ICUGW Chapter 19

Chapter 19: The Man-Eating Hot Pot Restaurant (8)

Zhu Ning rolled to the side, while Liu Niannian hid in the corner, trying to make her body as small as possible.

Zhu Ning: "The boss was a defective product. He was desperate and saw Eternal Life Pharmaceutical's experimental project recruitment, so he decided to try it. They then sent him a recuperation chamber and treatment drugs. The experiment should be something along the lines of injecting small doses of contaminants to slowly cause changes in the human body, but the experiment failed."

Zhu Ning stared at the mirror. With every word she spoke, the room changed. The figures of Zhu Ning and Liu Niannian in the mirror disappeared, and the mirror no longer looked like a mirror.

Liu Niannian realized that Zhu Ning’s words were not meant for her, but for the source of pollution.

"The boss's body mutated, and it was difficult to conceal his appearance. He had no choice but to move to the basement to avoid people, and only Yang Tao can go to the basement to take care of him. He and Yang Tao had an agreement that if anything happens to him, Yang Tao will kill him immediately."

The bell in the store is the bed call bell.

The guillotine might have been prepared at that time. The hot pot restaurant owner designed a way out for himself. If he really became an uncontrollable contaminant, Yang Tao would use the mechanism immediately.

"He thought he could avoid harming others by hiding, but he didn't know that once he became a contaminant, he would exude contamination, mentally polluting others."

"The first person to be contaminated should be Xiao Hui. When she was working on the cash register, she mentioned that her drawer was full of fingers. She started to suspect the meat her boss was feeding to the customers, and her hallucinations caused her to see Yang Tao with a pig's head. She was in a trance every day, and everything she saw was suspicious."

Swish!

Zhu Ning couldn't completely avoid the fourth attack. The guillotine slashed across her back, but Zhu Ning was more experienced than last time, quickly patching it up and applying healing agents.

"Xiao Hui later left. She didn't die in the store at all; she simply resigned. After she asked to resign, the boss let her go. But after she left, panic spread, and others started to overthink things."

"Wang Ming was already mentally polluted, and Xiao Hui's departure was his last straw. He began to wonder if Xiao Hui's meat had been sent to the kitchen–if it had been put into the hot pot. The meat they sell to customers, what was it? Where did it come from?"

From the very beginning, the Come Again, Okay? Hotpot Restaurant was just an incident of collective mental pollution.

Zhu Ning surveyed the room, searching for a way out. "Wang Ming suspected that he would be the next to die, so he began observing the boss, hoping to strike first. He entered the boss's medicine room and learned that the boss had been injecting drugs and conducting body modification experiments."

"Wang Ming drilled a hole in the floor of the medicine room to look at the basement and saw the boss's secret. It turned out that the boss was a defective product."

Boom!

There was a very strange noise coming from the mirror. Liu Niannian could almost feel death approaching when she looked at it.

They were moving. The mirrors were moving.

The mirrors on the four walls were slowly shifting, and if Zhu Ning and Liu Niannian didn't leave, they would turn into compressed biscuits.

Liu Niannian subconsciously looked up at the hole in the ceiling. She was thinking that they could take the way where they came from to escape. But when she looked up, she met dozens of eerie eyes.

The pig man and the others had recovered. They were standing around the hole with blood all over them, looking down at her with smiles on their faces.

It’s over. It’s over! All the roads up, down, left, and right were blocked.

Zhu Ning angered the source of pollution, and the contaminated area entered hunting mode.

Liu Niannian looked at Zhu Ning for help, wanting to ask her to find a way to leave quickly, but Zhu Ning seemed to be fascinated on story telling and insisted on chatting with a pollutant.

She looked like she was asking for death and won't stop until she completely irritates the source of pollution.

Zhu Ning dodged the attack again, her eyes never leaving the mirror from beginning to end.

"Wang Ming planned murder. He sneaked into the basement while the boss was sleeping and Yang Tao wasn't paying attention. He stood by the boss's bed, and then..." Zhu Ning paused deliberately, "...raised a knife."

Wang Ming said the opposite in the recording. He said the boss was standing beside his bed, but in fact it was Wang Ming who was standing beside the boss's bed holding a knife.

The four walls suddenly began to distort, and pig faces were reflected in the mirror. Their eyeballs were bulging like they were about to pop off. Liu Niannian would rather commit suicide than be squeezed into a pulp by this thing.

The guillotine in the room was losing potential energy due to inertia. Liu Niannian carefully crawled towards Zhu Ning.

(I don't know what this mean)

"The boss was dead, but he was already contaminated before his death. So, after his death, he released contaminated spores that instinctively sought out a new host."

"...Just one spore was enough to contaminate a person."

"Wang Ming didn't have any protective measures before killing the boss, so in no time, he was parasitized by the contaminated spores."

The pig man on the mirror began to struggle. They seemed to be angered by Zhu Ning and wanted to break free out of the mirror.

Zhu Ning was definitely provoking him. She spoke faster, "Wang Ming didn't lose his mind immediately after being infected, but he could clearly feel something changing inside him. He was expecting that his nightmare would end after killing the boss, but it brought about a new one instead. He didn't know how to get the contaminated spores out of his body."

"Pollution symptoms started showing up. When his eyes started changing, he wanted to replace it. When his hands started changing, he wanted to replace it."

"Later, he realized that the difference between contaminants and mutants was that the latter could retain their sanity. He thought he was clever and had found a solution, so he began offering a large reward for the genes of mutants."

"But no one paid any attention to this ridiculous reward."

"Shut up!" The pig face in the mirror gradually distorted.

'Success,' Zhu Ning thought. She was finally succeeding in angering him to commit suicide.

"An ordinary person cannot resist the pollution of contaminants. The spores in your body began to take over. A contaminant's instinct is to spread pollution, finding ways to contaminate other people."

Zhu Ning changed the storyteller's perspective and now spoke directly to Wang Ming.

"Your sanity collapsed, and you became the source of pollution for the hot pot restaurant. You also became the host of the contaminated area."

The hot pot restaurant has a pyramid structure of authority, and standing at the top of the pyramid was Wang Ming.

"You put the boss's body back on the bed and pretended he was still alive. Everyone in the hot pot restaurant was mentally polluted and confused, they couldn't tell the difference. Even Yang Tao had forgotten what the boss had told him."

"You exploited the boss's flesh, wanting to contaminate more people. Those who were mentally polluted would find the boss's rotten meat delicious, becoming the hot pot restaurant's golden sign. At the same time, you continued to recruit new employees. Until one day, the contaminated area could no longer be controlled and attacked the diners."

That day, tentacles emerged from the hot pot, wrapped around a customer's chopsticks, and then pulled the customer into the pot. The serious incident forced the hot pot restaurant to close, claiming the owner was ill.

Thirty years ago, contaminants in the corners of the federal districts were not thoroughly checked, and with limited human resources, they only knew that there was a contaminated area on this street.

But the hot pot restaurant was very stable. Without anyone's notice, it had formed a perfect ecology within itself.

They kill within themselves, and only a few customers who were obsessed with the hot pot restaurant comes to eat and become their new kind, so the Federation could only put up a warning sign.

Until Liu Niannian, the curious rich second generation, came.

As soon as Liu Niannian stepped into the hot pot restaurant, the cleaning center's forum updated and a grave post appeared. The hot pot restaurant successfully attracted Zhu Ning.

"Are you done?" A face slowly emerged in the center of the mirror. His face had been cut and sewn together, creating a distorted and huge figure reaching two meters tall.

Wang Ming, the real source of pollution has appeared.

His face was two meters away from Zhu Ning, and Zhu Ning could even see Wang Ming's round eyes.

The four walls squeezed in. The area where Zhu Ning and Liu Niannian laid down on was only five meters wide, leaving them with no room to escape.

Zhu Ning stood up. She was surrounded by walls and her body was slowly being slashed into countless pieces by the mirror.

The source of pollution appeared, but Zhu Ning didn't move. She didn't even raise her gun.

'What was Zhu Ning doing? Shoot quickly! Wasn't she a good shooter?'

'Or...was she really mentally polluted?'

Liu Niannian trembled as she raised her gun.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Liu Niannian fired several shots in a row. But the bullets spun into the mirror and were sucked in like jelly.

It was useless. Guns can't kill the source of pollution in front of them.

"That's all I have to say." Zhu Ning responded calmly.

Crack–

Crack!

The sound of the mirror breaking was very harsh, and the broken fragments were scattered all over the floor.

Liu Niannian's face turned pale as she watched a giant creature emerge from the mirror. Its head was about three meters tall. The stitches on its face were clearly visible, and several sharp pieces of broken lenses were stuck in its eyes.

Wang Ming opened his mouth wide, and Liu Niannian was greeted by a huge black tongue with disgusting bumps on the surface of the tongue coating.

'What does he, he, he, he, he want to do? Swallow us in one gulp?'

Zhu Ning suddenly asked, "Do you feel guilty about killing the boss?"

Liu Niannian was extremely anxious. Why does Zhu Ning keep talking to the contaminant? Did she think she was a contaminant psychologist?

"You mentioned in the recording that you suspected you had killed the guests, and you were very scared and felt guilty," Zhu Ning said.

The recording was a trap left by Wang Ming to mentally pollute people who entered the contaminated area. The events he described might not be true, but his emotions were real.

Does he feel guilty? How deeply has Wang Ming been mentally polluted?

The monster's open mouth suddenly stopped moving.

'It stopped moving? Psychological talks were actually useful!'

Liu Niannian's eyes were just about to shine, but a sharp sound interrupted her joy.

It sounded like hundreds of hands were scratching a blackboard at the same time. The noise was so loud that she almost died on the spot.

"He was the one who wanted to kill me!" The pollution source shouted, "He was the one who wanted to kill me first!"

"I just fought back first, what's wrong with that?"

As he spoke, Liu Niannian saw hundreds of black flying insects pouring out of his mouth.

Eugh–

Liu Niannian couldn't help but gag.

Hundreds of flying insects swarmed towards them, searching for any hole they could find to get in and eat their flesh.

Zhu Ning was still wearing a full body protective clothing and a black helmet. She looked very small standing in front of Wang Ming, like an ant standing in front of an elephant.

Zhu Ning raised her head and said calmly, "He wasn't planning to kill you. It was all just a figment of your imagination."

The boss had no intentions of killing.

Zhu Ning asked, "When you killed him, did he struggle at all?"

Wang Ming frowned. Because his facial features were very large, his expressions were hard to ignore. Liu Niannian felt that Wang Ming seemed to be in even more pain because of this sentence.

Wang Ming remembered himself standing before his boss, knife in hand, fiercely looking at him as if he were a mortal enemy. But the boss looked at him calmly, at peace with his own death.

The boss died with peaceful emotions, so he was not the source of pollution. The source of pollution must have obsessions. This world is a world based on mental value.

'Don't say anymore!'

Liu Niannian wanted to seal Zhu Ning's mouth.

'Please stop provoking him!!'

The entire basement was shaking. The people looking above the hole in the ceiling were smiling and clapping. The body of the dead boss was expanding infinitely.

"Shut up!"

"Go to hell, go to hell! He died, so you all should die too!"

The source of the pollution had a distorted face, and blood flowed down from the ceiling like a waterfall, emitting a strong metallic smell.

Liu Niannian couldn't help it and shouted to Zhu Ning, "He's crazy! Shoot him!"

Zhu Ning really know how to provoke people. The source of pollution was losing his mind and the entire hot pot restaurant was on the verge of collapsing.

Zhu Ning remained motionless. Liu Niannian had already confirmed earlier that guns were ineffective in this contaminated area, but Zhu Ning still had bombs in her backpack.

The simplest and quickest option at this point was to blow everything up, but the basement was a confined space. Zhu Ning was immune to the explosions, but Liu Niannian would be die instantly.

She wanted to complete the task in another way, so Zhu Ning opened her system panel.

System:

[The Rotten Fish Head has been chosen.

This will consume 5 health points.

Do you want to use Mental Pollution on Wang Ming?]

Zhu Ning: "Use."

Since Wang Ming was mentally polluted, Zhu Ning didn't mind giving him some more supplements to make it worse.

---

The translator has something to say:

Wang Ming: I just wanted to survive! Was that too much to ask?

Zhu Ning: Yep.

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