Chapter 43: Shuffling Monster?

Chapter 43: Chapter 43: Shuffling Monster?

"The military?"

The squad leader noticed that Xiang Yi seemed to be thinking it over, and assumed the mention of the military was enough to make him back down.

He was about to press a little harder, hoping to take control of the conversation from there.

But Xiang Yi suddenly pointed at the tall, skinny guy who had just come up and asked, "What’s his name?"

"Sun Yifei."

Xiang Yi had no way of knowing whether that was his real name or not, but he only needed something to call him by.

"This Sun Yifei — he’s carrying a Shuffling Monster’s fingernail on him."

"Don’t you dare make things up!"

The squad leader raised a hand to stop Sun Yifei from speaking and gestured for Xiang Yi to continue.

"You..."

Xiang Yi looked toward the squad leader.

The squad leader tapped his own chest lightly and said, "Wang Wu."

"Right around the time you sent your people to sweep the floors above and below, Wang Wu, I happened to be on the third floor."

"Your guy Sun Yifei took two others and ducked into a room to slack off instead of checking that floor."

Sun Yifei’s face flashed with something close to panic. "Bullshit!" he snapped.

Xiang Yi might not have known anything about Abnormalities before.

But Wang Wu had just pointed out that Abnormalities don’t appear without reason — and that was all it took for Xiang Yi to connect it to something he’d witnessed earlier.

"As luck would have it, the room they chose to slack off in was the same room I’d been resting in. They never noticed me, and started talking about what each of them had picked up on this run."

"Sun Yifei opened a metal case first. Inside was a small, dark gray fingernail."

"The short skinny guy over there said he didn’t find anything. The one called Shi Tie — I heard Sun Yifei use his name — picked up a black stone."

Xiang Yi laid out everything he had seen in careful detail, right down to Shi Tie’s name.

Sun Yifei was visibly losing it. He turned to Wang Wu and started working the emotional angle. "Boss, you’re not seriously going to believe some random guy who showed up out of nowhere, are you?"

"He’s skulking around in the middle of the night in a hazmat suit — who knows what he’s up to. He’s obviously not good news..."

Wang Wu cut him off. "Did you bring your containment box?"

"I..."

"If you did, open it. If he’s lying, I’ll sort it out myself."

"Boss... I..."

Sun Yifei’s stalling seemed to exhaust Wang Wu’s patience. He turned to Shi Qiang instead. "What about yours?"

Shi Qiang avoided Sun Yifei’s eyes and slowly pulled a metal box from his pocket.

He opened it. A black stone sat inside.

"Hff—"

Wang Wu let out a long breath.

"So everything that’s happened to us tonight is because you, Sun Yifei, broke containment protocol — you opened your containment box on the way back, let Dead Spirit Dust loose, and infected the corpses in the hospital basement. That’s on you. All of it."

"Fourteen brothers dead..."

Wang Wu drove his boot into Sun Yifei’s knee without warning, dropping him to the ground.

Sun Yifei had been keeping his hand shoved into the pocket beneath his jacket the whole time, and the fall knocked it loose — the metal box clattered out onto the ground.

Wang Wu picked it up and unlatched the lid.

The Dead Spirit Dust had already spread at scale. Opening the box now hardly mattered.

As the lid came off, a dark gray Shuffling Monster’s fingernail stared back at him.

A faint wisp of gray-black Dead Spirit Dust drifted off the nail — and with that, every word Xiang Yi had said was confirmed.

Wang Wu snapped the box shut and tossed it back to Sun Yifei.

"We’ll deal with this when we get back," he said, his voice flat and cold.

Wang Wu turned back around, intending to say a few more words to Xiang Yi.

Then a startled cry came from somewhere behind him.

Everyone instinctively spun toward the sound.

The black stone that had just been in the box was now embedded deep in Shi Tie’s right palm — sunken into the flesh as though it had always been there.

Whether from pain or something else entirely, every vein along his arm had swollen and bulged, writhing like a mass of bloated maggots beneath the skin.

And the veins weren’t the usual bluish color — they were the same dark gray as the Shuffling Monsters.

His face was twisted in agony, the light already gone from his eyes. His expression contorted like he was screaming at the top of his lungs, yet not a single sound left him — not until his last moment.

It wasn’t until the Scavenger beside him noticed something was wrong and cried out that anyone else realized what was happening.

As Shi Tie died, the Dead Spirit Dust drifting through the air began to spiral inward around him, forming a visible pitch-black vortex.

Xiang Yi took two wary steps back toward the edge of the rooftop. The remaining Scavengers clustered in tight around Wang Wu.

"Looks like the fingernail was just the trigger. This stone is the real source of the problem."

"What the hell is that thing?"

The Dead Spirit Dust swallowed Shi Tie whole.

By this point, Xiang Yi was already running the numbers on how to jump off the roof and survive.

On the other side, the Scavengers had their weapons ready, braced for whatever came next.

The vortex of Dead Spirit Dust collapsed in an instant, and what stood in its place was Shi Tie — already dead, and no longer recognizable as human.

He had been fully converted into a Shuffling Monster. Aside from the black stone piercing through the center of his palm, there was nothing to distinguish him from any other Shuffling Monster.

But compared to the ordinary Shuffling Monsters prowling outside, this one radiated a pressure that was hard to put into words.

Wang Wu moved first. He brought up his rifle, took aim, and fired.

The round punched out of the barrel and struck Shi Tie square in the forehead.

The same bullet that had blown Xue Hong’s skull clean off barely managed to burrow half its length into Shi Tie’s brow.

And once the bullet lost momentum, it didn’t lodge in the bone — it started getting pushed back out.

The slug dropped to the ground.

At the wound site, dark gray granulation tissue was already lacing itself back together at visible speed.

"Open fire!" Wang Wu ordered.

A relentless barrage of gunfire erupted across the rooftop.

Seven Scavengers remained on the roof. Three of them had guns.

A ragged storm of bullets tore into Shi Tie from multiple angles.

But just like that first shot from Wang Wu, not a single round could punch through Shi Tie’s skin. Every small wound sealed itself almost as fast as it opened, knitted shut by threads of writhing gray flesh.

It was far more resilient than any ordinary Shuffling Monster.

And as the incoming rounds shredded Shi Tie’s shirt away,

the upper body beneath was revealed — muscular to the point of grotesque deformity.

Shi Tie had been a tall, solidly built man in life.

But whatever the Dead Spirit Dust had done to him, every last trace of fat on his body appeared to have been converted into dense, coiled muscle — which almost certainly meant the strength behind that frame was something terrifying.

After standing there and absorbing half a minute of sustained gunfire without so much as a broken patch of skin, Shi Tie finally moved.

He took one step toward Wang Wu, and the concrete beneath his foot cracked apart in a spreading web of fractures.