Chapter 384: Perception

Jiang Yuan arrived behind the broken wall, half‑crouching, his back pressed against the icy concrete remnants.

The broken stones rasped his spine, painful, but that pain was nothing compared to the torrent raging in his mind.

He lowered his head to stare at the murky eyeball in his palm.

The gray‑green vertical pupil glimmered with a damp, cold light in the night, like the phosphorescence left on a deep‑sea fish's eye after death.

It felt colder than his memory, chilling down to his bone marrow, and the rhythmic pulse waves radiated outward from the eyeball in concentric circles, threading through skin into vessels, making every hair on his right arm stand on end.

He had to see clearly.

Not guessing, not doubting, not making ambiguous inferences from the lingering sensory aftertaste.

He needed to confirm with his own eyes.

Jiang Yuan slipped the Containment Box back into his waist, freed his left hand to brace the edge of the broken wall and steady himself. His right fingers gently closed, lifting the eyeball to a level even with his own right eye.

The distance was shortening.

Three centimeters. Two centimeters. One centimeter.

The oily‑thin membrane on the eyeball's surface was almost touching his eyelashes.

A chilling dread burst from the contact point, not a temperature cold but a deeper, corrosive sensation acting directly on nerve endings. It felt as if someone wielded an ice‑transparent silver needle, slowly stabbing along the optic nerve into the skull cavity.

Jiang Yuan clenched his jaw, his molars grinding out a muffled sound.

His temples throbbed twice. Muscles around his eye socket began to spasm, and his lacrimal gland secreted slowly.

But he did not move away.

His right eye's field underwent a qualitative change amid violent tremors.

The colors were fading.

The world's original black‑gray hue was covered by an indescribable cold‑color filter; every outline became hyper‑sharp to the point of distortion, even the dust particles floating in the air were outlined with crisp edges.

Jiang Yuan aimed this right eye, empowered by Anomalous Power, toward the camp thirty meters away.

The campfire was the first to give itself away.

The dancing flames, under the true‑vision eye, were not the normal orange‑red.

They were green.

A dreadful green, deeper than copper rust and heavier than rotting flesh, and the flames no longer leapt like tongues; they seeped upward from cracks in the ground, like ignited swamp gas rising from putrid mud, green‑glimmering as they licked the surrounding air, each flame tip dripping a viscous, translucent liquid.

A shadow fire.

Jiang Yuan's right‑eye pupil contracted to its limit.

Then he saw the thing beside the fire.

It was not a person.

Six outlines remained, the seated posture remained, even the folds of clothing and the glint of equipment persisted. But the true‑vision eye stripped away every cognitive‑level disguise, laying the underlying truth bare—

A ghastly pallor.

Its whole body was ghastly white, as white as something scooped from a lime pit. No hair, no eyebrows, no eyes, nose, mouth; the face was a smooth, unnaturally polished oval surface, like unfired clay, with only shallow depressions where features should be, no discernible outlines.

The skin's surface was not smooth.

Something moved underneath.

Tiny, maggot‑like writhing flesh buds surged in waves from the subdermal tissue, pushing the ghastly white epidermis into grain‑sized protrusions, rising and falling like bubbles rolling beneath boiling water.

Six faceless Fake Persons sat around the dreadful green shadow fire.

They still mimicked "teammate" behavior. The thing occupying the communications soldier Xiao Li's position kept "scrubbing the antenna", its eyeless face facing the handheld device, ten pallid, semi‑transparent fingers mechanically repeating the wiping motion, joint ranges as precise as factory‑calibrated industrial arms. The faceless head of "Zhao Zheng" seated by the gasoline drum tilted slightly toward "Sun Rui", the skin at its throat trembling rhythmically—it was simulating speech.

And the one squatting closest to Jiang Yuan.

"Lao Zhou".

The "Lao Zhou" who had told him to go back and hug the maiden.

It faced away from Jiang Yuan, staying in a squat, both hands flat on its knees. The dreadful green firelight reflected on its faceless occiput, the subdermal flesh buds writhing especially violently, strands of bluish‑black veins spreading from the base of its neck upward, converging on the crown into a vortex pattern.

At the instant Jiang Yuan's gaze pierced through.

"Lao Zhou's" abdomen split along the midline.

It wasn't the clothing that tore. The belly itself split, from the lower edge of the rib cage to the upper edge of the pelvis, a neat seam opening along the midline like a silent zipper pulling apart. Inside the split there were no organs, no blood, only a dense forest of inward‑curving, fine needle‑like teeth, each about the thickness of a sewing needle, layered in at least seven or eight concentric circles, packed so tightly it made one's scalp feel like it would explode.

A mouse.

It had scurried out from an unknown corner, gray and still alive, hopping erratically around the shadow fire in search of food.

"Lao Zhou's" unbelievably gaping abdomen suddenly contracted, a tentacle snatching the mouse off the ground; in a fraction of a second the mouse didn't even have time to squeak before the rotating, interlaced needle‑teeth pulled it in.

Jiang Yuan heard a chewing sound.

A moist, crisp crack of cartilage being crushed.

That faceless visage, facing forward, its ghastly white curve lacking a mouth, nevertheless emitted Lao Zhou's voice with perfect accuracy, continuing to converse with the other "people".

The intonation, breath, even the slight nasal resonance on the rising tail note were identical.

Jiang Yuan's stomach churned.

He withdrew his right hand from his face, the true‑vision eye was swiftly shoved back into the Containment Box, the click of the latch sealing was muffled by his palm, releasing only a faint thud.

Normal vision returned. The campfire turned back to a warm orange, the "teammates" in the camp continued their activities, chatting and laughing, everything as usual.

But Jiang Yuan knew what lay beneath.

Lao Zhou…

Was it never existent, or had it been replaced?

What about the memories of fighting side by side? The warning in the third‑layer Weird Domain Rules zone? The four‑kilometer weighted run? The shockwave when the first‑layer armor was blown apart?

Did it really happen, or was it a counterfeit planted in his mind?

He could no longer tell.

That is the part that drives one mad.

Jiang Yuan's left hand clenched into a fist, his nail driven into the flesh, four white marks pinched out on his palm. Pain rose from the palm upward, mixing with the exploding anger and grief in his chest, turning into a lump of red‑hot iron that blocked his throat.

He made no sound.

From Saint John Hospital to the Chicago Spider-like humanoid nest, from the Blood Moon Game to the top of the TV Tower facing Sai Men head‑on—those experiences of walking a tightrope on a knife's edge now took over his entire nervous system, pressing all surging emotions beneath the surface, leaving only a pair of eyes quiet to the point of terror.

He slipped his right hand into the Card Bag at his waist.

The instant his fingertip touched the card surface, a cold metallic glint flashed between his fingers, and four specially made Poker Cards were silently twisted out, held between his fingers with the edges outward.

The shadow beneath his feet began to shift.

Not the slow, receding tide‑like contraction before, but a boil—dense bubble‑like protrusions rose along the shadow's edge, blurred faces surged up from the dark plane then sank back down; the Shadow Legion sensed its master's killing intent and was awakening from dormancy.

The Spinal Sword on his back quivered slightly, emitting an extremely low hum that only Jiang Yuan could hear.

Jiang Yuan silently adjusted his breathing, using the Shadow Ghost's power to drop his heart rate below sixty.

Six targets.

All within a thirty‑meter radius.

The surrounding open ground offered no cover, ideal for deploying the Shadow Legion. First, cut the positional links between them with Flying Cards, then have Shadow Soldiers lock on from six directions simultaneously, and let the Spinal Sword reap the Core—he ran the whole plan through his mind twice, each timing point precise to half a second.

He slowly pushed half a body length out from behind the broken wall.

The Poker Cards adjusted their angle between his fingers.

The vanguard Shadow Soldiers within the shadow had already solidified half a form; the outline of Rain Night Butcher's Boning Knife flickered faintly in the darkness.

Ready.

Three. Two.

The corner of his eye caught a detail.

In the camp, the "deputy captain" chewing a mouse paused.

It wasn't a natural pause, nor the stillness after finishing.

It was a jam.

Like a looping video suddenly cut off from power, the chewing muscles froze at an utterly unreasonable intermediate position, and the half‑gaping abdominal wound solidified in a state neither open nor closed.

Then.

Six Fake Persons' heads began to turn at the same time.

Not the way a normal person turns their head. The base stayed still while the heads rotated in place—the cervical vertebrae under the skin emitted a series of fine, winding‑spring‑like "click" sounds, faces turning from front to side, side to back, back continuing downward—

One hundred and eighty degrees.

A full one hundred and eighty degrees.

Six pallid, featureless faces, having turned from the front of their bodies to the back, all brushed toward Jiang Yuan's direction.

They had no eyes.

Yet Jiang Yuan was "seen".

The feeling cannot be described in any language—like standing in an empty room and suddenly realizing hundreds of pinhole cameras on the ceiling are aimed at you; you can't see the lenses, but you feel the gaze behind them, a sticky, physical stare pressing on your skin, even the hair pores shrinking inward.

A faint, rotting sweet scent drifted through the air.

The nearest "deputy captain" to him, its face smooth as unfired porcelain, split a crack from the left ear root to the right ear root.

One centimeter. Three centimeters. Five centimeters.

The fissure widened, revealing not teeth but concentric layers of inverted fangs, each vibrating at a different frequency.

The crack twisted into an arc.

A smile.

Then it "smiled" aloud.

The sound surged from six directions at once, not any frequency a human vocal cord can produce, but a composite wave vibrating from ultra‑high to ultra‑low frequencies, like the shrill screech of metal bent to its limit overlaid with the deep, resonant rumble from a beast's throat, both extremes flooding Jiang Yuan's ear canals—

The glass shards of the entire abandoned gas station shattered simultaneously.