Click—boom!
Freed from the lock’s restraint, the door was flung viciously open by the monster and caught by the doorstop just before it struck the opposite wall, forming an unobstructed passage.
Su Ze stood motionless in the angle formed by door and wall.
The flat-headed monster apparently hadn’t expected the door to open suddenly, and it didn’t charge in right away. Instead, it raised its head and “looked” into the room.
A few seconds passed. It slowly spread its mouth until its entire head became a saw-lined clamp gaping a full one hundred and eighty degrees—and only then did its serpentine body coil with force and launch itself at the bed!
Seeing the dark shape flash past, Su Ze’s adrenaline spiked. Seizing the opening, he rounded the door and bolted!
Had he been an ordinary person, such cool composure probably would have carried him safely out. But Su Ze’s body couldn’t keep up with his brain. Just a few steps in, his heart pounded and his breath short, and he toppled onto the dining room floor—mere steps from the front door.
Only then did the flat-headed monster discover its prey behind it. It hastily reversed, the length of body still in the living room undulating backward, swiftly coiling around Su Ze and dragging him back.
Watching the flat-headed monster open its mouth—larger than his own head—straight at him, Su Ze gave a bitter inward laugh.
Adrenaline was a wonderful thing; it sharpened the body’s reactions. But for someone who had spent years unable to eat enough, barely keeping his body’s functions running, it was instead a death warrant.
Besides, sleeping might halve the body’s energy expenditure, but he hadn’t eaten anything to replenish his reserves either—so his stamina was overdrawn all the more easily…
Watching the monster’s abyssal maw, dripping saliva, plunge toward him, Su Ze closed his eyes in resignation.
Several hours earlier, in the Mayor’s Office of the Liyang Municipal Government Building.
The Mayor of Liyang City leafed through the documents in his hands. Across from him sat a man and a woman, watching him in silence.
The cover bore no title. The first page opened with a line of handwritten words: “Explanation Regarding the Sudden Incident at Liyang First People’s Hospital,” with a red “Top Secret” stamp in the lower right corner.
Everything in the document was handwritten, with corresponding photos pasted into the margins.
In the photos, the People’s Hospital’s emergency department was awash with flying flesh and blood. More than half of the body on the hospital bed was simply gone, leaving only twisted limbs and a head frozen in extreme agony, mouth stretched in a silent howl.
When he finished reading, the Mayor of Liyang asked, his voice hoarse and rough: “These people… who are they? Where did they even get seafood?”
The man across from him answered at once: “All of them are well-known rich kids in this city. On a whim, they wanted fresh seafood—live air freight, shipped in oxygen tanks under the guise of pet transport.”
“So all that publicity about ocean pollution and raw-food-borne disease couldn’t shut their mouths? Cause of death?” the Mayor asked, turning to the woman.
The woman shook her head. “Unknown. But the symptoms match the descriptions in the distributed files. Presumed cause of death is an imbalance between gene contamination and runaway cell proliferation. Samples have already been urgently transported to Zhongdu.”
The Mayor closed the file and leaned back, murmuring: “I thought we were lucky—an inland region, we should’ve been fine. Who would have thought…”
The Mayor’s words hung over the entire office like a dark cloud, refusing to lift for a long, long while.
The same hour, in a certain residential complex in Liyang.
“What did you buy all this stuff for? There’s nowhere left to step in the living room!” The old woman watched her son hauling things back and forth, her brow knotted tight.
The man set down a case of bottled water, panting. “Mom… didn’t I tell you what happened at the First People’s Hospital?”
“It’s just some infectious disease, isn’t it? You don’t need to buy all this. Have a little faith in the country!”
“Mom! I told you it’s not an infectious disease, it’s a biohazard crisis… ugh, just go back inside and watch your TV! Stop worrying about everything else!”
“You think I want to worry! Go on, keep frittering. Once you’ve burned through every last cent, then you’ll be happy!”
The old woman huffed and turned back into her room, slamming the door with a bang, leaving the man bustling about alone.
True to her word about not caring, she didn’t step out again—until she got up in the small hours and found the living room lit up bright, her son standing in the dining area with his head hanging low, breathing as heavily as a wild beast.
“Why aren’t you asleep yet? What time is it? Haven’t had enough of running around… Son? Son, what’s wrong with you?”
“Hungry…”
“Hungry? Then let me make you a bowl of noodles… AAAAAAAH!“
Meanwhile, at a certain astronomical research institute on the other side of the Earth.
“Hey, Angus, you guys still studying those Ursa Minor meteorites?” In the break room, a man raised his coffee cup with a smile at Angus, who had just walked in.
“Yep.” Angus set his cup under the coffee machine and yawned.
“Aren’t they just common stony-iron meteorites? What’s there to study?” the man asked curiously.
“Who knows? The boss is still paying top dollar for new ones.” Angus shrugged.
“Well then, good luck. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll discover a zombie virus!” The man waggled his eyebrows and left the break room laughing.
“Ha, ha, ha. Hilarious, Tim. Hilarious!” Angus shouted at the man’s retreating back, then sighed at the coffee machine gurgling away.
“Maybe I should transfer to another research group… Ever since Herman died, the boss has gotten more and more paranoid…”
Somewhere in a jungle on the Southern Continent.
“Are you sure there are meteorites here?” The woman reached back to scratch her back, asking in confusion.
The man pushed branches aside with a stick, his tone careless. “…That’s what the natives said. Should be right.”
“Then why don’t they come look for it themselves? The going rate is twenty grand a gram now!”
“They looked. Didn’t find it… too many trees here… can’t make out where it landed…”
“…I want to go back.” The woman frowned, scratching hard at her lower belly, saying it out of pure spite.
The words provoked no reaction from the man at all. He kept walking ahead, back to her, without once turning around.
The woman’s eyes went wide with disbelief, and she stormed after him. “I said, I want to go back! Hey! Jack! Did you hear me?! I want to go—!”
“What… is it…” The man slowly turned his head toward her. A cluster of mushrooms was sprouting from his left eye, as if growing directly off the eyeball, unfurling their red caps in the open air.
Then another cluster of mushrooms pushed out of his nostril, then his ear canal, his mouth. Cluster upon cluster of red mushrooms crowded every opening of the man’s body, swaying in the breeze, crimson and glistening.
The woman’s mouth fell open in terror, her scream jammed in her throat. It took her a good while to remember to run—but the moment she turned, she lost her balance.
Instinctively, she reached out to grab for anything, only to feel a violent pain at her waist as something drilled out from her side and braced against the ground, steadying her toppling body.
Trembling, the woman looked down. A pair of jet-black arthropod limbs extended from her waist, slender but powerful. She could even feel their warmth—and an indescribable sensation.
Then the skin across her back, her hips, her entire body began transmitting unbearable pain to her brain, as if something were writhing and growing inside her.
“No… no—!”
The woman’s scream finally broke free, echoing over the jungle, refusing to fade for a long, long time.
In a certain island nation on the Eastern Continent.
“Darling? Darling! What’s wrong?” Startled by the man’s sudden collapse to the floor, thrashing, the woman hastily helped him up, asking frantically.
The man hunched over, clutching his abdomen, forcing out a few words with difficulty: “Din… dinner…”
“Dinner? What about dinner? The fish was fresh! Darling, dar—AAAAAAAH!!!“
Amid the woman’s screams, the man’s abdomen swelled and burst. The force of the blast sent his upper body flying; his lower half flopped limply to the floor seconds later, the blasted-open flesh blooming across the ground like a flower of blood.
Drenched head to face in blood, the woman screamed for a good while before suddenly feeling a violent pain in her own abdomen.
“No, no… help… SOMEBODY HELP—!”
In the gaps between the agonizing pangs and the swelling of her belly, she seemed to hear her daughter’s crying not far away—then it cut off, abrupt as a snapped string.
Outside the window, similar sounds rose and fell, one after another, without end.
Within just a few short hours, some people ran into monsters the way Su Ze had, while others became monsters themselves; some lost their lives, and some gained new ones. Even as the sky lightened in the east, the unthinkable events showed no sign of stopping—if anything, they only grew worse.
After a brief incubation period, a crisis that would sweep across the entire Earth had erupted in full.
And Su Ze spent the whole night being chewed on by the flat-headed monster.
The transparent liquid it secreted was clearly corrosive—Su Ze’s shirt had been melted away, yet his skin bore not a single mark. Held in the flat-headed monster’s mouth, he looked like a section of peeled fresh lotus root, so white it dazzled.
…He was about to starve to death.
Feeling the dizziness born of extreme hunger, Su Ze thought, without much emotion. The sensation wasn’t unfamiliar—he’d been through it a few times before.
The first time had been right after that earthquake Su Qiuyu mentioned.
To save the others, he’d moved everyone to the windows, far from the tall cabinets—including more than a few chubby kids whose medications had them weighing over a hundred pounds at just ten years old.
Afterward, he’d passed out from hunger and didn’t wake until he’d been given three full bottles of glucose, at which point he was diagnosed with severe anemia.
The second time was his first PE class after entering high school.
With a doctor’s certificate, he could have been excused, but the PE teacher and the homeroom teacher both felt that just learning a calisthenics routine should be no problem. Halfway through, his hands and feet went ice-cold and cold sweat poured off him—the moment the teacher called a halt, he crumpled toward the ground.
It was also because of that fainting spell that Su Ze got to know Xing Lyu, and spent his three years of high school mooching no small amount of food and drink off him.
The third time, his college roommate ate his breakfast, leaving him starving through an entire morning and nearly collapsing at the cafeteria pickup counter at noon.
After that, he took to keeping candy, chocolate bars, and other high-calorie foods in his pockets to make sure such incidents never happened again.
These days he was long financially independent, free to eat and drink as he pleased—yet here he was, about to starve to death because a monster had him in its grip and he couldn’t reach his chocolate bars.
Life truly is unpredictable… but if I have to die, shouldn’t I at least die knowing why?
At that thought, Su Ze widened his eyes—sparkling with hunger-born stars—and looked down.
The monster clamped over his entire left shoulder and chest was deep green all over, its head flat and thin with nothing but one abyssal maw. What felt like teeth were actually sharp protrusions, shaped like rose thorns—pointed, with a slight hook.
Its body was about as thick as a human thigh, but flattened, with frilly, skirt-like tissue along the edges, covered in flagella—probably the locomotor organs it used to crawl.
The body was deep green, but the inside of its mouth was dark red. The fluid it secreted was transparent, and apart from being somewhat sticky, it didn’t reek at all—instead it carried a fresh, distinctive fragrance of green plants.
Su Ze didn’t know many plants—his range was limited to the dozen-odd species Su Qiuyu had kept. And the monster so persistently trying to “eat” him happened to be among them.
It was the Venus flytrap Su Qiuyu used to keep on the windowsill, in a pot no bigger than a palm.
The thing loved sun and couldn’t abide drought. Logically, it should have been among the first plants to wither once the watering stopped. Yet not only had it survived, it looked positively well-nourished.
Its one flaw was a poor set of teeth—an entire night of biting hadn’t managed to break Su Ze’s skin.
Su Ze stared blankly at the ceiling, everything in his field of vision seeming to spin faster and faster, while his thoughts felt as though someone had pressed slow-motion. Only a single voice sounded, slow and gentle—
[Little Ze, take care of yourself…]
Su Ze slowly closed his eyes. A few seconds later, he lowered his head and bit down hard on the mutated Venus flytrap’s big flat head.
