Blood vessels spread across the grotesque hammer like a spider's web.
"Anything else you two want to say?"
The tall doctor and the short doctor retreated simultaneously. In their eyes, Chen Ge had never looked like a normal person to begin with.
"If you've got nothing else, then let's begin the treatment. Don't worry — it won't hurt too much."
Before he'd even finished speaking, Chen Ge and
A little over a minute later, Chen Ge opened the door and walked out with Xu Yin. "We can move on to the next place."
The old man glanced into the room. The two doctors had already vanished. He didn't ask Chen Ge where they'd gone, acting as though he'd noticed nothing at all, and simply walked forward.
The blood vessels on the ceiling pulsed with increasing intensity. The white cat poked its head out of the backpack, seemingly having caught that scent it found so enticing again, meowing at Chen Ge from inside the bag.
Every time they passed a fork in the corridor, it would thrash around inside the bag like mad.
"This cat is a real little rascal."
The white cat could apparently sense that getting drenched in blood mist would lead to something bad, which was why it refused to come out of the bag. Chen Ge looked at its big, glistening eyes and couldn't help but feel a mix of exasperation and fondness. After consulting the old man, he tried to follow the directions the white cat wanted.
The corridor shook. Blood rain dripped down. At the end of the long hallway came the sound of heavy, labored breathing.
"Finally couldn't hold back, huh?"
Chen Ge had the old man stand behind him. Wielding his skull-cracking hammer, he walked at the front alongside Xu Yin.
A blood vessel overhead burst open, blood trickling through the cracks. Between the pulsing organs, swaying figures appeared one after another at the corridor's end.
Bodies pieced together from remnants of corpses, stitched together with needle and thread. Blood vessels coiled and wound through their hollowed-out skulls, converging to form faces that shifted and changed — their appearances in life, perhaps.
Arms assembled from limbs belonging to different corpses. Missing fingers, broken nails, with bits of dark-red flesh wedged in the gaps.
Ragged breathing issued from slits in their distended bellies, as though yet another monster lurked inside.
"No wonder we barely saw any earlier — they were all gathering here. Is the blood-red world directing them itself?"
The simultaneous appearance of the "security guards" also signaled that the operating theater was the blood-red world's final line of defense. Something tremendously important must be hidden inside, which was why the world was expending every last ounce of its power to protect it.
"More than I expected." The old man didn't retreat this time. He stood beside Chen Ge. "You'd better finish them off quickly. This is a factory of flesh and blood — those monsters are assembled from all kinds of 'scraps,' and there's no shortage of such material in this underground morgue."
Chen Ge nodded. After their earlier encounters, he already understood the composition of the "security guard" monsters: bodies cobbled together from assorted dismembered corpses, linked by blood vessels, with a core consisting of one or several death-row inmates' souls — brimming with resentment, defiance, and hatred.
"From the inside out, top to bottom, they're nothing but a pile of garbage. Completely worthless."
The two sides closed in on each other. A chaotic battle was moments from erupting, and only Chen Ge could remain cool enough in that razor-thin instant to calmly analyze the enemy's strengths.
The underground morgue was a top-tier three-star horror scenario, and Chen Ge had harbored limitless expectations for the world behind this door. Unfortunately, now that he'd actually entered, he realized that most of the monsters here weren't suitable for bringing outside.
They were different from the roof ghosts and sedan chair ghosts of
"Can't become haunted house employees, can't experience the warmth of the human world. What a shame." To leave a good impression on the old man, he refrained from charging to the forefront himself this time. Instead, he opened his comic book and sent his employees forward. "You all look like you're in so much pain — why don't I help you find release?"
Clad in her red dress, Xu Yin led the charge at the front, and the other haunted house employees broke from their usual behavior, growing remarkably bold.
Most of them clustered around Xu Yin — typically, once she tore a monster down, they'd swarm in all at once, displaying impressive teamwork.
The corridor wasn't wide. With Xu Yin holding the center, no matter how many monsters came, they could only be ripped to shreds — so long as she didn't fall.
Her red dress grew ever more vivid, yet the spot over Xu Yin's heart remained stubbornly unstained. He was mad with slaughter, but still he had not found the heart that belonged to him.