Chapter Ten: Mai Minghe · Gathering of Heroes

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Mai Minghe had never heard of a nest, and she had no idea what these so-called “residents” were, or how dangerous they might be.

But she thought that no matter how bizarre things appeared on the surface, nothing could truly violate the logic underlying its operation.

The hospital inside the nest seemed to function according to the same principles as a real hospital: press the call button, and a “nurse” would come—or rather, a “figure disguised as a nurse” would come—and whoever came would target the person who had pressed the button.

The nurses in a real hospital came to care for patients. What this “nurse” intended to do here… She did not let herself think any further.

If she could not escape the ward, she would soon experience the answer firsthand. Why waste energy imagining it?

To get out, she needed to create several evenly matched competitors for the patient in the bed beside hers.

There was one truth that would remain unchanged, both inside and outside the nest: only when several blades crossed and collided could a gap appear. A single blade would simply pierce straight through her body without distraction.

The real question was: could she squeeze through the narrow gap between the blades?

Clearly, the red-haired man had also understood the motive behind her pressing the button.

The instant he regained his footing, he kicked Bed Two with tremendous force. Its unlocked wheels scraped harshly across the floor, carrying the patient with it as the bed crashed into the cabinet and the bed behind it. Amid the din of impact, he shouted without looking back, “Even if you wanted to leave behind false images, you didn’t need to press the button four times!”

He was right. To be honest, Mai Minghe was beginning to regret it herself.

She had just rolled off the bed again, hoping to use the opening created by the red-haired man to land at the other end of Bed One and run for the door. But before one of her legs could clear the mattress, she abruptly stopped.

A nurse was already standing on the other side of Bed One.

All she could see was the hem of a pale-colored nurse’s uniform.

Frozen on the bed, she stared at that strip of fabric. It seemed that only a few seconds had passed, yet the room was already packed with people.

One humanoid shadow after another stood silently in the dim ward, like a forest rising from the floor. There were far more than four of them.

From the corner of her eye, she could not make out their faces. She could only vaguely see one enormous, perfectly round head after another, all identical. Every head was turned toward this corner of the ward, where two living, breathing people remained.

How had so many come?

“…Everyone’s very kind. I’m actually feeling much better,” she said dryly. “Why don’t a few of you go back?”

As the “nurse” beside the bed slowly lowered its neck toward her, Mai Minghe fell silent.

A great many fragmented, horrifying possibilities flashed through her mind. Yet she had never expected that when the thing lowered its head, she would see a perfectly normal, healthy face.

“Where does it hurt?”

It was a young, gentle, round face. It—or should she say, she?—spoke with a slightly drawn-out Southern accent, as though it had only recently started working and had not yet lost its country twang.

If Mai Minghe looked only at the nurse’s large eyes, with their faintly drooping outer corners, and ignored the round human heads glimpsed in her peripheral vision, ignored the slender black shadows rising section by section behind the red-haired man, each three or four meters tall, she might truly have believed that everything just now had been a hallucination, that she was lying in a hospital and dreaming.

“Stay away from that nurse!” the red-haired man suddenly shouted.

Mai Minghe shuddered and instinctively glanced toward him. Somehow, the red-haired man was half-hanging from the wall, like a bootleg Spider-Man who had failed to master his powers and ended up with his legs in an awkward tangle.

Once he was on the wall, the thing behind him was exposed: a slender black shadow with its head pressed against the ceiling, walking step by step toward Mai Minghe.

There were residents on both sides of the bed. The only exit was at the foot—

As if heaven had heard her thoughts and meant to grant her wish, something suddenly tightened around her ankle. It seemed to seize her and then jerk violently. Mai Minghe toppled onto the bed against her will, the nurse’s face and the ceiling streaking past her eyes as she was dragged straight toward the foot of the bed.

Cold sweat and hot sweat broke out together. Mai Minghe flung out both hands and gripped the edge of the bed, but apart from making the skin of her palms burn with pain, she could do nothing to halt her movement.

The thing beneath the bed that had seized both her feet and was dragging her toward the foot possessed strength no human could match. Not Mai Minghe—even a marine would have been helpless against it. In desperation, she shouted, “My ankle!”

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The nurse tilted its head.

“My ankle hurts!”

Between those few words, most of Mai Minghe’s body had already been dragged off the bed, and her feet were almost touching the floor.

The slender black shadow that had emerged from beneath the neighboring bed was waiting for her at the foot.

Contrary to what she had expected, it was not concerned with where Mai Minghe was being dragged. As she was pulled from the bed, her pajamas had ridden up, exposing her abdomen—and the rings of “snake straps” wrapped around it.

The slender black shadow reached toward her belly.

“Oh?” The young girl’s voice stretched out in a long, warm Southern drawl. “If your ankle is gone, it won’t hurt anymore.”

Every word she had once been taught that a proper lady must never say ran through Mai Minghe’s mind.

At the same moment, the slender black shadow touched her abdomen.

The instant its icy fingertips brushed her skin, Mai Minghe nearly lost consciousness.

It was as though the fibers of her skin, her blood vessels, and her fascia had all been twisted together by that cold touch, knotted into one knot after another. Her mind could not bear the agony of her nerve endings being tangled into a mass, and darkness had already begun to cloud her vision.

The little nurse did nothing to stop the slender black shadow. Her own ankle seemed about to be lost, while at the same time she continued to slide beneath the bed…

Just when Mai Minghe thought all hope was gone, she heard a howl from beneath the bed in a flash of lightning.

The emotion provoked by that howl in a human listener was almost impossible to describe. If one had to find a comparison, it was like discovering that the winning lottery ticket for the grand prize had fallen into a toilet. The tumultuous despair of watching the winning ticket whirl away with the filth was roughly the same as the feeling produced by hearing that howl beneath the bed.

But whatever the case, the grip on her feet finally loosened.

The little nurse made a questioning sound.

It had clearly been standing beside the bed a moment ago, yet somehow it had also reached the foot of the bed. Now it was bending over to inspect Mai Minghe’s ankle.

“There’s something on your ankle,” the little nurse said. “I didn’t pierce it just now. I’ll try again.”

As it spoke, it raised its hand. For the first time, Mai Minghe saw it clearly: protruding from the wrist was not a hand, but a dense cluster of thick, gleaming steel needles.

In that instant, she seemed to understand.

The nurse had been trying to inject her ankle, but a pair of hands had been gripping it. Naturally, the steel needles had pierced those hands instead…

Mai Minghe understood what had happened, but with both elbows braced on the bed and both feet on the floor, she could do no more than barely support herself and keep from collapsing. She still could not move—not with the slender patient standing before her, its body bent halfway over as its long fingers slowly peeled away the “snake straps.”

Whenever it touched her, the agony of her blood vessels and nerves knotting together left her unable even to draw breath, let alone walk or run.

“Belly,” she said, struggling to force the words out as she stared at the countless needle points. “My stomach hurts now… Inject my stomach…”

The little nurse seemed unable to see the other residents—or perhaps it saw them and simply did not consider them worth noticing. It lowered its gaze to Mai Minghe’s abdomen, raised the syringe high, and drove it down.

The slender patient finally stopped removing the “snake straps.” It abruptly swung an arm at the little nurse. The limb unfolded section by section through the air, as though it concealed an unknown number of joints. Though the motion seemed slow, in the blink of an eye it had pulled a hospital privacy curtain from the void, blocking the little nurse and its steel needles behind it.

What kind of bizarre trick was that?

Mai Minghe did not dare remain where she was and wait to see whether the little nurse could emerge from behind the curtain.

She seized the opportunity, sprang up, slipped past the slender patient, and ran desperately toward the ward door. From the moment she had seen the little nurse until now, only a few seconds had passed, yet she already felt as though half her life had been spent.

“Keep going,” said one round-headed figure from the darkness.

Do I need your encouragement?

“Crouch,” said another round-headed figure, standing motionless and speaking in an even tone.

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Who would crouch at a time like this—

Mai Minghe slammed on the brakes, bent low, and crouched. At once, she felt a fierce gust skim over her head. Something struck the doorframe with a heavy thud.

She had been only five or six steps from the ward door, yet now she had no choice but to turn back. Reluctantly, Mai Minghe cast a quick glance behind her and thought she saw a pale hand embedded in the doorframe, attached to an extraordinarily long arm.

Spiderweb cracks spread across the wall around the frame.

If she had not crouched, that hand would have struck the back of her head and smashed her against the doorframe like a fly.

She really had to thank the encouragement of the round-headed figures.

“You there!” Mai Minghe ran toward the cluster of motionless round-headed shadows and called out, “What’s the deal with these enormous heads?”

From behind one of the round-headed figures, a shadow suddenly moved. Mai Minghe had just started in alarm when she heard it hiss through the cold air and answer as though in pain, “I’ve never seen residents like these. I don’t know either.”

The red-haired man had apparently come down from the wall at some point, and he seemed to have been injured in the process. Perhaps to avoid the slender patient, he had also moved toward the cluster of round-headed figures in the center of the room, several shadows separating him from her.

Mai Minghe wanted to ask him what kinds of residents he had seen before, and what exactly residents were, but this was clearly not the time. The slender patient had already turned its head toward them, its crown scraping across the ceiling with a dry rustle.

As though afraid to let it approach, the red-haired man quickly slipped between the round-headed figures. His face was deathly pale beneath a sheen of sweat. Turning sideways, he edged toward the door in small steps, not daring to touch any of the round-headed bodies.

Mai Minghe imitated him and hurried into the forest of round heads.

The instant she saw them clearly, it felt as though her internal organs had suddenly lost all support and dropped into the depths of her abdomen.

She had thought they were identical because, in the dimness, every head appeared enormously swollen and perfectly round. But up close, she saw that the round-headed figures included men and women, the old and the young, each with a different face.

Their human skulls and facial bones had been split apart piece by piece. Then something like a mass of gas beneath the skin had inflated it, forcing the shattered bones and human flesh together into a perfect sphere. The broken fragments of bone, scattered beneath the skin yet still recognizable in shape, brought to mind the continental plates floating across Earth’s surface.

One eye was embedded on each side of the head, like two blisters that had grown from the flesh, turning to follow Mai Minghe’s footsteps. The nasal bone had been cleaved down the middle, stretching two crooked, elongated nostrils across the “face.”

The mouth, however, was normal. Around the corners of the mouth and across the entire face were countless long, deep-purple grooves formed where the stretched fibers of skin had torn apart.

A thought suddenly occurred to Mai Minghe.

“Were these people once human?”

The red-haired man rounded the last round head and left the group, striding toward the door. “Sorry. You’re the residents’ target, and there’s nothing I can do. If I ever see your corpse again, I’ll bring it back to Blackmoor City.”

He was indeed not the target. He was almost at the ward door, and the slender patient paid him no attention.

The nurse was still standing stupidly behind the privacy curtain, with only its shoes visible. Two hands protruded from beneath the bed, motionless.

Only the slender patient continued to pace slowly before the cluster of round-headed figures, as though waiting for an opportunity to strike Mai Minghe.

“It can’t come in,” said a round-headed figure standing to Mai Minghe’s left, suddenly speaking almost as if to comfort her.

The one on her right said, “We’ll surround you.”

Another round head behind her finished, “Then we’ll walk toward the door together, and you’ll be able to get out.”

These things might have been hideous, but their hearts were unreasonably kind, and their plan was sound.

Mai Minghe lowered her head and looked at the floor. Another thought from earlier flashed through her mind.

No matter how bizarre things appeared on the surface, nothing could truly violate the logic underlying its operation.

She suddenly raised her head and shouted, “You there! Stop! Don’t go outside!”

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