Chapter 242 [Old Calamities]

After the Black Scissors snipped Fake Lin Yue and the Stitched Monster to death...

They paused for a moment in mid-air!

Then, they actually flew back along the arc they came from ————————＞!

With every rotation, they shrank a bit; the two-meter blade became one meter, then half a meter, then palm-sized, and finally reduced to a black dot, disappearing from sight!

At the same time,

The seventh door.

The eighth door.

The ninth door.

The tenth door.

Opened all at once, the iron doors slamming against the frames with a sound that overlapped like a muffled clap of thunder!

But the expected monsters were nowhere to be seen; only darkness surged from the doorways!

In the silence, blood-colored silk threads densely wove across the entire arena, looking like a wound being stitched together!

And from the axis of the web, faint footsteps were heard...

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Chen Yu gripped the golden body card, a drop of cold sweat sliding down his forehead.

Since his rebirth, this was the first time he had faced such a sense of oppression.

“Gulu?”

Water Bubble poked its head out, its two small black dot eyes darting around. It looked at the blood-colored silk threads, then at the distant darkness, before tentatively touching the nearest blood-colored thread with a small section of its jelly-like edge and quickly retracting it.

“Don't move!”

Chen Yu was in no mood to appreciate its exploration spirit and yanked it into his military uniform.

Water Bubble bulged into a lump at his chest, struggled a bit, and finally flattened out like a piece of breastplate embedded in the lining of his military uniform.

“Get even flatter, like your Second Skill...”

Chen Yu urged.

Honestly, Water Bubble was surprisingly comfortable inside the clothes, providing absolute strike resistance.

Chen Yu pulled the zipper up to his collar, confirmed it was steady, and then looked up again.

He didn't know if the golden body card could protect both of them at the same time.

Theoretically, since the [golden body card]'s exclusion rule could include clothes, its range of judgment should be... a fuzzy area centered on the user.

Even if it wasn't based on an area but on "ownership," then Water Bubble was also his Vehicle pet.

As Chen Yu thought, he ran through the worst-case scenario in his mind.

If the golden body card could only protect himself, then he would have to shove a few golden body cards to Water Bubble for emergencies.

“Whew...”

“It's coming...”

Chen Yu looked at the blood lines and darkness around him and took a deep breath.

He recognized this as a Domain.

In fact, he even recognized this specific Domain at this moment.

But he was praying frantically that it wasn't what he thought.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

In the distance, a figure stepped out from the darkness.

Black round-toed leather shoes stepped on the taut blood lines, rising and falling.

Her pace didn't look fast.

But with every step, her figure would appear on another line over ten meters away, without any trajectory of movement, like a video with the middle frames edited out.

'It really is her...'

“Damn it, you've got to be kidding me.”

Chen Yu's pupils shrank, and his grip on the golden body card tightened further.

It was a girl, less than 1.7 meters tall, with porcelain-white delicate skin and waist-length dark green hair loosely tied at the ends with a black ribbon. A few stray strands hung before her collarbones.

Her features were extremely exquisite, but her eyes were cold, with the corners of her slender eyes upturned slightly.

A layered Gothic black dress trailed behind her, and a pair of Black Scissors hung from a thin chain at her waist.

In her hand, she held a heavy black hardcover book with brass corners, and the cover read — Diagnosis Report.

But what truly made Chen Yu's back tighten was the deep, pitch-black rift behind her.

It was as tall as she was, floating behind her shoulders, its edges slightly curled like scorched paper.

The blood-colored silk threads and the endless darkness were precisely what spread out from that rift.

“Have we met?”

Standing at the axis of the giant web, she tilted her head. “You seem very afraid of me?”

Chen Yu didn't answer, simply choosing to [Exit] repeatedly!

But it was useless; the [Exit] button was still lit, but it simply couldn't be selected!

Chen Yu gritted his teeth, intending to absorb Fake Lin Yue and the Stitched Monster first...

After all, what followed might be a tough battle!

But the next second—

A Steel Needle!

Flew out suddenly!

Initially extremely thin, just like a sewing needle, it began to expand rapidly the moment it left the rift. It grew larger and thicker in mid-air, and by the time it reached him, it was already comparable to a stone pillar!

“?”

Chen Yu hadn't expected the opponent to act so decisively. He dodged sharply to the side, his expression grim...

“BOOM!!!”

The Steel Needle grazed his shoulder and nailed into the ground, cracks spreading from the edge of the pit in all directions!

She blinked. “You dodge quite fast.”

She spun the Black Scissors between her fingers, tucked them back into the thin chain at her waist, and then smiled slightly!

“You're Chen Yu, right?”

“Your condition is...”

She flipped open the heavy book and then looked up, her tone flat. “Delusional Disorder.”

She spoke with a smile: “My name is Alice, and I am a doctor~”

Doctor, my foot!!!

Chen Yu certainly knew who Alice was,

Or rather,

Everyone on the Road to Survival would know sooner or later!

She wasn't a passenger at all, wasn't some BOSS, and wasn't even human!

She was an [Old Day Calamity] — Alice the Disease Demon!

In Chen Yu's mind, all the fragments regarding his past life and her...

...surged up simultaneously at that moment.

The so-called Old World Calamities,

They were the manifestation of "indescribable fear" within the human collective subconscious!

They were fear itself finding a vessel!

And Alice was the Disease Demon calamity; her prototype was Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: a neurological disorder where the objects a patient sees can suddenly grow large or small, and their sense of distance is completely distorted!

In his past life, after the tenth station, the Haicheng area and the adjacent highways merged!

Everyone was discussing what would happen after the merger.

Then, after the merger, the first thing they welcomed was the descent of Alice the Disease Demon!

That night, no less than seven highways were bathed in blood, and the communication channels of the entire region were filled with chaos!

[Are you kidding me? Tell me, how are we supposed to fight something like this?]

[It's not human, it's not human at all...]

[Don't give up, there are hundreds of thousands of us, we have to fight back!]

[Image—]

Image: On a highway at twilight, shrouded in endless darkness, blood-colored silk threads, like dense wound sutures, were woven into a web high above. The highway was strewn with corpses. In the distant horizon, a slender black shadow was looking over.

That was the first time Chen Yu had seen Alice...

And it was the first time Chen Yu had learned about Domains.

The level of shock was incomparable; every detail of that image was branded into his memory!

But now, the culprit was right before his eyes!

“You're pressing exit, right?”

“It's useless.”

“The rules of this world have been overwritten by me.”

——————

There was once a book that was forced to end because it entered the little black room too many times. The character Pork Chop felt most regretful about was Alice. This time, she will return as an Old Day Calamity~