Chapter 291 - 236: Yiyi

Chapter 291: Chapter 236: Yiyi

CLANG!

A woman was slammed against the outside of the iron bars, her face pressed tightly against the wire mesh that separated humans from monsters.

The woman’s hair was disheveled and her face was stained with blood; she had clearly been tortured. But her eyes were frighteningly bright, and she was still muttering curses that were drowned out by the clanging of the bars.

As soon as the commotion started, the banshee zombie cowering in the corner instantly tensed, ready to strike. Its long arm coiled near the ceiling like a scorpion’s stinger.

"Fucking bitch, you’ve got some nerve!" a voice boomed from the video. It seemed to come from behind the woman, but the camera’s limited view didn’t show the hallway.

"That’s the ’Boss’s’ voice!" Li Wan, standing behind Lin Fan, pointed at the screen, eager to please.

"Mm," Lin Fan just nodded. He had figured that out too. He clicked to continue playing the video.

"You dare ambush me? You think you can take me on with a pair of scissors?"

As he spoke, a hand pressed down on the woman’s head, then pointed at the monster in the cage, seemingly venting some kind of sadistic glee.

"Weren’t you looking for your daughter? Huh?"

"She’s already infected!" The hand grabbed the woman’s hair, forcing her to look up at the monster in the cage. "Look! This is your little girl! I spent so much effort turning her into this perfect specimen!"

"Since you miss her so much, I’ll do you a favor and reunite you two!"

After he finished speaking, two men walked forward. Lin Fan recognized one of them—the Superpower User with the metal ability. He opened a small hatch on the cage door, picked up the woman like a bag of trash, and shoved her horizontally into the cage.

"BANG!" The hatch was slammed shut and locked from the outside.

"Get back. I’m dropping the interference. We don’t want to get hit by the scream."

The men outside the iron cage spoke, and a series of footsteps retreated away.

At first, the woman was terrified by the monster’s appearance and instinctively recoiled. But soon, under the dim yellow light from the cage’s ceiling, she fought through her fear and carefully observed the creature opposite her.

"...Yiyi? Is that you, Yiyi?" Inside the cage, the banshee zombie didn’t attack immediately. It tilted its hollow-looking head, staring at the human on the ground as if studying its prey, yet also as if confused.

The woman scrambled up from the floor. She looked at the monster before her—a grotesque insectoid lower body fused with a woman’s torso—but instead of running, she tremblingly stretched out her hands and took one step after another toward the corner.

"Yiyi... don’t be afraid..." "It’s Mommy... Mommy’s here for you..."

Lin Fan didn’t know if Mutated Zombies had feelings. ’In my experience,’ he thought, ’while their bizarre or cruel faces sometimes seem to show a flicker of emotion, they’re mostly driven by beast-like instinct.’

The outcome was predictable.

A white afterimage flashed past.

A massive spray of blood erupted, dyeing the jade-white upper body red and creating an eerie contrast.

"UGH..." Li Wan, who was standing behind him, couldn’t watch anymore. She covered her mouth and rushed out of the office.

"If you puke up those cookies and that drink, they’re gone for good..." Lin Fan frowned, but his concern for the wasted food still made him say it.

He didn’t turn off the video. Instead, he emotionlessly dragged the progress bar, skipping over the middle segment bit by bit.

When the progress bar reached the end, the cage contained nothing but a patch of bloody, mangled sludge and a few unidentifiable bones. The banshee zombie, content, had retreated to its corner. It even drew its long arm close, coiling its whole body into a ball to begin digesting its large meal.

The video ended.

Lin Fan thought in silence for a moment, then clicked on the next video. The footage appeared to be from the same camera.

Onscreen, the banshee zombie was coiled in the corner, with only its long arm circling around its body, indicating the video wasn’t frozen. It was the same in three consecutive video files. Judging by the time stamps, this was from the night of four days ago. Each video was two hours long, meaning the banshee zombie had remained in this state for almost the entire night.

After the last file finished playing, CLICK. Lin Fan closed the player, deleted the surveillance footage again, and emptied the recycling bin.

’It seems the "Boss" deleted these videos because he thought they were meaningless since the banshee zombie wasn’t moving. He must have accidentally deleted the previous one along with them. The rest must be on that other hard drive.’

"Brother Lin, was that..." Li Wan hadn’t actually thrown up, it seemed, just dry-heaved for a bit. But the scene in the hallway outside must have been even more frightening, because she ran back in after only a moment.

"Just the Boss’s sick hobby. He had to record it, too... It’s not enough to just kill someone; he has to make it disgusting." Lin Fan curled his lip and answered dismissively, not wanting Li Wan’s imagination to run wild.

"Then... that Yiyi’s mother you asked about before... was that her in the video...?"

Li Wan asked tentatively, but she realized Lin Fan wasn’t listening. His gaze had, at some point, moved past her and was now fixed motionlessly on the office’s main door.

Instinctively, Li Wan followed his gaze and turned her head, only to be startled by the figure that had suddenly appeared!

"Ah—"

A short, sharp cry burst from Li Wan’s throat, but she expertly smothered it with her hands a second later.

Over there.

At some point, a small figure had appeared in the office doorway.

She was wearing a gray hoodie that was clearly too big for her. It must have been an item of clothing left behind by an adult employee; the sleeves were cut short, revealing her wrists, and the hood was pulled low over her head, revealing only a pair of large, round black eyes that reflected the light from the window behind Lin Fan, making them seem especially bright.