“Hee… ha.”
The laughter was like a tape recorder playing a damaged cassette.
Stuttering, eerie, grating—like the window had lost all soundproofing.
A chill exploded from Zhou Kai’s tailbone and instantly crawled over his entire back.
This… this was…
Uncontrollable terror enveloped his whole body in an instant, making him forget even the instinct to retreat.
The edges of his vision began to blacken in waves. The world spun.
The sword hilt in his hand was already soaked through with cold sweat.
A slender, pallid hand, utterly bloodless, pressed against the French window. Like a blind person groping around, it slowly, inch by inch, found the window latch.
It… could open the window?
It.
Was coming in!
Click.
A soft sound, accompanied by Zhou Kai’s increasingly violent heartbeat.
The French window opened.
Huff!
Zhou Kai’s lips trembled as he barely forced out a breath of turbid air.
Crash!
The long-accumulated wind and rain seemed to have found an outlet, smashing straight into Zhou Kai’s face.
The enormous raindrops carried a rotten stench.
Yet Zhou Kai, relying on sheer vicious resolve, kept his eyes wide open.
Creak… groan…
The sound of bare feet stepping onto the wooden floor rang out, sticky and wet.
The footsteps had no rhythm at all, staggering and faltering.
The oil was exhausted, the lamp extinguished; the room was pitch-black.
Boom!
A bolt of ghastly white lightning happened to explode at that very moment, its intense light tearing through the night and flooding the entire room.
In that flash of brightness that lasted less than a second,
Zhou Kai saw clearly what stood before him.
The thing was as thin as a bamboo pole, its back hunched, yet its shoulders nearly brushed the ceiling.
A huge, rotten head, so decayed its original features could no longer be made out, was looking down at him from above.
Two gray-white eyeballs had been forced out of their sockets by tangled, rootlike granulation tissue and hung outside.
At the very center of the eyeballs were two pupils the size of melon seeds.
Within those pupils was a condescending scrutiny and mockery.
That gaze was like that of a bored person deciding how to pinch to death an ant by his feet.
The absolute suppression from the top of the food chain sent goosebumps crawling all over Zhou Kai.
His body was afraid.
That slender, pallid hand slowly lifted and pressed down toward Zhou Kai’s head.
The palm was almost three times the size of his head.
Zhou Kai stood motionless, as though nailed in place.
Boundless despair and fear fermented in the depths of his heart, churned, and finally brewed into a fierce, violent fury.
Huff…
Zhou Kai sucked in a huge breath. The scorching rage in his chest and the surge of adrenaline instantly let him seize back control of his body.
That hand paused in midair for an instant, then its speed abruptly soared, pressing down with a sharp whistling of wind!
But!
Whoosh!
The recovered Zhou Kai was even faster!
He twisted his waist and swung his sword. The heavy two-handed sword carved a rust-red arc of death through the darkness, arriving after yet striking first, chopping viciously toward that pallid hand!
The nearly three-kilogram greatsword was driven by him to its limit. Part of the rust on the blade was shaken loose by the violent force, revealing the pitch-black metal beneath.
Carrying Zhou Kai’s fury and killing intent…
With one sword, he cleaved through the long night!
Boom!
Another bolt of lightning lit up, turning the room blindingly white.
The blade cleanly severed that pallid hand, then crashed onward into the fallen folding screen with a piercing clang.
“Haaagh!!!”
The tall monster let out a heart-rending shriek.
This time, that eerie sound could no longer shake Zhou Kai in the slightest. His movements did not even pause for an instant.
Using his right foot as a pivot, his body erupted with terrifying rotational force, driving the greatsword to carve a massive arc of more than two hundred and seventy degrees through the air!
Clang!!
The power pushed to its limit caused the front third of the blade to wedge brutally into the monster’s waist, cutting more than two-thirds of the way through!
The monster instantly lost its balance and staggered headfirst toward the bedroom wall.
Bang!
Zhou Kai planted a foot on the monster’s waist and used the leverage to pull out his sword.
Perhaps the blade was too rough, wedged tight in the monster’s bones; when he pulled, he actually failed to draw it out.
“Fuck, my strength is still far from enough…”
Zhou Kai’s face twisted ferociously as he cursed.
A faint light flashed in his left hand gripping the sword, and the bloodstained hatchet appeared out of thin air.
Both hands clenched tight!
Boom!
Boom!
Thunder rolled and lightning flashed.
Zhou Kai’s frenzied shadow, like a malevolent ghost, was cast across the monster’s body.
Perhaps it was an illusion, but Zhou Kai actually saw a fleeting flash of fear in those needlepoint pupils.
But he did not hesitate in the slightest. He raised the axe high and brought it hacking down at that rotten, mangled head!
The heavy axe blade crashed into the monster’s skull with a muffled impact like thunder.
Its face instantly caved inward, and gray-white brain matter mixed with viscous bodily fluid burst outward like popping pulp.
Once!
Twice!
The axe blade became a storm, falling madly.
Fluids flew everywhere.
Zhou Kai was like a maddened beast, venting the fear that had been suppressed to its limit.
It is precisely because humans have fears they must overcome that courage is born.
As for that monster’s vital signs, they had already vanished completely the moment the first axe fell.
“That’s all you’ve got!”
A dozen seconds later,
waves of soreness came from Zhou Kai’s shoulders. Only then did he stop chopping, prop himself against the wall, and gasp harshly for breath.
He was covered all over in gray-white mucus, his eyes bloodshot, his hair whipped into a mess by the storm, cutting a wretched figure.
【Killed “Wanderer,” gained Universal Experience Points *7】
【Thanks to Occultism Skill lv1, unexpected gain: a segment of memory】
Huff…
Zhou Kai exhaled a long, trembling breath, too lazy to bother with the axe buried deep in the brain matter.
He staggered over to the balcony window.
He let the torrential rain pour over him, washing away the filth on his head and face.
The bone-piercing cold made him clearer-headed than ever before.
And more excited than ever before.
By the soundless lightning that flickered from time to time on the horizon, Zhou Kai looked down from above and gazed into the distance.
His sight passed over the dark shadows wandering through the streets, saw the clock tower at the center of the town, saw a corner of the distant lake, and the enormous manor by the lakeside.
He saw the forest and mountains beyond the town, and saw an unimaginably enormous hand slowly rising from behind the peaks.
He saw, on the mountainside in the other direction, that Gothic structure piercing straight into the clouds, so vast it was like the residence of gods and demons.
This was the first time Zhou Kai had taken in part of Soraka Town’s appearance in a single view.
“That hand… fine. I just slaughtered a common soldier.”
That colossal hand instantly swept away the joy of victory that had just risen in his heart.
At the same time, he sensed that even more dark shadows seemed to be approaching this place.
Zhou Kai decisively retreated indoors, closed the French window, and at the same time drew the heavy curtains on both sides—curtains that, shockingly, had not rotted away.
【You have consumed Universal Experience Points *1】
【The oil lamp’s fuel has been refilled, but if you want its light to be visible only to you, more Experience Points must be invested】
When refilling the oil lamp’s fuel, Zhou Kai had realized that light was useful to him, but it was equally useful to the monsters. So an idea had occurred to him: to make this light his alone.
The subtitles’ prompt let him know that the idea was feasible… only, the price was not small.
“Later.”
“Now, it’s time to deal with the spoils.”
After relighting the oil lamp, Zhou Kai turned the light up a little.
At last, he could carefully observe this monster called the “Wanderer.”
It wore a set of tattered clothes completely mismatched with its body size. Its hands and feet were slender to an absurd degree, like the hands of an ordinary person had been stretched and enlarged five or six times.
Its body was hunched, propping up a height of more than two and a half meters, yet its waist was pitifully thin, only as thick as an ordinary person’s.
The strangest part was still that enormous head…
Only then did Zhou Kai discover that the monster’s teeth were actually two rows of rust-red iron nails forcibly driven into its upper and lower jaws…