Chapter 131
Chapter 131
Qin Ying was so dizzy it felt as if she had downed two glasses of erguotou on an empty stomach, then taken all that liquor sloshing around in her belly onto a fifty-meter pendulum ride.
After being swung back and forth a hundred times, the alcohol, brain matter, stomach acid, and bile had all been shaken into one nice, even mix.
She opened her mouth to vomit, only to realize she could not find where her mouth was.
Dizzy and disoriented, she instinctively reached out to feel around.
The next second, someone helped her sit up.
It took her quite a while to struggle through that out-of-body vertigo. When the pounding in her head finally eased enough for her to open her eyes, she saw that the one supporting her was Han Lie.
Han Lie after his beast transformation.
Qin Ying shook her head and wanted to ask what had happened.
But to her shock, she could not open her mouth at all. It felt as if some layer had been draped over her face, numb and stiff.
Startled, she raised her hands to feel around, and discovered that the place where her mouth should have been was completely smooth.
Her mouth was gone.
That shock was no small thing. Every hair on Qin Ying’s body stood on end.
She sat up cross-legged and rubbed both hands all over her face.
Not only was her mouth gone, but she also found a sideways nose on her chin, and on her right cheek, she felt a pair of ears nestled intimately together.
The two ears faced each other, actually growing like a pair of butterfly wings.
The nostrils on Qin Ying’s chin sucked in a sharp breath.
Perhaps seeing her panic, Han Lie hurriedly grabbed both her wrists.
“Supreme Deity, don’t panic. You’re inside the Wooden Puppet right now.”
He leaned closer, and through his gray, teardrop-shaped pupils, Qin Ying saw what a ghostly mess she looked like now.
Her facial features had been rearranged as if someone were playing a joke. Her two eyes were stacked one above the other.
Qin Ying made a muffled whimper in her throat, then saw the ten fingers on her right hand.
She tried moving those fingers and found, to her surprise, that they were extremely nimble.
“Very nimble, and… and very good-looking,” Han Lie tried to comfort her with words. “Like a fleshy flower.”
Qin Ying rolled both eyes at him. She was truly grateful for this kind of comfort.
Han Lie thought she was unhappy. His gaze searched her face twice more, and then he praised her again. “Your ears are like two fleshy butterflies.”
“Also… very unique.”
Qin Ying had no mouth, so she could not tell him to stop praising her. Even if he wanted to compliment her, could he please leave out the word “fleshy”? It made everything sound horrifyingly grotesque.
By now, she had completely shaken off that dizzy state. Her gaze swept around, and only then did she realize that everything to her left and right had become huge.
It was as if she had accidentally wandered into the land of giants. The books beside her, along with the water glass and cell phone, had all become incomparably enormous.
A giant lay unconscious with her forehead pressed against the desktop.
Judging from the hair, it was herself.
Qin Ying lowered her head and looked at her body.
What she saw was a body the color of raw wood, with a contact lens and a grain of Blood Rice stuffed inside its abdominal cavity.
Her consciousness had indeed entered that little Wooden Puppet.
With Han Lie’s help, Qin Ying stood up and used the glass cup as a mirror.
One glance, and she nearly scared herself into throwing up.
What in the nightmare-fuel was this thing? Han Lie really deserved credit for facing such a thing without batting an eye and still racking his brains to comfort her.
No need to think about it. The Soul-Container Consecration had definitely failed.
Qin Ying promptly lay flat on the ground, signaling Han Lie to take the Soul-Container Consecration items out of her belly and start over.
If she really walked through the World in the Box looking like this, she would not make it half a street before someone speared her as an evil god and burned her at the stake.
Han Lie was just as efficient at taking them out.
Along with the subtle sensation of her organs being stirred, Qin Ying saw Han Lie pull out the contact lens and Blood Rice that had gone in for the Soul-Container Consecration.
Her vision blurred, followed by another wave of spinning dizziness.
Something toppled over in the room.
Qin Ying’s real body had fallen to the floor in front of the desk, retching miserably again and again.
She had only drunk a cup of Yao Grass Water, so she brought up nothing at all. Instead, the distinctive sweet fragrance of Yao Grass surged back into her mouth.
She lay there for a long while before finally catching her breath and rolling onto her back on the floor.
During that time, Han Lie had already parkoured his way down along the edge of the desk, hopping and leaping until he landed beside her head and circled around it.
“Supreme Deity, are you all right?”
Qin Ying’s chest rose and fell. She weakly waved a hand.
“I’m fine. We’ll try again in a bit.”
Under Han Lie’s worried gaze, Qin Ying dragged herself up from the floor, her arms and legs limp.
“The Soul-Container Consecration items weren’t quite right.”
If they were completely wrong, she would not have been able to enter the Wooden Puppet. If they were completely right, she would not have turned into that evil-god monstrosity.
“Again!”
When it came to certain things that interested her, Qin Ying was especially driven.
“We need to add more items for the Soul-Container Consecration, and each one has to correspond to something specific.”
Between her and Han Lie, one was being a god for the first time and the other was performing Soul-Container Consecration for the first time. Neither of them had any experience, so all they could do was keep trying.
Qin Ying righted the chair and sat down again. Just then, she saw the Wooden Puppet lying on the desk. Its features had melted like cotton candy, returning to the color of raw wood.
“Let’s try again.”
Qin Ying brought over a makeup mirror and propped it up on the desk so she could observe the changes in the Wooden Puppet.
Then she fetched a pair of scissors and cut off a lock of hair from her forehead.
“Let’s test them one by one.”
Han Lie understood what she meant. He picked up a strand of the hair she had cut off and placed it beside the grain of rice soaked in Qin Ying’s fresh blood.
Then he wrapped them in the contact lens and stuffed them into the hollow cavity in the Wooden Puppet’s abdomen.
As he moved, Qin Ying lost consciousness once more and dropped off to sleep.
After waking inside the Wooden Puppet, she hurried to look in the mirror.
This time, she had grown hair. She had also grown a mouth.
But her facial features were drifting and flinging themselves all over her face.
If they were talking about horror and grotesquerie, adding hair honestly made it even more disturbing.
“Again!” Qin Ying said with the mouth that had grown on top of her forehead.
Over the next several attempts, Qin Ying cut off one eyelash and a small piece of fingernail in succession.
Each time they performed the Soul-Container Consecration, the little Wooden Puppet gained a few more things.
The problem was that her facial features were still in the wrong places, and her skin color was off too.
After discussing it, Qin Ying and Han Lie began trying to change the order.
They cut the contact lens used as wrapping into small pieces, then recombined and arranged them.
Following the Five Elements, they put in the hair first, then the eyelash, the fingernail, and so on.
The grain of rice soaked in blood went in last.
After a great deal of fussing, Qin Ying woke once again to Han Lie calling her name.
After so many attempts, she was dizzy and her head hurt like it was going to split open.
Han Lie supported her and brought her in front of the makeup mirror.
Qin Ying was delighted to see that her features had finally grown in the right positions.
The little Wooden Puppet standing before the mirror was still the color of raw wood, with no skin covering it.
But compared to that evil-god look from before, this was already much better. At least it looked human now.
Once she put on clothes to cover the ball joints and used a veil to hide her face, she would be fully capable of walking around the World in the Box in this form.
Qin Ying tugged at the hair on her head and found that the hair, which had grown by some unknown principle, was extremely secure. Not a single strand came loose.
Greatly encouraged, she looked up at Han Lie again and said, “Continue!”
Now that the order of the Soul-Container Consecration was correct, Qin Ying’s control over this body was increasing.
She could faintly sense that once they added the final missing item, this consecrated little Wooden Puppet might undergo a qualitative change.
After Qin Ying separated from the Wooden Puppet again, she woke in her own flesh-and-blood body.
This time, she brought over disinfecting alcohol and a sharp ceramic fruit knife.
After carefully disinfecting the pad of her left ring finger, she steeled herself and shaved off a tiny strip of flesh with skin attached.
The wound was not very large, but it hurt quite a bit.
After disinfecting it, Qin Ying wrapped a bandage around her finger, then hurried to deal with the tiny strip of flesh lying on the sterile cotton ball.
She cut that sliver of flesh to the proper size, then picked up a little bit and gave it to Han Lie.
With another Soul-Container Consecration…
Qin Ying’s vision blurred, and she found herself lying on her back on the desk.
This time, she did not feel much discomfort.
She felt the coolness of the tabletop against the skin of her back.
She smelled the alcohol in the air. She heard the sound of her own breathing.
When she raised her hand, she saw the back of it covered in skin.
“Han Lie.” Qin Ying happily climbed to her feet. “Did we succeed?”
After she asked, it was a long while before she heard Han Lie answer in a small voice, “Yes…”
Qin Ying turned her head and saw only Han Lie with his back to her.
The tail behind him was swaying in extreme unease.
Qin Ying froze. All at once, she felt a chilly draft over her body.
She lowered her eyes to look at herself. Only then did she realize that, as the consecration items were completely filled in, this little Wooden Puppet body had become thoroughly human.
Muscle, bone, skin, and flesh covered her entire body, concealing the Consecration cavity in her abdomen.
Expressionless, Qin Ying looked in the mirror and saw herself standing stark naked in the sunlight.
Nice figure.
After that instinctive moment of vanity, Qin Ying fled behind the mirror to hide at a speed as if she were being chased by a dog, cutting a rather sorry figure.