Chapter 318 - 245: Vast Sky, Boundless Wilds, the Banshee Becomes a Little Girl (3)

Chapter 318: Chapter 245: Vast Sky, Boundless Wilds, the Banshee Becomes a Little Girl (3)

No moths drawn to a flame, no insects dancing in the air.

Only the light, piercing the darkness in solitude.

"This feeling is terrifying," she said, her gaze fixed on the blueprints.

Lin Fan, however, didn’t engage with her comment about the "vacuum of death."

He casually placed the empty can in his hand on the concrete ledge beside him, making a soft clink. Then, grabbing the edge with both hands, he swung himself down into the light of the fourth floor, agile as a cat in the night.

TAP.

His soles met the ground with a barely audible sound. He landed steadily on the fourth-floor platform, stepping from the darkness into the stark, almost blindingly white pool of light.

Looking at the doctor before him, still engrossed in her analysis of ecological extinction, Lin Fan felt a strange emotion well up inside him.

"Look on the bright side."

Lin Fan walked to the side of the table, blocking some of the night wind. His tone was as casual as if he were discussing the weather.

"At least there are no mosquitoes to bite you. Back in the day, if you spent a night drawing under a spotlight like this, you’d probably wake up looking five pounds heavier—all from the bites."

Ye Qingzhou’s hand, holding the pencil, paused for a moment.

She looked up at the man beside her. He was wearing a T-shirt, and a small grease stain near the corner of his mouth glistened under the light. Her eyes flickered, as if she was recalling the aftermath of their previous encounter, and then her tense shoulders seemed to relax almost imperceptibly.

"You make a good point." The swishing of her pencil on the paper resumed, a little lighter than before.

Meanwhile, Lin Fan stood to the side. On a small table sat a laptop, its USB port connected to the hard drive enclosure and two drives that Lin Fan had "confiscated."

On the desktop, a video player window occupied the center of the screen. The video was paused, frozen on an unsettling frame that looked like a blurry mass of flesh and blood.

"She... What do you think she is?"

Lin Fan asked hesitantly, tapping the touchpad with his finger to play the video.

Lin Fan was very familiar with the scene in the video. Both the setting and the location matched the previous surveillance footage of the banshee zombie; this was clearly what happened next.

Its upper torso, once full of deadly allure and a dangerous aura, was now ashen and deteriorated, like a plaster statue weathered by a hundred years of wind and rain.

Its skin had lost all its luster and elasticity, exuding a withered, deathly air. There were even visible cracks on its surface. And its long arm now lay limply coiled beside it, like a dead tree root.

"What’s wrong with this zombie? Is this what a mutation upgrade looks like? Doesn’t seem right! It looks like it’s dead!"

It was the "Boss’s" voice, coming from outside the bars.

"This... I don’t know, Boss. I’ve never seen anything like this before... How did it get so shriveled up..." a hesitant male voice replied.

"I can’t even connect to it with my ability! Quick, go get the crystal! Don’t tell me it’s dead!" The Boss’s voice suddenly rose, laced with the panic of a man watching his assets depreciate.

The cage door then opened, and two people squeezed inside: the poison-using Awakened One and the female Awakened One with bone protrusions.

The female Awakened One entered and, without a word, activated her ability. Several bone spurs, including some from her hands, shot out from her body, instantly piercing the edges of the banshee zombie’s body, including its long arm.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK! With a series of thuds, the tips of the bone spurs drove deep into the concrete floor, pinning the creature firmly in place.

But even so, the banshee zombie didn’t even tremble, as if it truly were just an empty husk.

Seeing this, the man, holding a machete, moved around the field of bone spurs and approached the banshee zombie’s lower abdomen, which was swollen like an arthropod’s.

Although its upper body was desiccated, this huge, sac-like abdomen was still bulging.

SQUELCH!

The man gripped the machete with both hands and stabbed downward!

After a dull sound like a blade piercing rotten leather, the expected grayish-white pulp didn’t appear. Instead, a gush of thick, bright red liquid instantly surged out along the blade’s groove, even splashing all over the man’s face.

"What the hell! Why is there still blood?"

"Less talk! Cut it open and see!"

The sharp blade sliced through the thick, grayish-white layer of skin and muscle tissue. Amidst a torrent of fluid, a small, wet, naked body rolled out from the incision with a wet plop.

It wasn’t a crystal.

It was a curled-up, humanoid figure covered in slime.

The small body twitched faintly on the cold concrete floor. Although the earlier stab had missed any vital spots, it had left a long gash where the tender shoulder met the neck.

Bright red blood slowly trickled down its pale skin, mixing with the fluids on the ground, a shocking sight against the gray concrete.

Although the footage was blurry, Lin Fan could still tell from the rise and fall of its chest that it was still alive.

"Are you sure that’s..." Ye Qingzhou lifted her eyelids, recalling Lin Fan’s description of the little girl’s seemingly superhuman hearing. She trailed off, deliberately vague, "...her?"

"After seeing this video, I’m almost certain. When Su Qing was bathing her, she confirmed there was a wound in that exact spot. It’s scabbed over but hasn’t healed yet."

Lin Fan pointed to the bleeding wound on the screen. Not only that, but he now understood why the little girl had no other serious external injuries and why her blood volume was so low. It was because she was "born prematurely" and had lost a lot of blood...