Doomsday Wonderland

Lin Sanjiu’s brain was a muddled mess.

She inhaled deeply, steeled herself, and threw a punch at the invisible barrier. A deep red color instantly blossomed around the skin on her finger joints along with a numbing sensation, but she paid it no mind. She locked her gaze on Puppeteer, who was standing a stone’s throw away from her, and asked in a throaty voice, “Are you mad?”

Puppeteer raised one of his brows and pointed his finger at the grand prize next to her. “Are you blind?”

“What exactly do you want me to see? This is how he looks. Nothing has changed!” Lin Sanjiu took another deep breath. “If you say he’s a Veda, then you’ve got to prove it!”

Puppeteer looked into Lin Sanjiu’s eyes, and his pale cheeks flushed red. At that moment, the expression on his face was beyond description. He looked as if Lin Sanjiu was performing a sword-swallowing trick while piggy-riding on top of a monkey in front of him.

After a short while, he began talking again, but he sounded slightly quizzical, “Is this how he looks?”

“Sis, I don’t know who the hell this Veda is,” the grand prize chimed in, “I was brought here by some weird guy in the Salvation of God.”

Lin Sanjiu turned to her grand prize and asked, “A weird guy? How does he look like?”

In reality, she still expressed reservations about his identity. However, the Veda had told her that the data constitution of humans or any sentient creatures with human-level intelligence was complicated. If they did not fully interpret or possess their information in advance, there was no way they could code and create a replica of such a being. Hence, in a situation where she did not even know about the location of her grand prize, what were the chances that they could locate him from the Salvation Of God in merely a few hours and obtain his information? This had nothing to do with their nigh-omnipotent ability. It was just impossible.

Ji Shanqing glanced at Puppeteer warily. He thought for a while and whispered to Lin Sanjiu, “Sis, is he the reason you called me Graham?”

Lin Sanjiu came to a momentary pause when she heard the question without rhyme or reason. However, she soon saw the light of why he would ask this question.

She had nearly forgotten that the grand prize had seen Puppeteer before!

In the last round of the Starry Carnival Amusement Park, Ji Shanqing had been observing every posthuman in the mirror house, including Puppeteer. The grand prize was well aware of Puppeteer’s goal for participating in the amusement park. Thus, when Lin Sanjiu called him by the other name, he immediately understood everything.

Lin Sanjiu threw a glance at him and nodded.

“There was an expressionless man with two round eyes who kept following me around.” The grand prize sighed. “I thought I’d gotten rid of him, but never did I expect that he could control gods. The last memory I have is of a god catching me, and then the moment I came back to my senses, I was already here.”

‘So, is he the real grand prize?’

Lin Sanjiu was confused again. Just when she was tangled in her chaotic thoughts, a sharp voice pierced through the invisible barrier and wafted into her ears, “Lord Puppeteer, the Veda have made us look like fools. Don’t you think we should return the favor and teach them a lesson?”

Soulsqn had chosen a young girl in her twenties as her skin pouch in the end. She fixed her hair into two ponytails as she offered Lin Sanjiu a toothy grin.

Watching her terrifying grin, Lin Sanjiu wondered why she did not kill Soulsqn when she had the chance.

She could face the music of mistaking the Veda for her Grand Prize, but not otherwise.

“I’d be glad to do so.” Puppeteer took two steps back from the barrier, tilted his head, and enjoyed watching Lin Sanjiu blow her fuse. With a satisfied smile plastered on his face, he said in a soft murmur, “I have to think of a way to kill this Veda.”

“With all due respect, Lord Puppeteer, since the Veda have attained your information, I’m afraid you can’t do that.” It seemed that Soulsqn had recovered much of her stamina after wearing a skin pouch, as her voice became firmer. “Why don’t you leave the job to me?”

Were it not for the barrier, Lin Sanjiu would surely have shredded Soulsqn into a million pieces with her hands. Her eyes were ablaze with fury, but the flesh worm ignored her. She paid her no mind and continued to ask Puppeteer, “If you don’t mind me asking, is this barrier sturdy enough to contain her? You know, she’s a barbarian with brutal strength. I fear she’ll catch me the moment I touch him.”

Lin Sanjiu smashed the barrier hard when the two people left her hanging on the sidelines again. She turned around to see that Ji Shanqing had a gloomy expression as well. He scratched his head in frustration as he said, “Sis, what the hell is this Veda that you all keep mentioning? You have to tell me everything about the Veda so that I can prove my innocence…”

Before the grand prize could finish his sentence, Lin Sanjiu saw a shadow zoom past the barrier next to him. She had not dropped her guard the entire time; thus, she reacted fast. She pulled the grand prize towards her with great force, causing him to smack into the barrier behind her with a loud thud.

Lin Sanjiu did not check on her grand prize but looked around warily instead. When she saw the thing outside, she froze.

“What… What are you doing?” Lin Sanjiu asked blankly. She shifted her gaze and saw that Puppeteer was equally as stunned as she was.

“Didn’t you just wear a skin?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice.

The scene that was unfolding in front of them was one that was too gory to be unseen.

Her scalp and the skin on her face, as well as her neck, had piled together and slid backward. A fully restored, grub-like, burgundy creature then emerged from the opening. There was a network of white veins coiling around its body, spitting mucus with every pulse. None of them knew why Soulsqn would suddenly extend herself out of her skin pouch.

However, that was not the worst part. Soulsqn had her “head” dug deep inside the mouth of another human body nearby, leaving only her deep red, slimy, grubby body outside in the air. The person’s mouth, face, and head had ballooned up to a shocking degree. His skin had ripped and was dripping with blood. It seemed like a playback of when she had tried to get into the elder brother’s head.

The deeper Soulsqn went, the worse the body became.

There was a limitation to the human skin’s tensile strength. The skin had stretched to a certain point that after the skull was crushed, it began to split apart, exposing the flesh beneath. Puppeteer could not bear to continue watching anymore. His expression turned ugly when Soulsqn ignored him after he yelled a few times for her to stop whatever she was doing. Just as he strode forward towards the flesh worm, she came out.

Swoosh. 

Soulsqn opened her multi-layered mandible and said, “Okay, it’s done!”

Both Puppeteer and Lin Sanjiu were stunned.

‘Done? What is done?’

Soulsqn used her two hands, which were still inside the skin pouch, to grab the skin that piled on her back. Then, she threw the skin back onto herself as if she was putting on a hoodie. There was a gruesomely huge scar running from her chin to her neck.

After Soulsqn had put on the skin pouch, she looked at the two, and she seemed even more stunned than they were. “What are you two standing there for? Chop-chop and get the job done!”

Pressing herself against the barrier, Lin Sanjiu yelled out a question, “What did you do? What do you mean by getting the job done?”

Soulsqn was able to display a shocked expression even though she was not accustomed to her new skin. She hummed and hawed for a long time before it came as a distinct surprise to her that Lin Sanjiu and Puppeteer did not know what she was doing. “Oh, my good Lord. Don’t tell me that you guys haven’t figured it out yet?”

“Quit hitting around the bush and get to the point!”

Soulsqn had never imagined that amongst the three, she would be the only one who saw through the entire situation. She sat on the ground as her eyes flitted back and forth between Lin Sanjiu and Puppeteer. Then, the next sentence that came out of her mouth shocked both of them to the core. “Don’t tell me that both of you think this guy here is a Veda? No way! Didn’t we all escape from the same place? Whatever I’ve experienced, you guys should’ve gone through it too.”

Lin Sanjiu stole a glance at her grand prize and heaved out a long sigh of relief. Although she did not know how Soulsqn was so confident that Ji Shanqing was not a Veda, things should be easier as long as they came to a conclusion. When she thought about this, she quickly asked, “How can you tell that he isn’t a Veda?”

“Tell?” Soulsqn was taken aback by her question. She soon recomposed herself and replied matter-of-factly, “This is so simple. I don’t see any reason behind your confusion. How can he be a Veda if he’s a creation of the Veda? If I plant an apple, does that make me an apple?”