nucmednet Chapter 20 The Hungry Okasan
Chapter 20 The Hungry Okasan
As the ride-hailing car stopped...
Bai Yuzhe's gaze swept across Qingyang Bridge, which connects Hanjiang District and Yingwu District. Compared to yesterday, the security measures today were significantly stricter. Dozens of security personnel were on high alert, and everyone traveling from Yingwu District to Hanjiang District was required to undergo a physical examination. The contents of their backpacks were thoroughly searched.
Facing this circumstances,
Bai Yuzhe was used to it. He didn't bring anything with him today, just a laptop and two meat pies to take back for his grandma.
Moving forward with the flow of people
Bai Yuze discovered that Morikawa Kenji had returned to his post, but compared to yesterday, he seemed to have aged more than ten years overnight, his eyes filled with fatigue and anger.
It seems something has happened.
Bai Yuzhe wasn't very familiar with the other party, so he naturally didn't ask any questions.
A few minutes later,
Just as Bai Yuze swiped his card to verify his identity and was about to leave.
The middle-aged man suddenly stopped Bai Yuze and said with a hint of gratitude:
"Bai, I don't know how to express my gratitude, but thank you for saving my son's life last night. Here's 5000 Federal Credits, please take it."
Bai Yuze glanced at the slightly crumpled banknote, slowly shook his head, and said:
"Uncle Jian, Morikawa Hayasuka and I are classmates and both came from Parrot District, so naturally we need to help and support each other. Besides, I didn't help much last night."
"Without you, Zao Su would most likely have been beaten to death by those beasts, so you still have to keep this money. Or perhaps you think it's too little?"
"No, no, it's just that I really didn't help much, and Zao Su's treatment also requires a lot of money. Uncle Jian Er, you definitely need this money more than I do right now."
"..."
The two declined a few times.
Kenji Morikawa didn't press the matter further, but slowly said, "Bai-kun, I've remembered this favor. If you ever need any help in the future, just let me know."
"Uncle Jian, you're exaggerating."
After saying goodbye to Kenji Morikawa, Bai Yuze headed to his neighborhood, Sanyanqiao.
Compared to last night,
It can be observed that the density of the abyssal miasma has decreased significantly by noon today.
But if you want to live here normally,
It would be absolutely impossible in less than ten days to half a month.
A few minutes later,
The deeper Bai Yuze walked into the alley, the dimmer the surrounding light became, and a faint, sweet, and fishy smell permeated the air—a sign that the miasma of the abyss was gradually gathering.
Until he reached a dead end,
He stopped and spoke without turning his head:
"Brothers, you've been following us all this way, aren't you tired? I don't think I've done anything to offend you, have I?"
The voice just fell,
A few snickers came from the shadows.
Four or five young men dressed in flashy clothes strolled out, carrying rough wooden sticks and tapping them idly in their palms.
The leader was a tall, thin man with dyed red hair, a cigarette dangling from his lips, squinting as he sized up Bai Yuze.
"Kid, we've been looking for you for ages!"
Bai Yuzhe sighed helplessly: "Brothers, I'm just an ordinary college student. I'm usually law-abiding and shouldn't have offended you in any way, right?"
"offend?"
The blond thug next to him, as if enraged, suddenly swung his stick and smashed it against the wall with a dull thud. "You touched our Ash Gang boss's woman! Do you know that?"
"How is this possible?"
Bai Yuze chuckled wryly and spread his hands. "What beautiful woman would be interested in a bookworm like me, a loser like me?"
"Still pretending to be stupid!"
Another thug wearing an earring stepped forward, "Someone saw you enter Min Zhirou's dorm yesterday afternoon! You stayed for over an hour!"
"She asked me to pick up a package for her..."
Bai Yuze tried to explain, "Besides, I left as soon as I finished moving the goods, without even having a sip of water."
"Stop talking nonsense!"
Red Hair slammed his cigarette butt on the ground. "If the boss's unhappy, we're unhappy. If we're unhappy, you're asking for trouble!"
"Onii-chan~"
A voice softly sounded.
I don't know when,
Dressed in a JK uniform, Ye Yue quietly stood beside Bai Yuze, blinking her big eyes, tugged at his sleeve, and asked pitifully:
"May I...eat them?"
Her dark green eyes churned with undisguised hunger, and the invisible tentacles spreading from her body surged violently, emanating a thick miasma that almost overwhelmed the original pollution of the area.
"Okasan, what brings you out here?"
"Because I smelled that my older brother brought me food back~"
Bai Yuze sighed softly.
"Sigh, eat up, eat up, we're moving soon anyway."
"Yay!"
In an instant,
Ye Yue's petite body suddenly swelled and deformed, turning into a dark shadow that devoured light, sweeping towards the group at the alley entrance like a surging tide.
Generally speaking,
Humans cannot see the abyssal monsters.
In Professor Mu's words,
Ordinary humans possess a knowledge filter that protects their minds from the effects of miasma.
But as they followed Bai Yuzhe into this polluted area, the reality before them had already been distorted without their realizing it, and so the final scene that remained in their eyes slowly began to change.
In a blink of an eye,
The person standing before me is still the same harmless Bai Yuze.
But in the blink of an eye,
The other party then changed their appearance again.
A black exoskeleton surged from beneath the youth's skin like a tide, four scythe-like limbs bursting from his back, and his head was completely encased in sharp mud and a hard shell, leaving only two narrow slits spewing blue light.
In the blink of an eye,
The harmless boy had transformed into a ferocious monster over two meters tall. The limbs on his back swayed slightly with his breathing, and the sharp blades at the tips of his arms cut through the air, emitting a piercing shriek.
This change,
The thug in front of him froze on the spot, forgetting even to breathe. He'd seen imposters before, but this one didn't look like one at all!
Many thugs quickly rubbed their eyes, and the other person had returned to a clean-looking appearance, looking at them with a puzzled expression.
"Boss, I don't think we did anything to get dusty today!"
"Could it be that I ate too much Lego last night?!"
The gang leader shook his throbbing head, trying to dispel the damned hallucination. He could hear his brothers' heavy breathing and the chattering of their teeth.
"Forget about all that nonsense, let's finish our boss's mission first!"
He hadn't finished speaking when
Something happened that made his scalp tingle.
Standing to his left,
The guy who was just trembling and about to pull out his pistol suddenly let out a short, choked sound, and then he disappeared.
It's not about running away.
It didn't fall down, but rather vanished from sight abruptly, as if erased by an eraser, without even a sound of it falling to the ground.
"Ah, Ah Fei?!"
He turned his head in horror to look at the place where people should have been standing, but there was only an empty cement floor, reflecting a bleak light.
"Monster! There's a monster!"
Another thug screamed in despair and turned to run away.
But his movement was only halfway done when, as if he had hit an invisible wall, his whole body suddenly stiffened, and then, in the same bizarre way, he quickly dissolved into the air from head to toe, leaving not even a piece of clothing behind.
They vanished completely, silently and eerily.
"What's going on?!"
The gang leader's legs went weak, and cold sweat instantly soaked through his back.
He watched helplessly as the people around him disappeared one by one, without a sound or any resistance, simply vanishing into thin air.
There were so many people in the alley just now.
Now all that remained was the ever-growing sound of his own heartbeat from his chest.
That seemingly innocent and harmless college student stood there quietly, doing nothing, like an unrelated bystander, yet he was also the absolute core of this silent massacre.
run!
Must run!
The instinct for survival instantly overwhelmed all chaos and fear.
The gang leader used all his strength to try to turn around and rush towards the alley exit.
However, the instant he turned around, a sharp, icy pain shot through the side of his neck. It wasn't a stinging pain, but a slight sensation like being bitten by a mosquito.
But the next second...
He was overwhelmed by extreme cold and a feeling of suffocation.
In the last moment before his consciousness completely sank into darkness, something suddenly seemed to come to mind.
Could it be that,
This ordinary-looking student is not human at all.
He is not a fake person.
Instead, it is an abyssal monster.
And it's a monstrous abyss beast that can transform into humans!!!
A few minutes later,
Yeyue transformed back into human form, her little hands stroking her round belly contentedly, and she even let out a loud burp.
"I'm full!"
Bai Yuzhe walked to her side, took out a tissue from his pocket, and carefully wiped away the bloodstains from the corners of her mouth and fingertips as if taking care of a greedy child.
"Okasan, how many times have I told you to be careful about personal hygiene when you eat, and not to make a mess everywhere."
Hehe~
Ye Yue didn't say anything, just squinted her eyes and let him do as he pleased. After he wiped her clean, she proudly raised her chin, and a nimble beard rolled up a stack of bright red RMB bills and handed it to Bai Yuze.
"Little sticky rice cake, this is the pocket money I just earned, it's all for you~ Be careful with it!"
Bai Yuzhe didn't mind and put it all into his pocket. He knew that if he didn't accept the pocket money from Okasan, the other party would be very angry.
"Okay, Okasan, let's go back and pack up, then we'll get ready to move."
"Eh..."
Yeyue followed behind, seemingly wanting to say something but ultimately keeping quiet.
creak-
As Bai Yuze pushed open his front door, a pungent, sweet-smelling odor, unique to creatures from the abyss, wafted out.
Visible to the naked eye,
The living room looked as if it had been attacked by a small-scale horde of monsters, with the walls covered with scratches of varying depths and splattered dark red stains.
The sofa, which was barely usable before, was torn in several huge rips, with the filling scattered all over the floor, covered with a wet, fluorescent green slime.
The wooden table and chair legs were cut in half, and you could vaguely see a layer of slowly evaporating acid corrosion marks on them.
Not just the living room.
The bedroom was a complete mess.
The curtains were torn into strips, and the glass windows had spiderweb-like cracks. The wardrobe was open and askew, and the mattress in the center of the bedroom was completely sunken, with charred burn marks remaining at the edges.
The whole house,
It was as if they had been completely cleansed by creatures from the abyss.
This scene,
Even if a thief comes along, you'll have to leave him two hundred with tears in your eyes.
"Okasan!"
Bai Yuze's voice was very calm, so calm that it made one's heart tighten.
"Burp~"
Like a child who had done something wrong, Yeyue slowly moved out from behind him, her tentacles trying to hook his fingers in a fawning manner, but he gently avoided them.
She lowered her head.
An uneasy light flickered in his eerie green eyes:
"Onii-chan, after I fed you, I was so hungry, and you wouldn't let me go out hunting. I couldn't help it... so I let out a little blood."
The voice grew softer and softer.
Its whiskers curled up even tighter.
Bai Yuzhe silently surveyed the mess.
Don't think about it,
He could quickly recreate the scene in his mind.
Even he couldn't resist the allure of Yeyue's primordial miasma, let alone the abyssal beasts and pseudo-humans roaming the darkness around him.
Bai Yuze slowly turned around, his gaze falling on Ye Yue.
He then squatted down.
He gently pressed his forehead against her cool, smooth forehead, his voice low and clear:
"Okasan, I'm angry not because you're eating, but because I'm worried that what you're doing will attract something you can't handle alone. For example, the Gladiolus Judgment Team of the Judgment Bureau, the Threshold Guard Team of the Security Bureau... If we encounter such a situation, and I can't be with you, I..."
Speaking of which,
Bai Yuzhe paused for a moment, then looked at the other person earnestly and said slowly:
"Okasan, if you're really hungry, just text me. No matter where you are, I'll come right back. If we need to eat, we'll eat together; if the worst happens and we die, we'll die together."
"Huh?"
Ye Yue suddenly raised her eyes and met his eyes, which were inches away from hers.
There was no blame in it.
It was a deep, unyielding concern, and an almost overflowing seriousness.
The girl's face stiffened slightly, as if she understood something.
But the next second...
Her face suddenly lit up with excitement: "Does that mean that as long as Onii-chan is by my side, I can eat whatever I want?"
"Dream on."
Bai Yuze sighed and rubbed his forehead in exasperation.
"No matter how many times we move, we eventually need to find a place to settle down. I've been investigating Holly City for a long time. The forces here are deeply entrenched, and there are fake humans, monsters, cults, and gangs everywhere. The Security Bureau and magical girls simply can't handle it all... The chaos has actually become a protective shield for people like us."
Bai Yuze gazed at the unfamiliar world outside the window, his voice gradually calming down, as if speaking to Ye Yue, or perhaps planning for himself:
"Once I join Genji Technology and obtain legal status and resources, I will be able to access more compliant and legal samples of abyssal creatures and calamity beast cores... At that time, I will be able to easily obtain your food without having to resort to such dangerous methods."
In the following time
He said a lot,
It's about the future, about hiding, about how to live cautiously yet openly in this hostile and unfamiliar world.
But when he lowered his head
But they found the girl absentmindedly using her whiskers to pick up a broken piece of the calamity beast's forelimb from the ground, chewed it for a moment, and then spat it out with a look of disgust.
"Tch, it all stinks~"
……
In that instant,
Bai Yuzhe then realized that he had wasted the past ten minutes of his speech.
But what can be done?
The mother I recognized myself
Let's keep it.
"alright,"
Bai Yuze straightened up, patted non-existent dust off his hands, and said, "Since there's not much to pack, let's get ready to move."
"Yay!"
When Ye Yue heard the word "moving," her eyes lit up immediately, as if she had suddenly been given a shot of adrenaline.
"Let's move! Let's move quickly!"
"You really enjoy moving that much?" Bai Yuze looked at her helplessly.
"Because the food tastes different in every place!"
Ye Yue blurted out,
Realizing she had let something slip, she quickly covered her mouth with her two little hands and looked at him with her big, blinking eyes.
Bai Yuzhe shook his head and didn't say anything more.
He knew, of course, that he couldn't possibly keep an eye on Ye Yue every single moment.
The only thing that can be done is
The idea is to guide her to eat those fake humans and abyssal monsters that harm human society; after all, it's never too much to eat those things.
It's also less likely to attract unwanted magical girls.