Chapter 377: Yellow

“A parable?” Zhang Wenda murmured, staring absently at the distant swamp.

Hu Maomao floated up again. “What’s important now is that you’ve mastered this ability. It will be a huge help to us moving forward. That’s the most crucial thing.”

“No matter what happens to this world, you’ll be able to find your footing with this ability.”

Hearing this, a bitter smile touched Zhang Wenda’s lips. He held his right hand up before his face, staring at its plain, unremarkable palm. “But have I really mastered it?”

‘The so-called yellow world doesn’t correspond one-to-one with reality,’ he thought. ‘Even if I’m terrifyingly powerful in there, can I really pinpoint the concept that corresponds to my enemy every single time?’

He needed to experiment more and study this mysterious ability.

Just then, a rift in the Inner World opened. A very angry Little Black Cat poked its head out and complained to Zhang Wenda.

“Cognito, those people are eating the Serotonin fruits from the forest and the adrenaline leaves! They’re even trying to catch Dopamine to eat its meat, and they want to drink the water from the Prefrontal Strait!!”

“What? What people?”

“It’s those dozens of people you put in here earlier! They’d love nothing more than to tie us all up and roast us for dinner.”

Hearing this, Zhang Wenda finally remembered why he had come to the swamp. He was here to save people. The people imprisoned by the Big Circle were still in his Inner World.

When Zhang Wenda let them out, he found their mouths were stuffed full of fruits they had picked from the forest in the left hemisphere of his Inner World.

As soon as they were out, they were about to thank Zhang Wenda, but the bloody scene all around them made them jump in fright. They had no idea what had happened.

“Maomao, take them and get them settled,” Zhang Wenda ordered.

Hu Maomao looked at Zhang Wenda, nodded, and led their former colleagues away from the slightly tilted rooftop.

Jinfeng left too, leaving Zhang Wenda all alone on the rooftop.

He stood there thinking for a long time, finally deciding what he needed to do next.

‘No matter where the yellow ability came from or what hidden dangers it might have, I have to master it as quickly as possible. It’s incredibly useful. It might even be useful against 1999.’

‘And the very first thing I need to do is learn how to properly activate my new ability.’

That’s right. Even though he had used this ability to kill so many people, and in the eyes of others it was powerful and terrifying, only he knew the truth: he didn’t even know how to turn it on.

Zhang Wenda opened a rift to his Inner World, reached in, dragged Yellow out, and placed him on the ground in front of him, looking at him very seriously.

“You’re definitely the one who triggered that ability. Tell me, how can I get back into the zoo?”

“What zoo?” Yellow looked up at Zhang Wenda, his face full of innocence.

“Your ability! The power you used before. It wasn’t Jinfeng’s mushrooms, so it could only have been you.”

“I don’t know.” Yellow’s shaking head made Zhang Wenda feel like he was about to fall apart. “How can you not know? Stop messing with me, okay? This ability of yours can’t be a one-time thing, can it?”

Just then, Blue walked out, stepping between Zhang Wenda and Yellow. “It’s useless to ask him. He’s just a child, what does he know? He doesn’t even possess the most basic rationality.”

“I think rather than asking him, we should review what happened before and look for the trigger conditions for the zoo.” As he spoke, Blue took a few memory fragments from the Hippocampus and presented them to Zhang Wenda.

Zhang Wenda took them. After watching them over and over again, he discovered the difference. When Yellow was triggered, he had been on the verge of death.

“A near-death state? The yellow ability can only be triggered on the brink of death?”

“How about we find out for sure by trying it?” The blue rabbit’s paw reached out in front of Zhang Wenda and opened, revealing the mushroom key left behind by that fool Jinfeng.

“This stuff again? Can I just not get away from it?”

“Don’t you find this suspicious? Why can Jinfeng enter the Animal World using mushrooms? Isn’t it possible we’ve been misled by the mushroom all along?”

“What if the key to entering that world isn’t the mushroom’s hallucinogenic properties, but precisely its lethality?” Having said that, Blue pushed the mushroom forward again.

Zhang Wenda stared at the mushrooms, his brow tightly furrowed. “If this goes wrong, we could actually die.”

‘That fool might be useless, but when it comes to finding mushrooms, each one he picks is more poisonous than the last.’

At this moment, Red suddenly leaped out, about to swat the mushroom away with its paw, but Blue dodged.

“You don’t have to try. But if we don’t figure out how to activate the yellow ability, it will be a huge loss when we have to face the Lizard People or 1999 in the future.”

Hearing this, Zhang Wenda hesitated, but finally steeled himself. He grabbed the mushrooms and shoved them directly into his mouth, chewing them down with big bites.

Soon, the feeling returned. His breathing became rapid, and his vision started to go black. The whole world began to dim and fade.

Just as Zhang Wenda felt life slipping away from him again, he didn’t use his transfer ability. Instead, he tremblingly reached out his right hand toward Yellow, who was playing with a cat nearby.

When he grasped Yellow’s small hand, the feeling of suffocation intensified, but the zoo still didn’t appear.

‘Did Blue guess wrong? Did we guess wrong?’

With that suspicion, Zhang Wenda’s body went limp, and he collapsed to the ground. His entire life flashed before his eyes.

‘I’m dying.’ The realization flooded Zhang Wenda’s mind with absolute clarity. ‘This isn’t fake. I’m really, truly about to die!!’

Just as the heavily poisoned Zhang Wenda perceived a white circle forming amidst the chaos, Yellow exploded into a flash of golden light and dispersed. In that instant, his surroundings changed completely. The bright, sunny zoo appeared before him once more.

“It worked?! It really worked? My body has to be in a near-death state to use Yellow’s ability?” Zhang Wenda’s heart leaped with joy as he looked around.

But before he could celebrate, he saw several monkeys swinging on streetlights toward the gate of the rhinoceros enclosure, which they promptly opened.

When he saw the behemoths lumbering out of the enclosure in twos and threes, Zhang Wenda went pale with terror. “How are there still monkeys? Weren’t they all dead?!”

The distant monkeys laughed mockingly, hooting and screeching at Zhang Wenda before swinging off on the streetlights to open the other animals’ gates.

As the ground trembled, a rhinoceros covered in writhing maggots charged toward him, its eyes glaring at Zhang Wenda, filled with rage.