Chapter 37: Human Skin Script (15): Maggots

Outside the door, Wen Danning leaned against a nearby wall, her expression calm. Yet she frequently lifted her wrist to check her Bracelet. Standing beside her, surprisingly, was Li Sha.

Li Sha had been right behind the door when she was dragged into the Pollution Source’s past. Although her thinking had slowed to a crawl, she hadn’t reached the point of simply waiting there to die.

She had managed to force the door open and was then discovered by Wen Danning, who pulled her out.

There was no light in the corridor. Li Sha could only make out Wen Danning’s silhouette. Seeing her raise her wrist several times, she asked, bewildered, “Can you actually see the numbers on that in this darkness?”

Wen Danning moved her hand over, turning the watch face directly toward Li Sha.

Li Sha understood. Only from a direct, frontal angle could the faintly glowing numbers be seen. But in that short time, one of the numbers on it ticked down, then ticked down again.

“Is this the Sanity Value?” Li Sha asked.

“Correct.”

The Sanity Value kept falling, yet Li Sha observed that Wen Danning’s state didn’t seem to change for the worse.

Wen Danning explained, “Inside a Polluted Zone, everyone’s spirit is affected. My Sanity Value isn’t the only one dropping; yours is too.”

“Are our rates of decline the same?”

“No. It’s like people’s immune systems. Some are stronger, some weaker.”

Li Sha was silent for a moment. She could feel her own mind growing increasingly scattered, increasingly dizzy. “How can the Sanity Value be restored?” she asked.

“Sleep. Any way you can relax. Or get far away from the Pollution Source,” Wen Danning suggested. “This area is just a two-story villa. Moving elsewhere won’t make a huge difference, but it’ll certainly be better than staying right outside this room.”

Li Sha understood, but moving was a struggle for her.

Now that she knew of the Anomaly world’s existence, Li Sha was keen to learn more. “If being close to the Pollution Source makes the Sanity Value drop faster, couldn’t you just reverse-engineer that to pinpoint who the source is?”

Wen Danning shook her head. “Anomalous Phenomena have the same effect. It’s very difficult to distinguish. Most importantly, Pollution Sources will hide themselves.”

This particular Pollution Source had a certain uniqueness. One could say it hadn’t bothered to hide from the start.

Wen Danning checked her Bracelet again. The 30-minute mark was almost up. During this time, she had been doing as Xie Lincheng instructed, monitoring the changes in Contamination Level.

The Bracelet wasn’t capable of extreme precision; it could only detect the approximate total concentration within the immediate area. From the moment night fell, the Contamination Level had been slowly rising. Just as she had anticipated, the result Xie Lincheng wanted hadn’t appeared.

However… just now, while the Contamination Level hadn’t decreased, its rate of increase had stalled. The stall hadn’t lasted long, but it had stalled. This usually only happened just before dawn, after which the concentration would drop again.

It was still far from daylight. So what caused the stall?

Wen Danning couldn’t figure it out, nor did she have time to ponder it. The 30 minutes were up. She gripped the knife in her hand and said to Li Sha, “I’m opening the door now. To prevent the Pollution Source from dragging you back into her past, you’d best leave.”

“Okay.”

Li Sha slowly made her way along the wall, intending to hide downstairs.

Wen Danning stood before the door, having mentally rehearsed countless scenarios for what lay inside. If Xie Lincheng was still standing motionless, still trapped in the Pollution Source’s past, and she was immediately targeted upon opening the door, walking over to him might take some time. The fastest method would be to simply throw the knife and jolt him awake, though the drawback was that it would limit her own movements.

If Xie Lincheng was already in the final phase, all she had to do was wait.

The worst-case scenario: Xie Lincheng had been exposed in the script’s spotlight, lost motor function in his limbs, and was completely passive. In that case, the path Xie Lincheng had walked, she would have to walk all over again.

Barring any accidents, it shouldn’t come to that. Xie Lincheng might not be an Ability User, but his strength was not to be underestimated.

Wen Danning had considered every possibility she could think of. But when she opened the door and her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, what she saw was an unexpectedly horrifying tableau.

Not just horrifying, but also disgusting.

Crack.

When the lightning flashed, the stark white light illuminated the scene with brutal clarity.

The floor of the room was littered with chunks of torn-off human skin. So densely packed were they that they had piled up in layers. Many pieces were still attached to hair—dark, tangled clumps—scalps that had been ripped off.

Amidst all this discarded skin crawled a massive white worm, half the length of a human body and as thick as a thigh. It was moving forward slowly.

That shade of white reminded Wen Danning of Bai Luwei’s skin: very white, glossy, looking soft and bouncy yet utterly bloodless.

This was the Pollution Source’s true body.

If she ignored the size, Wen Danning thought it looked more like a maggot squirming on the ground.

A stinging electric current from her bracelet jolted her, alerting Wen Danning that her Sanity Value had just dropped by over 30 points in that single instant.

Wen Danning didn’t even know if it was purely caused by the horrific sight before her, or by the burst of Pollution from the Pollution Source.

She stood frozen, a wave of nausea churning in her stomach. It took her a long moment to recover before she spotted Xie Lincheng lying on the ground.

Xie Lincheng was looking at Xu Xiye.

From the moment Bai Luwei’s skin started being torn off strip by strip, he knew this round was won. But the scene that followed was something even he hadn’t anticipated.

Riiip~

Xie Lincheng had lost count of how many layers of skin Bai Luwei had shed. Maybe six, maybe seven, maybe more.

When she stopped, he thought her true body was finally fully exposed. If she wasn’t dead yet, the pain stimulus from the wound on his arm was enough to keep him sharp. He could finish her off with his gun. But then the little black blob on the table said one sentence, and everything changed.

It was a scene that even froze Xie Lincheng in place for a long time.

What he said was: “Are you done tearing it off?”

The Bai Luwei of the previous day had been so lively and human-like. Tonight’s Bai Luwei was utterly silent. Apart from that eerie laughter, she hadn’t uttered a single complete sentence the entire time.

She won’t answer Lu Ren, Xie Lincheng thought. Yet the next second, Bai Luwei didn’t answer with words, but with actions.

Riiip.

Riiip.

The human skin fell away even faster than before.

Before, it had been the Black Shadows in the anomaly doing the peeling. Now, Bai Luwei was tearing at herself.

Xie Lincheng narrowed his peach blossom eyes. Was this a coincidence, or was it Lu Ren’s words that had caused this result?

If it was a coincidence, fine. But if it wasn’t… if it weren’t for Lu Ren, uncovering the Pollution Source’s true body would have taken even more effort.

They really might have fallen here. A total party wipe.

Did Lu Ren know something?

The gaze Xie Lincheng directed at him couldn’t help but reveal a mix of surprise and something tender.

What could Xu Xiye possibly know? He knew nothing. He thought Bai Luwei couldn’t maintain her human form anymore and had started tearing her own skin off. So he just watched her tear. When she stopped, he naturally asked, “Are you done tearing it off?”

If she was done, he’d study more ways to stuff her in. Or maybe just crawl for her, to wake her up.

Riiip.

Bai Luwei started tearing again.

Oh, not done yet. Xu Xiye had no choice but to resume his seat on the table and wait.

~

While Xu Xiye had been continuously initiating conversations with Xie Lincheng on the spiritual level, Bai Luwei had detected his presence.

Or perhaps, His presence.

While she was fully immersed in chaos, that chaos had also clouded her perception. But the moment a thread of rationality finally surfaced from the maelstrom, the only thing she wanted to do was get closer to him. Get close to him.

She didn’t understand what it meant, but her instinct drove her to approach him. Once she was close enough, she would understand the reason for this compulsion.

Bai Luwei’s first layer of skin was torn off, but she didn’t care. Skinning was her favorite pastime, after all. When there was no one else to skin, she would skin herself.

Hee-hee~

Bai Luwei felt pleasure.

If only there were more Skinners. They could all skin each other, rip-rip, an endless cycle.

Hee-hee.

These manic, chaotic thoughts didn’t hinder her instinct to approach him. The more that was torn away, the more urgent Bai Luwei became.

It’s peeling off too slowly.

Bai Luwei suddenly felt that the human skin husks layered on her body were heavy and cumbersome. They were already slowing down her crawl toward him.

Had to tear them off faster.

The companions peeling her skin stopped. She heard his voice: “Are you done tearing it off?”

Was it done?

Was this the final layer?

Yes, it was the last layer. But why did she still feel so heavy, so burdened?

Riiip.

She began tearing at herself. One layer came off with ease.

She flailed her limbs, pieces of skin sloughing off her body. When she came back to her senses, her hands and feet were gone. What lay on the ground was just a maggot.

A maggot?

Chaos surged back with a vengeance, nearly drowning that single remaining thread of rationality.

Why a maggot?

A low-level creature, without thought or intelligence.

She was not a maggot. She had reason, she had intelligence.

She was a maggot, living in a stinking, rotting cesspool.

No, no…

The starting point of Bai Luwei’s life was like a pile of sludge. She came from a poor family, with parents who abused each other.

Her father needed to beat her mother to establish his authority. Her mother needed to slap her father to vent her rage. No matter the reason, violence was the means to achieve it.

Her father was strong; her mother was no match for him. But her mother was more ruthless, because she dared to use a knife.

Of course, they hit her sometimes too, especially her mother. Her mother loved slapping her while calling her a bastard, a cheap slut.

At first, she thought it was just verbal abuse. Later, she found out her mother was telling the literal truth.

She was a bastard, the daughter of her father and a woman from a hair salon.

Her mother couldn’t bear children, so she had accepted her into the household.

One day, her father and mother fought again. That time, her mother fell and never got up.

From then on, she wasn’t just the daughter of a domestic abuser. She was the daughter of a murderer, the daughter of a mistress, a prostitute’s child.

Even more people would gossip about her. Even more strange looks would cling to her. She had known from a young age: to escape all this, she had to leave that place.

Change cities, put on a new husk.

Everyone lived by putting on a husk.

Her father was one person outside the home and another inside. Her mother had more than one face too. Everyone was like that. If you wanted to be liked, you just had to paint the right things on your shell.

This was something she had known since childhood.

Yes, she was a maggot. A maggot that grew out of a festering, pus-filled wound.

Tear off those skins. Once her rationality was completely drained, she would become a maggot, through and through.

She already knew what He was.

He might have His own likes and dislikes, but the rationality and the rules He embodied would not.

Reason, rules, order. These were things everyone here pursued. Whether noble or despicable, fragrant or foul, all would yearn for Him, revolve around Him.

She knew that if she could just crawl over there, if she could just get close enough, she would surely be able to maintain more of her sanity.

He wouldn’t refuse.

No matter how rotten, how foul she had once been, she had already paid the price for her past. At least here, she had never done those things.

She still wanted to live on, clear-headed. She crawled and crawled. She crawled for so long, but He always seemed so high up, so far away.

She should have flown over.

She was a maggot. She could pupate, transform into a fly, and take flight.

The giant maggot on the ground quickly formed a larval casing around itself. It was a pupa. After becoming a pupa, an enormous fly crawled out from within.

Its compound eyes stared upwards, wanting with all its might to fly into the air. But before it could finish crawling out, it collapsed onto the ground and never moved again.

In the single second before her reason vanished completely, it realized that metamorphosing into a fly had already exhausted all its spirit.

It had died on the path to taking flight.

Xie Lincheng and Wen Danning watched this scene in stunned shock. After the Pollution Source died, they saw sluggish flies emerging from their own hair, one by one. The flies dropped, dead, and vanished.

Those were the Pollution Source’s Symbiotic Anomalies.

Before Bai Luwei became an Anomaly, she had constantly asked herself why she had fallen to such utter ruin. She had always operated this way, always done it well. She didn’t understand why she had to go through that ordeal.

She felt she hadn’t done anything wrong. But after becoming an Anomaly, her true body was a maggot. That was because her subconscious believed otherwise.

Xie Lincheng looked at the massive, empty maggot casing left on the floor. Bai Luwei was a maggot. And he, after his disgusting persona was exposed, was also a maggot.

He should have realized sooner. That buzzing sound wasn’t just little bees. It could also be flies.

For the first time, Xie Lincheng felt revulsion toward himself. He pushed his gradually recovering body up to a sitting position and noticed that Lu Ren was still staring dazedly at the mess on the floor, motionless.

He frowned, preparing to go over and take him out of the room.

Just then, on the road outside the villa, an Off-road Vehicle drove up. The Director and Assistant Director, standing at the entrance, looked over. The Director said, “The Investor’s here. Should be this one.”

The Assistant Director said, “We’re not short on investment, and our show is guaranteed to be a hit anyway.”

The Director: “Obviously. But that’s exactly why we need investment for early promotion. Do you know how much the other party is planning to put in?”

The Assistant Director: “How much?”

The Director: “1 million.”

As they spoke, the vehicle pulled up. The Director and Assistant Director went to greet it. The car door opened, and a man stepped out.