Chapter 729: I Suggest You Don't Lick Your Hands
The smoke from the poison gas bomb hadn't yet dissipated when the street beneath Xu Huo's feet transformed into a spiraling white staircase descending downward. He stood at the top, while the cannibal player he had abandoned his companions for was below.
Upon realizing he couldn't move, the cannibal player wasn't panicked. He spread his ten fingers and scattered seeds that resembled peas. These seeds rapidly grew upon landing, shooting up to half a person's height in the blink of an eye. The pods that formed on them burst open in succession, and the seeds that shot out landed and grew automatically, quickly covering the ground with large patches of bean plants.
However, with a little observation, one would notice that these bean sprouts only grew where the spiritual realm covered. In other words, the edge of the bean plants marked the edge of Xu Huo's spiritual realm.
Xu Huo reached out and caught a bean seed. The thing grew wildly in his hand, becoming more than twice the size of the bean plants on the ground in an instant.
Plants affected by spiritual power—he quickly made a judgment in his mind. Clearly, this plant could indicate the strength of spiritual power, but that was all it could do. He waved his hand to open a door, and the cannibal player, who had just crawled out of the grass, tumbled headfirst into the newly appeared door.
Spiritual power stacked again. All the bean plants used to mark the boundary disappeared, and the space returned to darkness. The cannibal player looked stunned, then scattered another handful of beans.
Unfortunately, this time the beans vanished without a trace. At the same time, several doors appeared around him and began to converge on him, stopping half a meter away.
"Click! Click, click, click!" All the doors opened simultaneously!
"Light that illuminates the world!" The cannibal player raised a glowing item high, and just as he leaned in to see inside the door, a hand suddenly reached out and grabbed his head!
Startled, he quickly tried to pull his head back. After barely managing to break free, hands reached out from all the doors surrounding him in a three-hundred-sixty-degree circle, grabbing his limbs and head, even hooking onto the bones in his body, fingers digging into his flesh!
The cannibal player let out a scream as all the hands pulled him back toward the doors!
"Breaking! Breaking! Breaking!" His arms, twisted out of shape, made a "crack" sound. Deep indentations appeared at the joints where bones connected, and cracks formed on the surface of his skin.
"Mercy... mercy... have mercy!!!"
The screams abruptly stopped. Xu Huo dropped the corpse with the broken neck on the ground, played with the bean seed for a moment, then withdrew his spiritual realm.
There were such marvelous plants in the game that could sense spiritual power, but sensing alone wasn't decisive. If one couldn't resist spiritual interference themselves, no amount of good things would help.
Casually storing the seed in his luggage compartment, he looked toward the other side.
Of the other two cannibal players, one was dead and one was injured. The living one, a fat man, was pinned under Xiao Ling's foot. "Who were you calling a little lady just now?"
"Only someone who gets stepped on and just whines like a baby is the real lady!"
The burly, fat man lying on the ground with broken limbs had nothing to do with "whining like a baby," but Xiao Ling was getting more excited the more she fought. Crushing his head into the ground wasn't enough for her; she pulled out a thin blade and started slicing his back.
The cannibal player screamed in pain, but she pressed his face and voice into the ground. "What are you yelling about? You're a cannibal player. When you eat people, you should have known that one day you'd be eaten."
The nearby Xie Ling and the others glanced uncertainly at the black number exposed through the tear in her clothes.
"Although I don't eat people, I love watching scum like you get carved down to skeletons!" Xiao Ling laughed loudly and shoved the chunk of flesh in her hand into the cannibal player's mouth. "Eat! Didn't you want to eat people? Didn't you like eating people? Taste your own meat—is it delicious?"
The fat man gagged and spat out what was in his mouth. "Bitch..."
Before he could finish his insult, Xiao Ling stomped directly on his neck!
With a "crack," the man died.
There were plenty of crazy people in the game, but few were this insane. Even after he was dead, she shoved his own hand down his throat, making it look like he was "eating people."
"Lunatic!" Liu Chengyi's expression turned unpleasant.
But Xiao Ling shook the blood off her hands and shot Xu Huo a flirtatious glance. "You're pretty tough, huh? Cannibal players have such hard mouths, yet he was begging for mercy on his knees."
In truth, because of the poison gas bomb, they hadn't clearly seen what happened with Xu Huo, but they had all heard the terrified pleas. Though they were a bit curious, that was all.
The scene was bloody. Xu Huo glanced at it and looked away. Seeing Xiao Ling raise her hand to her mouth, he spoke up, "I suggest you don't lick your hands. Players might have infectious diseases too."
This made Xiao Ling, who worshipped violence, freeze for a moment. Then the veins on her forehead bulged. "Who the hell was going to lick my hands!"
"Really?" Xu Huo said with slight disappointment. "I thought you were going to use that to show off your cruelty."
If Xiao Ling's brutality had been genuinely terrifying a second ago, now her actions seemed downright idiotic.
"Pfft!" Xie Ling couldn't help but laugh. Long Aotian beside her also chuckled and said to Xiao Ling, "Your method is too much effort. For someone about to die, eating a bite or two of themselves means nothing. If you ask me, the best way to deal with cannibal players is to starve them for seven or eight days, then lock them all together and let them eat each other."
"That way, they experience the fear of being eaten, and you get the thrill of revenge—killing two birds with one stone."
Xiao Ling didn't want to continue this topic. "Where to next?"
"We've killed a few people. Time to meet up with the later players," Xu Huo said. "Otherwise, if the situation isn't clear, we might end up fighting."
In fact, three minutes earlier, several players had already arrived near the mannequin building.
Xu Huo waved his hand toward a certain shop. After a moment, the player hiding inside came out. He had a buzz cut and a dragon tattoo on his forehead. He responded from a distance, "We don't care about the cannibal players' lives. Let's keep to ourselves?"
"No problem." Xu Huo agreed and even invited them to complete the instance task together.
But the response was a cold laugh. The observing players left one after another.
"What a shame," Xu Huo sighed, looking at the sun gradually setting in the west. "Let's head to the Needle Mountain Therapy Venue before sunset."
Xiao Ling and the other two hadn't experienced being locked up, but Xie Ling's group was very worried that this venue, which no one had visited yet, might close at night like the Wax Museum.
"Let's go in and take a look first. If things seem off, we'll come out," Liu Chengyi said. "Better not spend the night in the venue. Who knows what's inside."
The others didn't object and quickened their pace toward the Needle Mountain Therapy Venue.
Needle Mountain Therapy had nothing to do with actual therapy. The first thing they saw upon entering was a hanging mannequin, its chest, abdomen, and limbs pierced through by metal skewers three meters long, arranged in a cross shape and placed directly facing the entrance.
On either side of the door were several glass display cases, inside which were arranged some rusted surgical tools.
(Chapter End)