Being the Wife of a Fluffy Creature [Quick Transmigration] - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The First World (2)

The impoverished college student couldn’t possibly come up with 100,000, so he and the system could only watch as the hotpot restaurant owner took the dog away.

The system spun in circles anxiously, “What do we do, what do we do? The mission is about to end before it even starts! How am I supposed to write this report?!”

“Go borrow some money, or I can make you a few fake kidneys! Go steal, rob, or sell them! Don’t just stand there, do something!!!”

Wu Yao didn’t answer. He wandered around the hotpot restaurant, looking for a back entrance.

He wasn’t familiar with this place, so borrowing money would likely be too slow. The system’s “brilliant” ideas—robbing someone or selling fake kidneys sounded both difficult and criminal. By comparison, stealing a dog seemed much easier.

Wu Yao didn’t just want to save the dog; he also wanted to see inside the hotpot restaurant.

The boss and the gambler had been speaking in riddles in front of him; there was definitely something fishy going on, and he was likely to dig up a side quest.

After circling around, Wu Yao quickly found a narrow, dim alley. Passing two trash bins, he arrived at the back door of the hotpot restaurant.

His timing was poor; several employees were sitting right outside the back door. They were men in their twenties or thirties, sitting together gnawing on apples.

The employees weren’t chatting; they were eating quietly. In the silent alley, only the crunch-crunch sound could be heard, creating a strangely “healthy and wellness-focused” scene.

Two or three minutes later, the roar of the shop owner came from behind the door. “D*mn it! You dare bite me?! Let go! I’ll let you bite! I’ll beat you to death, you dog!”

“Eat up and don’t dawdle. The boss got bitten, everyone go in and help!”

The lead employee finished speaking, tossed the apple core aside, and wiped his hands on his clothes. “Another fighting dog today. We’ll be busy in a minute.”

An employee beside him mumbled incoherently, “Don’t even mention it. That female dog the boss took in last time was registered too. D*mn, she was fierce. She could break finger-thick ropes and nearly strangled that guest to death. If females are that hard to deal with, this male dog—which is even bigger—is going to be a real headache.”

“It’s fine. The male dog is crippled; what are you afraid of?”

Once the employees had all gone inside, Wu Yao poked his head out from behind the trash bin and slipped silently to the back door.

The system—which tried hard to pose as a cold, elite assistant but was actually a chatterbox amateur—muttered in his mind, “Why don’t you make any sound when you walk? Why are you holding a piece of iron wire? Do you actually know how to pick locks? You’re so annoying, you never like to chat with me.”

“They seem ready to chop up the mission target now. Do you still have a chance to save it? There are so many of them, can you take them? Why don’t we just sell a kidney? I’ll make you a fake one.”

“Talk to me! The more I think about it, the more I feel those employees are wrong. The way they talk is so strange.”

Wu Yao thought to himself: Of course they’re strange.

He’d heard of dogs biting people, but never of a dog that could strangle someone by the neck.

The new system was very talkative and noisy, but it was still better than his previous black-hearted system that would electrocute him at the drop of a hat. Recalling the days of being enslaved by the “Electro-Therapy King,” Wu Yao found himself liking this new system more and more.

The iron door was adjacent to the kitchen, which was empty, save for the faint sound of voices. Wu Yao held his breath, followed the sound, and stopped in front of a storage room.

The storage room door wasn’t closed tightly, revealing a dark staircase leading down. As he got closer, he could smell a thick, rancid stench—the same smell as on his own body, which didn’t bode well.

Just as Wu Yao scavenged a rolling pin from the kitchen for self-defense, the system screamed in a panic, “The target’s health value has dropped to 1!”

A translucent panel appeared before Wu Yao’s eyes.

“Mission Target: Black Dog”

“Name: General Black (Provisional, can be modified)”

“Health: 1 (Barely breathing)”

“Spirit: 0 (No will to survive)”

“Total Score: 1 (You won’t get paid with a score like this)”

Wu Yao: “!”

Following the stairs down, he found a basement. A pile of carcasses hung in the dim room—all kinds of dogs, some skinned, some not, suspended in mid-air by iron hooks piercing through their bodies like cured meat.

Wu Yao pushed aside a dog carcass with the rolling pin and looked into the room.

The employees he had seen outside were gathered together preparing tools. The shop owner’s eyes were swollen, and there was a ring of ligature marks on his neck. If the employees hadn’t returned quickly, he likely would have been strangled by the fighting dog.

In the center of the group was a rusty iron bed. The big black dog lay on it motionlessly; there wasn’t a single injury on its body, and its fur remained shiny and smooth.

It didn’t look like it was about to die; it looked like it was sleeping soundly.

Wu Yao looked at the lively “gold nugget” and then back at the “Health: 1” on his system panel, raising an eyebrow in suspicion.

The shop owner rubbed his neck and directed his employees, “Wash it clean and give it an injection to keep it alive. There are guests coming to eat tonight; I want the dog killed fresh.”

There were police in this world; Wu Yao didn’t want to blow things out of proportion. He prepared to exit the basement first and return once the people had left.

Just as he took a step back, Wu Yao suddenly felt something poking his head. He looked up instinctively, coming face-to-face with a withered palm.

A skinless female corpse hung upside down above him, her hollow eyes staring straight at him.

Wu Yao tilted his head in confusion.

Huh?

The system let out a shrill explosion in his mind, “Corpses! So many corpses!!!”

The dog carcasses hanging in the basement had, at some unknown moment, turned into human corpses. Wu Yao crouched amidst the bodies, with flies occasionally flying out of their mouths, buzzing as they landed on him.

Some of the corpses hadn’t been dead long; blood dripped onto the tip of Wu Yao’s nose and onto the concrete floor.

In the distance, two people pierced by iron hooks weren’t quite dead yet. Their bodies, wound with wire, were twitching and writhing, blood constantly vomiting from their mouths. Even without screams, one could see their pain and despair.

Wu Yao quickly accepted the reality.

He pitied the two poor souls and wanted to take them down to save them, but he couldn’t grasp the current situation. After thinking for a long while, he tentatively asked, ‘What’s going on? Does this mission have a “Hidden World” setting? Is it useful to call the police now?’

The system blinked naively, “I don’t know.”

The people in the hotpot restaurant hadn’t noticed him; they were still busy dealing with the fighting dog, backs turned to the stairs. A bang echoed from the iron bed—the employees were unable to restrain the dog and were cursing in anger.

Wu Yao turned to look, and the black dog was gone. Only a man in a black windbreaker remained on the bed. His clothes were tattered and his body was covered in scars, his short black hair matted to his wheat-colored forehead by blood. He lay weakly on the bed, struggling to pull himself up.

Noticing his gaze, the man looked up, revealing a face as resolute and handsome as a god.

Before this, Wu Yao had always thought he wasn’t a “face-con” (someone obsessed with beauty), and that he would only be moved by money for the rest of his life. But the moment he saw the man’s face, his heart skipped a beat.

This face, like a work of art, looked expensive.

The man widened his eyes in shock, clearly seeing Wu Yao hiding in the pile of corpses. His gaze swept over Wu Yao’s thin, slender frame, and his pale lips parted.

Wu Yao squinted; what the man said seemed to be, “Woof!”

Wu Yao: Ah?

Did he misread the lip-reading, or did the dog have a human face but couldn’t speak human words?

The next second, black fur grew on the man’s face, and he turned back from a human into a dog bit by bit. No trace of a human remained; only a pair of dark eyes stared coldly at him.

Simultaneously, the corpses hanging all around turned back into dog carcasses. The female corpse in front of Wu Yao also turned back into a pitiful little female dog.

Everything happened too suddenly and ended too quickly, leaving no trace behind. Wu Yao’s brain felt somewhat chaotic.

The hotpot restaurant owner and employees seemed to dislike this place, too; after a brief treatment of the dog’s wounds, they left.

Wu Yao’s vision blurred for a moment, and he saw the room full of corpses again. But this time, the bizarre imagery disappeared quickly, lasting only a split second.

He described his feelings to the system, hoping to get useful information from a “professional.”

The system pondered slightly, “I get what you’re saying. That moment just now, didn’t it look a lot like a ‘flash of clarity before death’?”

Wu Yao paused, then smiled in relief. ‘Forget it, I shouldn’t have asked you. Good boy, go make those fake kidneys; we might need them in a moment.’

The iron basement door closed once more. Wu Yao poked his head out from the pile of dog carcasses.

Bypassing the swaying bodies, he kept watch while replaying what had just happened.

The system shared his perspective, seeing what he saw. But their brains weren’t connected; the system couldn’t know his thoughts, nor could he be influenced by it. Since the system could also see the corpses, it meant everything he saw was real.

So, was there truly a “Hidden World” inside this basement?

Could one see the cruel and bloody human slaughterhouse hidden beneath the basement’s calm surface, provided certain conditions were met?

Before entering the basement, Wu Yao thought he would see a pile of pitiful, suffering dogs, and that the mission target would then issue a small side quest to save his companions.

He hadn’t expected it to turn out like this.

He knew there were no free lunches in the world; money is hard to earn, and life is hard.

Wu Yao followed his memory to find the two poor souls who weren’t dead yet. The two victims wrapped in iron wire had turned back into dogs, and like the black dog, he couldn’t tell what breed they were.

Wu Yao took a pair of gloves from his pocket, put them on, and tried to touch the slightly larger dog.

The big dog opened its eyes weakly. It looked at Wu Yao as if it had many things to say. Wu Yao leaned in and heard the big dog rhythmically whimpering softly. It whimpered exactly ten times—quite rhythmic.

Just as Wu Yao was wondering how to rescue them, the dying big dog suddenly widened its eyes, and the mission target who had been quiet until now, also began to thrash violently against the iron bed.

“Woof! Woof-woof-woof!”

“Squeak—creak—”

The big dog’s frantic whimpering and the squeaking of the iron bed echoed in the silent basement.

Wu Yao gripped his rolling pin and turned his head abruptly. The system’s terrified scream exploded in his mind like an air-raid siren.

In the center of the room sat the rusty iron bed, where the fighting dog was struggling desperately against its restraints, emitting low growls. The concrete floor beneath the bed, which had been flat, had suddenly collapsed into a massive hole.

Blood poured out of the pit, and hands covered in rotting flesh reached out, clutching the ground in a death grip.

Simultaneously, a translucent screen appeared before Wu Yao’s eyes.

“Congratulations to the host for finding the mission target: Fighting Dog. Main Quest started—Will the puppy meet a soft-hearted God?”

“Dogs are human’s best friends. Please take in the puppy on the iron bed, treat it as family, and give it a happy life.”

“Congratulations to the host for triggering a side quest—The Puppy’s Wish: Survival”

“Escape the hotpot restaurant with your future family dog. Time limit: two minutes.”