Chapter 104-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World

Chapter 104 The Forsaken Village (VIII)

Rubbing your eyes introduces countless bacteria—the moment you complete that action, your eyes are contaminated.

Zhu Yao was a doctor. She'd always been particular about Zhu Ning's hygiene habits. Since childhood, Zhu Ning had never had the habit of rubbing her eyes.

Now Zhu Ning raised one hand, desperately wanting to rub her eyes. She genuinely felt something was wrong with them.

But the motion was blocked by her helmet. Her knuckles knocked against it with a sharp crack, and the jolt snapped her mind clear.

Once you start suspecting something is wrong with your eyes, you can't stop. This village seemed to carry some kind of infection—and Zhu Ning still hadn't figured out the true route of transmission.

She activated the internal camera in her helmet, wanting to check the state of her eyes.

She aimed the camera at herself. The helmet had a real-time monitoring screen, and Zhu Ning used the camera as a mirror to examine herself.

A pair of eyes appeared on the screen. Zhu Ning's eyes were fairly large—normally clear and bright—but the intense mental strain had left them visibly tired, with a few red veins threading across the surface.

Red veins from exhaustion were normal. Zhu Ning enlarged the image, zooming in for a close-up of her eyes.

Why did they feel so itchy?

The lens pulled closer. A larger eye filled the helmet's screen. In that moment something felt strange—you were looking at your own eye, yet somehow it didn't feel like your own eye. It felt like a separate, independent creature.

The eye seemed to have a life of its own. It was its own entity.

Every blink, every slight movement of the eyeball was captured and magnified. Even the calmest person, staring at their own eye for long enough, would find it deeply unsettling.

Zhu Ning manipulated the camera direction—zoom in, zoom in, zoom in further. She could see the red veins with perfect clarity.

Probably just poor rest. She'd need to sleep properly when she got home. That many red veins might be a sign of something.

Then, abruptly, Zhu Ning stopped.

The red veins on the surface of her eye were moving.

Those weren't veins. They were tiny red worms clinging to the surface of her eye.

Red worms were crawling across Zhu Ning's eyeball.

At first they only twitched faintly. Then the twitching grew more frantic, consuming the black pupil, swarming densely across the entire eye.

Both of Zhu Ning's eyes were now overrun with red worms, writhing and struggling to break free from her eye sockets.

[Sanity decreased by 5%]

Zhu Ning snapped back. She looked at the camera again—just a normal pair of eyes, with a few red veins. Nothing more.

What had she just seen? A hallucination?

This was Psychic Contamination. The diary, the eye pain, the red veins—all of it was layered Psychic Contamination, building on itself.

Zhu Ning wasn't the only one who'd looked at her eyes after reading the diary. Xu Meng must have done the same—Zhu Ning could see her body give a sudden violent shudder.

Li Nianchuan's reaction was worse. His entire body went rigid. He'd definitely been hit by the contamination.

Li Nianchuan was staring at his own eyes. The worms crawled out from his eye sockets—tiny and dense, red worms covering his face, then burrowing into his mouth, his nostrils, his ears. They didn't miss a single opening.

They reproduced at a terrifying speed. Within seconds, the writhing worms multiplied and swelled until they filled the entire interior of his helmet.

Li Nianchuan tried to struggle, but he couldn't move a single finger. He could only watch helplessly as the worms devoured him.

Red worms blocked his throat, packed his nasal cavity. He felt like he was suffocating.

Smack—

Someone slapped him on the back. In an instant, the worms scattered as if startled.

"Li Nianchuan!" Zhu Ning was calling him. "Wake up!"

Li Nianchuan gasped. Fresh air poured through the helmet's filter, like a drowning man finally breaking the surface. He stared wide-eyed and looked at the inside of his helmet again.

Gone. The red worms had disappeared.

Li Nianchuan felt his sanity draining rapidly. If he stayed here much longer, he might lose his mind.

Zhu Ning: "Hey—still with me?"

Zhu Ning's helmet appeared in Li Nianchuan's field of vision, replacing the horrifying worms. Li Nianchuan's teeth were still chattering uncontrollably. He clenched his jaw with effort. "S-still fine."

Zhu Ning: "Take a Sanity Healing Agent injection."

They'd been issued Sanity Healing Agents for this mission—injectable, stored inside the protective suit. No need to remove the suit; just press the button on the arm, and a small needle would extend from the suit and pierce the skin.

The whole process avoided any exposure to infection beyond the wall.

But each person only had two doses. Li Nianchuan wanted to save them. "I-I can still hold on."

Zhu Ning said nothing. Sanity could be trained. Li Nianchuan had been through two advancement procedures—he probably wasn't as fragile as before.

"Tell me if you can't hold on," Zhu Ning said. By the time the hallucinations started, it would be too late.

Li Nianchuan made a sound of acknowledgment and asked: "Where's the squad leader?"

Xu Meng—Zhu Ning could only see her left hand trembling. Xu Meng was pressing her right hand over it to hold it still.

Xu Meng's voice came through steady. "I'm fine."

Li Nianchuan thought his squad leader was genuinely impressive. But wasn't Xu Meng just an ordinary Cleaner squad leader?

Were Cleaners really this capable now? Li Nianchuan was clearly not cut out for this line of work.

Li Nianchuan asked: "Psychic Contamination?"

He'd only entered enclosed Contamination Zones twice, and both times had been with Zhu Ning. He instinctively relied on her.

Zhu Ning closed the notebook. "Yes. Don't look at any more of the clues in here."

Inside a Contamination Zone, everything was designed to contaminate you. Back in the sewer, Zhu Ning had kept him from looking too closely as well.

Li Nianchuan didn't push back. His mind was grinding slowly, struggling to suppress the image of the worms, and he tried to think through the contents of the log.

"So the one playing the keyboard is Old Wu?"

Zhu Ning: "Most likely."

The Happiness Village observation log had recorded that Old Wu could play the keyboard—though his skill had deteriorated badly afterward. So the piano music they'd heard was probably coming from Old Wu's direction.

He was the first person to go missing and come back.

Old Wu had wandered around outside the old woman's house. He was a key figure.

Surveillance. Eyes. Worms.

Put those three together—what did it mean? Had this village once been infected by a worm-type Contaminant?

The old woman had written that a ghost had gotten into the village. Was Old Wu the Source of Contamination?

"Jiang Ping's team went to Old Wu's house," Li Nianchuan said.

Zhu Ning had exchanged channel numbers with Cui Kai before leaving. She tried to reach him—it was worth a shot, even if there was no guarantee of a signal in this place.

She opened the channel. A burst of static came through.

"Cui Kai?" She'd gotten through.

"What is it?" The voice on the other end was clear.

But Zhu Ning felt no sense of relief. You couldn't tell from a voice alone whether it was really the person.

Zhu Ning paused for a moment, then asked: "Have you gone in yet?"

Cui Kai's reply sounded completely normal. "Just got in. This place is strange. The people outside are gone—we seem to have entered a different layer of space."

So they'd encountered the same thing as Zhu Ning's team. They'd all crossed into another layer of this world.

Zhu Ning briefly summarized the clues they'd found. Cui Kai listened carefully. "This Old Wu was the first one something happened to?"

"Yes," Zhu Ning said. "I suspect there's something at his place. Be careful."

"Got it," Cui Kai said. "I'll contact you when we find something."

Cui Kai closed the channel. Zhu Ning had been on the public frequency, so Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng had both heard everything. They waited until the line went dead before speaking.

Xu Meng asked the key question: "Are you actually sure you were talking to Cui Kai?"

Zhu Ning: "Not entirely."

Just a voice—who could say whether the person on the other end was human or something else?

Zhu Ning wasn't worried about sharing information with them. If it was something else, it already knew what she knew. If it was a living person, the information would be useful to them.

Li Nianchuan: "Should we go find them?"

If they'd all entered another layer of space, they should be able to meet up.

Zhu Ning: "I want to find Old Zhang."

From the old woman's account, Old Zhang was genuinely suspicious—he'd gotten her to help with surveillance, and then when something clearly happened, he'd refused to share what he knew.

Old Zhang had definitely discovered something.

Neither of them objected. The place had grown colder. When they stepped out of the shed, the sunset outside was still frozen in place, time completely stalled.

The warm red of the sunset fell across them and somehow only made them feel cold.

Before leaving, they searched the entire house one more time. There was definitely no one inside—empty throughout.

Zhu Ning found a tin of rolled tobacco and a box of matches, though both had gone damp and would crumble at a touch. She kept looking at the blackened walls. The shed outside was blackened too. These dark patches weren't particularly conspicuous—the whole village was run-down—but the details kept nagging at her. Something had burned here. But why? An accident? Or deliberate arson? And if deliberate, who had done it?

Xu Meng found a hunting rifle. "Zhu Ning, look at this."

Zhu Ning knew guns best. This old hunting rifle looked homemade. She weighed it in her hands—heavy, probably around eight jin. Most people couldn't even hold it steady, let alone aim.

This old woman was genuinely formidable. She'd clearly been a hunter.

Zhu Ning pictured her: a cantankerous old woman who smoked rough tobacco and went hunting, with a short temper.

No wonder Old Zhang had wanted her help. If anyone in this village was most likely to survive, it should have been her.

The three of them searched for the old woman's name. Strangely, after going through everything in the house, they found not a single clue connected to a name.

Had her name been erased?

The key figures named in the diary were A-Fen, Old Wu, and Old Zhang. Because they were all acquaintances, they referred to each other by nicknames—no one used full names.

Zhu Ning took the old woman's hunting rifle. It wasn't as precise as the Sanitation Center's equipment, but it should work well enough.

There was nothing more to find in the house. Zhu Ning took one last look before leaving. The footprints by the window were still there.

They opened the front door. As expected, no Jin Tao outside—just a desolate village road. And when they looked back through the window from outside, the abandoned house was empty. No old woman. Just a truly forsaken room.

As they stepped out the front door, Li Nianchuan heard the strange sound again. His ears twitched. It sounded like someone talking—shouting something.

Zhu Ning asked: "What is it?"

Li Nianchuan: "I keep hearing sounds. Can you hear anything?"

Zhu Ning had taken gene injections—her hearing was decent too. She stood still and listened for a moment. Nothing unusual.

Li Nianchuan: "Maybe I'm hearing things?"

He suspected the Psychic Contamination had gotten to him and he was hallucinating.

Zhu Ning: "Not necessarily. You might actually be hearing something real."

Xu Meng picked up the thread. "If we've walked into another layer of this world, and the two layers are folded on top of each other in space, you might be hearing sounds from the layer above."

If Jin Tao was in the first layer and Li Nianchuan's group was in the second, the two layers were spatially overlapping. What Li Nianchuan was hearing was Jin Tao's voice.

Li Nianchuan could barely wrap his mind around it. Right where he was standing, Jin Tao was standing on the exact same spot. They shared the same anchor point in space, yet couldn't touch each other at all.

Jin Tao was shouting at the top of his lungs—was he trying to tell them to run?

Li Nianchuan: "If we can't get out…"

"Then we're in more trouble than Jin Tao's group. We'll die here," Zhu Ning said. That was the truth. If Jin Tao's group was in the first layer, they still had some slim chance of breaking out by force. But Zhu Ning's group might truly be buried here forever.

And Zhu Ning kept feeling this place was deeply wrong—possibly because they were beyond the wall, but it seemed like more than just an A-Level Contamination Zone.

The environment beyond the wall was complex. Even Xu Meng looked tense—and Xu Meng had been completely calm back at the aquarium.

Zhu Ning touched the back of her neck. She could feel the black viscous substance buried deep in her nape twitching faintly.

Because it sensed the contamination beyond the wall? Was the thing inside Zhu Ning the same kind as the contamination source out here?

How had this village been abandoned?

Zhu Ning: "Let's find Old Zhang's house."

Happiness Village homes should originally have had name plaques on their doors—something like "Zhang Residence" or "Li Residence," or at least a number for delivery purposes.

Now the plaques were gone, leaving only rectangular outlines where they'd been, as if someone had deliberately removed all identifying information. From the outside, there was no way to tell who any house belonged to.

So they had no choice but to search room by room, the slow way. First target: the house immediately to the right of the old woman's.

Zhu Ning still held to the rules of the contaminated world. In here, you needed to give yourself an identity.

She knocked on the door of the house next to the old woman's. "Hello? Is anyone home? We're lost."

Same line again. In a close-knit mountain village, the only role an outsider could play was exactly that—an outsider.

Creak—

The wooden door was pulled open from inside. A face appeared in the gap—half a wrinkled face, half hidden in shadow.

Someone was home. This house actually had someone in it.

The old woman's half-face was in shadow, only her right eye visible. Her gaze was sharp and guarded, the eye threaded with red veins.

Zhu Ning couldn't help staring at those red veins for a moment longer than she should have. This time it wasn't her imagination—the veins were moving.

Visibly moving. Like the surface of the eyeball was covered in tiny red worms, slowly crawling. As they passed over the eye, the worm's tail even flicked upward, nearly falling out of the socket.

[Sanity decreased by 2%]

Zhu Ning heard the prompt. Her rigid body shifted—she stepped sideways to block Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng behind her.

Her instinct moved faster than her conscious mind. She couldn't let her teammates see this. Not out of nobility—she needed to preserve their sanity.

"Don't look at her eyes," Zhu Ning said quietly.

"Something you need?" The old woman spoke. The house had no electricity, so she stood entirely in shadow.

Zhu Ning forced herself to stay calm. This is normal. This is normal. People having worms in their eyes is normal.

"We're lost," Zhu Ning repeated.

"Oh." The old woman gave a single syllable in reply. Her attitude was clear: I don't welcome you, and I have no intention of answering your questions. What does your being lost have to do with me?

Zhu Ning hadn't expected such a prickly response. She switched tactics. "Could I ask—where has the neighbor next door gone?"

The old woman's motion to close the door paused. "You know her?"

Zhu Ning: "She called us here."

Her mind moved fast. She immediately constructed a plausible reason for their presence. "She called and said her surveillance equipment was broken. Asked us to come fix it."

It was perfectly reasonable—the old woman's equipment really had stopped working. Calling for a repair technician made complete sense.

"We went to her house and found no one home," Zhu Ning continued, building out the lie. "Where did she go?"

The old woman made a sound. Zhu Ning's voice had been so certain that it was hard to doubt her.

The old woman glanced at Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng. Three people in black Cleaner protective suits with helmets—they looked completely out of place. But then, this whole village was out of place.

The old woman: "Want to come in and wait for her?"

She hadn't answered Zhu Ning's question, but she'd offered a new option.

Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng both frowned. Nothing about this looked right. Zhu Ning hesitated for one second. "Thank you."

Inside a Contamination Zone, you couldn't afford to miss any opportunity to learn the truth.

The old woman opened the door and let them in.

The interior was very dim. The whole house had fallen into disrepair—a mottled table, a shattered ceiling lamp, the same thick layer of dust everywhere. Blackened walls, crumbling brickwork showing through. It didn't look like anyone lived here at all.

Zhu Ning's first instinct was to check the window. There was a clear pair of footprints by the sill—same as next door, a single set of standing prints, no tracks leading to or away from them.

"Sit down."

The old woman stood barely one-and-a-half meters tall, her spine curved into a hunch, as if she were carrying a shell on her back.

The only seating in the room was the sofa. When all three of them sat down, it let out a long, drawn-out creak—an unpleasant sound, like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard.

An old sofa. A dust-covered living room. Li Nianchuan sat down beside Zhu Ning and didn't dare move.

The old woman brought out refreshments—a plate of rotting fruit. "Have something to eat."

Zhu Ning hesitated, then reached out and took an apple from the plate. It had already rotted—soft and yielding in her hand, giving off a foul smell.

The texture was wrong too. Not like fruit. More like flesh.

Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng each took one as well, following Zhu Ning's lead. They held them without eating. The old woman sat across from them.

She didn't speak. Her gaze carried a kind of pressure—being watched by her made you feel an invisible weight. She seemed to be waiting for them to eat the apple.

If you didn't eat, she would keep watching. She'd keep watching until she was satisfied that you'd swallowed it.

Li Nianchuan had squeezed his eyes shut. Holding the apple felt like holding a severed head. He was sure something would crawl out of it at any moment.

Zhu Ning looked at the apple. On the surface of the rotting fruit was a small hollow—and something inside it was burrowing.

Zhu Ning wanted to redirect the old woman's attention. "What should I call you?"

The old woman spoke, and as she did, the worms in her eyes crawled. "Just call me A-Fen."

A-Fen? She was A-Fen?

Zhu Ning recalled the notebook's contents. A-Fen had been the first to notice the locust tree at the village entrance was growing larger. From Zhu Ning's perspective, that tree had been unnaturally enormous.

And A-Fen, influenced by her neighbor, had bought her own surveillance equipment. Old Wu had appeared outside her door as well.

A-Fen: "Eat."

A-Fen smiled. As her facial muscles moved, one of the worms in her eye socket slipped partway out, its tail twitching against her cheek.

Zhu Ning looked at the apple in her hand. "Looks like something bit it."

A-Fen kept her eyes on Zhu Ning. "Just bite around it. It's fine to eat—those are fruit worms. Very nutritious."

When Zhu Ning used to visit her grandmother in the countryside, her grandmother never worried about worm-eaten apples. If Zhu Ning wouldn't eat one, her grandmother would—and she'd eat it while saying it was nutritious.

That had once been a warm memory. Now the same scene replayed in this context, and it was terrifying.

A chill ran down Zhu Ning's spine. She stared at the hole in the apple. It was roughly the diameter of a pen refill—which meant the worm inside was about the same size.

Zhu Ning prodded it with her index finger. Through the glove, she felt something soft—a red worm wriggling inside.

Almost on instinct, Zhu Ning pinched the worm and pulled it out. Eating fruit, even a bad apple—the normal thing to do was remove the worm first. The action was perfectly natural.

Normally, a worm in an apple would be a centimeter at most.

But Zhu Ning pulled and pulled, like catching a loose thread in a knitted sweater. She extracted a full two meters of red worm.

The blood-red worm writhed in her palm, like a length of reeking blood vessel—half coiled in her hand, the other half draped across her thigh. She suppressed every instinct she had not to fling it away.

The rotting apple collapsed inward. A-Fen was still watching her. "Eat."

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