Chapter 41 – You Look Delicious

Clang!

The entire door was smashed to pieces in an instant, and the Shadowy Figure entities pouring in finally revealed their true forms beneath the night outside the window.

They were countless threadlike strands, black tinged with red. Every strand of Black Thread seemed to possess a will of its own as it writhed and swayed. They swept over the two Xenospecies corpses. The eyes of the F-class male doctor Xenospecies lying faceup had already begun to rot, and the several blue pupils inside soon seemed to melt, their edges gradually blurring…

“So fast…” Su Lifeng had only just flipped out the window. From the moment the Black Thread entered through the door, it had locked onto him and immediately surged toward him.

The dense tapping sounds came from the strands of Black Thread colliding with one another, but right now they sounded like a death knell.

The instant the first wave of Black Thread touched his body, Su Lifeng let go and dropped. The moment he fell to the second-floor corridor, he used one of his Bone Wings, the one that was still relatively intact, to pin himself to the wall.

As he hurled himself into the corridor, the Black Thread came coiling down after him.

A chill ran down Su Lifeng’s back. Almost without looking, he leaped up and charged forward.

Only then did he realize that from that brief touch alone, countless red dots had appeared all over his body, each of them slightly sunken in. It wasn’t hard to imagine that if he had moved even a second or two later, he would already have been sucked dry into a desiccated corpse. But after absorbing an F-class Xenospecies, Su Lifeng’s body was constantly “burning,” and his self-healing speed had increased dramatically. The flesh and blood that had been drained away was quickly replenished, and the pain in his shoulder and at the base of his other Bone Wings also began to ease.

Even so, he was still badly injured. If wounds like these had been on an ordinary person, that person would have already lost most of their ability to move.

“Wisdom Species…” Su Lifeng knew what those strands of Black Thread were. Drawing the Wisdom Species out this way had been his plan from the start. What he had not expected was that the F-class Xenospecies would use that fact against him. If they had successfully trapped him in a pincer attack just now, Su Lifeng would have been dead all the same.

“I got too full of myself. But it was worth it.” Su Lifeng felt his actions tonight had been a little too rushed, but the gains were just as obvious. In terms of evolutionary level, this F-class Soldier was even a little higher than Li Yi. Although it had not yet reached the next level, it was clear that within this Nest, it counted as something like a “captain.” After absorbing it, Su Lifeng could feel his injured Bone Wings starting to heat up as well. Evolution was only a matter of time.

At the same time, he had also managed to get a rough measure of this Wisdom Species’s strength… Unlike the Wisdom Species on the island, this one was already a seasoned hand that had absorbed large numbers of animals from the mountain. Just from the Xenospecies in its Nest and the Black Thread it released, it was obvious that getting rid of it would be anything but easy.

After running more than ten meters, Su Lifeng glanced back and found that the Black Thread had vanished. But up ahead, Xenospecies began appearing one after another.

Su Lifeng was not naive enough to think that the Wisdom Species would not pursue him again. To avoid being boxed in from both front and rear, he absolutely could not allow himself to be held up.

“Two in front. I have one second to deal with them, and then the third one will pounce…” In that critical moment, Su Lifeng instead became calm. As he rapidly calculated in his mind, he charged straight ahead without the slightest pause.

Whoosh! His Bone Wings pierced one of them. Without even looking, Su Lifeng spun and drove the scalpel into the heart of another Nurse Xenospecies.

Yet before that Xenospecies died, it seized his wrist, slowing him for a moment as he pulled the knife free.

Pfft!

The third Xenospecies’s fingers stabbed into the arm Su Lifeng had raised to protect his vitals. In that brief instant, Su Lifeng’s knife also plunged into her body.

When he yanked her hand out, Su Lifeng realized her fingernails had become like hooked claws. A burning pain immediately spread from the wound.

He took the chance to glance downstairs. Sure enough, large numbers of Xenospecies were emerging below. After discovering that he had not jumped straight to the ground, these Xenospecies came out from their hiding places.

“Cunning…” In his mind, Su Lifeng added one more definition to that Wisdom Species.

“You’re Su Lifeng, right?”

A woman’s voice suddenly sounded behind him. Su Lifeng’s scalp prickled. He grabbed the Xenospecies corpse in front of him-the one whose fingernails had changed, and hurled it behind him, then dove forward before turning to look.

Pfft, pfft, pfft…

Blood mist burst outward. In an instant, the Xenospecies corpse was pierced through by countless strands of Black Thread and reduced to chunks of flesh scattered across the floor.

When the Black Thread parted to either side, a girl in a hospital gown appeared at the far end.

It was the one who had crawled out of the car after the crash… the Wisdom Species.

“We’ve met before,” the girl said, her expression calm, as if she hadn’t seen what had just happened at all. “I spent several days familiarizing myself with the way humans speak and their habits… Allow me to introduce myself. I am… this shell of mine is called Ren Xiaoying. Unmarried. A virgin. Before the transformation, she had just agreed to become a human’s girlfriend. You are the second Mutant I have seen.”

After saying that, she waited a moment, then tilted her head and looked at Su Lifeng, as though expecting something from him.

Although the atmosphere was extremely tense, the corner of Su Lifeng’s mouth still twitched.

This Wisdom Species couldn’t possibly be expecting him to give such a… comprehensive self-introduction too, could she?

And she said second… Did that mean she had seen another Mutant?

“What happened to the first Mutant?” Su Lifeng asked.

“A forest armed police officer. He had just absorbed a Soldier Type, and then I absorbed him. But you’re different from him. You absorbed an Wisdom Species, and many Soldier Type,” Ren Xiaoying answered cooperatively.

“What level are you? Your evolution level,” Su Lifeng asked again.

A faint smile appeared on Ren Xiaoying’s face. “E-rank…”

Before she could finish speaking, she saw Su Lifeng suddenly turn and charge into the stairwell.

His response was so decisive that Ren Xiaoying blinked… She remembered that the Mutant she had absorbed earlier hadn’t reacted like this. Although he knew there was a huge gap between them, he had trusted the weapon in his hand, the thing called a gun.

But he had forgotten one thing: a weapon was only useful if it could hit its target.

“But the taste of a Mutant is delicious.” Ren Xiaoying licked her lips. Her figure blurred, and the Black Thread wrapped around her from every direction, like a mass of Black Mist, as it chased after him.

“Huff, huff…” Su Lifeng panted violently. His running speed had already reached his current limit. He used his Bone Wings to grab the ceiling and vaulted over the heads of a group of Xenospecies, then landed on the floor with a bang.

On the way, he saw the tattooed man’s corpse. He was sitting against the wall, eyes wide open, with only a layer of skin left on his body.

Su Lifeng didn’t stop. He glanced left and right, crossed the lobby, and rushed toward another corridor.

The great mass of Black Mist soon flowed down the stairs and entered the first floor. By then, Su Lifeng had already climbed out through the window of one of the departments and was sprinting toward the perimeter wall without looking back. Run. Run as hard as he could. That was the only thought left in his mind…

The Black Mist stopped two meters after chasing him out the window. Then it vanished, revealing Ren Xiaoying within.

She watched Su Lifeng’s retreating back, her pupils slowly contracting until they finally became a strange vertical slit.

“Su Lifeng…” she murmured with great interest.

Su Lifeng sprinted all the way out of the hospital. After he vaulted over the wall, his Bone Wings also retracted back into his body.

Seeing the cars occasionally speeding past on the street and the traffic lights giving off a warm yellow glow, Su Lifeng felt for the first time as if he were standing between two worlds.

Good. She hadn’t followed him out…

But just then, his heart suddenly lurched. He whipped his head around and barked, “Who’s there?!”

A clump of grass at the base of the wall shifted. Then a deathly pale figure crawled out and asked in a drifting voice, “My name’s Gouzi… Bro, did you just escape from that hospital too? Did you see my brother Zhang Xiong?”

Su Lifeng immediately let out a breath of relief. As long as this man hadn’t seen what he’d done, or what he had looked like just now, that was enough.

But how had this guy gotten out alive?