Chapter 45 – Contact, Taking Root

Yu Sheng’s mind was submerged in a vast and indescribable tide of darkness. The shadow projected by the ravenous ‘Hunger’ entity was even more staggering in scale than he had imagined — and yet that very scale felt exactly as ‘Hunger’ ought to be: the greatest, most primal terror, suspended above the heads of all living things and buried deep within every living heart.

Then, within the depths of that shadow, he perceived the slowly drifting, writhing… ‘entity’.

It was difficult for him to describe what it actually was. It seemed to have countless tentacles and bloated, proliferating masses of flesh; every part of its body was constantly shifting shape, even collapsing into new structures or voids in real time as Yu Sheng watched it. Its surface was pitch black, yet deep within the tangled weave of those tentacles, colours seemed to endlessly fluctuate, carrying a chaotic, disorienting quality that could gradually unravel a person’s mind.

The instant Yu Sheng perceived that thing, the thing perceived Yu Sheng.

There was no time to react. Countless new tentacles and branching structures erupted from within it in the blink of an eye, and those malice-laden tendrils arrived in an instant, suddenly coiling around Yu Sheng’s mind.

Yu Sheng felt ten thousand voices explode within his ‘head’ all at once. He had no way to resist or dodge — his mind had already formed an irrevocable connection with something far larger. That thing howled from the depths of his consciousness, transmitting frenzied and terrifying thoughts. But the next second, Yu Sheng sensed that the thing seemed to possess no true intellect or thoughts of its own —

It was merely some vast and feral ‘instinct’, and the frenzied impulses and bewitchments he felt were nothing more than tools mimicked by this enormous instinct for the sake of ‘hunting’.

They originated from the living beings it had once devoured — the madness and despair those creatures had felt at the very end of their hunger, the lingering echoes of their dying screams. All of this had converged to form the monster’s entire malice, and it was this that had allowed what was originally nothing but an aggregate of instincts to grow to what it was today, transforming it into a powerful ‘entity’ that would actively ‘seek prey’, actively bewitch and coerce its victims.

And it was still growing at a rapid pace. The capacity for thought that had originally been mere mimicry was now gradually becoming its true ‘cognition’.

Now, it had begun to attempt to dismantle Yu Sheng’s mind, trying to turn this uninvited visitor into new ‘nourishment’ for itself.

A sensation of his mind gradually ‘dissolving’ crept in. Yu Sheng felt himself being rapidly ‘digested’, turning into a part of that monster. He struggled with all his might to break free from the tentacles coiling around him, only to find that the harder he struggled, the stronger those tentacles became.

And then, at that very moment, Yu Sheng suddenly felt something.

He snapped his gaze toward that vast entity endlessly writhing in the darkness. The next second, he saw countless eyes of all different shapes surge up amid the shifting colours in the depths of that darkness — and among those eyes… one pair was his.

Then he felt his vision lurch again. In the darkness he saw countless tentacles stretching forward, their ends coiled around a humanoid silhouette that was endlessly struggling.

He felt the monster consuming and absorbing him.

He felt himself devouring something.

He was feeding.

He was feeding.

At the moment when Yu Sheng could barely discern where his own perspective lay, when he could no longer distinguish the boundary between himself and that monster, Eileen’s startled cry suddenly drifted from the depths of the darkness —

“What the hell?!”

The next second, Yu Sheng felt a violent plunge downward.

That agonising experience of being jolted awake from last time — he went through it all over again in an instant.

Yu Sheng’s eyes snapped open. The sharp, thunderous pain in his head and the aches throughout his entire body overwhelmed all his senses in the blink of an eye. He rolled over, clutching the bedside table and retching violently, feeling as though he wanted to vomit his own heart out, yet nothing came up. Only after a long, drawn-out dozen or so seconds did the terrible after-effects finally begin to slowly subside.

Yu Sheng leaned against the bedside table and struggled to prop himself up. He saw the faint light of early dawn filtering through the curtains into the room, and saw the doll with the picture frame on its back sitting on his bed, its tiny face filled with enormous unease and anxiety.

“Are you alright?! Is it still you?” Eileen scrambled over on all fours, grabbing Yu Sheng’s arm and shaking it frantically. “Do you still remember who I am?”

“Stop shaking, stop shaking, I’m still dizzy… damn, why does everything hurt…” Yu Sheng quickly cut the doll off. “I’m awake, Eileen, I’m fine.”

Eileen stared at Yu Sheng for several seconds before finally letting go. “You scared me to death! You — you — you… you suddenly went completely still, like you were dead. Your mental response vanished entirely! Then you suddenly came back to life, your whole mind in chaos. I didn’t even know what I was waking up! You scared me to death! Scared me to death!”

Eileen said ‘scared me to death’ several times in a row, clearly having been frightened badly. Yu Sheng, however, had little energy left over to comfort this small doll. The enormous shock from establishing a deep link with ‘Hunger’ still lingered at the bottom of his heart — it even felt as though a vast shadow still remained. Yu Sheng fought to shake off its influence, leaning against the headboard and catching his breath for a long while before his mind finally cleared completely.

“Eileen, that thing is dangerous,” he said.

The small doll stood on Yu Sheng’s stomach. “Obviously I know it’s dangerous! I told you from the start that thing was dangerous!”

“No — I mean it’s more dangerous than you know. It’s almost learned how to truly think.”

Eileen’s eyes went wide and she froze.

“Originally it had only instinct. It was only after devouring countless minds that it learned the methods of coercion and bewitchment,” Yu Sheng said, leaning against the headboard and looking into Eileen’s eyes. “Simple, brutal killing could only yield limited ‘nourishment’. Driving a mind to madness through bewitchment and coercion, on the other hand, could yield astonishing ‘sustenance’. That thing didn’t understand this from the beginning — it learned it gradually. And now… it is almost on the verge of developing true cognition.”

A trace of horror finally slowly crept across Eileen’s face. But right after, she suddenly realised something else.

“How do you know all this?!” The doll surged forward abruptly, her face nearly touching the tip of Yu Sheng’s nose. “You…”

“…I formed a deep link with that thing. Deeper than we originally planned,” Yu Sheng said without concealing anything. “For a moment, I felt as though I had even become a part of that monster… and so in the depths of the darkness, I saw its most primal form, and the secret of its endless growth.”

“Wh — what the hell!” Eileen practically leapt into the air, followed immediately by a torrential outpouring of frantic rambling. “I said from the start this wouldn’t work! That it was dangerous! No one knows what could happen, and you still had to try — what do we do, what do we do, what do we do… it’s all over! It definitely took root! You weren’t just targeted, you got chewed on! ‘Hunger’ has absolutely taken root in your mind aaaaah — it’s over! All — over!”

The small doll grew louder and more frantic, crawling all over the bed and across Yu Sheng’s stomach. Yu Sheng tried several times to interrupt her but failed, until at last he was forced to grab her and hoist her into mid-air to get her to quiet down. “Calm down, Eileen. Calm down.”

“Calm down my ass! ‘Hunger’ has already taken root inside you! Aren’t you even a little bit nervous?!” Eileen swayed in mid-air. “It will grow inside your mind, bigger and bigger, and then — ‘bang’! You’re finished! Even hiding in the real world won’t matter! Do you even know the state you’re in right now… don’t say you can resurrect! This thing has taken root in your mind! Your body can renew, but can your mind? Are you sure that dying and coming back can shake off something that’s ‘taken root’ like this?”

Yu Sheng knew all of this, and yet he couldn’t understand why he felt not even the slightest sense of crisis that his life was counting down to its end. Even the ‘spiritual intuition’ that had grown increasingly sharp recently gave him no warning.

He simply understood intellectually that the situation was dangerous, yet his heart was filled with an abnormal calm.

But he knew he couldn’t let that calm show too plainly — it would only make Eileen even more frantic.

“As long as we destroy ‘Hunger’ before then — I mean, as long as we kill the ‘entity instance’ that is influencing me, there won’t be a problem, right?” Yu Sheng tried to redirect Eileen’s attention. “The part that has ‘taken root’ will take some time before it erupts. We still have time.”

“Time… right, we still have time — quickly, we have to be quick!” Eileen was indeed instantly redirected, and at the same time belatedly noticed she was being held in mid-air. “Put me down! Put me down now. We set out immediately and go kill that ‘entity instance’ — yes, yes, right away, while you still don’t feel anything yet…”

Yu Sheng let out a quiet breath and set Eileen down on the bed, then prepared to get up.

But the moment he made any larger movement, waves of aching pain shot through his limbs and bones, and he immediately sucked in a sharp breath.

“Hiss — why does it hurt so much…” Yu Sheng looked down at himself in bewilderment. “I could have sworn the after-effects disappeared pretty quickly last time I was jolted awake… and I didn’t ache all over back then either. Why does it feel like someone beat me up…”

While he was saying this, the doll who had been frantic just a moment ago suddenly went quiet. Then Eileen began casually edging toward the foot of the bed while muttering under her breath, “Sometimes… sometimes being jolted awake does cause some physical after-effects…”

“Something’s not right!” Yu Sheng caught on at once, pushing up his sleeve. “I was literally hit — there are teeth marks on my arm!”

Eileen had already crawled to the foot of the bed. “You grind your teeth in your sleep. You bit yourself.”

“Teeth marks this small, and you’re saying I bit myself?”

“Wasn’t I just trying to wake you up?! If the normal methods won’t work, don’t I have to use some unconventional ones?”

Eileen stood at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips, utterly unabashed. Then she turned, jumped down to the floor, and bolted for the door at full speed.

(End of Chapter)