Chapter Ninety-Six: The Inner Chamber of the Second Level and the Crisis

He had walked about a hundred and eighty steps—a distance that could by no means be called far, yet these forty or fifty meters were enough for the slight curvature of the pipe to obscure the view behind him.

Before Chen Qing, the pipe stretched for nearly a hundred meters, seemingly without end.

Just as he was hesitating whether to continue forward, a faint reflection on the water pipe to his left caught his attention.

He trotted forward a few steps in a hurry. Resting on the pipe were several glass water bottles, their caps removed and their contents drained.

He leaned in to sniff them; there was a faint, sweet scent inside. He extended his fingertip and dabbed the rim, finding it slightly sticky—evidently the residue of dried sugar.

Beside the glass bottles, two depleted batteries lay at the very edge. He bent his knees slightly, lowering his stature to about one meter fifty-five, and found that his fingertips could reach just past the batteries.

"Zhang Lan left these..." He furrowed his brows. Were they resting here at that time? Or were these meant as beacons?

He looked closer. There were three glass bottles; one had a thin layer of liquid left at the bottom, while two had been drained quite thoroughly.

Two batteries had been left behind, along with about a dozen small scraps of foil.

Had Zhang Lan taken that many sedatives?

He frowned. This quantity could not possibly be for one person.

Three people? Including her parents? But even for three people, this dosage was still far too high.

He reached out his fingertip, but just as he touched the foil, his movement froze.

He heard footsteps approaching from behind. Before he could turn his head, he heard a voice.

"Chen Qing? What are you looking for?"

He recognized the voice—it was Jiang Wan.

He turned around, but the moment his gaze met hers, he hesitated.

Was it really Jiang Wan?

He looked at her. He was intimately familiar with that face, yet she gave him an inexplicable sense of unfamiliarity.

It was as if... as if a familiar person had suddenly been replaced by someone else beneath the skin. It possessed all the memories of that person, yet the individual beneath the skin could not interact with the same demeanor.

"Nothing." He shifted half a step to the side, gesturing toward the foil and bottles. "I found some things left behind earlier."

"Did Zhang Lan leave them?" She walked over quickly, coming to stand beside Chen Qing.

She stood with her back to the boy, paying him no heed.

She looked down, bowing her head and bending at the waist, her gaze fixed intently on the scraps of foil. "What were these for?"

"Not sure. Can't you tell?" He frowned slightly, but his expression softened after a second or two. "You should be able to tell."

"I should be able to tell?" She hesitated for a moment, picking up the pieces of foil. She gently waved her other hand, wafting the scent from the foil into her nostrils.

"Your technique is quite professional."

Chen Qing’s voice suddenly rang out behind Jiang Wan.

"Huh? What's wrong?" She seemed puzzled.

"Nothing. I just remembered that you didn't take Toxicology."

"What of it?" She wore a half-smile, appearing not to understand Chen Qing's words.

"You remember your junior high knowledge so well." He smiled, bent down, and reached out, his fingertips landing on the metal weapon.

Feeling the faint chill radiating from it, he heard the person before him ask in confusion, "What are you doing?"

"What am I doing?"

With a flick of his finger, the latched metal buckle popped open with a click. With a hook of his finger, he pulled the firearm back two steps.

He looked at Jiang Wan, still smiling. "Do you know what your biggest failure is?"

She furrowed her brows, looking genuinely uncomprehending. "What are you doing? Give me my gun back."

But Chen Qing seemed not to hear her. He pulled the bolt back, disengaged the safety, aimed at the ground in front of him, and slowly squeezed the trigger.

His finger pressed to the bottom as expected, his grip tight against every corner of the handle. He looked at the ground before him, and his mouth suddenly curved into a smile.

He released his hand, then pulled the trigger repeatedly.

"Do you know what your biggest failure is?" He spun the weapon in his hand and tossed it at her feet with a thud.

"I don't understand." But as she looked at Chen Qing, the teasing light in her eyes had vanished.

She stared at Chen Qing, a look of profound malice becoming clearly visible. She asked again, "How did you see through it?"

"Habit."

"Habit?"

He nodded, though at this moment he glanced back over his shoulder. "Habit is the most terrifying thing in the world." He muttered, turning back, but at that very instant, he saw Jiang Wan’s figure appear right before him. She was only two or three centimeters away; he could even smell her scent.

The sweet, sugary aroma gradually morphed into a foul, bloody stench. He stared straight into her eyes, watching as her body dissolved like soft clay. Her clothes merged with her skin; her height began to drop continuously, sinking until it only reached Chen Qing’s chest.

It looked up. Its skin was pure white—whiter than any human race, whiter even than a corpse that had been dead for days. The moment it backed against the wall, Chen Qing felt a sense of vertigo; he could barely distinguish its form against the surface.

Its skin transcended what was possible in the natural world. Of course, it wasn't a product of the natural world; it was only fitting.

He looked down again. Its physique resembled a human's, but the details were vastly different.

Where the ears should be, there were only ear-shaped indentations in the skull. It didn't seem to have auricles like humans, though perhaps it possessed internal organs akin to an ear canal and cochlea.

Around its eye sockets lay a ring of pitch-black branding, a darkness far beyond what any human dark circles could achieve. It grinned, but inside its oral cavity lay no tongue—only layers of spiraling, clustered, fish-like organisms. As it looked at Chen Qing and grinned, the colony began to stretch, expanding its territory, crawling densely until the entire mouth was filled. Their tails extended long, sharp spikes that stabbed fiercely into the creature's own mouth to anchor themselves. Then, the suspended heads unfolded, splitting into sucker-like mouths the size of thumbs, lined with teeth.

Those suckers, much like those on a lamprey, writhed and clawed within the entity's mouth, waving their heads about, eager to grasp at anything.

In an instant, its mouth was filled with these suckers and teeth, leaving only tens of thousands of dense, sharp, white mouthparts visible.

It reached out with soft hands and gripped Chen Qing’s arm. In its sunken eye sockets, it seemed to be saying something. It looked at Chen Qing, its jaw clicking with a cracking sound, and the strength in its arms surged instantly.

Chen Qing’s expression changed; an unprecedented sense of crisis emerged.

His face turned pale. He seemed to have no effective artifacts to escape this predicament. He stumbled, a muffled sound coming from his shoulders, and a sharp pain radiated from his shoulder blades.

Gritting his teeth, feeling the pain travel to his central nervous system, he lifted his foot and kicked the creature in the abdomen. Even though the force was enough to lift the lower half of its body into the air, its hands remained clamped like iron pincers on Chen Qing’s wrists, and its mouth continued to drip with foul-smelling fluid.

His complexion shifted repeatedly, from pale to flushed, and then back to white.

His raised foot couldn't stop from dropping. He planted his feet on the ground again, but just as he prepared to kick once more, the creature’s feet stepped onto his abdomen, and its arms clamped even tighter. Chen Qing lifted his leg, but this time, he couldn't even touch the creature's body.

He struggled, but his arms were completely limp from the dislocation. He shook his body, and the moment he tried to use his elbows to push off the ground and flip over, the creature would press down hard with its feet. A surge of intense pain shot from his abdomen, interrupting his resistance and causing his brows to knit in agony.

He gritted his teeth, the metallic taste of blood in his mouth fading into insignificance.

He felt his surroundings; the stench of the creature was now incredibly close. He closed his eyes, preparing to accept death, when a gunshot echoed through the entire Backrooms.

The gunshot was deafening. The sound reverberated through the infinitely extending pipe corridors, striking the pipes and bouncing back to where Chen Qing and the creature were.

She looked at the two figures not far away, the trigger pulled once more. Flame and ash danced in the air, weaving together to propel the terrifying engine of death toward the distance—the most brilliant invention birthed by humanity, the embodiment of mankind’s yearning for thunder and fire.

The gunshot carried a spray of viscous fluid erupting from the entity's body. The thunderous roar made the wretched things tremble, and the fire of the gun halted everything they intended to do.

The organisms in its mouth retracted their tail-spikes, but before they could move an inch, their bodies began to twist and wither. Chaotic, discordant wails erupted from their mouths before they fell and perished.

She looked at the two on the ground. Jiang Wan finally let out a long breath, patted her chest, and hurried to Chen Qing’s side. Before she could even help him up, her gaze fixed on his shoulder.

The mark of the dislocation was quite obvious, but fortunately, dislocations were always the easiest to treat.

She took off her outer jacket. The shirt underneath was soaked with sweat and bore a very cute logo, though the logo was wrinkled now.

She rolled up the jacket and bound Chen Qing’s arm firmly. Looking at his deathly pale face and his chattering teeth, she suddenly smiled.

"Bear with it."

"Hey... don't... gently... be gentle!"

With a sharp cry, his arm was returned to its rightful place.