Chapter 98

Chapter 98: Sacrifice and Corruption

“My wolves are me.”

Something complicated flickered across Little Red Riding Hood’s face as she said it, but Yu Sheng couldn’t read it. He only felt a heavy pressure in the air around her, and he understood one thing clearly: whatever that meant, it wasn’t good.

If the timing and the atmosphere were different, he would’ve pressed. Instead, he tucked the thought away and returned his focus to the white exhibition hall at the end of the corridor.

Now even he could smell the blood, faint but undeniable.

The security guards reacted only to an intruder in person. They had vision but no hearing, no smell. They were stiff, rule-bound, and full of loopholes…

Yu Sheng’s expression turned intent.

“So?” Little Red Riding Hood lowered her voice. “Do we retreat first? We can come back tomorrow—”

“Wait.” Irene cut her off. “Look at Yu Sheng’s face.”

Little Red Riding Hood frowned. “What about his face?”

“He’s got an idea again,” Irene sighed.

Before Little Red Riding Hood could ask what that meant, Yu Sheng finished thinking and turned to the fox girl beside him.

“Tell me,” he said, dead serious, “do Foxy’s tails count as her?”

Everyone froze.

Little Red Riding Hood’s brain lagged, but her mouth ran on instinct. “Of course they do. They grow on her—”

“But her tails can be launched,” Yu Sheng said. “Strictly speaking, they’re magical tools she refined. And they’re reloadable.”

Little Red Riding Hood stood there with her mouth open.

Then her brain caught up.

The next second, she stared at him in horror. “Wait—what are you trying to do?”

“Try something.” Yu Sheng’s curiosity shone like a bad omen. “Worst case, if we alert the plastic people, we open a door out. You said the guards only have vision, right? Then if we block all their sight without being seen… doesn’t that solve it?”

Ignoring her stunned look, he turned to Foxy, who still looked mildly confused, and explained quickly. “I have a plan, and I need your tails.”

“Hold on.” Little Red Riding Hood forced herself into the conversation again. “You said there are at least seven or eight guards in that hall, right? Foxy already launched two earlier. Do you even have enough left?”

Even saying it felt surreal—like her worldview had shattered and was desperately trying to weld itself back together. But once the words were out, she realized she’d adapted far too fast.

Foxy had already understood. She reached back and casually yanked out two tails, laying them on the floor. Then two more. She kept going until she was nearly out.

She glanced over her shoulder, fell silent for two or three seconds, and then—whum, like a blade leaving a sheath—nine more tails burst out behind her.

Little Red Riding Hood just stared.

“She stocks them up,” Irene said with the weary patience of someone who’d seen everything. She twisted and patted Little Red Riding Hood’s arm. “She eats a lot. That’s how she stocks tails.”

Little Red Riding Hood kept the same stunned expression.

She understood every word.

She just didn’t understand how they could form a sentence like that.

Foxy pointed at the tails she’d arranged and began introducing them like products on a shelf. “This one needs twenty chicken legs. This one needs ten—”

Little Red Riding Hood’s brain short-circuited, but somehow her mouth still tried. “Because the second one is half price?”

“Because this one only accelerates to subsonic. It’s a subsonic cruise tail.” Foxy looked at her like she was the strange one. “Matter and energy are proportional. Do you have any common sense?”

Little Red Riding Hood seriously considered giving herself another shot of sanity-blocking agent.

By then, Foxy had neatly lined up every tail she planned to use. The fluffy silver-white tails hovered a few centimeters above the floor, sparks of eerie foxfire crackling around them. They vibrated faintly, like rockets waiting on a launch rack.

The moment that image formed, Little Red Riding Hood felt her life was over. The Hotel Trio had influenced her. Her brain was starting to go wrong.

Dealing with entities was dangerous.

Even someone like Yu Sheng—who looked harmless—was the same.

Foxy raised her hand.

The tails, wrapped in foxfire, lifted into the air and drifted down the corridor at a careful, almost intelligent pace. These treasures could fly at subsonic or even supersonic speed, but under Foxy’s control, they moved with painstaking slowness.

“If the guards don’t react, we block all their sight and go in to check the situation,” Yu Sheng said, watching her control. “If they suddenly move, we grab whatever’s at the center of the hall and retreat at top speed, then open a door out.”

As he spoke, he reached into the air. A faintly glowing, unreal door formed in his hand.

“I’ll prep the door. Tell me what you get.”

“Mm.” Foxy nodded, nervous now, and guided the tips of her tails inch by inch into the white exhibition hall.

Only Little Red Riding Hood still felt numb. She knew she should be tense. The atmosphere demanded it. But she couldn’t match it, because everything was already so warped her mind couldn’t keep up. Her senses couldn’t match her worldview, and her worldview couldn’t match reality. It felt like her heart had glitched.

Even her wolves had gone slack-jawed.

“They didn’t move,” Foxy said at last, her face bright with cautious joy. “I tried blocking all their sight at the same time… I think it works.”

Only then did Yu Sheng ease a fraction.

The phantom door in his hand faded away.

After Foxy confirmed again, Yu Sheng waved them forward. “Come on. Let’s see what’s going on.”

The group moved toward the white exhibition hall, each of them carrying a different kind of dread.

When they first saw the dark blue uniforms, their nerves tightened to the limit. Then, slowly, they loosened as they realized the plastic dummies weren’t moving at all.

Little Red Riding Hood’s eyes snapped first to the security guard by the entrance, posed like it was guarding the passage. It stood motionless, but its head had been wrapped layer after layer in a silver fox tail.

On Foxy, the tail looked like a floating piece of art.

Wrapped around a mannequin’s head, it looked like a grotesque cocoon.

Then Yu Sheng sucked in a sharp breath. “Holy crap.”

Little Red Riding Hood turned, following his gaze to the center of the exhibition hall.

The platform there was supposed to hold the Weeper statue.

The statue was gone.

In its place was a corpse—bizarre and horrifying. A man had been bound to the platform with iron thorns studded with spikes, forced into a kneeling, weeping posture, both hands covering his face.

It was the exact pose described in the briefing.

The victim had been drained of blood. He looked like he’d been dead for a long time. No killer was in sight—only the choking stench of blood saturating the white room.

Yu Sheng’s heart lurched.

He wasn’t unfamiliar with death. He’d died violently more than once himself. But this was the first time he’d been confronted with something this brutal from the outside looking in. And even the brutality wasn’t the biggest shock.

The real impact was the thick, twisted atmosphere of sacrifice woven into the scene.

A body drained dry, pinned by iron thorns. A deliberate recreation of the Weeper. Blood trailing down from the platform. A polluted white hall. Silent plastic dummies standing around an offering.

This was nothing like Entity-Hunger.

“Little Red Riding Hood, do you know what this—”

Yu Sheng turned instinctively to ask the only experienced person here.

Then he saw her.

She stared at the sacrifice, her eyes shifting toward the same blood-red as her shadow wolves. A low, rumbling whine rose in her throat. Fine fur pushed out along her cheeks and the backs of her hands.

Her shadow behind her stretched.

It swelled.

A huge beast crawled out of it—a monster that stood upright, like a person wearing a wolf pelt, or a wolf that had swallowed a human and taken on a human frame. It burst into the room without a howl, without warning, without theatrics.

It simply lunged.

Not at Yu Sheng.

Straight at Little Red Riding Hood.

It was hard to dodge an attack from your own shadow.