Chapter 12 – There’s Someone Here!?

Yu Sheng said his goodbye to Eileen, but this time after finishing his words he didn’t hang up right away.

Not because the thing on the other side had suddenly turned vegetarian, but because this terrifying Amalgamated Beast had, for some unknown reason, fallen into a kind of dazed stupor.

It stood in the night wind, dozens of eyes tangled chaotically across its mass of flesh staring with a strange “gaze” fixed hard upon its prey. As odd as it was to say so, Yu Sheng felt he could genuinely read “confusion” in those eyes — the kind of confusion you get when your mouth and your stomach have been trying to balance their books for half an hour and still can’t make the numbers add up.

Eileen was still anxiously calling out to him in his mind, but all of Yu Sheng’s attention was locked onto the horrifying monster before him. Eileen’s voice felt as distant to him as if it were coming from behind a thick curtain. He tensed his muscles, felt his heart pounding like a war drum, and every twitch of muscle and surge of vein on that creature’s body was etched clearly into his eyes.

Though he had already steeled himself for something like this when he had “revived” back in the ruined temple, actually facing the crushing weight of death again still filled Yu Sheng with immense tension.

The one thing that was different from last time was that the fear mixed in with that tension had greatly subsided, replaced instead by something that even he himself found unfamiliar — excitement.

Then, he suddenly felt something.

It was muscles contracting, thick turbid blood pooling, hunger surging deep in his gut, and from within a murky, chaotic mind came the command to feed. In that extremely brief instant, a sharp sense of alarm surged within him, and he traced its outline with precision.

The beast was about to strike — from the left, but only as a feint. The real killing blow was a barbed, blade-edged serpent tail that would come whipping around from behind.

The beast lunged forward. A gaping maw split open from the tip of one of its limbs and snapped toward Yu Sheng’s left side — but before it had even leapt, Yu Sheng had already reacted. Without much thought, he twisted sharply to the side just as the warning in his heart had told him to, then immediately threw himself forward in a rapid lunge, moving with a speed he couldn’t even believe himself.

He noticed that his previously sprained waist had fully recovered at some point. It seemed that ever since he had “revived,” this body had been in an almost unbelievably good state.

The beast’s lunge missed completely. The serpent tail that had been sneaking in at a treacherous angle only barely grazed the “prey’s” back. Yu Sheng felt the pressure of the wind from behind and the sensation of brushing past the edge of death made his hair stand on end — but more than that spine-chilling feeling, what struck him most was sheer disbelief: he had actually dodged it?! What in the world had just happened?

But he had no time to think it over, because the next wave of danger came surging from behind him. This time there wasn’t enough time to dodge, and he could only barely scramble back to his feet after a clumsy roll on the ground before a razor-sharp claw came crashing down straight at his head.

In his desperation, he could only act on instinct and raise his hands, using his weak human arms to block that claw as it came down like a falling meteor.

A tremendous crash rang out. The air rippled and scattered grass and dust for several meters in every direction. Searing pain flooded his entire body, and Yu Sheng felt as though a dozen bones had been shattered all at once. He let out a stifled grunt, couldn’t catch his breath, and staggered back two steps —

But he had blocked it. He had truly and completely blocked that blow.

Yu Sheng stared at his own hands in astonishment. He saw that his left hand was bent at an unnatural angle — clearly the bone had genuinely been broken — yet the pain was fading at an astonishing speed, and the twisted bone seemed to be slowly mending itself.

He still clearly remembered the monster’s first attack on him. He remembered the creature’s true power — every inch of muscle on that thing could crush a human body with ease, and Yu Sheng was one hundred percent certain that if the beast had struck with its full force, no number of broken bones would have been enough to block it.

But the beast clearly wasn’t going to give him much time to think. After landing, it adjusted for only a second or two before this famished giant let out a chaotic and furious roar and lunged at the irritating “prey” before it once more.

A bone-cutting gale surged forward as the leaping beast descended like a mountain falling from the sky. Yu Sheng reacted ahead of time once again, rolling ungracefully to the side, then leaping back to his feet and jumping clear of a tail strike that could have split a mountain. But a moment later, before he could steady himself, that same tail swung back and swept him off his feet. Right after that, the beast’s body split apart at its midsection, and a revolting, constantly-writhing “tongue” like some grotesque tentacle shot out through the night, coiling tightly around the off-balance Yu Sheng and dragging him violently back.

Yu Sheng braced hard with both hands to keep that “tongue” from cleaving him in two at the chest — or at least to keep it from happening so quickly. He watched helplessly as he was hauled in front of the beast. Its body had split open into a massive hole at the center, and within that hole countless fangs and blades churned and scraped against each other like the mouth of a creature starving beyond all reason.

In the instant before he was dragged into that enormous maw, Yu Sheng’s feet kicked out with sudden explosive force. The rock beneath his feet cracked and shattered with a bang, and the tremendous recoil even made the beast stumble.

Without pausing to wonder why he had such strength, Yu Sheng seized that fleeting breath of respite and, drawing on almost every last ounce of his strength, let out a roar as he wrenched apart the tongue coiled around him. Then he snatched up a sharp shard of rock from the ground and threw himself at one of the beast’s bulging, madly trembling, clouded eyeballs on its flank.

The tongue was severed, and the beast let out a hair-raising howl as blood sprayed from its midsection. It staggered, struggling to regain its balance, all dozens of its eyes fixed with fury and hunger upon the prey before it —

It smelled so good. So wonderfully good…

The scent of blood was seeping into his nostrils, stimulating the nerves of the famished one, awakening some kind of… instinct that had been dormant for a very long time.

It really did smell so good.

Yu Sheng felt his heart pounding wildly. He felt something blazing within his blood, nearly on the verge of boiling. A kind of wild joy was slowly welling up from deep inside him, and he tried hard to identify what that joy actually was. Finally, he understood.

It was the delight of being about to feed. The reward for a hunger that was about to be satisfied.

That beast — that mass of stacked flesh and blood — that chaotic and fallen soul — that…

Good meat.

The sharp shard of rock was slowly being ground to powder in his grip. He breathed in heavy pulls, and felt the world around him slow down. He threw himself at the beast, and the beast threw itself at him. Food embracing food. In a daze, he had the strange feeling that he hadn’t eaten in over twenty years, or at least hadn’t eaten “real food.” He embraced the hideous limbs along the beast’s flank, and the beast “embraced” him back with far greater force, snapping one bone after another within him.

But Yu Sheng seemed to feel nothing. He had already sunk his teeth into the beast’s flesh and blood. It wasn’t like last time — a final, desperate, and furious counterattack before death. He had a new mindset now —

He wouldn’t die. He would come back. This beast could kill him once, twice, or countless times, but he would always come back.

And each time, he would understand a little better how to deal with it.

It might take a long time.

But he would enjoy this good meat, bit by bit.

The dozen or so eyes on the beast’s flank trembled wildly, and a few of them seemed to sense something. They slowly, finally, focused on Yu Sheng.

A great maw lined with razor teeth was already gnawing into Yu Sheng’s side, yet within those eyes, a layer of fear seemed to be gradually rising.

Yu Sheng felt his body being torn apart piece by piece by the beast. He knew that this time, as expected, he had lost again — he would die, be devoured by this creature.

At least this time, he still couldn’t win.

All the same, how long he had managed to hold out this time was far beyond anything he had expected. He had originally assumed he’d die in a single exchange, yet here he had actually traded blows back and forth with this beast for quite a while.

“Eileen…” Before his consciousness sank into darkness, Yu Sheng tried calling out deep in his mind.

Eileen’s voice rang out almost immediately: “Yu Sheng! Yu Sheng, are you okay?! I kept calling for you just now and you wouldn’t answer…”

“I’m fine, I just said goodbye too early. Now I’m really going…”

He paid no more attention to Eileen’s panicked cries, and simply waited quietly for death to arrive.

Yet just before that heavy darkness descended, he suddenly heard a sound from nearby — a clear, unmistakably real sound that existed right there in this valley.

“Don’t be afraid! I’m coming, I’ll save you!”

Yu Sheng’s consciousness was already badly clouded, yet in that moment it jolted into a brief flash of clarity. A thunderous shock exploded through his mind —

Someone? There’s someone here?! There’s a person in this place?!

He forced his eyelids open with great effort and looked toward the direction of the voice. He saw a figure charging rapidly from a distance. He made out what vaguely looked like a girl in tattered clothes, but a second later, he caught sight of other shapes trailing behind her, fluttering through the night.

What was that? A tail? A fox?

A person? No — a subsonic headbutt.

Yu Sheng watched in despair as the figure who had cried out to save him accelerated a second time through the air like a rocket-assisted artillery shell, head lowered and charging straight at him. The beast that was currently gnawing on him happened to shift its body to the side at that exact moment — very possibly on purpose — so he became the direct target of that figure’s unwavering charge.

“What the f—”

He only managed to squeeze two syllables out through clenched teeth.

The girl hurtling toward him hadn’t even seen what was in front of her.

The subsonic headbutt connected with Yu Sheng’s chest, and then he no longer had a chest.

Nothing below the neck.

Gone, as if evaporated.

“Girl, you… goddamn… missed…”

And then, Yu Sheng was rescued to death.

(End of Chapter)