Chapter 19: The Cannibalistic Hotpot Restaurant (Part Eight)

Zhu Ning rolled to one side, while Liu Niannian huddled in a corner, curling her body as small as possible.

Zhu Ning spoke: "The boss was a defective product. At his wit's end, he saw a recruitment notice for experiments from Eternal Pharma. They sent him cultivation chambers and therapeutic serums. The experimental direction was likely low-dose injections of pollution factors to gradually induce changes in the human body, but the experiment failed."

Zhu Ning stared intently at the mirror. With every word she spoke, the room underwent a transformation. The reflections of Zhu Ning and Liu Niannian vanished from the mirror; it no longer appeared to be a mirror at all.

Liu Niannian realized that Zhu Ning was not speaking to her—she was speaking to the source of the pollution.

"The boss’s body began to mutate. The grotesque external changes were hard to hide, so he had to move into the basement to avoid people. Only Yang Tao was allowed to go down to care for him. He and Yang Tao had an agreement: if anything happened to him, Yang Tao was to kill him immediately."

The ringing sound in the restaurant was the hospital bed call bell.

The guillotine-style blade had likely been prepared at that time; the hot pot restaurant boss had created a fail-safe device for himself. If he truly turned into an uncontrollable pollutant, he wanted Yang Tao to trigger the mechanism at once.

"He thought that by hiding away, he could avoid harming others, but he didn't know that once one becomes a pollutant, they continuously radiate pollution, mentally infecting those around them."

"The first to be infected was Xiao Hui. While working the register, she felt as if the cash drawer was full of fingers. She suspected the meat the boss served to customers was tainted, and she looked at Yang Tao as if he were a pig's head. Every day, she was dazed and paranoid, seeing threats in everything."

*Swish—*

Zhu Ning did not fully dodge the fourth attack; the blade sliced across her back. More experienced than last time, she quickly patched the wound and applied a healing agent.

"Later, Xiao Hui left. She probably didn't die in this restaurant at all; she simply quit. After she submitted her resignation, the boss let her go. But after she left, panic spread, and others began to overthink."

"Wang Ming was already suffering from mental contamination. In his eyes, Xiao Hui’s departure meant she was dead. He started to guess: had Xiao Hui’s flesh ended up in the back kitchen? Had she been boiled in a hot pot? What kind of meat was actually being served in the hot pot restaurant?"

From the very beginning, the "Hao Zailai" Hot Pot Restaurant was nothing more than a mass mental contamination event.

Zhu Ning scanned the room, speaking while searching for a way to break the deadlock. "Wang Ming suspected he would be the next to die, so he began watching the boss, wanting to strike first. He entered the boss’s pharmacy room and learned that he had been injecting serum to conduct body-modification experiments."

"Wang Ming smashed a hole in the floor of the pharmacy room and saw the boss’s secret: the boss was, in fact, a defective product."

*Boom—*

A strange sound emanated from the mirror. Liu Niannian took one look and nearly died of fright.

They were moving. The mirrors were moving. The mirrors on all four walls were slowly closing in. If Zhu Ning and Liu Niannian didn't leave now, they would be crushed into compressed biscuits.

Liu Niannian instinctively looked up at the hole in the ceiling—the way they came in was the way they could go out.

But when she looked up, she was met with dozens of sinister eyes. The pig-headed men and the others had reconstituted; they were covered in blood, surrounding the hole in the floor, watching them with smiles on their faces.

It was over. It was completely over. The paths up, down, left, and right were all sealed.

Zhu Ning had infuriated the source of the pollution, and the polluted zone had entered hunting mode.

Liu Niannian looked at Zhu Ning for help, wanting her to come up with a way to escape, but Zhu Ning seemed captivated by her own story, insisting on chatting with a pollutant. She was acting as if she had a death wish, unwilling to stop until she had thoroughly enraged the source of the pollution.

Zhu Ning dodged another attack, her gaze never once leaving the mirror.

"Wang Ming formulated a murder plan in his heart. While the boss was sleeping and Yang Tao wasn't paying attention, he snuck into the basement, stood by the boss’s bed, and then..." Zhu Ning paused deliberately, "...raised the blade."

The recording Wang Ming left was reversed; he had claimed the boss stood by his bed, but in reality, it was Wang Ming who stood by the boss’s bed, holding a knife.

The four walls began to twist. Pig faces appeared on the mirrors, their eyes bulging like three-dimensional reliefs. Liu Niannian would rather commit suicide than be crushed into pulp by these things.

The momentum of the guillotine in the room was decreasing. Liu Niannian crawled cautiously toward Zhu Ning.

"The boss died, but he was already infected before he passed, so after his death, he exuded pollution spores. If even a single spore remains, a pollutant can complete its regeneration. The blood-red pollution spores instinctively seek a host. Wang Ming didn't take any precautions before committing murder; he was parasitized by the pollution spores."

The pig-headed men in the mirrors began to struggle, as if enraged by Zhu Ning, trying to break through the shackles of the glass.

Zhu Ning was definitely here to provoke them. Her speech grew faster. "After Wang Ming was parasitized by the spores, he didn't lose his sanity immediately, but he could clearly feel something inside his body. He hadn't expected that killing the boss wouldn't end the nightmare, but instead would birth a new one. He didn't know how to remove the pollution spores from his body."

"That same day, the pollution symptoms began to manifest. His eyes mutated, so he wanted to perform surgery to get a pair of eyes; his arms mutated, so he wanted surgery to get a pair of arms."

"Later, he thought, the difference between a pollutant and an esper is that the latter retains their sanity. He thought he was clever, having found the solution, so he began offering a huge bounty for the genes of espers."

"But no one paid any attention to such a ridiculous bounty."

"SHUT UP!" The pig faces in the mirror grew increasingly distorted.

*It worked,* Zhu Ning thought. She had finally succeeded in courting death and enraging him.

"Ordinary human willpower cannot resist the erosion of a pollutant. By the next day, the pollutant inside you began to take the upper hand. The instinct of a pollutant is to propagate; they do everything possible to infect more people."

Zhu Ning changed the perspective of her story, now speaking directly to Wang Ming.

"Your sanity collapsed, and you became the source of the pollution in the hot pot restaurant, and its master."

The internal structure of the hot pot restaurant was a pyramid, and at the top of that pyramid stood Wang Ming.

"You put the boss’s corpse back on the hospital bed, pretending he was still alive. Everyone in the hot pot restaurant was mentally contaminated and dazed; they couldn't distinguish reality. Even Yang Tao forgot what the boss had previously instructed."

"You sliced the boss’s meat to infect more people. Those who were mentally contaminated found the rotten meat of the boss to be delicious, and it became the restaurant's signature dish. At the same time, you continued the tradition of the hot pot restaurant, constantly hiring new employees until one day, the pollution zone could no longer be contained and attacked the guests who came to eat."

That day, tentacles crawled out from inside the hot pots, wrapping around the guests' chopsticks and dragging them into the boiling broth. The serious incident forced the restaurant to close, with the public excuse that the boss was ill.

Thirty years ago, the screening of pollutants in the corners of the Federation’s districts was not thorough. With limited human resources, they only knew there was a source of pollution on that street.

However, the hot pot restaurant was very stable. In places unknown to the world, they had formed a perfect ecological closed loop.

They killed among themselves, and only the occasional guest who couldn't forget the hot pot would return to eat, becoming their new kin. That was why the Federation only posted a warning sign.

That was until Liu Niannian, a curious rich kid, arrived.

At the same time Liu Niannian stepped into the restaurant, the Cleaners' Center forum scrolled, a gray tombstone post appeared, and the hot pot restaurant successfully drew in Zhu Ning.

"ARE... YOU... FINISHED?" A face slowly emerged from the center of the mirror. His face had been cut and stitched back together, twisted and enormous, reaching two meters in height.

Wang Ming, the true source of the pollution, had appeared.

Wang Ming’s face was two meters away from Zhu Ning’s; she could even see his eyes, which were the size of dinner plates.

The four walls pressed in. The space where Zhu Ning and Liu Niannian stood was no more than five meters wide. They had nowhere to run.

Zhu Ning stood up. Surrounded by the four walls, her body seemed sliced into countless pieces by the mirrors.

The source of the pollution had appeared, but Zhu Ning didn't move. She didn't raise her gun. What was she doing? *Shoot! Why won't she shoot? Isn't she a good marksman?*

*Had she been mentally contaminated?*

Liu Niannian shakily raised her own gun. *Bang! Bang! Bang!* Liu Niannian fired several times, but the bullets spun into the mirror as if hitting jelly, instantly sucked inside.

It was useless; guns could not kill the source of the pollution before them.

"I am finished," Zhu Ning replied calmly.

*Crack, crack—*

The sound of the mirror shattering was piercing, and broken shards showered the floor.

Liu Niannian’s face turned pale as she watched a behemoth crawl out from the mirror. The man’s head alone was as large as a wall, nearly three meters tall. The stitched wounds on his face were clearly visible, and several sharp mirror shards were embedded in his eyes.

Wang Ming opened his mouth wide. The first thing Liu Niannian saw was a black tongue, so massive, with disgusting protrusions on its surface.

*He... he wants to swallow us whole?*

Zhu Ning suddenly asked, "Do you feel guilty about killing the boss?"

Liu Niannian was dying of anxiety. Why was Zhu Ning talking to a pollutant? Did she think she was a psychiatrist for monsters?

"You said in the recording that you suspected you killed a guest. You were afraid, and you felt guilty," Zhu Ning said.

The recording was a trap Wang Ming had left behind to mentally contaminate those who entered the zone later. The events he described weren't necessarily true, but his emotions were.

*Are you guilty? How deep was Wang Ming’s mental contamination?*

The monster's gaping mouth suddenly froze. Why did it stop? *The psychiatrist approach actually worked?* Just as Liu Niannian felt a glimmer of hope, she heard a sharp, screeching sound.

It sounded like hundreds of hands scratching a blackboard at the same time; it was so noisy she nearly died on the spot.

"HE WANTED TO KILL ME!" the pollution source roared. "HE WAS THE ONE WHO WANTED TO KILL ME FIRST!"

"I just struck back! What exactly was wrong with that?!"

Accompanying his words, Liu Niannian saw hundreds of black flying insects pouring from his mouth.

*Ugh—*

Liu Niannian couldn't help but gag.

Hundreds of flying insects surged toward them, seeking any tiny vulnerability; they only needed one opening to crawl inside and gnaw on skin.

Zhu Ning, wearing her protective suit and a full-coverage black helmet, looked tiny standing before Wang Ming, like an ant facing an elephant.

Zhu Ning looked up, her voice calm: "He didn't want to kill you. Everything was just your imagination."

The boss had never harbored any intent to kill.

Zhu Ning asked, "When you killed him, did he struggle at all?"

Wang Ming’s brows furrowed. Because his features were so massive, his micro-expressions were impossible to miss. Liu Niannian felt that Wang Ming seemed even more tormented by that question.

Wang Ming had stood before the boss with a blade, his expression fierce, looking at the boss as if he were a mortal enemy. But the boss had looked at him with a peaceful gaze, calm in the face of his own death.

The boss had shown no ripples of emotion when he died. Therefore, he was not the source of the pollution. A source of pollution must have an obsession. This world was a world based on mental values.