ICUGW Chapter 34

Chapter 34 The House Where People Are Chased (7)

Ding Chaojie felt the door behind him open. He felt his body uncontrollably walked backwards, and when he finally stepped inside the dark space, the door shut close.

BANG!

There was a porch in front of him.

But, he should have been facing the green door....right?

Ding Chaojie had been chased for so long, yet this was the first time he came in. He couldn't move his hands and feet, like a poor fly stuck in a spider web. He couldn't even utter a word.

It was also freezing cold.

Suddenly, Ding Chaojie's breath hitched. He felt someone slowly approaching him from behind.

He couldn't look back, but he could see the shadow cast in front of him. Someone was holding a hammer, ready to strike him. His eyes constricted.

BANG!

…

The witcher who got parasitized into a snail was under the TV. Its employee bracelet flashing with lights as if telling her to look at it.

The function of the employee bracelet was similar to that of a black box. They both record the process of the user's death. Zhu Ning couldn't understand how a witcher could die here, so she went to check the employee bracelet on the witcher's hand.

Suddenly she stopped moving.

There was someone behind her. Judging from the reflection of the TV, it looked like a tall and thin woman holding a hammer.

Zhu Ning was hit from behind. Her body softened and fell to the ground with a bang.

After being beaten by witchers hundreds of times in the fighting class, it was impossible for her to be knocked down so easily. She was about to struggle, but hesitated for a moment and stopped moving.

There were two bangs. The woman was probably afraid that she would fight back, so she hit her hard on the back of the neck twice.

After the injection of the genetic drug, the skin hardness increased. It was as if she was wearing soft armor under her work clothes, protecting her fragile spine. There was pain, but it was not unbearable.

The danger premonition didn't give off a warning, so the situation shouldn't be as dangerous as the pig man's sneak attack.

Zhu Ning heard the hammer being thrown away. Then came a woman breathing loudly; seeming to be in a state of extreme panic. The sound was very familiar.

"I got you," the woman said, still in shock. "I got you."

Then the woman dragged her Zhu Ning by the feet like a corpse. Zhu Ning, including her work clothes, weighed at least 150 kilograms. The woman seemed to have difficulties dragging her, as she keeps stopping and resting before pulling her again.

She was a little curious about what the woman was going to do. So, Zhu Ning took the opportunity to observe the house. There was a witcher's steel uniform on the ground, which should have been left by the witcher.

There were also two highly decomposed corpses at the door of the toilet. Perhaps due to the failure of alienation, it was impossible to tell whether they were male or female.

The woman continued to drag Zhu Ning into the master bedroom's bathroom. The inside of the bathroom was like a murder scene, all bloody with blood spots splattered on the ceiling.

Dried blood could be seen on the edge of the bathtub, as if someone had been killed here, filling the bathroom with blood.

There was also another person in the room.

With a click, the woman handcuffed Zhu Ning's wrists to the water pipe. Zhu Ning finally saw the woman in front of her.

It was Huang Ya Ruo.

She was wearing the floral nightgown she wore on the day she disappeared, and a pair of white rabbit-shaped slippers on her feet, stained red with blood.

Her hair was dry and disheveled, and she was so thin that her eye sockets were sunken. She looked like a skeleton covered with skin.

Like the frail and helpless persona in the video, Huang Ya Ruo looked like she barely aged at all, but there was a distinct madness in her eyes.

[Random Guest: "Haunted House" mission: finding the missing Huang Yaruo has been completed.

Current purification progress: 60%]

This person was really Huang Ya Ruo. She doesn't look abnormal at all–at least she doesn't have a snail shell attached to her back.

Huang Ya Ruo kept muttering, "Why is there one more? Why is there one more?"

'One more?'

Huang Ya Ruo seemed to want to take off Zhu Ning's work clothes, but the cleaner's protective suit was difficult to take off. It even took Zhu Ning 20 minutes to put it on for the first time. Only an expert would know where to start taking it off.

Sure enough, Huang Ya Ruo gave up after trying for three minutes, only taking off Zhu Ning's cleaning backpack.

In addition to her cleaning tools, the backpack was filled with standard weapons. Ordinary people would not even dare to touch them when they see them because they might accidentally hurt themselves.

Huang Ya Ruo frowned when she saw the backpack full of weapons, "Are you the same as him?"

'Is she referring to the witcher earlier?'

Huang Ya Ruo looked at Zhu Ning deeply and said, "Don't be afraid, it will be healed soon. It won't hurt."

The helmet did not filter out the smell of blood, and with blood all around, Zhu Ning felt that the words "it will be over soon" meant that she was, well, going to die.

Huang Ya Ruo didn't want to talk to her at all. She took Zhu Ning's cleaning backpack and put it in the corner of the wall near the bathroom door.

The distance between Zhu Ning and the cleaning backpack was more than one meter. She won't be able to use her metal skills to control it, but the handcuffs on her hands and the water pipes behind her were made of metal.

Huang Ya Ruo walked out of the bathroom and closed the door.

After she left, Zhu Ning began to look at the other victim in the bathroom. The other person had his hands tied and was curled up on the edge of the bathtub, his body covered in blood.

He might have been hit by a hammer, as the back of his head and shoulders were covered in blood. Zhu Ning suspected that his bones might be broken.

Well isn't this Ding Chaojie? Shouldn't he be in the Public Security Bureau?

Unless...the Public Security Bureau wasn't able to protect him.

Ding Chaojie had his back to Zhu Ning and was twitching slightly.

Zhu Ning exhaled. She doesn't know why, but right now she felt like she and Ding Chaojie felt like a kind of stored food.

Huang Ya Ruo was processing food just now, and then she left to call the snail people outside to eat.

This seems like a logical thought, no?

The appearance of Ding Chaojie immediately broke the tension Zhu Ning has been feeling since she entered the green door. At least this man was a living person not a dead person, and she could talk to him.

Humanity's greatest fear has always been the unknown. After Zhu Ning saw Huang Ya Ruo, the situation gradually became clearer and Zhu Ning began to rethink the matter.

Ding Chaojie was lying on the ground half-dead. The both of them were tied at the two ends of the bathroom, but the bathroom itself was not very big.

Zhu Ning kicked him and asked softly, "Hello? Ding Chaojie?"

Ding Chaojie's eyes widened. He recognized Zhu Ning's voice and looked up to see a woman in a motorcycle suit.

Ding Chaojie would never forget this weirdo even if he died. He stared at her with red eyes and sniffed. "Liar! You lied to me!"

Zhu Ning: “…”

Well, was this really the time to point and blame others?

Ding Chaojie was covered in wounds. Zhu Ning noticed that all ten of his fingers were broken, as if they had been forcibly broken by someone. Did Huang Ya Ruo do this?

But looking closely, the fingers were all bent backwards. An ordinary woman doesn't have that much strength to bend the fingers of an adult man.

Zhu Ning lowered her voice. "What happened to you?"

Ding Chaojie's face was covered in blood. When Zhu Ning asked him this, he felt as if a painful incident had been exposed. He leaned his head against the edge of the bathtub and said, "This is retribution, retribution. Its found me."

Ding Chaojie's voice sounded very dull, "This is retribution for killing her."

What?

When Zhu Ning first met Ding Chaojie, he looked nervous, but now he seemed a little ... weird?

“Hahahahahaha,” Ding Chaojie muttered to himself, “It chased me all the way to the Public Security Bureau. No one could save me. This is karma.”

Zhu Ning's temples throbbed when she heard this. She's guessing that the green door had hunted Ding Chaojie again in the Public Security Bureau. She just didn't expect the green door to be so flexible, chasing its owner with such great lengths.

Zhu Ning extracted the key word and asked, "What do you mean you killed her?"

Ding Chaojie turned even more aggrieved. He banged his forehead against the bathtub, making a banging sound: "I didn't mean to do it. I just wanted to steal something, but she said she would call the police. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I can't do anything..."

Sure enough, the story he told Zhu Ning concealed part of the truth. Ding Chaojie was not just a thief. He had attempted to break into a house and was discovered by the owner.

Ding Chaojie: "I made a mistake. I know I'm guilty. I know I'm guilty."

It turns out that Ding Chaojie's story was like this. Ding Chaojie attempted to rob a house but got discovered, so he killed the owner. After the murder, he immediately fled. Unexpectedly, the first person to catch up with him was not the police, but the green door.

He killed the original owner of the house and became the new owner of the house. The green door had bound him. He could escape the capture of the police, but he could not escape the capture of the green door.

The green door had chases him his entire life, even to the ends of the earth. Over time, he himself began to suspect that this was retribution. He had killed someone, and now the victim turned into a door to chase him for revenge.

No wonder when Zhu Ning first met him, he was eager to be jailed to atone his sins.

'You've done something bad and now you're afraid of someone knocking on your door. It's really retribution. You deserve it.'

Zhu Ning speculated that this house may have existed for a long time, and the green door was constantly walking among the people, looking for the next owner who would move in by accident.

Once the owner was bound, they will be hunted to death unless they enter the green door. But once they enter, they will be trapped in the space and cannot leave. After quite some time, they'll get parasitized into becoming a snail person.

But what about Huang Ya Ruo? She didn't look like she was forced. Has she been taking care of the house?

The house does not seem to have the ability to actively attack. To make an analogy, its existence was more like a Venus flytrap.

Huang Ya Ruo's action of knocking Zhu Ning and Ding Chaojie unconscious was very much like a mother hunting then feeding her cubs.

The cub has not grown fangs yet, and the snail people move slowly, so Huang Ya Ruo needs to process the food herself before feeding it to the house.

Zhu Ning asked, "How did you get in?"

She wanted to hear the specific process of Ding Chaojie entering the green door. Maybe she could find new clues.

Ding Chaojie didn't seem to understand what Zhu Ning said. He suddenly laid down quickly, like a fish lying on the cold bathroom floor. His body kept twitching and his movements were too strange. It was not something a human could do.

Zhu Ning's heart skipped a beat. She was too familiar with this conditioned reflex.

It was one of the signs a human would be turning into a zombie.

Zhu Ning took a deep breath. "What's wrong with you?"

"I, I, I'm so cold."

It was indeed quite cold in the house. The temperature displayed on the helmet panel was 18 degrees Celsius. Seeing that Ding Chaojie was only wearing a denim jacket, it was normal to feel cold.

But then he screamed. His body squirming.

"You, you you you--" Ding Chaojie widened his eyes, and two streams of yellow liquid flowed from it. They were not tears.

Ding Chaojie shook his neck like a zombie, muttering "you you you" while crawling towards Zhu Ning.

If it were any other time, Zhu Ning would have wanted to kick him away, but today she didn't move.

"Can you help me take a look?" Ding Chaojie said.

"My back hurts." Ding Chaojie: "It's a little itchy. Can you scratch it for me?"

Something was growing on Ding Chaojie's back, breaking out from the spine and making his jacket bulge out like the severe hunchback patients in the village.

Before Zhu Ning could say anything, she heard a crackling sound.

The bulge bursted, and a soft new snail shell appeared on his back.

The shell was orange-yellow with a black swirl line on it. Because it was newly grown, it was a bit transparent and you can even see the soft flesh inside.

He had been parasitized.

"What's wrong with me?" Ding Chaojie kept trying to turn his head to look at his back. His voice began to sound strange.

Ding Chaojie turned around with great effort, but he couldn't see anything.

Zhu Ning didn't know how to tell him the truth.

Tok–

A tooth fell out of his mouth.

Both Zhu Ning and him were stunned. The fallen tooth was particularly conspicuous on the tiles.

Immediately afterwards, Ding Chaojie's teeth came loose one by one, and dozens of teeth fell down with a crackling sound.

“Ah—ah—”

It was unclear whether Ding Chaojie wanted to speak or do something else, and in the end he could only utter a single syllable.

Ah—ah—

Ding Chaojie lost his ability to speak. He was thoroughly parasitized by contaminated spores.

Zhu Ning immediately knew that he had become a contaminant.

She was close enough to him to see the entire process of his transformation, which was somewhat similar to becoming a zombie.

Ding Chaojie opened his mouth wide. After Ding Chaojie's teeth fell out, new teeth grew in his mouth, forming the snail's unique radula.

Zhu Ning thought of the boring popular science magazine she had read before on her previous world. She knew that snails were the animals with the most teeth, with a single snail having tens of thousands of teeth.

Their teeth were different from those of humans. They were not used to chew food, but to crush food with the tens of thousands of teeth on their radula. Now, the man in front of her has developed that radula.

Ding Chaojie's neck twitched, and his eyes turned red, but his hands and feet became softer. Mucous could be seen constantly secreted from his palms.

His head tilted and water droplets began to appear on his face. His pale face swelled up quickly as if it had been soaked, and even the way he looked at Zhu Ning changed.

'Food, that's food.'

Ding Chaojie opened his mouth wide and tried to crawl towards Zhu Ning.

Zhu Ning frowned. She was actually staying in a room with a newly mutated contaminant.

With a creaking sound, the bathroom door was suddenly opened.

Dozens of snail people appeared, twice as many as Zhu Ning had observed earlier.

Their red eyes glinted as they opened their mouths wide, showing their teeth and tongues, and slowly crawled towards Zhu Ning. The house was about to enter hunting mode.

In Zhu Ning's previous world, there was a very popular question on the Internet:

<You'll be given 100 million dollars, but you'll be chased by snails for the rest of your life. If you get caught by a snail, you'll immediately die. Will you take the hundred million or not?>

More than half chose yes. After all, snails are so slow that as long as you are five meters further than the snail, you can win.

However, there was still a small group of people who didn't want to live in fear for the rest of their lives, worrying all the time that the snail will catch up and kill them. Living such life for a hundred million doesn't seem to be worth it.

When Zhu Ning saw that question, she couldn't imagine how she would be chased by a snail, so she had no way of answering it.

Well, now she knows.

She had lived in the apocalyptic world for so many years and had come into contact with all kinds of mutated zombies, but she never imagined that one day she would be hunted by a room full of snails.

Huang Yaruo stood behind the group of snails, looking at Zhu Ning like she was just a leaf meant to be fed to the snail people.

The snails were moving very slowly, with Ding Chaojie only half a meter away from Zhu Ning. The contaminants were finally beginning to show their true colors.

After Zhu Ning entered this strange house, she was depressed and felt suffocated by the atmosphere inside.

It was only her and those silly gossipy furniture in their own little world. No one else could be found, and not even a hint of a sound could be heard. Silence can drive someone crazy.

But now, there were people. Yes, they're contaminants, but hey, if you're desperate enough, they can still be considered people! Not to mention that there were blood, and bodies, and sounds. Zhu Ning felt like the world came alive again.

Thinking back carefully, the helmet reported that the house was only a Class C pollution area. The house where people were chased was like a question in an elementary school math test. The question was a bit tricky and many adults can't solve it, but if you strip away all the pretense, it was still just an elementary school question.

Ding Chaojie squirmed his body and slowly crawled towards Zhu Ning with slimy substance trailing behind him. She let him approach her with no intentions of moving. Ding Chaojie's feet covered with slime were about to touch Zhu Ning's legs. Once touched, her work clothes would be quickly corroded.

Suddenly, Ding Chaojie stopped abruptly with an extremely painful expression on his face. He opened his mouth wide to shout, but no sound came out.

The handcuffs that bound Ding Chaojie tightened on his wrist and broke both of his hands.

Zhu Ning finally used her metal manipulation skill.

With a click, the handcuffs on her wrists broke.

When she flipped over, the handcuffs that she was controlling had already slammed down on Ding Chaojie's head. There were a lot of metal inside the bathroom, and it was all within a meter of Zhu Ning's range.

The bathroom shower rose into the air like a snake, and the stainless steel handles near the faucet and the bathtub were suddenly torn from the wall. Zhu Ning didn't even touch the snail people. The metal parts inside the bathroom were enough to kill three of them in a few seconds.

The snail people who moved so slowly were really not worth mentioning in her eyes. It only took her one minute to complete a round. It had to be said that the metal manipulation skill was quite useful.

Click.

Zhu Ning looked up at the sound. Huang Ya Ruo had opened Zhu Ning's backpack and took out a gun.

"Don't come over, don't come over." Huang Ya Ruo's voice was shaking. The muzzle of the gun was pointed at Zhu Ning.

Zhu Ning took a step forward expressionlessly.

Huang Yaruo's face turned pale as she shouted, "Back off! If you come any closer, I'll shoot!"

Zhu Ning didn't say anything. She just took another step forward.

Bang!

Huang Ya Ruo pulled the trigger. People who don't often touch weapons are more likely to shoot randomly in a panic.

Huang Ya Ruo fired five shots with her eyes closed. They were only five meters apart. Even if she was not a professional shooter, Zhu Ning would definitely be hit at least once with how close they were to each other.

After Huang Ya Ruo fired the gun, she raised her head tremblingly, and was surprised to see that there seemed to be an invisible barrier one meter in front of Zhu Ning. The five bullets stopped abruptly, as if controlled by some force.

Zhu Ning just stood quietly behind the bullets.

Then, the bullets floating in the air fell to the ground like raindrops.

"Are you still shooting?" Zhu Ning asked.

"Who are you?" Huang Ya Ruo panicked. She had never seen such a person before. How did she do it? Why could she control bullets?

Huang Ya Ruo retreated. She took several steps backwards until she had nowhere to retreat. If this house was like a Venus flytrap, then this time it caught something that was very difficult to digest–

Zhu Ning.

"Are you a mutant?" Huang Ya Ruo had just opened her mouth when Zhu Ning had already walked in front of her.

Huang Ya Ruo's gun was easily taken away. During the whole process, Zhu Ning did not move a muscle at all. The gun was like a little pet that Zhu Ning kept, floating on her shoulder. The black muzzle stared at Huang Ya Ruo like a cold eye.

The positions were now swapped. As long as Huang Ya Ruo made any unusual movement, the gun will shoot.

The snail people in the house couldn't react. A snail was not a dog that would protect its owner.

Zhu Ning may not be able to get out, but she can drag down Huang Ya Ruo and this group of snail people to die together.

She had already hooked her cleaning backpack with one hand. Inside the bag were full of weapons she could control with just a thought.

Then she asked, "Are you Huang Ya Ruo?"

Huang Ya Ruo didn't answer, but deflected instead: "Who are you?"

"Ah," Zhu Ning: "I'm here to save you."

She realized that apart from the fact that Huang Ya Ruo seemed a little strange living in this house, she was an ordinary person in other aspects.

Sometimes the difference between ordinary people and warriors was as big as the difference between humans and animals. Zhu Ning doesn't even need to use her skill to kill her.

"Save me?" Huang Ya Ruo's face turned pale.

Zhu Ning: "Didn't you post a request for help?"

Huang Ya Ruo recorded many videos, all for the sake of asking for help. She had hoped that someone would see it and come to save her.

"Post?" Huang Ya Ruo seemed shocked, her voice trembling. "My post was still on the web?"

She does not seem to be happy at all when she heard that Zhu Ning was coming to save her. In fact, she looked terrified.

"Are you afraid of me?" Zhu Ning asked.

"No, no." Huang Yaruo forced a smile, but she couldn't laugh.

Zhu Ning looked around and found that there were still snails in the house, but it might take half an hour for them to crawl over.

She had many questions in her heart, and she believed that Huang Ya Ruo was the only one who could answer them for her. So, Zhu Ning sat on the sofa, acting like the real owner of the house. For the time being, she was not worried that the snail people would kill her.

"Are you raising them?" Zhu Ning asked.

"I, I..." Huang Ya Ruo took a breath, and suddenly couldn't continue.

"You deliberately filmed the video and uploaded it online to attract people." Zhu Ning helped her, saying, "Was it to feed this house?"

"No," Huang Ya Ruo denied immediately. She raised her head quickly, probably wanting to say something to explain, but nothing came out. After a long while, she finally said, "Everything I said in the video was true. I didn't lie."

She really encountered a supernatural event. After waking up, all the furniture in the room faced the wall with their backs to her, as if the furniture was looking at another space through the wall.

Huang Ya Ruo thought that everything would be fine after she moved, but she didn't expect that after moving, she couldn't get rid of the house no matter how hard she tried. The house kept chasing her.

Huang Ya Ruo started crying.

"Everything I encountered was true. I really didn't lie, but, but..."

"...It calls me mom."

Mother--

The door in the video once called out to her, trying to lure Huang Ya Ruo late at night. She clearly has no children, but the house really felt like her child.

Huang Ya Ruo used up all her savings and bought this house when she was 35 years old. She chose her favorite wallpaper from hundreds of wallpapers, spent a month running around the furniture market before choosing these pieces, compared the sizes, patterns, and materials of the sofas one by one, and carefully selected the color temperature of the lights in the house. It took her two weeks to decide on each piece of furniture.

Because she was short of money, she made every decision carefully.

Because she loved her house so much, she was willing to redo the renovations.

Finally, she got the house that she was most satisfied with. It was simply perfect, and every inch of the house was what Huang Ya Ruo had imagined in her heart.

She has worked for others all her life. She has no lover and no children, so this house felt like her child.

But it slowly revealed its imperfect side. In the middle of the night, the furniture would move and change their formations strangely.

Alive, Huang Ya Ruo always felt that this house was alive.

From that day on, Huang Ya Ruo started to go crazy. She tried every possible way to restore the furniture to its original position, but every day when she woke up, the furniture had its own will.

They don't change because of Huang Ya Ruo.

Finally she moved and abandoned the house where she had spent most of her effort, life savings, and beautiful imaginations of life.

She doesn't want it anymore.

She gave up the house, but the house did not let her go. After she moved, the house followed her again. In the middle of the night, it made strange boxing-like movements to attract Huang Ya Ruo's attention.

It was very angry. Like an abandoned child, it called her deeply in the middle of the night.

Mommy.

Mommy...

Mommy!

It was like a nightmare.

Huang Ya Ruo had no choice but to walk back. Then she found another space in the house, and there was another house inside the house.

She was like a snail. From the moment she bought the house, she carried a heavy shell on her back. No matter where she went, the house would follow her.

Mom, I'm hungry.

The house said it was hungry and wanted to eat.

Huang Ya Ruo had never given birth to a child, but to her, the word "mother" was definitely a punishment. She became the mother of a house. The relationship between them was no longer that of a house and a person, but that of a mother and a child.

"What else could I do?" Huang Ya Ruo said, "It was begging me. It said that it was so hungry."

So Huang Ya Ruo could only help solve each victim. After the house was full, it would not make any noise. It would be quiet for several days, docile like an ordinary house.

House slave.

There were only these two words in Zhu Ning's mind. She had never felt that the term "house slave" was so appropriate.

Snails carry their houses wherever they go, so they move slowly and cannot go far. People spend their entire lives buying their own houses, and from then on they are imprisoned by them and become slaves to them.

In Zhu Ning's previous world, the relationship between house slaves and houses was a loan relationship, but in the wasteland world, it became a deformed mother-child relationship.

A house acting like a child and always asking for things.

"Did you post the video?" Zhu Ning asked.

"No," Huang Ya Ruo shook her head violently, "It, it was imitating me."

In early childhood, the first person a child learns from is often their mother.

Huang Ya Ruo once posted her experience online, which attracted many so-called exorcists and internet celebrities who wanted to take advantage of the popularity to ride the wave.

Anyone who enters the green door would die. Then the house discovered some patterns in the process.

Zhu Ning heard that this house has the ability to learn.

The contaminated areas that Zhu Ning had come into contact with before usually had a pollution source, and most of them were once humans, such as the fish man who missed the last train and Wang Ming from the hot pot restaurant.

They naturally have human thinking patterns, and Zhu Ning only needs to follow their thought process to find the source of pollution.

But this house was a contaminant formed by contaminated spores parasitizing on a non-living contaminant.

At first, the house was like a baby, crying in the middle of the night, calling for its mother to come and feed it. But as time went on, it grew.

It possesses some human intelligence and even imitates Huang Ya Ruo's movements, posting videos online to attract more food.

Zhu Ning asked, "When did you come in?"

It seems that the parent-child relationship between this house and Huang Ya Ruo has been going on for a long time.

Huang Ya Ruo: "The 65th year of the new calendar."

Logically, Huang Ya Ruo should be in her fifties now, but she looks no different from the her in the video 15 years ago.

It seems that Huang Ya Ruo was supporting the house, and the house was also supporting Huang Ya Ruo. Zhu Ning guessed that Huang Ya Ruo was either a contaminant herself or had already been assimilated as a part of the house.

Zhu Ning asked, "Where did you get the money to buy the house?"

She still had many questions that were not answered, such as why Huang Ya Ruo bought a three-bedroom, one-living-room apartment at that time.

Huang Ya Ruo herself had never thought about it, so she took a long time thinking about it.

Zhu Ning sat on the sofa and waited patiently.

Huang Ya Ruo finally said, "I went to the property development to look at houses. I could only afford the smallest unit, but when I visited this house, I thought it was beautiful. I loved it so much."

As she spoke, she seemed to recall more details, and her tone became more and more certain. "But it was three times my budget, and I know couldn't afford it. I went home after the first house viewing."

Huang Ya Ruo said: "Later, the sales lady contacted me and said that she saw that I liked it so much, so she was willing to sell it to me at the lowest price."

"Thinking about it now, it was really strange. The price they quoted was exactly the balance I had in my account. I only had 800,000, and they said they would sell it to me for exactly 800,000."

At that time, Huang Ya Ruo's budget for buying a house was 600,000, with 200,000 left for decoration. But the house costs 800,000. Huang Ya Ruo thought about it all night and felt that it was a huge bargain. If she missed it, she would regret it for the rest of her life.

Many years later, Huang Ya Ruo could still clearly remember how she felt when she bought the house.

Realizing something, she asked, "Did they do this on purpose?"

Huang Ya Ruo had never thought in this direction.

Later, strange phenomena occurred in the house. Huang Ya Ruo went back to the sales office once, but the salesperson who was selling the house had resigned, and the new employee played her like a fiddle.

Every time she asked them, they would always say, "We can't be held responsible for this kind of thing."

But after thinking about it, the whole house buying process was really suspicious.

Zhu Ning didn't know what to say. In her opinion, the house was a contaminant and they were looking for a mother for the house. And it could not be given away for free. If the house was given away for free, the person who gets it may not cherish it.

What they were looking for was someone like Huang Ya Ruo, who wants to buy a house of her own. She would cherish it, take care of it, and love it as much as she loves her own life.

It would have been fine if it was given away for free, but they squeezed Huang Ya Ruo's last penny out of her even though they didn't care about the money at all.

In this way, Huang Ya Ruo will not abandon it easily. Even when she begins to doubt something, she will convince herself that the cost was too high to let it go. She could only hope that everything will be okay.

Huang Ya Ruo figured it out herself, "I even borrowed money from my parents for the renovation."

The more she invests, the harder it will be for her to give up. She will try every possible means to convince herself that she loves the house like its her own child.

Huang Ya Ruo took a deep breath. Facing the snail people crawling all over her house, she realized how ridiculous this matter was. She supported a house for fifteen years and gave everything she had for it, while the people behind her watched her struggle as if they were teasing a cat or a dog.

Zhu Ning saw Huang Ya Ruo smile and then burst into tears. She was crying and laughing at the same time. It should be difficult for a normal person to accept the situation for a while, not to mention that she had been trapped here for fifteen years.

But Zhu Ning didn't give her time to process her emotions and quickly asked the next question: "Do you still remember the name of the company?"

Huang Ya Ruo went in a daze.

Zhu Ning repeated: "Do you still remember the name of the company? This is very important."

She looked at Huang Ya Ruo seriously. Although she was wearing a helmet, and Huang Ya Ruo could not see Zhu Ning's expression at all...Well, she didn't even know what Zhu Ning looked like!

But Zhu Ning said that she was there to save her.

"Will you really save me?" Huang Ya Ruo asked.

"Yes." Zhu Ning said without hesitation: "I can take you out."

"I, I am a murderer." Huang Ya Ruo took two steps back. She didn't trust Zhu Ning.

Zhu Ning: "That's for the Public Security Bureau to work on, not mine."

Zhu Ning was just a garbage collector, not a vigilante. Arresting criminals and punishing evildoers were not within her job scope. Besides, even if Huang Ya Ruo was a victim or a perpetrator, she still needed to be brought to court for trial.

Zhu Ning was an ordinary person and has no right to judge whether someone was guilty or not.

Huang Ya Ruo was silent.

"Remember the documents." Zhu Ning reminded her, "You should've signed documents or at least left something behind as proof."

Huang Ya Ruo realized that Zhu Ning could save her, but there were conditions. Huang Ya Ruo had to prove that she was worthy of being saved.

"I didn't keep any documents, but I saw their company information," Huang Ya Ruo started. "They showed me the company information and said that it was a charity project under Eternal Life Pharmaceutical, specifically for people who wants to achieve their dreams like me. I thought it was a scam, so I checked and found that the charity foundation was really legal and compliant."

Eternal Life Pharmaceutical. It’s this company again. Isn’t its appearance rate too high?

This is the second contaminated area related to Eternal Life Pharmaceutical that Zhu Ning has found, but this time it was a different situation from the hot pot restaurant owner. The hot pot restaurant owner was a victim of Eternal Life Pharmaceutical, or to be more precise, an experimental victim.

But the house clearly looks like a long-planned...experiment.

They seemed to be monitoring this place to see whether Huang Ya Ruo could become the mother of the house. They were watching what would happen to a normal person living in an abnormal house.

Were they studying the parent-child relationship between humans and contaminants? Was there really a parent-child relationship between humans and contaminants?

If this was really an experimental body, it cannot be left unsupervised. Theoretically, Zhu Ning would have been monitored as soon as she came in, which would makes things a bit troublesome.

Even if she managed to escape from the contaminated area, she would most likely be hunted down by Eternal Life Pharmaceuticals.

Prometheus. Zhu Ning gritted her teeth. Very good, that AI really pushed Zhu Ning into the fire pit.

Zhu Ning asked, "Where is the exit of the house?"

Huang Ya Ruo closed her eyes and said, "You can't get out. Once you enter the inner space, no one can get out."

Huang Ya Ruo, as the mother of the house, couldn't even leave. In all these years, she had never seen a living person walk out.

"It will slowly drain you to death, and you won't be able to get out." Huang Ya Ruo covered her face.

It was because she knew this house too well that she became even more desperate. Over the past fifteen years, Huang Ya Ruo had tried all sorts of methods but to no avail. In the end, she could only resign herself to her fate and become the mother of the house.

Zhu Ning has experienced the style of this house. It will make you lose the concept of time and space and will hide its danger to lower your guard.

It simply traps you, constantly polluting you mentally. When you're finally confused, it would then release snail people to hunt you.

No matter how powerful Zhu Ning is, can she kill every single snail person there is? Can she live without sleeping? Can she live without eating?

How many years can she hold out here? Ten or twenty? Heck, can she even last a month?

As long as she relaxes for a moment and reveals a flaw, the house would definitely take advantage of it and breach her defenses.

This was a contaminated area, and the source of the pollution should be just around the corner. In her previous missions in the contaminated areas, she was able to trace the source of the pollution through clues. Once the source was found, the contaminated area would automatically collapse.

But it was different for this house.

This was the first time that Zhu Ning encountered an inanimate object contaminant, and it seems that it has its own operating logic that is completely different from the usual.

"What should we do?" Huang Ya Ruo looked at Zhu Ning helplessly. Fifteen years had passed and she couldn't stand it anymore.

Since Zhu Ning was wearing a helmet, Huang Ya Ruo couldn't see her expression. Zhu Ning walked to the wall.

"You can't go back." Huang Ya Ruo reminded her, thinking that Zhu Ning wanted to return the same way.

The rule of this house was that people from the outside can walk backwards to the inner space, but people inside cannot walk back.

Zhu Ning did not try to go back.

She put one hand on the wall and gently rested her forehead against it.

There were two ways to deal with pollutants.

The first way was to find the source of pollution and then eliminate it.

The second was, well...just blow the area up.

Fortunately, the house was made of reinforced concrete.

---

Snail's radula

The translator has something to say:

Zhu "demolition officer" Ning: Can't defeat others with logic? Then just go beat them up! Can't escape? Then just break everything!

This was a really long chapter aaa!!

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