Chapter 424: Sudden Situation

Qian Cheng's face had nothing on it.

It wasn't stripped off. It was erased from within—the skin remained, but where the features should be was a smooth, reflective flesh-colored plane, with no pores.

A scream burst from the crowd, piercing and sharp, able to twist people's nerves into rope.

But no one had time to let out a second cry.

Qian Cheng's body began to swell.

Not the slow swelling of edema, but like an inflatable toy hooked to an industrial air pump—his uniform strained to bursting at the seams in three seconds, fabric fibers snapping with a rapid crack like firecrackers. His limbs stretched outward at angles that defied human anatomy, his fingers swelling into translucent flesh-colored balloons, the blood vessels beneath his skin expanding to visible.

"Everyone lie down—"

Fang Ming's mouth had just opened halfway.

Qian Cheng exploded.

No fire. Only flesh.

Organs, bones, and blood inside his body were atomized into a pink water mist under extreme pressure, centered on where Qian Cheng stood, spraying uniformly in all directions. The spray radius was about six meters. The three students within two meters of him were soaked from head to toe.

Immediately after, space went wrong.

Cracks in the ground began to bend. Not the bending of natural fracture, but a geometric bending—straight lines became arcs, right angles became acute angles, the outline of the distant broken building twisted, as if an invisible hand had gripped its corner and wrenched it in an impossible direction.

Fang Ming's waist-mounted TR-07 Detector lit up.

Not a yellow light. Not a red light.

All indicator lights lit up at once, emitting an electronic shriek that pierced the bone membrane, then the instrument's casing bulged, the burnt smell from the fried circuit board not yet reaching the nose—

Boom—

The detector exploded.

The trajectory of the metal fragments was also bent.

A fragment of circuit board the size of a nail flew along an arc that defied inertia, precisely slicing into Fang Ming's left eye.

"Ah—!"

Fang Ming covered his eyes, fresh blood spurting from between his fingers, flowing down the back of his hand to his forearm. His right hand was still feeling for the communicator at his waist, thumb desperately pressing the emergency channel transmit key.

"Headquarters! B-09 isolated ruin Weird Domain revived! Repeat! Weird Domain revived! Request—"

The communicator had no electric sound.

No static.

Nothing at all.

Fang Ming tilted his head back.

His remaining right eye saw the sky.

The sky, which just minutes ago still showed a faint milky afterimage of the domain membrane, had vanished. In its place was an eye.

The entire sky had become an eye.

Massive blood-red eyelids, covering the upper limit of the field of view, closed, their surface thick with capillaries as large as tree trunks, dark-red fluid slowly flowing within them. The edges of the eyelids bore uneven lashes, each as thick as an electric pole, their shadows falling on the ruins and dyeing everything dark red.

Sealed shut.

The canopy above, the boundaries on all sides, the ground beneath—every escape route closed at the same moment.

The spatial channel relied upon by quantum communication must maintain topological continuity with real external space. This Weird Domain, at the moment it awoke, cleanly excised itself from reality.

They had been swallowed into the belly of something.

Fang Ming's lips twitched twice, blood from his left eye socket flowing to the corner of his mouth, mixing with the shards of his broken teeth.

"Damn it."

He only managed to spit out those two words.

Crimson fog surged from the north side of the Square. At its leading edge, a silhouette was slowly forming.

First came the feet.

Not a pair of feet. Many feet—male, female, children's—human lower limbs severed at various points twisted together by some force, toes and heels interlocking to form an irregular base about two meters in diameter.

Then came the torso.

Arms. Thighs. Ribs. Spine. Innumerable human limbs, stacked, nested, and welded in ways that defy anatomical common sense, finally assembled into a roughly four-meter-tall humanoid entity. It had no skin; exposed muscle fibers and fascia gleamed with a wet sheen in the red mist.

Its head was also assembled. Three different skulls were split lengthwise and sewn back together into one, six ears distributed across the irregular cranium surface, with no features on it.

A hollow.

A hollow identical to Qian Cheng's earlier.

Its right hand—if the thing made of seven forearms twisted together could be called a hand—dragged a rusted executioner's blade. The Giant Saw Blade was large, its rust stains dark brown, whether from oxidized iron or dried blood unknown. A notch in the blade held half a molar.

Two assistant teachers rushed forward.

The female agent on the left shoved both hands forward, a dozen silver-white threads shooting from her fingertips to wrap around the entity's right arm. The male agent on the right opened his palm, his palm temperature spiking, the air scorched to a smell of burning.

Three meters.

When they were still three meters from the entity, both stopped at the same time.

It wasn't them stopping.

Their bodies simply shattered.

No blade flash, no shockwave. The female agent's body split open from the midline of the chest, as if cut by an invisible mirror—left and right halves separating at an extremely slow speed, the exposed cross-section clean enough to see every tissue layer. The heart still beat, the bisected ventricles on each side making a few final ineffective contractions.

The male agent had it worse. He wasn't sliced; he was "shaved." Layer by layer, from outside in—skin, fat, muscle, bone—peeled off according to anatomical strata. The process took about one and a half seconds, but to everyone present it felt infinitely stretched.

Two blood mists dispersed.

Warm liquid splashed onto the faces of several students in the front row.

A female student lowered her gaze to her reddened hand‑back, then began to scream. That sound was no longer human—a breathy shriek from vocal cords torn by fear, thin and piercing, like a nail scraping a blackboard.

Fang Ming tore a strip of cloth from his coat, bound it around his bleeding left eye, and shoved the nearest student backward.

"Run! Run down the south alley! Everyone, run!"

He turned around, facing the still slowly approaching assembled dismembered limb body.

Fang Ming's ability is defensive—he can overdraft his life force to deploy a shield around his body, with duration depending on his remaining lifespan. The data on the Federation medical examination report says he can still live twenty-three years.

He put everything into it.

A milky-white shield burst from his body surface, covering a fan-shaped area about fifteen meters behind him. His hair turned from gray to pure white within three seconds, age spots speckled his skin, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth sagged.

His forty-one-year-old face instantly aged to over seventy.

"Quick...... run......" his voice had become the hoarse, indistinct rasp of an old man.

That entity stopped.

The hollow skull tilted slightly. It had no eyes, but everyone could feel——it was "looking" at Fang Ming.

Then it lifted the right hand, twisted from dismembered limbs, that had been dragging on the ground.

The index finger extended.

It pointed.

Fang Ming's shield split open from the middle.

——The front half of the shield remained intact, while the back half, together with Fang Ming's left side of his body, vanished from this space together.

Deleted.

Along with the shield, his left arm, left ribs, left lung lobe, spleen, left kidney, and half of his pelvis were also deleted.

Fang Ming lowered his head and glanced at his remaining half-body on the right side. The organs on the cross-section were neatly exposed to the air; only the right atrium and right ventricle of his heart remained, still beating meaninglessly.

His half-body toppled forward, hitting the gravel ground with a soft thud.

Thirty-two students. Three guard teachers.

From the Weird Domain's recovery to the last teacher's death.

Thirty-seven seconds.

The crowd completely collapsed. Screams, wails, and the chaos of people shoving and trampling each other intertwined into a boiling porridge. No one knew which way to run; scarlet thick fog filled all directions, and above hung that perpetually closed blood-red giant eye.

Li Xiang sat down on the ground, still clutching a bag of spicy strips, his whole body trembling like a sieve, his mouth opening and closing, unable to make any sound from his throat.

Chen Yao was knocked down by the crowd pushing and shoving. Her knee struck the broken glass, her uniform pant leg was slit open, and beads of blood seeped out.

The crushed distress signaler gave no response.

The inside and outside spaces seemed to be isolated.

At the moment she fell, in the shadow of an abandoned building on the east side of the Square, a black-clad figure emerged from the darkness. His hands traced a complex trajectory in the air——a spatial rift tore open a half-meter-long gap beside Chen Yao, and white light leaked from the rift.

That was a high-ranking Death Soldier of Eden Garden. His Weird ability is spatial ripping; in emergencies he can forcibly open a channel to teleport the protected target away.

But the rift lasted only 0.4 seconds.

The Weird Domain's Rules were like an invisible hand, directly pinching that rift shut.

The black-clad person's body stiffened violently, his mouth opened, and a large mouthful of blood spurted from his throat, splattering the stone wall before him. Red fissures appeared densely on the surface of his eyeballs—internal injuries caused by his spatial ability being forcibly rebounded.

He tried again.

The rift didn't even have time to take shape.

The black-clad person's knees gave way, and he knelt on the pile of broken bricks. He lowered his head to watch his palm cav ing inward——the Weird Domain's Rules were consuming his spatial ability itself. Using it once more would fold his body into a point.

He couldn't withdraw.

Chen Yao saw the image of the black-clad person kneeling down.

Fear finally appeared in the depths of her eyes.

The entity composed of countless dismembered limbs rotated its hollow skull in the thick fog.

The six ears sewn onto the skull's surface twitched simultaneously, as if catching a specific frequency.

Its "gaze" swept through the fleeing crowd, through the wailing students, through the black-clad Death Soldier fallen on the ground—

It locked onto Chen Yao.

The rusted beheading Giant Saw Blade was dragged up from the ground. Rust flakes fell off in a patter, and dark-red liquid oozed from the remaining notches on the blade.

The blade was raised above the head.

Chen Yao sat between the shattered glass and Fang Ming's pool of blood, head tilted back.

The shadow of the Giant Saw Blade enveloped her entirely.