Chapter 37: Our Lady of Foul Bones

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Once the explanation was over, the captain yielded the center position and stepped aside. Then she looked at Zhou Chu. “I’ll leave the team in your hands.”

The others wore dazed expressions, still pondering what the captain had described. Whether or not they signed an anti-law pact with the Furry King and entered the system under its control, diligently cultivating a uniform and strengthening themselves was unquestionably a sound choice. That had already become the consensus among them.

“Hey, Meng Xiyue. Would you choose to cultivate a Seed of Power and embark on the Furry Path?” Yuan Zhu nudged the pink-haired girl beside him with his elbow.

“Of course not. Playing around with it is fine, but I’d never casually sign an anti-law pact with an Outer God.” Meng Xiyue shook her head. Zhou Chu had put it perfectly: remain wary of every anti-law evil god, and reject them all the moment you make contact.

“Why?” Yuan Zhu pressed, eager to learn more.

“Why? Because there are better choices, obviously! Anti-law demon gods always give people the impression of being somewhat illegitimate—liable to kill you at any moment, with their roots severed. If you’re going to devote yourself to a path of power, why not choose one with greater potential, a broader future, stability, legitimacy, and a perfect fit for yourself?” the young woman countered.

Yuan Zhu’s face filled with longing. “Oh? Then what did you choose? Do you think I’d be suitable?”

Meng Xiyue proudly raised her chin. “I’m a college student, you know. Naturally, I follow the traditional academic route. It’s a path that relies on the mind, with no risk of contamination. What’s your educational background? What are you good at? Tell Big Sis, and I’ll see whether you have the qualifications.”

Yuan Zhu’s eyes lit up. “No risk of contamination? How is that possible?”

“The uniform provided by the Furry King carries no risk of contamination in theory, so long as you don’t sign an anti-law pact and stop before entering the supernatural threshold. The academic route works the same way. It relies on the accumulation of intelligence, knowledge, and experience. We have our own tools and media as well, which we use to explore, study, and summarize the laws governing different supernatural forces, thereby making indirect use of them. The process is extremely complicated, but its advantage is safety.”

“Oh…” Yuan Zhu put on an expression of partial understanding, mentally labeling her a scientist. It suited the academic style perfectly.

She had also claimed that, at the very least, she could live to the age of three hundred. It seemed that the universities of the Duling Star all offered research projects on supernatural forces, and that the entire field had already developed into a highly mature system.

Yuan Zhu remembered that the boss of Flame Fang had also promised to arrange a visit for him to the Rain Institute in Running Peace, where he could consult experts about the system best suited to him. The thought suddenly filled him with excitement.

…

The team members excitedly imagined their future paths to greater strength, while the investigator crouched beside the active remains and took several familiar test strips from her pocket.

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Yuan Zhu remembered that the two investigators who had examined the evil-god contamination in the sacrificial hall had used identical test strips.

Seeing his curiosity, Meng Xiyue explained, “Those are contamination test strips issued uniformly by the Security Bureau, five to a set. Each strip is made with powders derived from several types of forbidden contamination. Once a strip comes into contact with contamination of the same origin, it produces a special reaction, allowing for a simple screening test. If you set a contaminated strip alight, the intensity and color of the flame can be used to determine the strength of the contamination.”

Yuan Zhu suddenly understood. At last, he knew what those two investigators had been doing back then.

Zhou Chu dipped one corner of a test strip into the viscous green blood. Her brows furrowed as she stared intently at the distorted lines spreading across its surface. Gradually, an expression of hostility appeared on her face.

The captain asked curiously, “What did you find?”

Zhou Chu rose and set the strip in her hand on fire. A small mass of dark-green flame burst into being.

Her expression grave, she said to the captain, “The situation is extremely bad. I don’t understand why the blood of these mad beasts has mutated into this green color, but I can say with absolute certainty that they’ve been infected by Forbidden Contamination: Filthy Bone Tainted Blood. Filthy Bone Tainted Blood spreads through blood, bites, ingestion, and other means. Its infectivity is extraordinarily strong, and its range of transmission is enormous. In a closed micro-world with limited territory and a simple ecosystem like this one, an outbreak would be nearly impossible to contain. The entire ecosystem could even become filthy and corrupted, reduced to a paradise for Filthy Bone monsters.”

The Duling World was teeming with evil spirits and countless forms of contamination. Its native inhabitants had gradually grown accustomed to them through numb endurance, and long ago stopped finding them strange. After all, there was the Spirit Realm Layer, a super-sized recycling station. Once contamination grew too severe, it could be expelled from the material world and sent upward to ascend.

As long as they survived that round of catastrophe, wouldn’t better days come again?

Hadn’t Earth endured thousands of years of droughts, floods, plagues, locust swarms, wars, and human disasters, one after another, while everyone continued to cling stubbornly to life? And every night, people still cheerfully made more people.

Yet among the countless sources of contamination in the Duling World, there were still a few that were exceptionally terrifying. The righteous powers in the open, together with the great nations, jointly hunted them down and exterminated them, defining them as Forbidden. The moment one was discovered, overwhelming force would be brought to bear to eradicate it.

The Filthy Bone Holy Mother was one of them. In a fantasy novel, it would be nothing less than an apocalypse.

“Are Filthy Bone creatures really that frightening?” Yuan Zhu turned once more to the all-knowing Miss Meng Xiyue. College students were supposed to know everything!

“Um…” The young woman looked at him mournfully. Did he think she was some kind of answering machine?

Still, for the sake of his handsome face, she replied, “An abnormal desire to kill that twists reason, an extraordinarily powerful ability to spread tainted blood, plague-like transmission, terrifying vitality, an abnormally voracious appetite, the distinctive foul-smelling black, tar-like blood-rage, and blood-red bones that erupt through the skin in abnormal growths… These are all characteristics of Filthy Bone creatures.”

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Yuan Zhu stared at the heap of flesh. Cracks constantly opened across its skin, revealing tiny eyeballs before snapping shut again. He marveled at its vigorous vitality. “Why is its blood dark green?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. Because they’re too dangerous, the university refuses to purchase or introduce Filthy Bone specimens for laboratory research. I’ve only seen them in illustrated books, and those were all grotesque giants clad in dark-red skeletal armor. This vegetable-green trash is a first for me too. The world is truly full of strange things.”

Meng Xiyue looked both curious and disgusted. It was as though she had encountered something filthy and was instinctively stepping back to put distance between them.

At that moment, Zhou Chu stood up, snapped a rod-shaped object in half, poured the fuel inside over the vigorous green chunks of flesh, and set them ablaze.

The corpses and remains, which had been madly blinking their eyes, rapidly multiplied and grew rows of tiny mouths lined with sharp teeth. They emitted shrill infant cries, as if singing in chorus and trying to lure nearby creatures with maternal instincts into coming to their rescue.

Yuan Zhu could not endure the cries, which sounded terrifyingly real. Gooseflesh rose over his body as he retreated. Unable to stop himself, he asked, “Is it doing that deliberately? Could it still be alive? Could some fragment of intelligence remain?”

Zhou Chu’s face remained expressionless. “No. It’s completely dead. Its head was blown apart. How could it still have a brain with which to think? The cries of these remains are an instinctive survival mechanism carved into them. If some animal became curious and was drawn by the sound of a crying infant, then lured and seduced by the scent given off by these chunks of flesh, it might be unable to resist taking a bite and become infected by the tainted blood. Even if it managed to suppress its hunger, these chunks of flesh could still launch a sudden counterattack, bite any creature that approached out of curiosity, and accomplish their purpose of spreading the tainted blood.”

With that, she kicked a stone over.

The stone landed among the dead beasts. At once, the surrounding flesh began to writhe and twitch. The sharp mouths that had multiplied by consuming their own vitality opened wide and bit down on the stone, snapping one brittle milk tooth after another.

Then they began to cry even harder.

“They’re that lively?!” Yuan Zhu and his companions were startled and hurriedly retreated. It was difficult to believe that only moments ago they had been kicking one beast after another away with a succession of whipping leg strikes. How had they suddenly become so savage and disgusting?

At that moment, the little mountain goat that had wanted to charge forward and feast to its heart’s content—but had been denied the chance—smelled the scorched stench and began crying just as mournfully.

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