Plague Town

"..."

The roar of the train gradually died down, finally coming to a halt within a gray fog so thick it refused to dissolve.

The carriage door creaked open, and a gust of air mixed with the stench of rot, mold, and a faint hint of rust rushed in. It felt like an invisible hand tightly strangling one's breath.

"We're here," Tian Xiaotian said. Her mood seemed a bit off at this moment.

Because...

All her teammates had vanished. They never came back. There had been several tunnels along the way, but she never saw her teammates again.

In reality, Tian Xiaotian didn't have much affection for those teammates, with the exception of Zhang Ya. They had been partners for decades. If she were to fall here...

Even though she was accustomed to life and death, Tian Xiaotian's heart still felt as if it were being squeezed tight.

"Plague Town." Ye Chuan looked out the window. It was still a vast expanse of fog, too thick to disperse.

It felt like the fog was getting even heavier.

"Let's go." Ye Chuan stood up and began to float.

Tian Xiaotian followed Ye Chuan off the train, her heart heavy. As soon as her foot touched the ground, she felt a slippery, sticky sensation—beneath her feet was not a platform, but earth covered in blackish-brown sludge.

The sludge was mixed with unidentified bone fragments and tattered fabric. Stepping on it made a squelching sound, as if the ground were swallowing something.

She raised her head and saw the true appearance of Plague Town. The entire town was wrapped in thick gray fog, with visibility of less than five meters. Sunlight seemed permanently shut out, leaving only a dead, grayish light shrouding everything.

Scattered houses huddled in the mist, looking like silent tombstones.

Most were low wooden shacks. The walls had long since rotted and turned black, with large chunks of the surface peeling off to reveal the decaying wood underneath. Some houses had half-collapsed, and dark green vines emitting a fishy stench wound through the broken walls and ruins.

Hanging from those vines were shriveled objects, their original forms unrecognizable, looking like dried corpses.

The roof tiles were shattered beyond repair. In some places, the roof had caved in, revealing pitch-black attics that resembled eyeless sockets, silently peering at the intruders.

"Plague Town..." Tian Xiaotian suddenly spoke. "It's not quite like I remember it."

"What do you mean?"

"Back then, Plague Town was littered with corpses, but now it looks different."

The streets were paved with irregular flagstones. Many were broken or jutting up, covered in dark red stains that looked like blood dried long ago.

Scattered along the sides of the street were overturned, dilapidated carriages, rusted iron buckets, and shattered wooden crates. Occasionally, one could see clumps of black hair inside the crates, or half-rotted chunks of something indistinguishable between meat and wood.

[//// Town]

A crooked wooden road sign stood in the sludge. The writing on the sign was long blurred, leaving only a few twisted strokes that looked as if they had been carved out by fingernails.

Occasionally, vague sounds drifted from the depths of the fog—like someone coughing, or the faint, intermittent sobbing of a woman, mingled with the wind so that the direction couldn't be discerned.

Ye Chuan floated beside her. His small figure appeared and disappeared in the thick fog, but his pitch-black eyes could penetrate the mist, taking in the entire town.

He hummed in acknowledgement. "Interesting. The aura of the supernatural here is much denser than at Silent Hospital."

Ye Chuan and Tian Xiaotian moved forward through the mist. Unknowingly, the surrounding fog seemed to thicken.

"What kind of supernatural presence does this place..." Ye Chuan hadn't finished speaking when he seemed to notice something.

He turned around, but Tian Xiaotian had already vanished.

Ye Chuan stopped. The surrounding fog began to fade gradually.

The town revealed itself clearly before him once again, yet there was not a trace of living breath.

"Little Tian is gone?" Ye Chuan released his spiritual perception. It was blocked by the dense fog, but he still couldn't find any aura of the living. Tian Xiaotian's presence had vanished completely.

Interesting.

It seemed the fog just now had separated him from Tian Xiaotian.

Since that was the case, Ye Chuan knew it was highly unlikely he would find Tian Xiaotian again, unless he cleared this scenario. Thinking of this, his gaze fell upon a dilapidated house nearby.

It was pitch black inside; something seemed to be in there.

"Let's go take a look." With a few flashes of movement, Ye Chuan appeared inside the house.

The interior was in ruins, with hardly a single piece of furniture intact. Moreover, the walls were splattered with blackened bloodstains.

There were also some strange scratch marks.

Ye Chuan glanced around. Just as he was about to leave, his gaze landed on the floor nearby.

There was a piece of yellowed paper.

Ye Chuan twitched his finger, and the paper floated up into his hand.

[It's too terrible. Those monsters infected by the plague... No, it's truly too terrible... They can't be killed at all!]

[However, they seem unable to see, so one must not make any sound!]

[Don't come over!]

There was more written below, but Ye Chuan couldn't read it anymore.

Rules?

Monsters that can't see, so you can't make a sound?

Interesting.

Ye Chuan scanned the ground again. After confirming there was nothing else, he decided to put the note away.

Leaving the dilapidated house, Ye Chuan looked at the surrounding buildings. He planned to search them all to see if there were similar notes.

But just then, a strange friction sound caught his attention.

"Hmm?" Ye Chuan paused, looking toward the fog on one side.

Within the mist, a figure was faintly moving!

From the blurry silhouette, it appeared to be something crawling on all fours, like a human moving on hands and knees. The ear-piercing friction sound seemed to be caused by fingernails scraping against the flagstone pavement.

"..." Ye Chuan remained expressionless and simply raised his hand.

However, a second later, a familiar voice came from the mist: "Boss!"

Ye Chuan's hand froze in mid-air, followed by a look of confusion.

That thing in the mist...

Tian Xiaotian?

Ye Chuan lowered his hand and floated toward the figure in the fog.

But as his vision cleared, Ye Chuan discovered it was a two-meter-tall flesh-colored monster!

It had no facial features, its entire body made of fleshy skin tissue covered in blood vessels!

It crouched on the ground on all fours, its sharp black fingernails scraping against the floor.

"Boss~"

"Boss~"

Even though it was a monster, it was emitting Tian Xiaotian's voice, which Ye Chuan found somewhat unbelievable.

"No, this voice... is it a hallucination?" Ye Chuan quickly realized the truth.

Using this method to lure people in?

"Ah!!!!!!" Upon hearing Ye Chuan's words, the flesh-colored monster before him suddenly let out a piercing scream, generating a blast of air.

Buffeted by the shockwave, Ye Chuan simply raised his hand and fired a beam of light. "You're too noisy."

"You have a death wish!"