almost too small to see with the naked eye. The strange sensation of being watched that Song Zang had noticed at first became intensely obvious now.
So it was these tiny things secretly staring at his beautiful naked body in the dark!
Song Zang was annoyed, but the tentacles wrapped too tightly around him to let him easily chase and kill the hateful little things. He could only press his lips together and sit in Yin Chen’s “arms,” allowing them to move closer and study his physical and mental state.
Song Zang exhaled. He seemed to be able to hear 【thoughts】 moving through the air, buzzing like insects and disturbing the peace.
The instant that idea appeared, Song Zang’s brain bizarrely adapted to this mode of communication. Then Xu Qing’s voice abruptly echoed directly in his mind.
“Song Zang, you can hear me now, can’t you?”
“You bastard still aren’t dead?” Song Zang raised a brow.
Xu Qing was not angry in the slightest. He even laughed in pleasure at the insult. “Neither of those two can compare to me. I can give you one active choice, all right? I will make you happy.”
“Then spit it out. My partner is out there destroying worlds. Can you hurry up?” Song Zang genuinely had no patience for another romantic performance from him.
“All right. I’m very obedient. Song Zang, you have two choices now. You can be forced to endure a mental attack and become a human incapable of caring for yourself, then let us carefully look after you for your entire life while giving you endless love and resources. Or… you can willingly become one of us.”
Song Zang frowned slightly. “If I choose the second, what do I need to do? And why do you want me to become one of you?”
“Because you make no sense. Song Zang, as a tiny, fragile human, what right do you have to attract every bit of Split Body 01’s attention and force him to completely sever himself from the Collective? And what right do you have to make me unable to stop myself from loving you? What did you do?
“As long as you willingly offer yourself and allow us to conduct a short study, perhaps… the Collective will spare you both and spare me. Under the protection of the Collective, we will eventually become one happy, harmonious family.”
Xu Qing’s voice grew increasingly excited. Song Zang only became more speechless.
Was he sick? What kind of thought process was this?
Thinking carefully, what had the countless consciousnesses residing within the so-called Collective experienced throughout their unimaginably long lives?
Relentless plunder and occupation, absolute unity toward collective survival and evolution, ruthless killing and confrontation, cautious hiding while traveling through the universe…
In the end, no matter how powerful and unstoppable these consciousnesses might be, they were still idiots who understood nothing about emotion. The moment they encountered love, they turned directly into unreasonable lunatics.
Perhaps rich emotion in organic life was viewed within the Collective as useless refuse that only slowed the collective’s evolutionary route, space garbage forbidden from consumption.
Song Zang was not particularly afraid of it. He was even eager to try, because this seemed like an excellent opportunity.
It was instinct. The danger warning brought by the so-called Collective was actually weaker than the warning generated by this dark world Yin Chen was currently tearing apart.
Perhaps at his peak, Song Zang had once violently beaten up part of the Collective himself.
Xu Qing’s proposal sounded insane, but it happened to strike exactly where Song Zang wanted.
He had always suspected that his missing two years of memory had been deliberately sealed by some 【external object】. The method of sealing was so precise and powerful that even terrifying deities in the ordinary sense, such as God, could not forcibly unlock it for him.
By comparison, the Collective was certainly stronger than the God inside a game instance. If he used it for an experiment, perhaps something unexpected would happen.
Song Zang wanted to deliberately endure even more powerful and terrifying mental shocks and contamination, ideally enough to leave him half dead and trapped between delirium and madness.
Almost dead, but not truly dying. Nearly insane, but not completely insane. His body’s potential forced into overload, struggling desperately to preserve what remained of life. That was the most effective kind of stimulation therapy.
Even if it failed, there was still a high chance the “seal” would begin to loosen and leak more memory fragments for Song Zang to use as clues.
Before taking that gamble, he had to discuss it with Yin Chen.
Song Zang raised his head and looked directly into Yin Chen’s hundreds of beautiful eyes.
Yin Chen was watching him too. At least three hundred eyes were dedicated specifically to monitoring Song Zang. As Xu Qing’s ambiguous, twisted “temptation” sounded in Song Zang’s mind, the number of monitoring eyes became five hundred.
Cold, slippery tentacles wrapped Song Zang extremely tightly and somehow kept squeezing harder, nearly preventing him from breathing on his own, as though he had been pressed into a sticky bubble bath.
Song Zang did not really want to struggle free. He was not wearing clothes and his whole body was covered in wet, odorless mucus. If he actually squeezed out, he would look like someone who had run □□ out of the bathroom halfway through a shower and found himself watched by countless eyes in broad daylight… exceptionally strange.
If they were all Yin Chen’s eyes, fine. But the microscopic particles could squeeze through every possible opening. Song Zang really did not want these strangers crowding in too and admiring how beautiful the natural human body could be.
So Song Zang calmly nestled inside the crook of the tentacle and said softly, “Yin Chen, I’m going to accept his proposal and let him study me.”
“…What did you say?”
“Don’t you have faith in me? You said it yourself. I’m the strongest player in this world. I can uncover the truth by myself.” Song Zang spoke slowly, word by word, carefully observing Yin Chen’s mental state.
After a moment, Song Zang simply gave up trying to read him.
This man had too many eyes. Song Zang could not understand anything.
Yin Chen fell silent again.
The dangerous kind of silence.
At the same time, the wet, slippery little hairs on the tentacles suddenly extended deep into Song Zang’s brain, pressing close to nerves, blood vessels, and fragile membranes, moving without restraint.
This feels so strange. Song Zang’s heart jumped violently, and he abruptly discovered an even more terrifying fact.
He had intended to pretend to be shy and act cute for Yin Chen, maybe blush a little, but he could not produce any vivid expression at all. His facial muscles had become inexplicably numb. His tongue and vocal cords slipped beyond the control of his conscious mind, and he could not say a single word.
The numbness spread from the top of his head down through every limb. Like a barely surviving paralyzed patient, Song Zang’s legs went soft and he could only lean helplessly against the tentacle.
Yin Chen was still destroying instance worlds without restraint, yet he could divide most of his attention and lock it onto Song Zang. Almost every eye stared at him, strange blue-white flames churning together in the depths of countless compound eyes.
“I’ve told you many times. Other than me, nobody is allowed to hurt you. Song Zang, the definition of that sentence includes you yourself.
“But you don’t listen. You always want to leave me.”
I do not, Song Zang whispered inwardly.
“Since that’s the case, how about I add a little more fire to your experiment?”
Yin Chen’s voice was cold and low, buzzing inside Song Zang’s brain with brutally violent killing intent.
His immune system completely stopped functioning. It continued patrolling Song Zang’s body in vigilant circles yet remained entirely unaware of the foreign invader with such an obvious presence.
The strange mucus secreted by the alien organism slowly merged with the wet membranes of Song Zang’s brain until they became impossible to distinguish.
Soft, elastic, transparent suckers forcibly attached themselves to the most fragile part of his brain, spreading and writhing as they began to suck at it unhurriedly.