Chapter 727: Blooming
As Lun Qin once again suppressed the monster attempting to seize her body with her sheer will, a world of pink unfolded before her.
Yet, this shade of pink offered not a shred of warmth, only an icy chill that crept up one's spine.
Lun Qin instinctively swung a fist towards the ground, and a ball of high-energy air, heated to a plasma state by friction, smashed into the pink-shrouded earth.
An artificial plasma "bomb," tens of thousands of degrees Celsius, exploded on the fleshy carpet.
Then another.
The extreme heat instantly vaporized the flesh within the blast radius, a ten-meter expanse of pink vanishing without a trace, leaving behind an unnervingly pristine crater.
Unfortunately, the void left by her punches was swiftly refilled by the surrounding flesh, a futile effort akin to striking the ocean with a fist.
But she did not give up. If one punch wasn't enough, then she would throw ten, a hundred.
Her fists, delivering strikes comparable to a missile saturation attack, began to visibly erode the pink expanse covering several kilometers around her, the regeneration unable to keep pace with the destruction.
His body had been corrupted by the power of the Great Chaos Will, completely transfigured into another life form, but this did not mean he had lost the sensation of pain.
However, Dun Que, having rashly transformed into another life form, had no time whatsoever to familiarize himself with his new body. He could do nothing but passively endure the beating.
"Run!"
Only when more than half of his surface body had been obliterated did he finally learn the most crucial survival skill of an animal—fleeing.
Almost without hesitation, Dun Que chose to turn and flee.
But this "turn" was somewhat peculiar; he was heading underground.
Like water, he seeped into the Earth's crust, evading the attacks from above.
The pink expanse, still covering over a hundred thousand square meters, vanished completely in less than five seconds. Relying on root-like tentacles instinctively extending downward, Dun Que effortlessly reached a depth of three hundred meters.
...
After reaching the relative safety of the underground, a deluge of sensory information began to assault his consciousness. The vast majority of it was a single word: hunger.
Eat.
I need to eat something.
But what to eat?
This was the inorganic-filled underground; there was nothing for him to digest.
"I must return to the surface, and I must avoid that woman."
Ten minutes later, Dun Que's body sprouted several tubular tentacles. The tips of these tentacles extended all the way to the surface, opening up like blooming flowers.
A large number of special spores, resembling dandelions, sprayed forth from the tentacles' openings, beginning to drift across the globe.
These inconspicuous spores were his "eyes," searching for prey while allowing his main body to evade Lun Qin.
...
"Hey, don't you think there are a lot fewer people in the camp?"
In a certain survivor camp, two scouts chatted idly.
"They probably ran off with food. Happens every day."
"No, that's not right. I didn't see any traces of humans leaving the vicinity."
"Hmm?"
"Speaking of which, the dandelions are blooming, too." One of the men, wearing a beret, picked up a small flower that had drifted onto his clothes.
"What time is it, and you still have the mind to care about something like that?"
"Well, if I don't get a little artsy to release stress, I'm afraid I'll go crazy."
"Go relieve your stress inside; there are plenty of women who want to party with you in this apocalypse."
Months of apocalyptic disaster had long since driven most survivors, constantly struggling between life and death, to the brink of neurosis. Seizing the day had become the creed for many.
After all, one never knew when a monster might appear and bring their life to an end.
In such a high-pressure environment, living one day at a time, getting off once for a momentary thrill, using the hormones brought by sex as an anesthetic to muddle through life in a stupor.
"A mind can't just be filled with lust and mere survival; it also needs some poetry and distant horizons. Look at this flower, how beautiful." The beret-wearing man held the small white flower, examining it.
"I can't stand you."
"Humans are humans because, besides reproduction, we also think and appreciate other things."
"Flowers are just plant reproductive organs, anyway..." the other scout, carrying a backpack, retorted.
"..." The beret-wearing man felt he couldn't converse with this guy whose mind was apparently filled only with white fluid.
...
"Something's wrong. Don't go in yet."
After circling the camp's perimeter, the two returned to its main gate.
The man with the backpack stopped the beret-wearing man, who was about to walk inside.
"I smell blood. Fresh blood."
"I'll throw a flashbang."
The beret-wearing man tucked the small flower into his chest pocket, then pulled out a flashbang retrieved from an arsenal and hurled it with all his might towards the depths of the camp.
A blinding flash, like lightning, streaked across, and the tranquility of everything instantly shattered.
Countless pink tentacles emerged from the shadows, some still dangling dried bones. Their sinuous, fleshy roots sprouted from the ground, greedily searching for any possible food.
The camp's ground and walls were swiftly replaced by writhing biological tissue. Their surfaces and interiors continuously spawned numerous terrifyingly shaped organs, and the entire camp had long since transformed into a hell of flesh and blood.
Only then did the two of them realize they had already been standing at the edge of a gaping, bloody maw.
The scent of blood the backpack-wearing man had detected was, in fact, the residue from an uncleaned mouth.
...
"Run!"
Without a moment's hesitation, the two men also turned and fled. Such a monster was simply not something two small soldiers like them could contend with.
The man-eating tentacles, which had been gnashing and flailing moments before, chose not to pursue them this time.
After devouring the thousand-plus people who had been staying in the entire camp, Dun Que's hunger was appeased. He shifted from a state completely dominated by bestiality back to one where humanity held sway.
As a Reincarnator, he truly didn't view the NPCs of the reincarnation world as actual people, feeling no guilt whatsoever in arbitrarily exploiting and oppressing them.
However, this did not include directly eating them, squeezing every edible part out of them as if they were thrown into a juicer.
To put it plainly, making employees work 996 hours and actually eating their flesh were two entirely different matters. The former was at most class oppression; the latter was psychopathy.
"I'm human; that was just an accident." He watched the two men flee desperately, attempting to convince himself to accept what had just transpired.
"But... I still feel a little hungry..."
...
"That monster must be destroyed." She muttered resentfully, gazing at the hundreds of meters deep crater that had been punched out behind her.
Unlike Dun Que, who could simply burrow away, she possessed only pure physical strength, which was insufficient against a monster hidden deep underground.
She just hadn't realized that, at some point, she had become infected with hatred by the devil within her..
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