Daomu Biji: Restart

Before going down, I especially looked for Fatty's position. I didn't want to pass by any member of Xiao Hua's team, so I climbed straight down towards Fatty.

Once I reached him, he asked me how my chat with Xiao Hua went. When I told him that Xiao Hua fell asleep while talking, Fatty sighed deeply and said to me, "It's not easy. Do you think there’s an easy mode for life?"⁽¹⁾

I experienced it once before, but I didn’t regret losing it. In any case, it wasn’t like there was a “regret option” in life, so there was no point in thinking about it. "How’s Tang Tang?" I asked him.

"There really are changes. Take a look at them." He pointed to Xiao Hua's team members on the side—everyone looked like they were facing a big enemy—and then pointed his flashlight at the body.

I really wasn't ready to see what Jin Wantang looked like now, but I could see his severely dehydrated and shriveled hands exposed by the half-opened sleeping bag.

I first checked to see if his nails had grown longer, but Fatty just shook his head and held Jin Wantang's withered hand up for me to see. I found that on some parts of his hand, the muscles looked like they were pulsating. These pulsations were very strange, almost like bugs were moving through his veins.

If this were a fresh corpse, it wouldn’t be surprising to see such a neurological reflex, but Jin Wantang’s body was almost mummified. The cells should almost be dead, so why were his muscles still pulsating?

"We have to look at the face. Are you ready?" Fatty asked me.

I nodded and took a deep breath just as Fatty pulled the rest of the sleeping bag away, revealing Jin Wantang's face.

In an instant, all my hair stood on end. Jin Wantang's face was completely shriveled up and his hair was almost falling out, but his skull had somehow become very elongated. It distorted his facial features by pulling his eyes all the way up to where his forehead was supposed to be.

But his eyes were still looking down, as if he was looking down at us. It would have been reasonable to assume that his eyeballs had shrunk into his eye sockets by now, but instead, they were still there. Plus, they had turned a grayish-green color.

It was too scary. I had never seen this kind of facelift affect someone’s facial features so much before.

I was so dizzy from the sudden shock of it that I had to take a deep breath. A member of Xiao Hua's team suddenly spoke up at this time, "His body has already started to change."

I looked at Jin Wantang's face and realized that this might also be what a Shigou Diao’s corpse would look like. But I didn’t quite believe that Old Jin was a Shigou Diao member. There’s no way this extravagant guy would ever eat corpse flesh.

Old Jin, ah, Old Jin, what happened to you? Do you have secrets, too? Or were you coerced?

"What's your name?" I asked the speaker.

"Little Master Three, my name is Jin Xingsan." The other man immediately nodded and bowed. He seemed like the type of person who knew how to get around.

"Korean?"

"Yes."

I looked him in the eye. "What will happen if this corpse isn’t disposed of?"

Jin Xingsan hesitated for a moment before looking at the others around him. "What? Do you still engage in mysticism even at this time?" I asked him.

"The head will become longer and the skin will tear from the upper lip, revealing another face," he responded.

"What do you mean?"

"Little Master Three, every corpse here is different. But in this situation, the skin on this corpse’s face will definitely tear all the way up to the head during the corpse transformation process. The skin can be lifted away from the upper lip to reveal the whole skinless face below—it’s actually how many cosmetic surgeries are done—and then the corpse will come alive."

"What should I do?"

"People can't be resurrected after death. You have to throw it down."

I looked at Jin Wantang, but I didn't recognize him anymore. My fingers were shaking as I asked Fatty to close the sleeping bag back up. I wasn’t a man who couldn’t make a decision about this kind of thing, but if Old Jin's body was thrown down the cliff, would he be trapped here forever?

I knew that it had all been in my head, but I couldn’t brush off that scene I had witnessed on the grassland before.

"How long do we have?"

"There should still be a few days left," he said.

I breathed a sigh of relief, but at this time, I suddenly saw Poker-Face resting behind Fatty with his eyes closed.

I stared blankly for a moment. Shit, isn't Poker-Face keeping an eye on Xiao Hua above us? But after looking at Poker-Face, it seemed that he had never moved from his position.

“Little Brother?” I called out. He opened his eyes and gave me a questioning look.

I thought about it for a moment and then broke out in a cold sweat. This is bad, I said to myself before I immediately started climbing up.

****

TN Notes:

(1) He means like a game. Easy mode, normal mode, hard mode.