Chapter 1037: Bohemia's Discovery
"Oh, really," Lin Sanjiu sighed, gently wiping Puppeteer's oddly peaceful cheek with a damp towel. As she pondered, she reached up and grabbed a pair of scissors from the top of the cabinet. As the blade opened, it quietly glinted in the dark.
"Since it's safe... then Bohemia should be fine, right?"
Bohemia in the distance didn't share this sentiment.
The night breeze, mixed with the stench of corpses, blew in gusts, lifting her long hair, skirt, and sleeves, making them flap loosely in the wind. The night sky, washed by the torrential rain, was beautifully dark. The deep purple sky lit up with the dazzling starlight of the cosmos, complemented by the warm orange glow of streetlights, creating layers of shades of purple. In this watercolor-like night, even the drops of black blood falling into the gasoline from the bodies could be clearly seen.
Beyond the scattered bodies on the ground, her gaze finally settled on the overturned open truck bed.
Just a moment ago, it seemed like a mountain of corpses... but now, as the truck bed opened, only a few bodies rolled out. Most of them had melted like wax, gradually losing their shape, forming clumps in the truck bed...
In just half a minute, several slender flesh-colored cylinders emerged from this pile of wax-like bodies. She could even sense a feeling of their pure joy and pleasure as they continuously grew taller and longer.
Oh, oh, oh, the world outside is so sweet
We've come out, we've all come out
The earth, soaked so moistly, feels so comfortable, so lovely
"Huh?" Bohemia rubbed her ear vigorously, looking a bit confused.
She seemed to hear an uncomfortably eerie sound—no, that's not right, there wasn't actually a sound at all. How was she hearing it?
These fleshy columns don't have eyes, so they wouldn't be able to see her, right? It's been quite a while, and they haven't moved... On further inspection, they seem to have grown out of the corpses and can't change their positions.
Bohemia, who had been gazing upward with her head raised, couldn't help but take a silent step backward. The surfaces of these columns seemed to be filled with a flesh-like texture and elasticity. When the night breeze blew, they trembled, as if their entire bodies were swaying along with it, making it impossible to tell whether they had noticed her.
'Hurry up and leave, these things probably don't move—'
Just as she was contemplating this, she suddenly felt something in her heart and looked down.
From the darkness beneath her feet, a human face had silently risen, steadily approaching her. The cheek on that face was swollen and distorted, as if the skin was about to burst from the enormous smile on its face. The brow bone, the corners of the eyes, and the lips were stretched and cracked, but it continued to grow upwards, with an irregular mouth filled with shadowy masses of flesh.
Bohemia couldn't help involuntarily gulping, and immediately lept backward. When she landed and looked back, she realized that it was the face of a corpse lying at her feet.
However, that human face had long since separated from its body. The body still lay on the ground, but in the middle, there were several tens of centimeters of these ever-growing slender flesh columns sprouting, inserted directly into the person's head and supporting it as it extended upwards. It was like an uncontrollable, ever-lengthening neck.
"What are you?!" she angrily shouted, taking a few steps back and swinging her hand, casting a shadow. Just as the wind blew and the flesh column supporting the face swayed, a hoarse voice came from a nearby truck, "Stop!"
Bohemia suddenly pulled back her hand, involuntarily retracting her scarf.
"Who's there?"
As she looked in the direction of the sound, a hoarse cough, as if choked with blood, came from the broken window of the overturned truck. A blood-stained arm extended from the driver's seat, and slowly, a face covered in blood emerged, gradually becoming visible amidst the rustling sounds.
"D-Don't hit it..." In the broken window of the driver's cabin, Old Da's voice trembled. His face was covered in blood, making it difficult to discern his features. "If you injure it... it will a-attract..."
Before he could finish his sentence, he began to cough violently.
'Attract what?'
Bohemia's heart tightened as she stared at the thin flesh column rising from the skull of the corpse, slowly growing towards the sky. She circled around it, keeping her distance, and quickly approached the overturned truck on the ground. "Do you know what that thing is?"
With a section of his scalp torn open, revealing a mess of blood and flesh on top of his head, Old Da seemed to be enduring excruciating pain, unable to speak coherently. He just managed to let out a low "uh."
"Then, tell me! What good does 'uh' do?"
Old Da looked as though he was clinging to life by just a thread, ready to pass out at any moment. He continued to bargain in fits and starts: "You... you save me... I don't want to die here..."
"But in your current state, I don't want to touch you."
His round belly was almost choking him with his own blood. He coughed several times before saying softly, "If... if you... save me! I'll tell you... e-everything I know..."
They had originally split up to gather information, and Bohemia didn't want to return empty-handed. She cast a glance at the fleshy columns happily growing from the corpses behind her. Suppressing the surge of anger rising in her heart, she eventually gritted her teeth and used her sleeve to grab Old Da to drag him out of the car window.
"Be gentle, my leg bone is broken!" He suddenly let out a howl of pain.
The sound echoed through the night sky, causing Bohemia to quickly turn her head.
It wasn't the wind, and she hadn't mistaken it. When he howled in pain, several of the thickest flesh columns slightly inclined their "heads" in her direction.
Just as she could hear those things, they could also "hear" human voices.
"Shut up!" Bohemia scolded in a low voice, but Old Da continued to scream in pain, completely ignoring her—his broken leg was pinned under the collapsed car, and if she pulled him forcefully, he would scream in agony.
She let go and stood up.
"Eh, what are you doing? Where are you going..."
His weak voice was cut off by a wad of cloth.
Behind her were those strange things of unknown origin, and she was essentially putting her life on the line here. However, she couldn't run away and had to force herself to stay at the scene, listening to this ordinary, ugly, and useless man's chatter—why?
Bohemia felt irritated and afraid at the same time. She had no patience left for Old Da at this moment. Her previous fierceness resurfaced. She quickly circled to the other side of the truck, kicked the glass forcefully, leaned in, and with a swift motion, she chopped off both of his legs.
Liquid sprayed out from the severed legs, instantly drenching the dark and deformed cabin, splashing onto Bohemia's face. She left the legs in their original place, shrouded in the shadow of the vehicle, looking hazy and almost nothing like a part of a person.
Holding the half-unconscious man, she hurriedly retreated to the roadside and snapped her fingers. A faint blue flame immediately ignited from the severed leg wounds—this way, all the blood vessels, nerves, and muscles in the body would be burned into a blackened mass, preventing him from dying of blood loss.
"Speak up," she commanded, waking him up again. Bohemia's voice was filled with hostility. "Otherwise, I'll kill you and throw you to those flesh columns."
Old Da, who had lost most of his life, finally weakly began to speak.
"I'm not from this country," he gasped, his round belly heaving up and down violently. "The garbage recycling company I belong to was secretly sent here by our country, disguised as citizens... The purpose is to gather as many corpses as possible, whether from natural or accidental deaths..."
'No wonder there are more elderly corpses.'
"Why?"
In the span of just these two sentences, countless new flesh columns sprouted from the wax-like clumps of flesh in front of her. The slender flesh columns crowded together, swaying gently in the night breeze.
"These things... grow out of the soil where corpses are buried. When there is no soil, only a few specific types can grow directly from the corpses... What we want is those."
Bohemia wiped her face absentmindedly and was about to ask "why" again when suddenly, she stared at her own hand in amazement. Shouldn't the liquid that had splashed on her face be the blood that had spurted out when the leg was severed?
What is this transparent greenish liquid?
She glanced at the top of Old Da's head and couldn't help but gulp. She quickly added another layer of protection for herself, before reaching out her hand towards him.
Her slightly trembling fingers smoothly penetrated the bloody mess on Old Da's scalp. Her fingertips pushed aside the scalp, going deeper and deeper, until the entire length of her fingers were inside—
Old Da, who had been gasping for breath, gradually quieted down, and his white eyeballs turned toward her.
"You... you've found out," he hoarsely said. "I knew it was inevitable..."
With a snapping sound, Bohemia tore off his scalp.
There was no skull, no brain, nothing humans should have. Where there should have been facial features rising and falling, there were only some hard small objects propping up the surface, forming the same facial bone structure as a normal person from the outside—the peeled-off skin sagged softly, but Old Da's face was still talking.
"Don't look at me like that, I really am a human."
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