Apocalyptic Era: Starting from picking up a Bishoujo
Chapter 517 - 486 First Encounter with Doomsday Creature 2

Chapter 517: 486 First Encounter with Doomsday Creature 2

The night sky without stars and the moon...

Such a monotonously dark night sky is not normal, and it immediately triggered my thoughts. I’ve seen this same night sky in other places before. That said, since this is the Different Space, it makes sense that the night sky doesn’t have stars and the moon. The moon is Earth’s satellite, while stars are distant celestial bodies. Even for an open Different Space, it’s hard to imagine it spanning a cosmic scale.

After a brief moment of contemplation, I pushed open the window and fired two Fireballs into the outside world. One Fireball soared upwards, while the other was tasked with exploring the surroundings.

Perhaps due to the chaotic influence of the space, these two swiftly moving Fireballs seemed to be endlessly distancing themselves from here, yet their relative positions felt erratically near and far, flickering within my perception. The feedback information they sent back was primarily composed of noise. Originally, I intended to transform the Fireball responsible for exploring the surroundings into thousands upon thousands of "Fireflies" to enhance efficiency, but for now, I could only progress slowly.

By the illumination of the Fireballs’ light, I gradually saw the scenery of the city outside more clearly.

Put simply, this is a city of ruins.

I’ve watched quite a few zombie apocalypse-themed horror movies in the past, and the outside impression of this city seemed akin to a post-zombie crisis twenty or thirty years after destruction—or perhaps a product of a third world war. Desolate, decayed, the majority of city buildings visible were damaged to varying extents. Groups of abandoned vehicles looked more like rusty, discarded toys casually strewn across the roads.

At this moment, I was situated in a residential building, on its fourteenth or fifteenth floor, overlooking a neighborhood below. The untrimmed vegetation had grown chaotically from green spaces into roadways, weeds sprouting from cracks in the concrete pavement, even the building’s outer walls covered lushly in creeping plants resembling ivy.

Scattered across the streets were objects resembling skeletal remains. Occasionally, suspicious shadows would flash through dark corners—humanoid monsters seemingly lurking in the shadows—though upon closer inspection, it seemed that it could just be a misperception, nothing truly visible there.

My intuition wouldn’t make such a rudimentary mistake; therefore, there must indeed be numerous unknown dangers lurking outside. At the very least, the owner of this house wouldn’t have obsessively sealed its doors and windows without good reason. Though I hadn’t directly identified threats as of yet, I dared not let down my guard.

Just as I was thinking this, something abnormal occurred suddenly.

I heard an incredibly mournful, despairing scream, seemingly coming from the distance. Even with the sharp hearing of this body, which should allow me to pinpoint the scream’s exact source, I somehow couldn’t discern where it originated.

At the same time, when one of the Fireballs passed by the upper floors of a residential building far away, its light illuminated the interior of one of the rooms. Despite it being just a fleeting glimpse, I saw something shocking inside that room.

It looked like a living room. In front of floor-to-ceiling windows sat a man in a chair, covered with a white fabric drape like a customer at a barber shop. Behind him stood a tall, blurry black shadow figure, wielding scissors like a barber performing a haircut.

But the man had no hair atop his head. In fact, not only that—his skull cap was cut off in a bowl-like shape and discarded on the floor, revealing grayish-white brain tissue streaked with blood, exposed to the air. Blood trickled down the man’s forehead, disfiguring his face into a horrific, monstrous visage. The tall, blurry black shadow figure held rusted, blood-stained shears, methodically snipping pieces of the man’s brain tissue.

The man opened his mouth wide in uncontrollable terror, letting out an extreme, panicked scream. The scream I’d heard earlier was likely his. Blood stains covered the white drape around him. Though he didn’t appear to be restrained in any way, he sat still as if paralyzed by an immobilization spell, unable to escape—only the muscles in his face seemed capable of movement. His bloodshot eyes bulged wide as he continued screaming, his only permitted act.

I immediately manipulated the runaway Fireball, commanding it to return toward that room, while recalling the man’s face in my mind. Strangely, despite his grotesque appearance, twisted from fear, and his features challenging to distinguish due to the removal of his scalp and hair, something about him seemed familiar to me.

Yes, that face—I know it well.

It looks like... my face.

The Fireball returned to that room, and I glimpsed its interior once more. But this time, the scene didn’t appear in the living room—it appeared right in the glass window in front of me.

Impossible—I had clearly opened the window earlier. When had the window been closed again? No, the issue wasn’t just the window. What was unfolding before my eyes left me utterly preoccupied.

The glass pane, like a mirror in a barber shop, reflected my current state. Somehow, I now sat in a chair, my front covered by the blood-soaked white drape, and my own skull cap cut off into a bowl-like shape and discarded at my feet. Half of my grayish-white brain tissue had already been snipped apart.

Behind me stood that same tall, blurry black shadow figure, holding the rusted, blood-stained shears, still speckled with bits of brain matter that resembled crumbled tofu.

The shears drew closer again, cutting into the fragmented brain tissue.

I tried to stand up, but found my body refused to obey commands. Of course—my brain had already been cut apart to this extent, making it incapable of sending instructions to my body. No wonder the other man had sat still, seemingly under an immobilization spell.

Under normal circumstances, given my condition, I wouldn’t even have the chance to stand, let alone escape death itself. However, for me, my physical form is but a facade—my brain simply another aspect of that facade. I don’t rely entirely on my brain to control my body. Swiftly, I stood up and kicked at the tall black shadow figure behind me.

This shadow figure, resembling something out of a supernatural horror story, wasn’t an actual ghost but a physical entity. My kick struck true, sending it flying across the room. It crashed into distant tables and chairs, collapsing awkwardly to the floor.

"Really? You take off strangers’ skull caps without even introducing yourself—is this kind of invasive behavior the norm for local monsters here?"

Honestly, I was somewhat shaken. Before becoming a demon hunter, despite frequently investigating supernatural phenomena, I’d never encountered anything truly beyond the ordinary. Even after beginning my demon hunting career, most of my encounters were straightforward clashes, rather than precariously eerie scenarios like this.

To stabilize my fluctuating emotions, I pretended to speak calmly while bending down to retrieve my skull cap from the floor, reinstalling it back onto my head.

After securing it in place, it felt slightly misaligned, so I adjusted its angle with a gentle twist, finally achieving a tight, seamless fit that reassured me.

"Now, let’s see—what kind of monster are you?" I demanded.

The figure lay still in the darkness without a sound, and I didn’t expect it to respond. From what I’d learned, not all monsters are capable of speech—rather, the ones that can understand human language and engage in communication are exceedingly rare. Even Yinyue, an anomalous entity, had numerous cognitive gaps that hindered alignment with human thinking.

The vast majority of monsters resemble alien creatures from horror films—or phenomena so unfamiliar they remain incomprehensible.

I directed the Fireball to approach the motionless figure, illuminating its location, as well as shedding light on the entity itself. What I saw left me speechless.

It wasn’t the blurry shadow figure that had stood behind me, nor did the rusted, blood-stained shears remain. Instead, sprawled like a broken puppet among the overturned tables and chairs, was the house’s long-decomposed owner’s corpse—the one I had seen lying by the bedroom door earlier.