Eldritch Horror Theatre

Blood splattered as Shen Yuan's near-manic shrieks split the air.

She slashed with such frantic force that after a few rough, sawing motions, her neck was almost entirely severed at the base.

Even after decapitating herself, Shen Yuan didn't stop moving. She reached directly for her severed neck.

With a fierce tug, she yanked out a dark red strip of flesh shaped like a thick, legless grub, its surface faintly etched with eerie, grotesque patterns.

There really was a bug!

Fu Qian stared at the scene and let out a long exhale.

He had to admit, things were only getting more bizarre.

Having finally resolved her obsession, Shen Yuan stood frozen in place.

However, the severed head dangling in her grasp bore an expression of pure relief.

A moment later, the familiar dark red haze suddenly bloomed around the two of them, filling Fu Qian's line of sight.

Just like at the hospital, the surrounding scenery rapidly shifted.

In the blink of an eye, the museum lost all its former pristine neatness, decaying into a state of utter dilapidation.

"It seems you really can enter this world using this method," Fu Qian muttered to himself.

From the looks of it, a cognitive collapse triggered this exact transition.

Triggering it on himself would undoubtedly be much more convenient.

Unfortunately, even setting aside whether or not he was different from everyone else, there was an issue.

Even if he were the same, given his own psychological tolerance, suffering a genuine cognitive collapse would be rather difficult.

So, that idea was a nonstarter.

He pondered this while observing his surroundings. Since it hadn't started raining yet, the visibility inside the building was a bit better than it had been in the hospital.

Aside from looking a bit older and more dilapidated, the overall layout didn't seem to have changed much.

Displaying an admirable amount of patience, Fu Qian used the faint light filtering in to thoroughly search the museum once again.

After circling around, he eventually returned to the first floor and found a rather suspicious spot tucked away in a corner.

"I don't recall there being a floor underneath this place..."

Fu Qian stood by the staircase in the corner of the lobby. At some unknown point, a pitch-black opening had appeared below it.

Had it caved in from age?

Judging by the surrounding layout, this tunnel was clearly never part of the building's original design.

It seemed that if the museum was hiding any secrets, they were highly likely to be down there.

He was definitely going down, but under these circumstances, there would undoubtedly be no light source inside.

Fu Qian thought back to his mental map of the layout. He quickly navigated his way to the museum's duty room, where he successfully scavenged two flashlights and a handful of batteries.

Truly top-tier household appliances.

After swapping in fresh batteries and confirming both flashlights still worked, Fu Qian offered a word of praise. Wasting no more time, he jumped straight down into the opening.

Why is this looking more and more familiar?

As he descended the steps beneath the opening, the beam of his flashlight could only pierce a small radius of the darkness. It didn't take long for Fu Qian to be struck by a seemingly familiar sensation.

The walls of this passage were entirely constructed from rectangular blocks of black stone, with faint, almost imperceptible patterns etched across their surfaces.

He was no stranger to this architecture. Back in the Rotten Forest, the tunnel dug deep beneath the Small Island had looked exactly like this.

Although it lacked the spiral structure at the top, the overall similarity was incredibly high.

Could they have been digging for something here, too?

If that was the case, he was afraid his current condition wouldn't be enough to handle monsters like the singing girl.

However, according to Kelly and her team, this place was a Nightmare akin to a hallucination. If he actually got killed here, there was a high probability he would just wake up in an upper layer of consciousness—right?

Fu Qian's movements grew even more cautious, his pace slowing down significantly.

Fortunately, this tunnel was much shallower in comparison. It didn't take long for Fu Qian to reach the bottom.

Just past the final step lay a familiar-looking circular chamber.

Unlike before, however, there were no other branching tunnels leading out from the edges of the room.

They went to all this trouble, only for there to be nothing down here?

Fu Qian stared at the empty chamber before him, falling into deep thought.

The next moment, he suddenly took off his jacket, wrapped it tightly around his right hand, and grabbed at the wall.

His actions might have looked somewhat unhinged, but an instant later, Fu Qian confirmed that he had grabbed hold of something—and not just one.

The seemingly bare wall wasn't empty at all.

The texture of the things he had grabbed was indescribable, but he could confirm with absolute certainty that they were alive. Even through the thick fabric of his jacket, he could feel them wriggling.

Albeit at an incredibly sluggish pace.

Bugs? Transparent ones? Clinging to the walls all along this tunnel?

A rapid series of deductions flashed through Fu Qian's mind.

If that was really the case, then wasn't it entirely possible that...

Fu Qian tilted his head and looked up. Was he, at this very moment, completely surrounded by these things?

It was undoubtedly a chilling thought. Fu Qian immediately turned and headed back up the stairs, though he made no rush to discard the things clutched in his hand.

Quickly vaulting out of the hole at the top, Fu Qian used the significantly brighter ambient light in the lobby to inspect his catch, only to confirm that the squirming mass inside his jacket remained entirely invisible.

Truly fascinating!

So, if this place really was the source of the entire infection, then the virus Kelly and the others had spoken of was actually these things?

It was still a form of parasitism, but this variation seemed far more horrifying.

Besides, no matter how you looked at it, these things didn't resemble needles in the slightest!

His mission wasn't to help Kelly's team uncover the truth, but rather to locate the anomaly known as the Servant's Needle.

Lost in thought, Fu Qian tossed his jacket—along with whatever was trapped inside—back down the hole.

At the same time, his hands rapidly patted down his own body.

Unsurprisingly, he discovered several more of the unseen creatures clinging to his hair and clothes.

Sure enough, there were already stowaways.

Keeping only one, Fu Qian tossed the rest of the bugs back into the darkness and retrieved the Dagger.

He could tell that the Dagger had once been meticulously maintained, though being mottled with Rust Mark was inevitable.

Of course, worrying about the risk of tetanus hardly seemed necessary at the moment.

Fu Qian pressed his fingertip against the still-sharp blade and swiped it across the edge, slicing open a thin cut.

He squeezed a single drop of blood from the wound, letting it slide down the Dagger to pool right next to the bug he had captured.

To get a better look, he turned on both flashlights and aimed them at the blade from different angles.

Very quickly, the bead of blood seemed to brush against something. It trembled briefly before its volume began to rapidly shrink.

He still couldn't see the creature, but it was abundantly clear that they were interested in human flesh and blood.

The result wasn't particularly unexpected.

It was just difficult to imagine what kind of conditions would be required for a swarm of things with the movement speed of maggots to infect an entire city.

Putting everything else aside, just crawling out of this museum alone would take them ages.

Wait a minute. Crawling out...

Realizing something, Fu Qian whipped his head around to stare back at the hole.

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