Chapter 1372: The Call of the Stars (Part 15)

"The disaster that broke out in this strange world is probably not a biochemical crisis at all. This attack is aimed at the spirit, and none of us have a way to guard against this kind of mental attack. The situation is terrible to the extreme."

By the window on the second floor of the bar, Xu Shangqi said while eating the sealed bread he found in the bar's storage room that hadn't expired yet.

"I have no idea what you encountered." Jarvis blinked and said: "This kind of mental attack is completely ineffective against me, and I can't imagine what they heard and saw to make them hurt themselves so desperately."

Jarvis's expression was very helpless. If he really had to summarize everything that happened tonight in one sentence, it would be "Humans are really interesting," and if he added another sentence, it would be "I don't understand, but I am greatly shocked."

Jarvis knew that the sister and brother, Scarlet Witch Wanda and Quicksilver Pietro, although they had been displaced since they were young, hadn't suffered any physical pain because of their own powerful abilities. Wanda would scream in a soprano tone if a thorn on a rose pricked her finger.

But just last night, she used a rough branch to gouge out her own eyes, and now she was still wearing an expression of rejoicing after the disaster. How terrifying must the things she saw have been to cause such a huge change?

Jarvis had to hold Wanda's hand all the time because losing her vision made her very insecure.

More importantly, because she was worried about losing control and hurting her companions, Wanda directly abolished her own martial arts, poured all the Chaos power she could control into her eyes, and destroyed them.

And she was now completely unable to contact Chthon, nor did she dare to invoke the Chaos power of this universe, so she was now almost an ordinary person.

This was unimaginable for a mutant. Their abilities were originally like their arms. Losing their abilities wasn't just as simple as being disabled; it was as if the world had changed its appearance.

In the past hour, Wanda had asked Jarvis hundreds of times what was around her. According to the young witch, when she had the ability as a magician, she didn't need to use her eyes to perceive the world around her at all. The perspective from which she observed and perceived the world was completely different from that of humans.

Riley's situation was slightly better than Wanda's. He had lost his hearing and needed to rely on other people's lip movements to judge what the other party was saying, but he had another trouble, which was that he didn't dare to speak, for fear that the tune that had circulated countless times and lingered in his mind would be sung out inadvertently.

He endured it very hard, almost unable to call upon his energy to do anything else. Wanda was the same.

Therefore, it was foreseeable that in the journey ahead, not only would they not be the most powerful people in the team, but they would become a drag.

And what could be imagined was that whether it was Jarvis or Xu Shangqi, it was impossible for them to abandon their companions, so although it was dawn, the journey ahead would probably be even more difficult.

"I take back my previous judgment." Xu Shangqi spoke first: "My original plan was to find an enclosed place to hide, slowly accumulate resources, and after survival was no longer a problem, find a way to manufacture weapons, go out to explore regularly, and wait until the base scale was large enough and the technology was advanced enough before exploring toward the possible center of the event step by step."

"But now it seems that this way of building high walls and storing grain doesn't apply to this world at all. There are too few monsters that can be seen and defeated, and weapons are of no use."

"And I'm afraid there are no large-scale survivors for us to save. That neither has the conditions for large-scale production, nor is it necessary. More importantly, every day we wait, the possibility of being eroded by darkness increases by one point."

Xu Shangqi covered his eyes and said in a painful tone: "Why is it that after I hugged the thighs of Spider-Man and Scarlet Witch, I traveled to a world that tests mental strength!"

Then he gritted his teeth and said: "Don't let me know which little smarty-pants did this!"

Jarvis also sighed. He shook his head and said: "I'm sorry, most of the machines in this city have been damaged. My hacking ability can't be of much use. At most, I can repair cars or something."

"And regarding the mental attacks you encountered, I can't feel them at all, and I can't help. So, I'm afraid I'll have to rely on you next."

"I'm just an ordinary person." Xu Shangqi emphasized: "If you think it's because I have a strong will that I've persisted until now, then I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I'm relying on a treasure."

Xu Shangqi took out the jade pendant from around his neck. He trusted the character of the few people present very much. More importantly, the energy on the jade pendant was already very thin, and the high wall he built with the characters of the Heart-Clearing Technique was already crumbling.

Jarvis's scanning device scanned the jade pendant around Xu Shangqi's neck and said: "There is a strange energy on it, but I don't know what it is. Do you have a way to replicate this energy?"

"Unfortunately, I don't. I already said I just learned the mental cultivation method at the last minute... Alright, let's not dwell on this. We have to do something during the day. We can't wait here anymore, otherwise, when night falls, we will still be just as helpless."

"I think the way to break your weird state should be to find out the truth." Jarvis analyzed rationally: "Those strange things attacked your spirits, so there must be a way to resist this kind of attack."

"I searched the data of all mutants and super-powered individuals who possess mental abilities, including Professor X, in the database, and didn't find any method related to establishing a mental barrier."

"This is not an attack." Scarlet Witch, who had covered her empty eye sockets with cloth, squeezed Jarvis's hand and said: "It's very difficult for me to describe it to you, but I wasn't attacked."

"On the contrary." Riley's somewhat hoarse voice sounded: "It is precisely facing the truth that made us become what we are now."

Xu Shangqi still hadn't forgotten his central theme. He said: "Sitting here discussing the route is useless. No matter what, it will get dark. Yesterday during the day, I saw some strange mucus traces on the first floor of the bar. I think we can go investigate and see what happened here..."

After speaking, he didn't pay attention to the few people sitting by the window and turned to walk downstairs. Jarvis looked at Riley and Wanda, who had lost part of their mobility, and several people walked to the first floor of the bar together.

The first floor of the bar was filled with a foul odor. The complex human body structure made the stench emitted during decay more complex and harder to ignore. Xu Shangqi blocked his nose with his sleeves and lowered his head to look for the traces he saw yesterday.

Many people think that fear is a continuous emotion. Being thrown into a terrifying environment, people will definitely feel terrified continuously and be unable to do anything.

But in fact, the human brain has a protective mechanism. After experiencing intense emotions, there will be a kind of extreme fatigue. This fatigue is not used to deprive humans of their ability to act, but precisely to let the brain stop briefly, and then let instinct take over the body, continuing to maintain the ability to act, thereby increasing the chance of survival.

And after experiencing multiple scares, this fatigue period will become longer and longer. At this time, humans usually fall into a state of numbness. No matter what terrifying things they see or what scenes they encounter that they cannot accept, their reactions will be very small.

Xu Shangqi wasn't afraid of corpses. After all, it was his first time coming into contact with so many corpses, nor could he endure that kind of foul odor. It was just that the operating law of an ordinary person's brain made him have to adapt to all this with numbness.

Fortunately, the state of numbness allowed him to overcome most of his physiological discomfort and also barely calm down to act according to reason.

"These monsters crawled out of human bodies." Xu Shangqi looked at the traces by the wall and said: "They drilled out from various parts of the human body, ate a part of the human body, and then left in a hurry."

Jarvis also looked around. His scanning function told him that what Xu Shangqi said was right. There were too many mucus traces crawling outward here.

Xu Shangqi endured the fear and tried hard to recall the situation when facing the monster before. The monster carrying the lower body of a woman didn't look like it was treating the human body as a part of itself.

Any creature would have the instinct to get rid of burdens. The human body was completely useless for the monster's movement, so it didn't get rid of it, which meant it wasn't that it didn't want to get rid of it, but it was possible that it couldn't get rid of it.

"Hatching failure." Xu Shangqi spat out a few words. He frowned and thought for a while, then said: "If the monster hatched from the human body, then the eggshell shouldn't remain on their body except for providing the necessary nutrients at the beginning."

"The two monsters we saw might both be failed products that didn't successfully get rid of the eggshell halfway through hatching, and these corpses are the eggshells left behind by those who succeeded."

Xu Shangqi had to endure the nausea and use a more objective, even cold and ruthless third-party perspective to narrate this matter, to describe his own kind as a kind of inorganic matter.

But his reason was telling him that they were all living people once, maybe they were celebrating on the dance floor of the bar the second before, and the next second they were broken through by monsters, and then ruthlessly swallowed.

The scene forced him to remain rational, but morality made him feel sad. Xu Shangqi took a deep breath and recited the Heart-Clearing Technique a few more times in his heart. By the last time, he couldn't even recite it silently, but recited it aloud, as if the sound could give him security.

The others couldn't understand Chinese and thought Xu Shangqi was praying. After calming down for a while, Xu Shangqi said: "If the monsters that didn't fully hatch stayed on the street, then where did those that hatched successfully go? I think this might be the key to the problem."

"We can't sit here and wait for darkness to descend anymore. No matter whether there is truth ahead or not, we have to continue walking. Let's go."

Xu Shangqi turned and walked out the door. The other three followed behind him. Xu Shangqi didn't have strong reconnaissance capabilities, but fortunately, there were many mucus traces on the street, and the few monsters gave them plenty of room for investigation.

While chasing the traces, the group walked toward the end of the street. Although having clues was a good thing, the process of stopping from time to time to observe the direction of the traces to ensure they hadn't gone astray was very time-consuming. They hadn't walked a few kilometers before the sky darkened.

"Find a place to rest." Xu Shangqi exhaled. The existence of Qi made his body not tired, but his spirit was exhausted to the extreme.

Carefully observing those mucus traces was definitely not an easy job. By the end, Xu Shangqi even felt that kind of mucus had crawled onto his body, making him feel sticky all over, mixed with the corpses and foul odor on the street, making Xu Shangqi's desire to vomit stronger and stronger.

Xu Shangqi stroked his chest, constantly using his hands to smooth his breath. He always felt that something was about to surge up. He thought it was because his stomach disease hadn't healed, and he felt a bit nauseous, so he kept swallowing saliva.

During the journey, several people found some weapons, but most of them were cold weapons, because the guns they could find basically had no bullets.

Riley, who had relatively greater strength, took a fire axe, Jarvis, who had an automatic aiming program, took a harpoon gun, and Xu Shangqi took the fruit knife he was most comfortable using in the store.

Finally, they decided to rest in a relatively clean residential house. The owner here seemed to have gone out in advance, and the house hadn't been ravaged by monsters. The beds and daily necessities were all complete, which could be considered a good place for a temporary rest.

But they didn't intend to sleep in separate rooms, but planned to sleep in the living room together. Xu Shangqi threw his body onto the soft sofa and sighed with relief after a long time.

But the more tired he was, the less he could sleep. He could always hear his own heartbeat, "thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump..."

The more Xu Shangqi listened, the more irritable he became. He had to sit up from the sofa, tried hard to take a few deep breaths, and started to circulate his cultivation method again.

During the investigation today, in order to deal with those disgusting scenes, he had recited the Heart-Clearing Technique countless times. When he recited it again, it sounded smooth and fluent.

But just as he opened his mouth to recite the first sentence, Wanda, who was sitting on the opposite sofa and had just untied the cloth on her eyes, suddenly raised her head.

Those eye sockets that only had two black holes stared straight at Xu Shangqi. Xu Shangqi also looked at her, and Wanda said blankly:

"What you recited is different from the daytime..."

Xu Shangqi was stunned.

"I..." Xu Shangqi had just spat out a syllable when he froze there, and then showed an extremely terrified expression.

Because he discovered that what he said wasn't Chinese, or even any language he understood.

At this time, Riley, who was sitting on the side sofa, suddenly turned his head to look at Xu Shangqi. Xu Shangqi also looked at him.

A kind of sadness suddenly appeared in Riley's eyes. He looked at Xu Shangqi with tear-filled eye sockets and said:

"I just heard you speak."

The muscles on Xu Shangqi's face started to tremble, and then this trembling spread to his whole body. The desire to vomit became stronger and stronger.

But when his throat tightened and the sour feeling spread up along the esophagus, what he spat out wasn't food, but a series of ancient and strange languages he had never mastered.

The moment that terrifying gibberish appeared in the room, Riley clutched his ears in pain, fell to the ground, and let out an astonishing scream. Scarlet Witch also started to gasp constantly, as if she were being strangled by something. Xu Shangqi desperately covered his mouth, but his stomach was like being gripped by a giant hand, constantly squeezing out that kind of vague and strange language. Xu Shangqi desperately let his head hit the coffee table, but the pain didn't make him any clearer.

Through the blur of tears, Xu Shangqi saw the last ray of golden sunset light fading through the gap in the curtains, and the night descended.

The screams of Wanda and Riley echoed constantly in the room, and their painful faces fell into Xu Shangqi's eyes.

Those were all characters he had liked the most. He had once had his heart fluctuate and moved to tears countless times because of them on the movie screen.

Thanos hadn't made Spider-Man suffer so much.

The moment this thought appeared in Xu Shangqi's heart, boundless anger burned through his soul.

The string in Xu Shangqi's brain snapped completely. He trembled and pounced on the sofa, touching the fruit knife he had placed in the gap before.

Under the terrified gaze was the mouth that opened tremblingly. The sharp blade reflected the desperate eyes.

Instantly, blood splattered. The nerve reflex brought by the intense pain made the tongue that had been cut off twitch slightly after falling to the ground, like a fish thrown onto the shore.

In the silence where the whispering disappeared, Xu Shangqi, with a mouth full of blood, felt for the first time such a heavy smell of blood lingering between his mouth and nose.

Then he discovered that he didn't hate the taste of blood that much, and even after losing his sense of taste, he could still taste a hint of sweetness from it.

Xu Shangqi lay weakly on the coffee table, but tried hard to raise his head, swallowing the blood that should have been vomited out. Those tears that blurred his vision no longer flowed, allowing him to see the stars in the night sky clearly through the gap in the curtains.

In his panting, Xu Shangqi discovered that what was sweet wasn't the blood, but the taste of victory.

And in the same dark room, the trembling nib of the quill pen wrote this sentence on the black notebook—

"If I write about the apocalypse, I cannot just write about the apocalypse. I must write about the fools who survived by accident, the smart people who calculated everything but lost by one move, the good people who were driven to madness, and the bad people who sacrificed selflessly.

I must write about the heroes who were already great composing songs of courage, and also write about the ordinary people who were as humble as dust, bleeding in despair, yet finding it sweet."

You wouldn't really think that being under Schiller's protection is a good thing, would you?

Look at Batman in

Look at Batman in the distance, family.