Chapter 147
Chapter 147
Elsewhere, Su Muhan and the others exchanged grim looks when they heard the thunderous blast of the noise grenade.
“That doesn’t sound like something a monster would make. Should we go take a look?”
The middle-aged man made the suggestion, and the others nodded in agreement.
Before they had taken more than a few steps, dozens of monsters roared at once.
The din nearly deafened them.
The sound died away after a while. Realizing there might be a clue there, they decided to investigate first and worry about the danger later.
They crossed a deep, pitch-black passage where pinpricks of firelight played over the dilapidated rafters.
At the end of the path, shattered glass instruments and scarlet blood littered the floor. The truly frightening sight lay farther in.
Dozens of bat-eared monsters lay sprawled on the ground, blood pouring from their ears.
They were not especially large compared with the monsters the players had encountered before, standing roughly two meters tall by eye.
But why were they all lying there like corpses?
Some of the players had yet to work it out.
Su Muhan, however, connected it to the disturbance they had just heard. The initial explosion had driven the monsters into a frenzy, causing them all to roar.
Then, after prolonged exposure to the combined volume of their own roars, they had injured themselves.
The person who had set off that explosion… was a genius.
A noise grenade might not have done much against one or two bat-eared monsters. But once it stirred up chaos among an entire group, they naturally turned that chaos on one another.
Among all the players, it was easy to guess who would have done something like this.
Why had Xiao Huai done it? Where was he now? And had he come here for some special purpose?
Since he had already left and all the bat-eared monsters had passed out, did that mean this place was temporarily safe?
Su Muhan surveyed their surroundings and signaled with her eyes that they should explore the area.
Many corpses that looked like research staff were piled in one corner.
Dense handprints climbed high up the wall, as if pointing out that something was hidden above.
Qin Rong moved to rummage through the corpses, but Su Muhan stopped her.
She put a finger to her lips, then pointed into the distance.
Following her gesture, the players saw an entirely new monster…
They could not help shuddering.
The little monster stood about one and a half meters tall and wore a pink Western-style dress. It had no hair, and its eyes occupied half its face.
It had no nose, mouth, or ears.
The sight was downright bizarre.
At first, they thought the little monster had not noticed them.
But then it spotted the man’s photograph hanging from the players’ waists. It suddenly bounced off the ground in delight and flung itself toward them.
The players nearly screamed in fright and scattered in every direction.
Su Muhan’s heart clenched. She almost fled too, but one thing Xiao Huai had said remained fixed in her mind.
He had told them to bring the man’s photograph because it would improve their odds of finding his daughter.
Could this little monster… be his daughter?
But she looked nothing like the girl in the photograph on the man’s phone!
The little monster had excellent eyesight. When it saw everyone retreat from her, she stopped chasing them. Her enormous eyes suddenly reddened and grew damp, as if she were about to cry.
The sight of a little girl crying might tug at an adult’s heart, but a red-eyed, giant-eyed monster was simply terrifying.
No one dared approach her.
They traded urgent looks, as if telling one another, “Run! This monster can see us.”
Su Muhan clenched her fists and gathered her courage. Taking the photograph from her waist, she slowly walked toward the little monster.
Qin Rong started forward to dissuade Su Muhan, only to freeze.
The wavering firelight from the main laboratory reflected in the little monster’s eyes. Her yearning was so pure, so sincere.
When the little monster saw Su Muhan approaching with the photograph, she cupped her hands carefully, her gaze never leaving it.
How much could she possibly love that photograph?
No one felt such affection for a photograph without reason. It had to mean something extraordinary to them.
It might be a picture of a friend, a lover, or… a family member.
Su Muhan became certain. She gave the photograph to the little monster, gently took her hand, and gestured toward the exit.
The little monster stared with her enormous eyes. To their surprise, the players caught a trace of childlike innocence in this creature.
More or less everyone looked confused, but then the little monster began gesticulating with irrepressible excitement.
Their doubts seemed to resolve themselves.
So they had been right… The big-eyed monster was the man’s daughter.
* * *
Qi Sha looked at Xiao Huai. “Unfortunately, the one you took away was me. The mission won’t be completed. If you go back now, my little pets will already be awake. Taking her away won’t be so easy.”
“I have a question.” Xiao Huai’s tone was casual. “Who started the fire?”
Both the charred monster they had encountered at the beginning and the road to the main laboratory proved that a huge fire had once raged here.
Qi Sha arched an eyebrow. “Oh? You actually noticed that detail. Fascinating, isn’t it? That was the only part I didn’t anticipate. I never expected you to exploit it.”
Xiao Huai had followed the smell of burning the entire way.
If she wanted to call that exploiting a loophole, he would not disagree.
At the very least, the fire had directly inspired him.
Qi Sha said, “Why, that good father of course. I didn’t erase his memory, so he still believed he was searching for his daughter inside this monster research institute. To keep her safe, he lured all the monsters into the main laboratory.”
“He tried to burn all my darlings to death, but how could a little fire made by humans kill them so easily? And that wasn’t all. Heh.”
She paused to laugh. “He probably died never knowing that his daughter was inside the very place he set on fire! Hahaha! Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.”
She threw her head back and laughed, her eyes brimming with contempt and disdain for the man.
Those had been a father’s final struggles before death. All he had wanted was to make his daughter a little safer. Yet in Qi Sha’s eyes, a man with such a spark of humanity was little more than a clown.
His soul belonged to her. No matter how wildly he acted, it was nothing to her but the joke of a toy behaving out of turn.
Qi Sha said, “I cut him in half as punishment for trying to hurt my little pets. Later, I placed him at your spawn point and told him that if he shared his wish with all of you, his daughter might be saved.”
She watched Xiao Huai. “I can never forget his expression. Every time he begged you to fulfill his dying wish, so full of hope, it was hilarious. Humans are all so dull, but sometimes they become such wonderful toys that I can hardly bear to put them down.”
Qi Sha approached Xiao Huai one step at a time. “He was once the favored son of heaven, happy and blessed. But the finer and nobler a human being is, the more fascinating it becomes to watch them sink into ruin.”