Chapter 34
[User “Pure Love Warrior” is waiting for your action.]
[User “Strongest King” is excitedly waiting for your tragic death.]
[User “World’s Cutest Girl” is curious about your scent and has tipped you 20 universal coins.]
[User “Rich Young Master” hopes you will clear the pollutants as soon as possible and has tipped you 0.1 universal coins.]
Yu Zhi didn’t have time to pay attention to the barrage and told Lu Liming to shoot quickly.
Zuo Feiyang also fired, the continuous sound of gunshots echoing in the office.
Bang, bang, bang
Several shots were fired, smashing half the mouth of the beer-bellied lip-faced man who had led the way earlier.
Despite this, the beer-bellied lip-faced man’s movements were not slowed down in the slightest. Foul blood mixed with saliva dripped to the floor as it charged over again.
Lu Liming’s eyes widened in disgust and shock: “Holy crap, holy crap, its mouth is smashed, how can it still move? Don’t they eat people with their mouths? Do we have to shoot the head? No, where is their head, holy crap…”
Yu Zhi glanced at the bleeding long neck of the dead pollution source and quickly said, “Try shooting the neck.”
Lu Liming continued to shoot. The beer belly’s neck was long and thin, and his aim wasn’t good.
Several shots missed or hit other larger areas, but none hit the neck.
Zuo Feiyang noticed the situation here, turned his gun, pulled the trigger, and two shots broke the beer belly’s neck.
With a “bang”, the beer belly’s fat body fell heavily to the ground, completely blocking the already narrow passage and tripping several lip-faced monsters who were close behind it.
The office was quite large, and eight or nine lip-faced monsters approached them from two directions.
Yu Zhi picked up a small stool from the ground and stuffed it into the mouth of the nearest lip-faced monster.
It bit off the leg of the stool and subconsciously chewed on what was in its mouth.
Yu Zhi seized the opportunity, his right hand thrusting upwards into its neck from below.
The blade pierced the lip-faced monster’s slender neck. It spat, and the wood chips stained with saliva and foul blood sprayed all over Yu Zhi’s hand.
The slimy and disgusting touch made Yu Zhi freeze.
Damn, it’s disgusting enough looking, and it even spits.
The lip-faced monster lowered its mouth and bit again.
Yu Zhi immediately dodged behind it, raised his hand to pinch the gap in its neck and wiped his hand on its clothes. At the same time, his right hand cleanly cut its neck.
The big mouth on its neck fell off, and the human-like body lost its aggression, becoming soft like a person who had just died.
Yu Zhi threw away the neck in disgust and frowned: “We have to completely break their necks.”
Only when the mouth is separated from the body will these pollutants completely lose their fighting capacity.
Glancing at the clock on the wall, his frown deepened.
It was now twelve o’clock noon.
Taijiang High School’s lunch break was from eleven-thirty to one o’clock.
They had no time to waste on these pollutants.
Yu Zhi immediately asked Zuo Feiyang: “Xiao Zuo, can you still use your ability?”
Zuo Feiyang: “Yes, but it’s too crowded here. If I break something…”
After receiving an affirmative reply, Yu Zhi stepped on a chair, climbed onto the desk, and rushed towards the door without looking back: “I’ll lure them out, then you use your ability.”
“Okay,” Zuo Feiyang hurriedly asked, “How do we help you lure them…”
Before he could finish the last word, Yu Zhi stepped over a desk like a hurdler and nimbly rushed towards the office door.
He didn’t do anything else, just simply ran out, and the lip-faced monsters followed.
Zuo Feiyang looked at Yu Zhi’s running back, then at the monsters that were completely ignoring him and Lu Liming.
He suppressed his doubts and followed in stride.
The moment Yu Zhi ran out of the office, he used his ability to manipulate the ground.
When Zuo Feiyang made his move, Yu Zhi flashed back into the office with the “Ordinary Kick” ability. Turning around, he saw that several floor tiles at the office door had turned into mud and swamp, and the lower bodies of six lip-faced monsters were stuck in it, firmly trapped.
He glanced at Zuo Feiyang’s pale face, then at the time, and pressed down Zuo Feiyang’s hand that was continuing to use his ability: “There’s no time, just trap them, let’s find clues first.”
Zuo Feiyang exhaled: “Okay.”
Yu Zhi walked quickly to Chen Wan’s desk and paused when he saw the faceless student by the wall.
It was the same as before, silently lowering its head, not speaking, not attacking them, standing still like a wooden man.
Yu Zhi looked at it twice, made sure it had no reaction, retracted his gaze, and decided to ignore it for now.
Chen Wan had a lot of things. In addition to a school desk, she also had a separate small table filled with things.
The three quickly divided the areas they were responsible for.
Lu Liming was in charge of the drawers of the desk, and Zuo Feiyang was in charge of the small table.
Yu Zhi was in charge of the surface of the large desk. As he lowered his head, all he saw were books.
High school Chinese textbooks, teaching materials, test papers, etc. Chen Wan was a Chinese teacher.
There were only dense lecture notes in the teaching materials. Yu Zhi scanned them twice and put them down.
There was a thick stack of extracurricular books on the corner of the table. Unexpectedly, these extracurricular books were not classics, ancient poems, or essay selections, but a pile of books about adolescent psychology and how to communicate with adolescents.
?Parents’ Awakening?, ?How to Communicate with Teenagers?, ?Accompanying Children Through Three Years of High School?, and so on.”
He quickly flipped through them. Chen Wan had read all these books and even highlighted some key notes.
When he flipped to the last book, he found a mobile phone inside. It seemed Chen Wan had left it there while reading.
Yu Zhi pressed the power button, but the screen remained black. It was dead.
The charger was plugged into the socket. He just plugged the phone in to charge when a noisy commotion suddenly erupted outside the teaching building.
Zuo Feiyang’s rummaging became faster. Without raising his head, he asked, “Is the lunch break over so soon?”
Yu Zhi suddenly remembered something and glanced at the Faceless Student by the wall, who hadn’t moved at all.
It was scolded by the teacher for eating for more than half an hour, which meant that other students had even less time to eat.
His expression changed slightly: “The teachers here don’t give the students any break.” They even tried to make students memorize words during exercise time, let alone other times.
As time passed, the commotion outside got closer and closer.
Although the Faceless Student was not aggressive at the moment, it was still a pollutant, and there was no guarantee when it would erupt.
Yu Zhi became more and more anxious as he searched. He rummaged through the desktop but found no useful clues other than the mobile phone: “Xiao Ming, how’s your search going?”
Lu Liming didn’t respond.
Yu Zhi looked down and saw Lu Liming squatting on the ground, holding a light green floral password book in his hands, his mouth open and drooling like a fool.
He wasn’t sure if it was an illusion, but he felt that Lu Liming’s facial features seemed to have become a bit blurred.
Yu Zhi immediately snatched the password book from him. The moment his fingertips touched the book, he felt a chilling coldness seep straight into his body.
The smell of the leather cover also entered his nostrils, frantically stirring his appetite.
Lu Liming slowly raised his head, his eyes still unfocused, murmuring, “I’m hungry.”
“I’m so hungry, I want to eat meat, braised pork, braised ribs, sweet and sour pork, twice-cooked pork…”
Even Yu Zhi was getting hungry from his words. He quickly tore open a packet of biscuits and stuffed several pieces into his mouth.
Lu Liming’s mouth was suddenly stuffed with dry biscuits. He choked and retched, his eyes rolled around, and his pupils gradually focused.
Seeing this, Yu Zhi quickly said: “This is a polluted area, there are only braised lips, sweet and sour lips, cooked lips, boiled lips, and stir-fried lips with green peppers.”
Hearing the word “lips” over and over again, Lu Liming’s eyes gradually cleared. The image of ugly mouths appeared in front of his eyes, and his stomach started to churn.
He was hungry, but he wanted to vomit even more. The urge to vomit temporarily overcame his appetite.
What a way to fight poison with poison.
Lu Liming chewed the biscuits in his mouth and said vaguely, “I didn’t find the password for the book.” “I wanted to find the password, but I don’t know when I spaced out.”
Yu Zhi stuffed the whole packet of biscuits into his hand and said quickly, “No need to find the password.”
As soon as he finished speaking, he raised the password book and slammed it against the wall.
A slight click sounded, and the lock on the password book was broken.
Simple and crude, no password needed at all.
Lu Liming swallowed the biscuits in his mouth with difficulty and looked at him blankly: “Brother Yu, I think I’ve been mentally polluted.”
Yu Zhi comforted him: “Don’t think, you are mentally polluted.”
Lu Liming: “….”
Yu Zhi opened the book. It was a diary.
The first page had the owner’s name written on it – Chen Tingting.
The diary was new, and the first entry was dated March 9th.
[February 20th, Tuesday]
After talking with my sister, I realized that the past seventeen years have been a daze.
My mother seems to want to harm me.
Every day after school, my mother locks me in the study room, the door bolted from the outside, as if I were a chicken or duck.
*
Yu Zhi had just finished reading one page when a burst of rapid footsteps came from outside.
The office was right next to the stairs, and many pollutants were coming upstairs.
His eyelids twitched wildly. The ones coming now should be Faceless Students, and they were not aggressive yet.
Seeing that Zuo Feiyang and Lu Liming were still searching, Yu Zhi gritted his teeth and continued to read the next page of the diary.
[February 21st, Wednesday]
I carefully got out of bed this morning and saw my mother in the living room making a phone call through the crack in the door.
Her teeth were bared in a ghastly grin, her words were full of poison, her smile full of knives.
While she was out, I sneaked into her room and opened her computer to try to figure it out.
I looked carefully for a long time before I deciphered the code from her chat records with other teachers – they are eating people!
They are all eating people!
*
Yu Zhi’s fingertips paused. The diary entry was from February, during the high school students’ winter vacation.
Had Chen Wan already started eating people then?
Was Chen Wan the source of the pollution?
“Brother Yu… Brother Yu…” Lu Liming stammered.
Yu Zhi lifted his eyelids and followed his gaze. There were more than a dozen Faceless Students at the door of the office.
It was probably because of the lip-faced teachers stuck in the mud in the hallway that the Faceless Students had stopped moving forward. Their blank faces, devoid of features, uniformly turned toward the office.
Even though they had no eyes and no mouths, Yu Zhi inexplicably felt as though he was being watched and judged by them.
It was as if they were blaming him for blocking their path, preventing them from returning to their classrooms and continuing their studies.
In the blink of an eye, Yu Zhi saw a few of the Faceless Students’ mouths suddenly grow larger, stretching from their cheeks all the way to their ears. The change was unmistakable.
A bad feeling rose in Yu Zhi’s heart. It wasn’t his imagination—their lips were indeed growing larger.
The Faceless Students seemed like… juvenile forms of the lip-faced monsters.
If they truly were juvenile forms, they would inevitably grow into the highly aggressive lip-faced monsters.
Yu Zhi immediately asked, “Are you done yet?”
Zuo Feiyang was sweating nervously. “Almost, almost! Chen Wan stacked all the class schedules together, and I’m still trying to find her schedule for this term.”
“Help Xiao Zuo,” Yu Zhi said, hastily shoving a diary, a phone, and a charger into his backpack before joining Lu Liming to assist.
Halfway through the search, Yu Zhi heard soft footsteps behind him.
A Faceless Student standing against the wall was walking toward the office door—it wanted to return to the classroom too.
As it passed by him, Yu Zhi caught a faint whiff of meat.
The scent wasn’t subtle because it was weak, but because it was identical to the pervasive meat aroma in the air. The two were perfectly blended, making it impossible to distinguish unless one was very close.
Yu Zhi’s eyelashes trembled. There was no doubt about it—the meat scent in the air was indeed coming from the students.
Why, among all the pollutants, did the student pollutants emit a meaty aroma while the lip-faced monsters didn’t?
In this “scenario,” the students were fragrant. They were meat.
In the blink of an eye, the Faceless Student reached the office door.
The nearest lip-faced monster suddenly stretched its neck and bit down on the Faceless Student’s head.
With a loud crunching sound, it began gnawing, relishing every bite.
Before Yu Zhi could feel any relief at their infighting, the next scene sent his heart racing into his throat.
The lip-faced monster was sucking the Faceless Student’s head with such force that its mouth formed a perfect “O” shape. As it sucked, its head tilted back, stretching the Faceless Student’s previously normal neck to twice its original length, turning it into a long, thin stalk.
With a loud pop, the lip-faced monster spat something out.
Yu Zhi’s hair stood on end. It wasn’t the mutilated, chewed-up remains he had expected.
It was a lip-faced monster’s mouth, large as a head.
The long, thin neck now resembled a flower stem, supporting a slick, saliva-covered, oversized lip-faced mouth.
What had been consumed was the Faceless Student’s head, but what emerged was a grotesque new mouth, almost identical to that of the lip-faced monster.
The consumed pollutant had transformed into the likeness of the one that devoured it.