After All Species Mutated, I Activated Cheats [Apocalyptic] - Chapter 18

Lu Mian turned his head with a stiff neck. He didn’t know how he was supposed to react. In his sensory world, all sound seemed to recede in an instant. He could hear nothing, and his eyes could see nothing else, his entire vision was filled with Brother Mantis’s compound eyes.

From this close, Lu Mian could clearly see the hundreds of segmented pupils within those compound eyes dilating rapidly. A poisonous hatred, almost physical in its intensity, screamed to drag him down into hell along with it!

Lu Mian’s heart hammered violently. A piercing pain shot through his temples. As the pain intensified, his ears began to roar, and the world went quiet. It was as if he had suddenly gone deaf, leaving his mind in a state of total chaos.

After an unknown amount of time, Lu Mian managed to claw back a shred of consciousness, only to realize that everything around him had been hit with a pause button. Whether it was the giant mantises struggling in the pool, Brother Mantis who was deathly gripping him, or even the hairworms just beginning to crawl out of the mantis’s long abdomen—everything was frozen perfectly still!

This eerie, logic-defying scene caused his barely recovered brain to stall once more.

He looked toward the exit. He saw Old Wang turning back, a face full of terror frozen as he looked at him. Further ahead was Brother Chen’s thin back, and Lin Feng had already reached the doorway, his right hand gripping a lighter with his thumb pressed against the switch. He was clearly waiting for them all to get clear before torching the swim center.

Lu Mian didn’t know what was happening. In a daze, he remembered experiencing something similar before.

Back when he killed the Butterfly Queen, there was a split second where everyone’s movements felt like they were in slow motion. At the time, he had attributed it to his own extreme focus. He had always felt that when a person’s mental state was highly concentrated, their thinking and movements would feel relatively faster, and that life-or-death moment had simply pushed his potential to the limit, creating the illusion that the world had slowed down.

Similarly, in the seconds before he was nearly sucked into the Leech King’s mouth, his entire mind had been on the salt cart. Driven by a crisis and peak mental focus, everything around him had seemed to pause, giving him the extra time to judge if he could reach the cart.

But right now, his mind was flickering between confusion and a daze. He wasn’t “highly focused” by any stretch of the imagination, yet this strange time-stop was happening anyway!

At this point, it was hard not to attribute this phenomenon to himself. He knew he had mutated, but he hadn’t expected that besides physical organs like his right hand and eyes, he could actually influence external things, like, time!

Lu Mian took a deep breath. He carefully moved his hand, which was riddled with holes from the barbs. Bright red blood flowed from countless wounds, dripping onto the floor.

He couldn’t pull his hand free from Brother Mantis’s foreleg!

He used his other hand to clutch his chest, where his heart was racing. The dull ache in his brain was growing heavier, causing his ability to think to plummet.

Suddenly, without the restraint of his reason, a hunger in his right palm that he had been ignoring took over for the first time. Saliva began to pool in Lu Mian’s mouth, and a loud, hollow growl erupted from his stomach as if he were starving.

In truth, from the moment he entered the narrow alley, his palm had felt uncomfortable. He had been too busy to deal with it, but he never expected that the unexplainable, weird sensation would reach its peak now.

He couldn’t stop his right hand from moving toward Brother Mantis. When it touched the barbed, mutated foreleg, it was like iron meeting a magnet. With a snap, his palm clamped onto the limb.

A series of “gulp, gulp” swallowing sounds rang out like a thunderclap, shattering the last of his logic. Like an addict, he greedily absorbed the energy from Brother Mantis. An indescribable sense of satisfaction spread from his palm through his entire body.

The feeling of being full came sooner than expected. Lu Mian withdrew his hand, trembling. He looked in shock at Brother Mantis’s withered, shriveled foreleg, and a sense of wrongness and guilt began to surge within him.

No matter what Brother Mantis had mutated into, he had once been a living, breathing human! For Lu Mian, who insisted on identifying as human and maintaining his humanity, the act of “feeding” on Brother Mantis was difficult to swallow.

He comforted himself internally: if he hadn’t acted, he wouldn’t have escaped. He wasn’t some noble saint with a hobby of feeding himself to insects, nor did he want to be dragged into a pool full of hairworms. In his mind, nothing was more important than staying alive.

The thousands of barbs pierced into his arm lost their vitality, turning into fine, hair-like strands. Once the grip hooking into his flesh vanished, all that remained was the sensation of foreign objects stuck in his skin. He moved slightly, and this time, he successfully pulled his hand back.

He stumbled back several paces. In the next instant, the shackles on time shattered, and the world restarted.

Lu Mian had never been so happy to hear noise. The sound of frantic footsteps, the splashing of giant mantises in the pool, Old Wang’s muffled cursing, thousands of sounds erupted at once. They rang in Lu Mian’s ears, but they also chased away his unease, giving him the emotional relief of returning to the world of the living.

Suddenly, someone yanked him. His body fell backward uncontrollably. After a dizzying blur, Lu Mian felt his feet leave the ground as he was hoisted up and carried toward the exit.

Lu Mian looked back into Old Wang’s large, sweating face.

“Wait,” Old Wang muttered, “didn’t you just…”

He shook his head mid-sentence. “I must be seeing things.”

Lu Mian narrowed his eyes. He knew what Old Wang was going to say.

The second before time stopped, Old Wang had seen Brother Mantis grab him. That was exactly why Old Wang had turned back to drag him away regardless of the cost.

But now, he wasn’t in Brother Mantis’s grasp.

Old Wang let go and complained, “What the hell were you doing back there? Stopping to admire Brother Mantis’s beautiful physique?”

Lu Mian broke into a run to keep up with the others, sprinting toward the door as if his pants were on fire.

He didn’t have the courage to stay in that room with Brother Mantis for another second!

The group scrambled out the door. Brother Mantis, proving his human origins gave him a formidable will, continued to chase them tenaciously even though his abdomen was crawling with hairworms and most of his life force had been drained by Lu Mian.

Lin Feng found a scrap of old clothing outside. Seeing that everyone had cleared the building, he lit it with practiced speed and threw it straight into Brother Mantis’s arms. Brother Chen and Old Wang worked in perfect sync to slam the doors of the swim center shut, and then the group ran for the corner without looking back.

A gas explosion was no joke. They were mere flesh and blood, unable to withstand it. Their only option was to get as far away as possible and find cover.

But they still underestimated the power of those two gas tanks. Even with the protection of a building, the group was knocked unconscious by the scorching shockwave the moment it hit!

The next morning, the group, having narrowly escaped the narrow alley, returned to the residential complex looking like a mess in a borrowed red pickup truck.

They had spent the night in the alley, “borrowing” the truck early that morning and stocking it with food and water scavenged from the area. They had wobbled all the way back, only to find they couldn’t even get through the front gate.

Old Wang stared blankly at a wall of green where the main gate should have been. “I remember the gate was fine when we left yesterday morning. Why can’t I see it now? Is our complex even here? Did we take a wrong turn?”

Lu Mian rubbed his aching brow, feeling helpless. “There’s a newsstand here. We’re in the right place.”

In this age of the internet, newsstands were a rarity. There were hardly any left in all of X City, but there happened to be one right at their gate. It had become the landmark for their complex.

“Great,” Brother Chen said. “Do you guys remember where the underground garage entrance is?”

Old Wang leaned lazily against the seat. “This entire road has been taken over by these crazed trees. It’s green everywhere. Even a ghost wouldn’t recognize the place.”

A five-minute silence followed.

Having no choice, they gave up on driving into the garage and prepared to walk in through the main entrance.

Peeling back layers of branches, they struggled through the lush greenery to find the iron gates shut tight. Due to the power outage, their key fobs didn’t work, so they had to grope their way through the motorcycle lane on the far right to enter.

The wild growth of the trees had blocked out the light. Since it was early morning and the sun was still low, the entire complex looked dim and gloomy.

But that didn’t stop Lu Mian from seeing the bizarre sights inside.

The trees in the central courtyard were now far taller than the buildings. Many branches had pierced through the residential blocks, growing from one window straight through to the other side of the house. Below, a layer of white silk covered almost the entire complex. It looked as if a sudden snow had fallen, every object draped in a layer of white, doors and windows sealed shut.

A breeze blew, rustling the leaves and lifting layers of white silk to drift in the wind.

Because the light was so poor, the floating white silk was even more noticeable. Its extremely light and airy texture gave it the visual effect of green smoke, looking exactly like the fluttering hems of ghosts in a horror movie. In an instant, they were pulled from the real world into a dark, spectral underworld.

Old Wang’s eyes widened, a deep sense of confusion in his shocked expression. “What the f*ck… is this?”

Brother Chen lifted his foot and looked at the silk stuck to his sole. “So sticky!”

Lu Mian knelt down and pinched a small piece of the white silk. It did indeed stick to his fingertips. He rubbed it firmly, and the tiny, smoke-like white filaments rolled into a ball, turning a grayish color.

Just then, Lin Feng tapped his shoulder. “Xiao Lu, look at that tree!”

Lu Mian looked up in the direction Lin Feng was pointing. After seeing what was on the tree, a wave of revulsion washed over him.

Hanging from that towering banyan tree were a dozen or so long, white, tubular objects. As the branches swayed, the objects swung back and forth. Looking at the silhouettes, they were clearly the shapes of living human beings!

Lu Mian stood up, intending to walk toward the banyan tree, but he suddenly realized that Old Wang and Brother Chen, who had been standing with him just a moment ago, had vanished!

“Brother Lin!” Lu Mian cried. “Old Wang and Brother Chen are gone, you…”

As he spoke, he turned back toward Lin Feng.

There was… no one there.

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