Old Mrs. Ji had once lived half a lifetime of perfect happiness.
She never lacked food or clothing and possessed wealth enough to rival a nation. Even the wealthy wives of elite families and high society treated her with respect.
That was because the circles she and her husband had access to stood a level above so-called old money and the business world.
Although their only son died suddenly while working overtime, and even their biological grandson was forcibly taken away by the beautiful woman who had almost become their daughter-in-law, brought to a distant city to live, with the woman refusing no matter what to submit to a DNA test… Old Mrs. Ji did not lose hope in life.
She had frozen plenty of eggs when she was young.
All they lacked now was a son to inherit the family business. She was only middle-aged. If she wanted several children, she could simply have several.
Exploring the sea of stars and searching for intelligent life in the universe were ideals and missions on a higher plane. But for the Ji couple, selfishness was the only reliable recipe for happiness.
Their comfortable life, however, was soon shattered by chaos.
Batch after batch of “spacetime travelers” with crooked faces and deformed limbs inexplicably fell from planes that had only just taken off, rolled out of driverless taxis, twisted and crawled along railway tracks, or even abruptly appeared dangling from high-altitude billboards in bustling downtown districts, screaming that the apocalypse was coming…
Everything descended into chaos.
Society destabilized. Everyone feared for themselves. Violent incidents, robberies, and murders erupted on a massive scale. Countless ordinary people who had once been friendly and mild became, one after another, people who acted without restraint or bottom lines.
Human riots could be suppressed by armed force, and a chaotic social order could be forcibly pushed back onto its tracks.
But a collapsed economy could not simply be restored. Research institutions in technology, biology, medicine, and other fields were stormed by mobs and suffered irreversible damage in the early stages. From top specialists to precious research equipment, the losses were catastrophic.
Even more terrifying was the strange and incomprehensible “spacetime turbulence” that followed.
One day, the Ji couple were still hiding in a mountain villa for safety. The next morning, when they opened their eyes, they found themselves thirty years into an apocalypse, with plants gone, supplies scarce, and cities buried beneath snow.
They opened their eyes again and found a world filled with mutated humans who had snake heads, pig heads, or rabbit heads on human bodies. Their intelligence was extremely low and their appetites bordered on madness. They would often attack and devour one another.
They had even reached five hundred years into the future once. After enjoying half an hour in a peaceful world, an intelligent detection system captured them, threw them into prison, injected them with muscle relaxants, and forcibly silenced them.
Nearly a hundred million people experienced the same thing as the Ji couple.
Humans who had endured countless years of madness and brush after brush with death returned to the modern world in batches… like people waking from the most despairing nightmare imaginable, their minds hovering on the edge of collapse.
They could no longer distinguish reality from the future. They could not adapt to order and could barely control their stress reactions, violence, or words.
They even, even, even… became terrifying monsters they themselves did not dare look at directly.
Strange mutations spread from head to foot in a radiating pattern like radiation. Some people grew three heads. Some had limbs wrapped in sticky scales. Others grew another mouth in their navel that chattered endlessly.
Old Mrs. Ji and her husband were relatively lucky. Their problems affected only the absorption and metabolism of energy in their bodies. The muscles in both arms became abnormally massive, while their torsos grew dryer and thinner by the day, almost like stick figures.
Earth could not accommodate them.
The speed of their mutation rose in direct proportion to the clear 【premonition】 that their lives were draining away. Only two futures remained open to them.
Become mindless, inhuman monsters completely.
Or preserve their minds and personally witness themselves die under tormenting madness.
Scientists risking their lives in frontline experiments once issued a statement: the “spacetime travelers” still had a sliver of hope.
As long as they maintained mental stability and a normal state of mind, the probability of a mutation outbreak would slow significantly.
At least for two or three years, they would not become outright monsters… giving humanity room to research a cure.
Even so, they were still treated as dangerous outsiders. No one wanted to approach them, and no hospital dared admit them.
The slightest disturbance in front of ordinary people would inevitably end in violent fighting born from fear.
After all, two or three years was far, far too little time.
Anyone with eyes could see that the travelers would never survive long enough for a cure to be developed. They would gradually be swallowed by the ultimate evil of distorted chaos and turn into inhuman creatures incapable of controlling themselves.
One tragic accident split humanity into two utterly opposed fronts and destroyed the balance of social order.
Yet neither side was truly at fault. The mutated humans were victims, while the ordinary people harmed by them might have been even more desperate and afraid.
The chaos seemed endless and only grew worse.
Then the person who temporarily brought the disaster to an end came from somewhere no one expected: a beautiful young man who looked strangely familiar to Old Mrs. Ji.
Song Zang.
A strange name. But at a single glance, Old Mrs. Ji could tell that he shared an inseparable blood relationship with her.
He was the child that the almost-daughter-in-law had taken away, the child from whom they had heard nothing ever since.
He was her biological grandson, the only descendant she had left in this world, her closest blood relative.
The existence the Ji family had never cared about before suddenly became incomparably precious and meaningful.
The Ji couple considered contacting Song Zang themselves, but very quickly they discovered something horrifying… Song Zang was insane.
Cruel, bloodthirsty, without any limits, and so powerful he was scarcely human.
When an absolute powerhouse who obeyed no law but his own lost his reason to hatred, the consequences were unimaginably brutal.
Those well-proportioned, pale hands had clean, beautiful lines and looked exactly like the hands of a pampered, delicate young master from a wealthy family.
Yet Song Zang had torn open the carotid arteries of countless “monsters” with his own hands. His beautiful fingers had pierced skulls and stabbed into hearts without the slightest hesitation or mercy.
He even did it on a public livestream, smiling as he tilted his head before the camera and revealed sweet, innocent dimples.
He said he would kill every 【source of contamination】 and avenge his mother.
Who counted as a source of contamination?
The Ji couple sitting before the television looked at each other, then at each other’s bizarre, skeletal bodies. They saw the same deep terror in one another’s eyes.
Old Mrs. Ji felt she was about to go insane too.
For the humans who had remained safely in the present, Song Zang was the savior who restored order from chaos.
But to her, and to all the involuntary “spacetime travelers” like them, Song Zang was a demon, a god of death, Satan’s Undertaker, the embodiment of every bloody and brutal form of tyranny.
Madness bred despair, and despair bred madness.
No. Were they still human?
Perhaps they had ceased to be human long ago. Perhaps their cognition and reason had already dissolved completely.
Like savage beasts struggling instinctively to survive, like revolting worms writhing in filth, like a cup of sour, spoiled milk gone lumpy, they spilled everywhere and spread contamination, bringing an endless stream of devastating disasters into the world without realizing anything was wrong.
In truth, Song Zang was no longer human either. From the moment he appeared in public view, everyone knew there was no possibility that he could still be human.
But no one dared say it aloud. No one dared point out that hopeless truth.
Dead silence.
Silence.
A faint sense of luck and one thread of nearly lost hope made humanity place every responsibility on Song Zang’s shoulders.
Song Zang was becoming less human bit by bit.
A pair of enormous, dreamlike black wings as beautiful as a butterfly’s gradually became a second pair, then a third… When they spread, it was like a sudden eclipse, whipping up fierce winds and completely blotting out the sky.
A pair of blood-red eyes like insect compound eyes swirled with chilling, insane malice. Viewed up close, they were even more horrifying.
They were not ordinary double pupils, but a deep blood-red formed by dense layers of eye after eye superimposed together.
A beautiful, cold serpent tail changed color with the shifting light. It could grind any living creature into slick pulp like a meat grinder.
If someone stared at the tail for too long, its iridescent scales would suddenly rise, revealing dark “compound eyes” quietly proliferating beneath them. Pure black eyeballs embedded deep within the tail would silently stare straight back at whoever was watching.
All of that was enough to inspire endless terror, to say nothing of the wounds and cracks that repeatedly appeared across Song Zang’s body, and the ancient molten-gold patterns that frantically filled those fractures…
He was not harming himself.
His existence was simply too powerful for this world to contain.
Every second of every minute, Song Zang was subjected to forced erasure punishment, only to restore himself at once through bizarre anomalous means. It was equivalent to enduring an excruciating cycle of death at every moment.
But Song Zang did not care much about any of it, nor did he care that his body was gradually twisting into a malformed amalgamation of monsters.
Even when the tip of his tongue split like a snake’s, when a faint growing pain spread along the side of his neck, when scorching yet sinister blue-white magma flowed through his skull, and when the color of his blood faded into transparent, watery clarity, Song Zang did not care.
He never slept, day or night. One by one, he sent every inhuman creature that had turned into a monster toward a sweet death.
Until he found the culprit who had killed his mother, Song Zang would never stop. He absolutely could not close his eyes.
More importantly, mutation was contagious. Unnoticed mutations had already begun spreading quietly.
If he ignored it, everyone would eventually grow two or more heads.
The extra heads would develop the thoughts of 【other people】 and could not be controlled by the original human body.
They were evil creatures from dark corners of the universe, remnants of distant dreams and thoughts shed by evil gods, egg-like offspring and tiny spores from filthy masses of flesh…
They were contaminated malice silently spread by the 【Collective】 after it corroded countless tiny holes through Earth’s barrier.
Even at the cost of his own life, the contamination had to be dealt with as quickly as possible.
Song Zang had nothing left to fear. He had already lost everything.
When the Collective passed through the wormhole, the Infinite Game players at the front line were the first group overwhelmed by madness, but they were also humanity’s only defensive line.
Song Zang personally watched people trapped inside a café dissolve in the blink of an eye until not even their bones remained, as though molten steel had been poured over them. Others were caught in a gravitational field, spun helplessly, and died from tidal forces and vacuum suffocation.
He watched a friend disappear beneath a strange swarm of worms that fed through the skin. When the swarm finally dispersed, the once lively, cheerful tall man had been reduced to a thin, translucent layer of skin.
So Song Zang ate every one of those worms.
Not only the worms, but also muddy plants covered in spikes and fine needles, and enormous hairless rabbits covered in sores and carrying deadly poison.
At that time Earth itself had not yet been contaminated. Every newborn monster was part of the Collective and originated from its own power.
There was only one way to resist such an incomprehensible horror: become the same kind of existence as it. Even if that meant being assimilated into something inhuman, so be it.
As long as eating it did not kill him, he would keep eating until it nearly did.
Song Zang had probably succeeded. While the unlucky “travelers” suffered through spacetime turbulence, he transformed himself little by little, giving birth to new skin, organs, and flesh from distortion and agony.
Eventually, the rejection centered on Earth kept growing stronger. Even the game system began to regard him with hostility.
Song Zang ignored the intense sting and itch deep in his spine. He toyed with his cool, smooth, mutated serpent tail and revealed a pleased smile.
His target lay higher still. Every monster stood within his sights, and he would show none of them mercy.
Even when those two skeleton-shaped inhuman creatures crawled from a dark nest piled with human bones, raised thick arms covered in tumors, clacked their teeth several times, and screamed at Song Zang.
“Grandson, spare me! I’m your grandmother!!!”
Song Zang tilted his head. His blood-colored compound eyes suddenly rotated, and his black wings snapped upward beneath the scarlet moonlight before he dove like a butterfly beating its wings.
He did not have a grandmother.
He had been raised in a single-parent family.
Now he did not have a mother either.
His slender, deathly pale right hand was covered in molten-gold patterns. With terrifying force held back by nothing, it reached straight for the rigid side of the skeletal man’s neck.
But in the next instant, Song Zang abruptly stopped. His figure drifted backward with ghostly lightness, his red eyes blank with shock.
“You brat, what are you doing? What weird thing did you eat?”
“That snake tail… Did you eat your boyfriend?! Are you sick in the head, Song Zang?!”
His mother, more than ten years younger than she was now, stood inside the vortex of spacetime turbulence with her eyes wide. Her furious finger was almost poking Song Zang directly in the forehead.
His mother took the two skeletal figures away. No, perhaps their survival instincts were simply too strong. Ignoring the risk of being torn apart by the turbulence, they threw themselves into the vortex whose depth no one knew.
Song Lan Jing kicked the two skeletons away, then turned around and scolded Song Zang again. “I used to suspect you were hopelessly love-brained. Now I finally know you’re a little lunatic born with absolutely no sense of self-preservation!
“This world can’t be saved. Song Zang, if you still consider me your mother, then get out of here right now!”
…
The long nightmare ended abruptly.
Song Zang sat beside the hospital bed, gripping Yin Chen’s hand as a strange bitterness rose in his throat.
In the spacetime where Old Mrs. Ji had lived, it seemed he really had, really had… really had eaten Yin Chen.