Chapter 44

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Chapter 44: Star Death Reality Show (XXVII)

{cw: vomiting, gore}

He Yi said these things, and Qi Leren thought about them.

It was just like how from time to time, players would complain that a game was too full of coincidences. These contradictory coincidences promoted the development of the story, and some plot settings could even be said to be unreasonable—for example, that the research institute’s power system that had been collecting dust underground for many years could be restarted.

But the player would still accept such a setting, “because this is a story.” The players convinced themselves. No one would complain that being shot in a shooter game was only a health deduction, not continuous blood loss or loss of mobility until death, because the setting was the setting whether the player accepted it or not.

Qi Leren was the same. He wouldn’t ask why a horror game was always full of coincidences, and why every time he wanted to find someone, that person would always have an accident, why he would have an accident when he wanted to take risks, and why the task difficulty he met always rose sharply.

It was meaningless. He couldn’t even give the game a low score as in the real world. He could only accept all this.

But in this copy task, “these coincidences” had a perfect explanation—this was a conspiracy.

“The spacecraft that picked us up isn’t waiting outside the atmosphere, it left the planet. There’s no two-way communication equipment here and you can’t get external information… Is it because the production company actually knew about all this?” Qi Leren asked. “They maliciously created a closed island and let us die here?”

“No, it wasn’t like this at first.” He Yi covered his face, his voice hoarse. “The director is my distant cousin. We have a very good relationship in private. He won’t make a mockery of my life. Before the program began, we placed luminous ore similar to octopus eggs—the one found by Lara and Francis, and hid octopus data in the basements of some contestants’ rooms. The above words were randomly written according to the words of this planet, and we just wanted you to see the pictures of the octopus. There’s also the underground research institute… According to the plan, I’m the default actor. I’m responsible for guiding you to discover the abnormality of this world step by step, and this place was supposed to be ‘accidentally discovered’ by you around the fourth day, thus creating panic.”

“But the amphioctopus egg was real,” Qi Leren said coldly. “I have seen the remains left after it hatched, and there’s also dried blood inside.”

“Yes, someone changed it!” He Yi shouted in despair, collapsing as if struck. “It’s true! Really! After I was kidnapped by Mark, I discovered that Mark’s eye-bleeding symptoms were definitely something that would happen after being parasitized!”

“So you escaped from the attic into the basement, blasted the entrance, hid in the research institute, and kept all of us in the dark… But what I don’t understand is, since you were ready to hide it, why do you want to tell the truth now?” Qi Leren asked.

“Probably because people want to say something good before they die.” He Yi looked at Qi Leren faintly, and his eyes seemed to pass through his body, looking at somewhere far away.

Qi Leren flexed his hands—the hand holding the gun tightened, and he calculated how long it would take him to get out of the power room and close the door again.

“You listen up. There’s a particularly powerful amphioctopus specimen called Leviathan. Even if it’s frozen in the extremely cold environment of minus 40 degrees, it will not die, but will only go to sleep. It’s like the amphioctopuses’ soldier ant, and its fighting capacity far exceeds that of the workers. Leviathan is different from the ordinary octopuses. As long as it senses the approach of living creatures, it will be forcibly thawed. It will not even try to capture the host’s brain. Instead, it will suck up the nutrients of the host within two to three hours after parasitizing, so that the host can feel the sensation of being eaten alive… I met it in the glacier below the deepest level of the institute…” He Yi’s voice had begun to change, and the distorted voice seemed to be coming from broken bellows. Dirty blood flowed down from his raised eyes, then his nostrils and corners of his mouth. As soon as he opened his mouth, the blood flowed out madly, and the blood diluted by mucus fell to the ground, causing a deep red stain.

“It is almost immortal, and its soft skin hardens rapidly after contact with air. Its strength is comparable to that of a light tank. Its speed is extremely fast, and its top speed is equivalent to the limit speed of human beings. The most terrible thing is that it has a brain. It won’t eat the host’s brain, but will keep the brain tissue completely in its own body, and continue to think with that brain… Run away, it’s going… it’s going to come out…”

He Yi knelt on the ground and began to vomit intensely. Sticky tentacles stretched out along his esophagus, bursting the narrow pipe and tearing open his neck! The ochre tentacles poked out from He Yi’s neck, and the soft skin gradually turned into a hard metal substance the moment it was exposed to air!

The hardened epidermis added to the tentacles’ horror. They ripped He Yi’s neck apart and pulled open fist-sized wound to wring He Yi’s neck! His spine had been broken, but his head was supported by a straight hardened tentacle, which preserved his brain and swallowed it into the body. More tentacles rushed out of the broken neck, expanding, gushing out, and then hardening. After leaving the human body, the small octopus became a horrible monster more than one meter tall!

Qi Leren pulled out the gun to shoot and all the bullets were shot, but they were all embedded into the skin of the tentacle, neither penetrating nor flying off. The bullets wouldn’t work, so he had to…

Qi Leren turned and ran. After passing through the door of the power room, he threw a hand grenade in, then slammed the door and threw himself on the ground.

The ground shook with the explosion on the other side, and Qi Leren got up and continued to run as fast as he could, and quietly started the “Secretly Observing” skill once he was behind another door.

He didn’t believe that this monster would die, but he wanted to know how much damage this level of an explosion would do so he could formulate a plan!

In less than half a minute, the closed iron door of the power room was hit hard, as if an iron statue had been thrown against it, and the shocking sound made Qi Leren’s face go white.

But the terror did not end. After the impact, the iron door opened.

It wasn’t knocked open, it was opened. That monster, it knew how to open the door, it had intelligence!

When the hardened monster climbed out of the power room in a twisted posture, Qi Leren’s heart almost jumped out of his throat, and he tried to restrain his impulse to escape. If he moved quickly, the Secretly Observing skill’s effects would probably be discovered by this monster.

This monster was extremely difficult, and the hand grenades couldn’t solve it. Qi Leren’s fate if he faced it head on would be absolutely terrible. He had to find his teammates first, and then find suitable weapons, such as the rocket launcher that Mark had used against him… To deal with such a high level boss, I’m afraid I can’t do it by myself.

The monster lingered outside the door of the power room for a while. It had two directions to choose from, but almost without any suspense, it walked slowly in Qi Leren’s direction.

Qi Leren wanted to cry without tears: …I knew my luck was this bad!

He Yi’s flesh and blood were sucked dry, and Leviathan, which had devoured his brain, was getting closer and closer to Qi Leren. Qi Leren, who clung to the door, did not dare to make a sound, and even held his breath.

He was full of confidence in Secretly Observing’s effects. In order to get full use out of this skill card, Chen Baiqi had helped him to test its strength. The more he did not move, the better the skill’s cloaking effect was. As long as he wasn’t touched, he could be almost perfectly undetectable. Even his smell and temperature would be hidden. However, once he started to move, the cloaking effect declined. If he moved very close to the enemy… Unless he was out of the enemy’s sight, the effect of being invisible would no longer work.

But for people with strong intuition or perception, even if they couldn’t see or hear, they would still feel “someone” watching them. But Chen Baiqi had also said that there were very few people like this, so he didn’t need to worry too much. Anyway, people at this level could basically kill him casually. It was really Chen Baiqi’s personal style of comforting him.

The monster was getting closer and closer. Qi Leren didn’t dare to go out, staying as quiet as if he didn’t exist.

Under close observation, the monster’s body shape gave off a sense of disharmony. It had thirteen tentacles like the rest of its kind, but it was as if each tentacle was wrapped in a layer of tinfoil, which made the soft tentacles strange. Even the posture of its movements was very strange with so many tentacles crawling on the ground together, pulling its body to crawl forward, but its speed was slow, and you couldn’t tell that it had the potential to move faster than a human’s running speed. The position of the mouthparts should be between the tentacles and close to the ground. When it crawled, the fine teeth at the bottom could occasionally be seen. This big elastic mouth and its freely telescopic body could swallow a living person in an instant and chew it up.

The monster was getting closer and closer to the door, so Qi Leren couldn’t help but look at the door’s emergency close button by his hand. If he pressed the switch, the door would come down immediately to isolate the monster. However, this action would take a few seconds, and the monster that had devoured He Yi’s brain might quickly find the switch on the other side and open the door again.

This monster with a strong attack power, high defense power, and intelligence was too difficult to deal with.

Qi Leren had to wait patiently for it to pass far enough away, and then leave down another corridor and go to the arsenal to find suitable weapons, and hopefully meet several teammates along the way.

Two of the monster’s tentacles had stretched over the doorway, less than one meter away from Qi Leren. He held his breath and kept a close eye on the two tentacles, but a question appeared in his mind—will the tentacles touch him?

As if it had heard his inner doubts, the tentacles made a playful roll on the ground, shook out for a moment, and inadvertently rubbed against Qi Leren’s calf.

The monster whose body was about to pass through the door opened its only eye. The fist-sized spindle-shaped eyeball popped out from the meaty seam, and its scarlet pupil looked straight at Qi Leren.

With a bang, Qi Leren slapped the door’s emergency close button, and the falling door pinned the monster’s two tentacles under the door!

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