Perhaps because the time since losing contact was too short, the medicine bottle was fortunately not refreshed back into the drawer of the children’s room by the game, leaving Xu Dengming with a chance to recover.
Xu Dengming had already created some distance between herself and the old woman.
At the same time, the earlier sense of weakness rapidly spread, seeping from her bones to her entire body.
Having experienced this before, Xu Dengming knew she would soon lose her ability to move.
She had to act quickly and take the medicine to alleviate her condition.
There were two pills left in the bottle.
Xu Dengming paused her movements.
The surroundings were eerily quiet, and she clearly heard something soft and limp fall to the ground.
Had the old woman done something again, or had she failed to hold on tightly, dropping the medicine bottle once more?
Xu Dengming instinctively looked down to check, only to realize she had made a critical error in judgment: her body was still acting according to her will, and up to this moment, she was still tightly gripping the medicine bottle, with no sign of letting go.
But her finger had fallen to the ground.
The fresh cut, the red bloodstains splattered on her skin, the fingertips clutching the medicine bottle still twitching slightly, as if they were still connected to her palm.
The game hadn’t stripped Xu Dengming of her common sense or logic, because this place itself defied common sense.
Xu Dengming suspected her ability to think was already compromised.
She instinctively looked at her left hand, which was now only half there, the broken end revealing jagged flesh, with less blood than she had imagined.
She felt she should pick up the severed hand along with the medicine bottle, to see if she could piece the missing part back together.
But plans couldn’t keep up with changes the moment she tried to grasp the severed finger with her right hand, it too fell to the ground.
Ten fresh fingers tangled together like vines, inseparable.
She had lost the chance to pick up the medicine bottle and the severed fingers.
Xu Dengming habitually wanted to rub her temples but failed.
She noticed her eyes and nose were becoming moist, with blood quietly seeping out.
The injuries had appeared without warning, and this fragile body was on the verge of collapse.
Compared to the relatively normal bedroom, Xu Dengming’s experience in the living room was both dangerous and absurd.
Xu Dengming decided to return to Guo Jiajia’s bedroom.
Compared to the outside, the game’s initial spawn point was practically a safe zone.
She needed more time to sort through the clues she had.
She lifted her foot to start running back, but what she lifted was only her lower leg.
“Drip, drip.”
Pieces of flesh, bone, and blood fell to the ground one after another.
Xu Dengming felt her vision getting lower and lower.
Her body had turned into a large piece of pre-sliced roast meat, hanging loosely on a skewer, with pieces falling off at the slightest movement.
The last thing to fall was her eyeball.
The eyeball, smeared with sticky blood, landed on the floor, its white vitreous body covered with fine red veins.
The door to the children’s room was more than a meter away from the eyeball.
The eyeball stared blankly at the surrounding pieces of flesh, the unnaturally low-angle images being transmitted frame by frame to a brain scattered who knows where.
Xu Dengming tried her best to stay calm-after her body shattered, she should have been dead, so why hadn’t she seen the system’s failure prompt yet?
Her consciousness had been forcibly left on the eyeball.
Xu Dengming began to replay all her experiences since entering the game in her mind, trying to find the cause of her death.
“Tap, tap, tap.”
As long as the players couldn’t log out, the game continued.
Xu Dengming heard footsteps approaching from outside the door, stopping, followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.
The woman who had gone out to buy groceries finally finished her task.
She skillfully placed the basket containing potatoes and vegetables on the shoe rack, bent down, and changed into slippers.
At this moment, the living room was littered with minced meat, resembling a slaughterhouse more than an ordinary home.
Faced with such a horrifying scene, the woman’s expression remained unchanged, as if she was completely unaware of the abnormality around her.
Thick blood slowly flowed near the doorway, soaking the woman’s slippers.
The woman walked into the house without noticing anything.
She stepped on a piece of minced meat, and blood oozed out from it.
“Squelch.”
The meat was flattened under her foot, yet the woman’s expression remained normal.
Xu Dengming’s blood was carried to various parts of the room through the woman’s slippers.
As the woman walked back and forth, she occasionally stepped on some brain matter.
The once clean and tidy house began to take on the appearance of a haunted house.
Xu Dengming watched the scene before her, feeling a slight chill.
She wanted to close her eyes, but her eyelids were missing, making it impossible to shut off her vision.
After putting down the groceries, the woman glanced at the fragments near her mother-in-law and muttered something softly, as if complaining about the environment.
She covered her mouth and nose and sneezed:
“Achoo!”
Then the woman went into the bathroom, grabbed a broom, a cloth, and a trash can, cleaned up the countless pieces of the shattered ceramic pot, and carefully wiped away the liquid on the floor.
Bloodstains.
While cleaning, she occasionally took away some of the minced meat and bloodstains left by Xu Dengming.
After tidying up the living room, the woman headed to the kitchen.
As she passed by the window, the sunlight shone on her, revealing a small stain on her cheek that she had inadvertently picked up.
Throughout it all, the woman’s expression remained normal, her demeanor natural and habitual, her calmness eerily unsettling.
After finishing the cleaning, the woman entered the kitchen, took an apple from the counter, opened the fridge, and pulled out a small piece of what looked like expired pork.
Xu Dengming knew from the diary that the woman was usually responsible for buying groceries.
She sincerely hoped that the contents of the fridge wouldn’t be little Guo Jiajia’s lunch.
The woman skillfully washed the apple, used a small knife to remove the black spots, then crushed the apple flesh together with the “expired pork” to extract the juice, filtered out the residue, and poured it all into a new ceramic kettle, adding enough water.
Watching the woman’s actions, Xu Dengming suddenly had an epiphany.
Sure enough, the woman brought the prepared drink to the old man, lifted the thin blanket covering him, and unbuttoned his shirt.
A large hole was revealed in the old man’s chest.
The woman poured the pink liquid into the hole in her chest, filling it about a third of the way, and placed the remaining drink on the wooden cabinet.
The old woman’s throat emitted a soft, muddled murmur: “Jiajia…”
After being fed the liquid, the old woman’s abnormalities and aggressiveness disappeared, returning to his original frail but harmless state.
Xu Dengming silently watched the entire process, unable to speak.
After all, even if she wanted to comment now, it would be hard to determine where exactly she had left her tongue in the living room.
At this moment, Xu Dengming felt an indescribable sense of strangeness and absurdity.
When faced with danger, humans might scream or struggle, but she had been stripped of all subjective initiative.
Xu Dengming thought that her current calmness might have nothing to do with her mindset; it was entirely because her physical state didn’t allow her to express any emotional fluctuations.
She could only watch, just watch.
After pouring the drink for the old woman, the woman’s expression relaxed a bit.
She walked briskly back to the kitchen and began preparing to cook.
The eyeball on the living room floor turned slightly, glancing at the clock.
The time was now 10:14 AM.
It had sped up.
The argument with the old woman definitely hadn’t lasted nearly three hours.
Ever since Xu Dengming lost her ability to move, the flow of time had become abnormal.
In the kitchen, the woman took out some leafy greens and a potato from the vegetable basket.
After the Great Catastrophe, many vegetables had changed.
For example, the radishes commonly consumed now were mostly the blue- skinned varieties cultivated in the Core City.
As for potatoes, they were one of the few plants that had remained remarkably stable in their characteristics, making them very popular among the residents.
The woman deftly washed off the dirt from the potato’s surface and raised the shiny kitchen knife high in her right hand.
“Thud.”
The knife came down.
Blood splattered across the counter.
The woman’s head, like the potato, fell from her severed neck and rolled across the floor, from the kitchen all the way into the living room.
Her eyes were wide open, filled with unmistakable shock, and they were staring directly into Xu Dengming’s eyes.
The woman’s blood gradually spread across the kitchen, blocked by the counter near the south side, preventing it from flowing into the living room.
As their eyes met, the woman’s head began to roll again.
Xu Dengming thought it would move toward her, perhaps to intimidate her up close, but instead, the head rolled all the way into the bedroom, completely out of her sight.
After the head entered the bedroom, the woman’s body disappeared, and the kitchen returned to normal.
The blood that had filled the kitchen seemed to be nothing more than an illusion created by Xu Dengming lying flat on the floor.
Xu Dengming instinctively glanced at the clock again.
The time was now 11:17 AM.
After the anomaly in the living room, the flow of time had once again been distorted.
11:40 AM.
Xu Dengming heard footsteps and the sound of a lock being opened once more.
This time, it was the man returning home.
The man was wearing a cheap dark coat, with loose threads visible at the cuffs.
His hair was a bit messy, and his complexion wasn’t great, with several deep wrinkles etched between his brows, making him look somewhat irritable.
He stepped unknowingly on the minced meat on the floor, walked through the blood-stained living room, and then looked around in confusion.
The woman’s body was gone, and the groceries she had bought were also missing, as if no one had ever been at the counter preparing lunch.
This didn’t align with the man’s understanding of the woman’s schedule.
The man frowned, clearly sensing that something was wrong, and began to carefully observe the situation at home.
He first walked to the window and looked out, then crouched down.
The vegetable basket the woman had used was placed on the floor, and due to the angle, the man had only just noticed it.
“Gulp.”
As the man caught sight of the vegetable basket, a second potato-shaped head thudded onto the floor, bouncing slightly.
A fountain of blood gushed endlessly from the severed neck, splattering even into the living room and splashing across Xu Dengming’s eyes.
Amidst the crimson, a system message flashed in Xu Dengming’s vision-
[First playthrough complete. Player has achieved the accomplishment [Total Annihilation].]