Chapter 42 – His Brain Kicks In

“I-I came with my buddy. After we got inside, I kind of had to piss, so I went to the bathroom first. When I was done and about to head out, I heard him arguing with someone. Then he suddenly screamed, and shouted something about… a monster, or something like that. I’ve never heard anyone scream like that before. It sounded… it sounded horrible! I didn’t dare go out. Then I heard someone coming toward the bathroom, so I hurried and climbed out the window and ran. When I turned back, I saw a monster’s face. It looked like a person’s, but its mouth was open, and a long black tongue was coming out of it…” Gouzi scratched at his bald head, his eyes full of terror, as if he still hadn’t completely recovered from the shock.

Su Lifeng more or less understood. This man’s cowardice had saved his life.

“I ran out, ran for a while, and somehow I ended up coming back. My buddy Zhang Xiong… I kept thinking about his scream. He did call for help, but at the time I had no idea what was going on. I was staring at the door, but I just didn’t have the guts to open it. This place is seriously cursed. If we’d known, we never should’ve gone in…” Gouzi sat back, still looking utterly lost. Then he suddenly lifted his eyes and stared straight at Su Lifeng. “I didn’t have a choice, right? If I’d gone out then, I would’ve just died too. Zhang Xiong would understand me. Little brother, don’t you think so?”

From the way Gouzi’s words tumbled out incoherently, Su Lifeng could tell he had been tortured by guilt and fear until he could no longer keep it in. No matter who was in front of him, he would have been desperate to say all of this. In truth, it was a rather pathetic way of venting.

Su Lifeng did not answer him. He glanced inside the perimeter wall, then asked in return, “Do you want to avenge Zhang Xiong?”

Gouzi froze for a second, then nodded. “Of course I do, but what can I do? I don’t know if that thing really was a monster or not, and even if it wasn’t, I don’t want to face it again.”

“I have a way,” Su Lifeng said. Then he suddenly remembered something else. “Did you call the police?”

“N-no…” Gouzi answered.

“Why not?”

“Zhang Xiong had a dagger on him, and I… I had one too. He came here looking to cause trouble for someone, and both of us have records. They’ve been cracking down hard lately, so I was afraid…” Gouzi stammered. Then he secretly glanced at Su Lifeng. Now that his own safety was involved, his reason slowly began to return, and only then did he feel that he might have said a little too much to this young man. But when he looked more closely, the young man did have a refined-looking face. It was just that he was covered in blood, his clothes torn and ragged, as if he had only escaped after enduring all kinds of torment.

He said he had a way to get revenge. Did he mean calling the police?

It’s fine. If he calls the cops, I’ll teach him a lesson! Gouzi felt a bit of his nerve return. At the very least, when facing someone like Su Lifeng, he did not feel afraid.

But what Su Lifeng said next made Gouzi start to doubt his own judgment.

“So, you might not know how to kill someone, but you can definitely set a fire, right?” Su Lifeng asked.

“Huh?”

Gouzi almost thought he had misheard. But looking at the boy’s perfectly calm expression, it didn’t seem like he had! Besides, just what did this kid think thugs with criminal records were? Professional killers and arsonists? He had only followed a bunch of buddies around, making noise and putting on airs, helping people watch their turf. At most, he’d done a bit of petty theft! He hadn’t even been in many group fights!

Su Lifeng, however, had no time to listen to him mutter. He walked straight to the unlicensed car parked by the roadside, first turned it around so that it faced the perimeter wall, then took a bottle of gasoline from the back seat and poured it all over the car.

He had specifically asked that bodyguard to prepare it, but he had not said what it was for. Presumably, neither that bodyguard nor Jiang Yushi could ever have imagined that the car he wanted was actually meant to be burned.

Long before he came here, Su Lifeng had already made up his mind: he was not going to let this Nest continue to exist.

“Did you get all that?” Su Lifeng tossed the empty bottle onto the seat, then took out the clean clothes he had prepared and changed into them. He threw his old clothes in after it, then finally turned to Gouzi, who was staring at him with his jaw slack.

Gouzi swallowed and nodded mechanically. Then he asked, “Got a wrench and a lighter?”

A few seconds later, as Su Lifeng and Gouzi retreated onto the road, the burning, plateless car had already become a giant fireball. With a loud boom, it crashed through the wall.

“Now we don’t have to call the police ourselves,” Su Lifeng said.

If the police arrived quickly enough, they would find the corpses hidden in the grass.

Though as far as Su Lifeng was concerned, the existence of the Xenospecies had probably already drawn the attention of state forces long ago. His warning was likely completely unnecessary. But that Wisdom Species had first sent Li Yi to ambush Jiang Yushi, then treated him as prey. Even if he couldn’t beat her right now, causing her a bit of trouble could count as collecting a little interest in advance.

“Ren Xiaoying…” Su Lifeng repeated her name, then looked into the raging firelight with a cold smile. “Who’s the prey and who’s the hunter is still up in the air.”

Then he turned and looked at Gouzi, who was still standing there in a daze. “What are you spacing out for? Run.”

“Oh… Oh, right!”

The two of them crossed the road and rushed straight into the greenbelt on the opposite side.

Gouzi kept staring at Su Lifeng in disbelief. Only now did he realize that although the guy looked seriously injured, he was actually running faster than him. And he wasn’t even breathing hard.

He hesitated for quite a while. Finally, when the two of them stopped, he couldn’t hold back anymore and asked, “Bro, what line are you in?”

Su Lifeng glanced at him with a frown, then waved him off. “You set the fire. We never met tonight. That’s that.”

Seeing Su Lifeng turn to leave the moment he finished speaking, Gouzi hurried after him again. “Bro, my real name’s Gou Jun, nickname Gouzi. I usually operate around this district. Bro, I just want to ask you something. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that thing was a monster. No person could grow like that, right? If it was human, then Zhang Xiong’s usually a tough bastard. There’s no way he’d make a sound that scared. And there have to be quite a few monsters like that, right? So many people have died lately. Does it have anything to do with them?”

At first, he had thought Su Lifeng had barely managed to escape. But now he felt that Su Lifeng had to know a lot more about what was going on. Otherwise, after running into something like that, Gouzi had nearly been scared unconscious, so how was this kid still so calm? And there was one other, most important point… When Su Lifeng had changed clothes, Gouzi had snuck a glance. He had seen that although Su Lifeng was covered in blood, there weren’t many wounds on his body that could have caused that much bleeding. Which meant that blood wasn’t all his.

This guy was the real ruthless one! More ruthless than Zhang Xiong, maybe even more ruthless than that big brother he followed who had killed someone before!

Su Lifeng had originally only wanted to shake him off as quickly as possible, but when he heard that, he stopped. “A lot of people have died? Where?”

Looked like Gouzi had a sharp side after all. His brain had come back online pretty quickly.

“I heard at the police station…”

“I mean when they died. Where were their bodies found?” Su Lifeng cut him off and asked.

“This is kind of scary to say, but it was near the place I watch over. More than ten people have died there already…” Gouzi said, cold sweat running down his face. As he spoke, he felt a chill creep over his entire body… If those monsters were wandering right around him, then where in this city was actually safe?

But then he thought of another shocking possibility right in front of him. “Bro, why are you asking that…?”