Chapter 348: Under Attack (Two-in-One)

Wang Han felt a bit dizzy; he knew that driving in his current state counted as dangerous driving, but it was better than letting the eager-to-try Li Yuning drive without a license.

He always felt that things were developing exceptionally smoothly, and as an Enforcer, Wang Han felt a bit suspicious of the necessity of his profession at this moment.

Supernatural crimes should have left no evidence and been difficult to investigate; even with the support of modern technology and diligent casework, as Enforcers, they could not be certain they could find someone as mysterious in appearance and identity as Miss Hong within a week without the help of good luck.

But like Li Yuning, directly asking the deceased for answers brought out the lost clues... It was just like, "Why don't you go ask the Magic Conch?"

Of course, this was Wang Han's complex internal grumbling; he was also very clear that not all Investigators could be like Li Yuning, and the act of "asking the Magic Conch" came with a price.

However, the one bearing the price was himself.

Wang Han was actually a bit concerned about the conversation between the shop owner, Lin Ling, and Li Yuning in the Forest Cabin earlier; what exactly did Lin Laoban mean by "you currently have no trading capacity"?

The venue for the Socialite Gathering was some distance away from Wang Han and the others, and it was estimated to take an hour and a half of driving to reach the destination.

After hesitating several times, Wang Han still couldn't help but ask: "Aren't you afraid?"

"Afraid of what?" Li Yuning looked at Wang Han; she had already noticed Wang Han testing her with his gaze several times and was also curious about what the other party would say to her.

In Wang Han's mind, the lake water that imprisoned and drowned countless souls emerged, and feeling the temperature inside the car drop a few degrees, he turned up the car's air conditioning, "Didn't you say there is... in your brain? Aren't you afraid of death? After seeing that lake, you even said that the lake would imprison all the souls in the world; if you die, you will go there too, won't you?"

"... I dream about it every day." Li Yuning replied after a slight silence, "My whole body sinking into the Weak Water, all the evil spirits and souls tearing at my body, I am all alone, unable to struggle... Just thinking about it makes me feel terrified."

"Then why did you look like you weren't afraid at all when you saw those things before?" Wang Han saw Li Yuning's shoulders unconsciously pull in slightly as she spoke, still full of doubt.

Li Yuning then revealed a smile with a complex expression: "Brother Boss has many books in his shop, and I often borrow them. Several books describe what the world is like after death. After reading them, I realized that I would likely go to hell, so I might have had some preparation in my heart. Thinking that I am clearer about the pain I will suffer than those who don't know, I actually feel a bit fortunate."

"Besides, rather than saying I fear death, it's more that I fear the world after death. If one dies, everyone will die, but the unknown that one experiences after death is even more chilling."

Wang Han was silent for a moment, looking at Li Yuning's endearing appearance, and seemed to have made a decision in his heart, then asked: "Everyone will fall into that lake after death, right? I will also go down there one day, won't I?"

"Probably." Li Yuning nodded.

Wang Han smiled: "Then you can hold my hand when you are afraid, and we will face it together; perhaps it won't be so scary then."

Hearing this, Li Yuning was slightly startled, then beamed and smiled: "You are as gentle as everyone in the water..."

"Huh?" Wang Han blinked, recalling the countless ghost hands in the lake that tore Zhao Qian to pieces, and suddenly felt the temperature in the car drop again.

Was that a sign of "gentleness"?

Baiyin Shajiao in Baizhou City was a place rarely visited by people, but in ancient times, it had been a bustling trade port. However, after certain changes occurred later, this port was abandoned. Most of the people who originally lived here went elsewhere to seek development, and the remaining small portion of people lived there just like those dilapidated houses and the abandoned port, ignored and quietly decaying.

At seven o'clock in the evening, Wang Han and Li Yuning drove the car into a place called Baisha Village here.

It was terrifyingly dark here; one could not see anyone to the left or right. The houses where people lived and the abandoned houses were all dilapidated, a dark mess mixed together, making it difficult to distinguish between them.

"Have the people in the village gone to sleep? But it's only this time." Wang Han was somewhat incredulous. The local customs of Baizhou City were accustomed to nightlife; based on his understanding of the locals he knew, it was no exaggeration to say that it wouldn't be strange for them to stay up all night two days a week, which had led him to get used to the city's schedule.

Li Yuning, however, said: "They aren't asleep; they are watching me."

This little girl could make a grown man like him shudder every time she spoke. He followed Li Yuning's gaze and looked carefully, vaguely seeing a person standing in the courtyard of an old house. It seemed to be a tall, thin man, motionless. It was so dark here that he couldn't see the specific appearance, and could only guess the person's gender through the silhouette.

"Turn on the flashlight; how about we stop and ask someone?" Wang Han asked for Li Yuning's opinion. He took out a small flashlight, no bigger than an adult male's index finger, from the box next to the gear shift and gave it to her.

Li Yuning agreed, took the small flashlight, and after Wang Han stopped the car, she shone the flashlight toward the feet of the silhouette, as they were afraid that others would think it was impolite to shine it directly on someone's face to ask questions.

But who would have thought that when the light from their flashlight shone over, they only saw a pair of blood-soaked trouser legs and bare feet.

Wang Han's heart skipped a beat, and a thick sense of unease surged within him.

The person being questioned made no sound in response, but Wang Han and Li Yuning seemed to see the upper body of the other party, which was not illuminated, move. He raised his hand, signaling a direction, as if pointing the way for them.

As Li Yuning slowly moved the flashlight's beam up the villager's body, Wang Han and Li Yuning both saw a scene that was enough to make one scream in madness.

As the light slowly shone on the villager's face, the two realized that the source of the villager's blood-soaked, bleeding state was on the other's face. The villager's face had been bitten away by some terrifying thing, leaving a huge gap; the entire facial area had completely disappeared, and the facial bones were left incomplete and shattered.

This villager had clearly been dead for a long time, but for some reason, he was able to maintain this standing posture without falling.

But what made Wang Han even more puzzled and his scalp tingle was that he had clearly captured the villager's pointing motion with his eyes, but when the light shone on the person's shoulder, the other party's hands were clearly hanging down, with no intention of raising them to point the way, and it was even more impossible for a dead person to point the way.

And the maddening things didn't end there. Immediately after, Wang Han and Li Yuning both saw the villager whose entire face had been eaten away suddenly twitch. The wounds on his face suddenly became active, bursting with huge black swollen bubbles that gradually filled the entire wound. Following that, the villager's body also began to swell and twitch eerily, as if it had been parasitized by something.

Wang Han decisively stepped on the gas pedal. He knew very well what that thing was now; he was very familiar with those eerie and dense black swollen bubbles—they were the eyes of the spiders, the arthropods he feared. And the thing that was about to burst out of the villager's corpse might not even be a spider at all, but an Abnormal creature that could change its physical form based on the things he feared most in his heart—a Child of Cruelty!

Although his vision was limited, Wang Han floored the gas pedal, speeding through the dilapidated village with almost no deceleration.

Wang Han was incredibly grateful that the walls of the buildings here were very fragile. It wasn't that his driving skills were so high that he dared to drive so fast in a village with primitive roads and unknown conditions, but that even if he hit a building with the car, he didn't worry about the car getting stuck on some wall.

Li Yuning grabbed the handle above the car window with one hand, an excited smile appearing on her face: "So you are afraid of spiders?"

"Damn it, a spider as tall as a floor, how could I not be afraid?" Wang Han shouted while driving, almost biting his tongue, then quickly shut his mouth and focused on driving.

Li Yuning looked back, heard what seemed to be more than one rustling sound around them, and said: "We seem to have fallen into someone's lair; it feels like we are about to be surrounded."

"Fuck, what should we do?" Wang Han asked hurriedly. He was just driving blindly now; he didn't know where he would end up, nor did he know how much longer his Mustang could hold out.

"The best way to overcome fear is actually to face it. Although the ability of the Children of Cruelty is a bit eerie, being able to change into physical forms based on the things deep in a person's heart, this is also their weakness..." Li Yuning stared straight ahead and whispered, "Something is coming!"

Ssha!!!

A huge spider covered in black bristles suddenly smashed through a tile-roofed house, rushed out from the flying rubble and bricks, let out a strange cry, and came to kill Wang Han and the others.

Boom!

Wang Han was so nervous that he didn't even step on the brake; his whole foot had long been pressed on the gas pedal like a wooden stick, fixed there, and the whole car drove directly into the giant spider without a hint of deceleration.

Splat!

Wang Han and Li Yuning felt the car jolt violently, and they were jolted up along with it. Immediately after, before they could look closely at the hideous face of the black spider, the spider's head and body were smashed to pieces, and green plasma and internal organs were burst out, sticking to the car window.

At this moment, Wang Han also realized what the "weakness" Li Yuning mentioned earlier was.

Those Children of Cruelty should be "invincible" to humans when they haven't turned into physical forms, but once they turn into physical forms, their lives have substance. They can turn into the form the prey fears most to hunt the prey, but at the same time, they become living beings that can be killed.

Thinking this through, the pressure in Wang Han's heart was suddenly greatly reduced; he no longer felt so panicked, and even had the thought of wanting to run over another Child of Cruelty.

And whether it was because the death of a companion alerted the other Children of Cruelty, Wang Han and Li Yuning didn't hear the sounds of those fierce creatures chasing them anymore; he didn't know if they were hiding in some dark place, peeping and observing.

The body of the giant spider that had been run over wasn't completely smashed into two halves. Wang Han could only start the windshield wipers, reverse, and ask Li Yuning: "The navigation can't locate that damn place Zhao Qian mentioned either. Did you see the direction the villager was pointing just now? That might be where the Socialite Gathering is being held."

Li Yuning pondered for a second and pointed in a direction, "It should be there."

"Okay." Wang Han shifted back into drive and stepped on the gas pedal again, looking at the rearview mirror with some depression. Indeed, he didn't see any shadow of giant spiders following them; those Children of Cruelty seemed to have given up.

Vroom, vroom, vroom...

But this thought didn't last long before Wang Han heard the sound of houses collapsing densely behind him, as if they had been bombarded by something, yet he glanced at the rearview mirror and found not a single glimmer of light, leaving him even more bewildered.

Li Yuning, however, seemed to heave a sigh of relief and said with a smile, "It's fine, I'll keep driving forward; there's no need to worry about anything else."

"But..."

"I will help you keep an eye on the road conditions; my intuition is much stronger than yours, and I can sense danger earlier than you can."

"Alright." Hearing Li Yuning speak with such confidence, Wang Han stopped asking questions and headed into the depths of the darkness.

After driving for a few minutes on the seemingly endless dark road, Wang Han gradually saw a few red lights ahead, and as he got closer, the outline of a rectangular building slowly appeared there.

The car stopped, and after getting out to take a closer look, Wang Han was a bit dazed and said blankly, "This seems to be an abandoned warehouse?"

Although it was called an abandoned warehouse, the environment around it didn't look abandoned at all; it was clean, tidy, and filled with all kinds of luxury cars, which far exceeded his Mustang—a car that would be considered a luxury vehicle in the eyes of ordinary people.

"This must be the place." Wang Han and Li Yuning exchanged a look, and the two decided to go into the warehouse to investigate.

The entire warehouse mainly had two entrances, one at the front and one at the back, with a small side entrance on the west-facing side; there was no need to even consider the large front and back entrances as they were sealed tight, and touching them rashly would easily create a commotion that would alert the people inside the warehouse, so they could only consider sneaking in through the small door.

The two of them stealthily picked the lock, with Li Yuning volunteering to step forward and saying she had this skill, while Wang Han, who didn't know how to pick locks, could only stand to the side and keep watch.

The surroundings were very quiet, as quiet as a graveyard, drifting with the unique scent of corpse rot and grave grass; he looked up at the moon and found that today's moon was exceptionally round and also somewhat red.

After staring at that Red Moon for a long time, Wang Han always felt as if he were locking eyes with an eye, and the prophecy Zhao Qian had mentioned surfaced in his mind, making him inexplicably start to panic.

Feeling that something was wrong somewhere, Wang Han hurriedly put on the Copper Coin Mask; he hadn't had the chance to wear the mask in the car earlier, and although it was originally meant to evade the Children of Cruelty and hadn't been used at such a critical moment just now, it didn't matter, as the Copper Coin Mask could dispel more than just the Children of Cruelty and could also be effective against other Abnormal creatures.