Chapter 340: Beast

With the Youth Palace, while he couldn’t exactly swagger through this area, he could at least move freely between all the pools.

Now that he understood the rules of the area and had explored the unknown seabed, the place no longer seemed so dangerous in his eyes.

Having temporarily escaped his predicament, Zhang Wenda put everything else aside. He took Song Jianguo’s cat and returned to the spot where he had last found Hu Maomao’s scent.

A trap had interrupted his search for his friend, so now, naturally, he had to resume it. Even though he knew Hu Maomao was strong, he was still very worried about her.

“Search carefully, and remember, you’re looking for a living person. Don’t lead me into another trap!” Zhang Wenda said, tapping the large black dog on the head.

“WOOF WOOF!” The large black dog, formed from the aggregation of Black Cats, lowered its head and resumed sniffing the ground.

In truth, Zhang Wenda knew he couldn’t blame the Little Black Cats. No matter how clever they were, they were still just animals. They could only follow a scent, unable to tell which direction it led or when it was left.

Hu Maomao had indeed gone into that trap, leaving her scent behind. That was why they had led him right to it.

He wasn’t sure if it was because the Youth Palace was with him, but this time, there were no traps floating on the water’s surface. He could finally search in peace.

All the while, the Hippocampus remained suspended in the air, rapidly writing and drawing. Zhang Wenda glanced up at it and asked, “What are you noting down?”

The Hippocampus presented Zhang Wenda with a drawing covered in small grids. “I’m making a map of our route. With this, we’ll never get lost on the same path again.”

Zhang Wenda noticed the Hippocampus outlining the dimensions of each pool with just a few strokes. Seeing this, an idea struck him. “Since you’re already drawing, you might as well map out all the pool rooms in the entire Area 2. Make a complete map of Area 2!”

“No problem.” As the Hippocampus’s pen glided rapidly, the once maze-like Area 2 gradually took shape, becoming a clear diagram of hundreds of interconnected squares.

And so, Zhang Wenda followed the black dog, stopping and starting as he went. After passing through five or six pools, the dog finally stopped and began circling in place.

After confirming several times that there was nothing unusual about the spot where the dog was circling, Zhang Wenda looked down at it and asked in confusion, “What’s wrong? There’s nothing here.”

“WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF!!”

But no matter what the black dog tried to say, Zhang Wenda didn’t have the ability to communicate with cats. He could only vaguely understand that it was expressing some kind of uncertainty.

Zhang Wenda decided to go straight into the Black Cat’s Inner World. There, within its sparse memories, he finally understood what it was trying to say. “Too much time has passed. The scent is too weak. We lost the trail.”

“Fuck, I can’t believe you guys! How do you lose a trail when you still have the scent?”

“WOOF WOOF WOOF!” Hearing this, the large black dog grew indignant, its ears perking up as it barked at Zhang Wenda.

A small, yellow version of Zhang Wenda suddenly jumped out, holding his hands up to block the black dog. “Don’t you scold the doggy! It’s trying very hard.”

“Alright, alright! Enough nonsense! Let’s get back to searching!” He wasn’t about to give up so easily after finally finding a clue. Zhang Wenda refused to accept it.

He quickly thought of another method. They began a spiraling search pattern, starting from the pool and expanding outward. However, aside from the map recorded by the Hippocampus growing larger, they had no significant findings.

Several hours passed. Zhang Wenda knew there was no point in searching any longer. They hadn’t found anything. The trail for Hu Maomao was well and truly cold.

Just as he was about to head back and use the influence of his Small Circle to find another way, something on the white ceramic tiles in the distance made him jolt to attention.

It was a corpse—the body of a middle-aged man, his face frozen in despair. He was starved thin and his clothes were in tatters. It looked as if the apocalypse had tormented him greatly.

And yet, as pitiful as he was, he had been murdered. He’d been disemboweled, a gruesome death. Against the backdrop of fresh blood, the entire pool looked particularly horrifying.

A large chunk of his clothing and some flesh had been torn away, and a trail of bloody water spreading into the distance showed that the killer had fled to the left.

The lingering warmth of the body proved he hadn’t been dead for long. The murder was recent.

His expression grim, Zhang Wenda patted the black dog’s arched back. “Go!”

‘If something from the water can climb ashore and kill people at will, then I have to destroy it today, no matter what it is.’

The scent of blood hadn’t dissipated, and with the black dog tracking it, Zhang Wenda quickly caught up.

Just when he thought he’d found the man-eating monster, he saw an unexpected scene. Behind a slide was a happy family of three.

The little daughter, who looked to be only three or four, was wrapped in cloth just stripped from the dead man’s body, happily eating the food her father had brought back.

Beside them, a bare-chested, bearded man holding a pistol and a gaunt woman were offering a piece of fresh meat back and forth to one another.

But this “warm” scene was shattered by Zhang Wenda’s arrival. The man quickly shielded his wife and child behind him, raising his weapon and roaring at Zhang Wenda.

Seeing the man’s murderous intent and the terrified child who had started to cry behind him, Zhang Wenda’s heart grew heavy.

‘He couldn’t say the man was wrong. Not eating meant starving to death. For the sake of his child, even biological instinct would have driven him to do it.’

But Zhang Wenda felt an inexplicable sense of sorrow. ‘He’s clearly a human, clearly holding a firearm—a symbol of civilization—yet his first reaction upon meeting someone else isn’t to communicate, but to let out a beast-like roar to intimidate an enemy.’

‘Killing one of his own kind to feed his offspring… This desperate environment had turned people completely into beasts.’

The heavy scent of blood on the man was all the proof he needed, but Zhang Wenda did nothing. He turned and left with the black dog, his steps heavy.

Even after he was out of the family’s sight, Zhang Wenda’s mood didn’t improve. It wasn’t just about them.

He could imagine there were many, many more people like them in Area 2, eking out a desperate existence for the sake of food.

When he had rescued Wang Shaojie, the man had told him about the law of the jungle in Area 2. But hearing about it and seeing it with his own eyes were two different things entirely.

As he walked, Zhang Wenda found himself back at the pool with the corpse. The poor man’s body was now being wrapped in a slimy tendril and slowly dragged toward the water.

Suddenly, Zhang Wenda stopped in his tracks. He took out the badge and looked at it. At that moment, he felt that as the Director of Bureau 507, as an 03-level powerhouse, he had to do something.