Fear of food

Chen Qi arrived in Wentang City silently, without alerting anyone.

Wentang City is a food-related contamination area, but the contamination has not escalated and remains in the first stage.

So, on the surface, the city appears to be operating normally, maintaining the necessary order.

It was already evening when Chen Qi arrived. He walked all the way to Mo Nan's school and didn't find any parasites along the way.

Moreover, it can be felt that the level of pollution in the city is decreasing.

It is clear that the Nightmare Clan in Wentang City is also preparing to retreat.

When the Nightmare Clan called Chen Qi to negotiate, they had already begun their massive retreat.

After Chen Qi attacked Chang Le City, the Nightmare Clan must have realized that Chen Qi had broken the agreement, and now they are making urgent preparations to withdraw from the country.

The pollution sources in each polluted area are converging the pollution energy within the polluted area, so the overall pollution level will decrease at this time, and the pollution sources in some key polluted areas will all disappear.

Chen Qi did not rush to attack the Nightmare Clan's lair in Wentang City. For him, investigating the origin of the pollution was definitely more important than eliminating the Nightmare Clan in a city.

Since the main suspect is now Mo Nan, he needs to find out what exactly happened to Mo Nan first.

Mo Nan disappeared at the school, so Chen Qi had no choice but to come to the school first to find the answer.

The university campus was generally quiet at night, but many dormitories were still brightly lit and quite lively.

It's 10 p.m. now, the time when college students are at their most energetic.

But as Chen Qi approached, the college students who were playing games, using their phones, or dating suddenly started yawning.

For a moment, yawns rose and fell, and the college students seemed to have taken a sleeping potion, their eyelids drooping uncontrollably.

Some people who were lying in bed simply closed their eyes and fell asleep.

Some players would slump onto the table, snoring loudly, and then AFK halfway through a ranked match, only to have their teammates confiscate their mothers' names.

Some people were chatting with their girlfriends on their phones when they suddenly closed their eyes, started snoring loudly, and didn't even realize when their phones fell from their hands and hit their faces.

The first thing Chen Qi did upon his arrival was to give them a precious gift: a good night's sleep!
The purpose is to help them develop good habits.

In the blink of an eye, the boys' dormitories fell completely silent, with only a few snores.

Chen Qi silently walked into the boys' dormitory, found a chair and sat down. Then, with a wave of his hand, a group of Nightmare Clan employees appeared beside him.

Although he is no longer a parasite, it does not prevent him from using the abilities of the Nightmare Clan, because he still has a group of high-level Nightmare Clan employees under his command.

Of course, he can do what he's about to do himself.

Hypnosis and dream entry are abilities possessed by many dream thieves, and Chen Qi could do them with ease. However, he needed to enter the dreams of too many people, so for the sake of efficiency, he had to ask his employees to help.

After the Dream Thief and the Phantom Eater's abilities underwent their third qualitative change, he could not only summon safe houses in reality, but also summon employees and facilities within safe houses without actually summoning them.

However, you can only stay within a certain range around him; you can't be too far away.

Chen Qi closed his eyes, and the next moment he entered the dream of a group of people.

He had already found out Mo Nan's dormitory number in advance, and this time when he entered the dream, he would focus on asking about Mo Nan's roommates.

As Mo Nan's roommates, they knew her situation best.

Mo Nan lived in a six-person dormitory. At this time, apart from the missing Mo Nan, the other five people in the dormitory were still there.

Chen Qi directly constructed a temporary shared dream world, connecting the dreams of all five people.

The five looked around somewhat bewildered, then they all saw each other, but they could all tell that they were dreaming.

They all thought the existence of the other four people was just a dream.

Chen Qi did not show himself, but his voice rang out directly in the empty dream world: "Do you know where Mo Nan went?"

Mo Nan's five roommates looked surprised and asked, "Who are you?"

Chen Qi did not respond. This was a dream he had created. Even if the five people did not answer when he asked the question, he could directly read their thoughts.

The dream world, a world constructed from consciousness, connects the minds of the five people. Here, Chen Qi can get infinitely close to their core consciousness and peek into their thoughts.

The five ordinary people were completely powerless against Chen Qi's abilities.

Therefore, when Chen Qi asked the question, as long as the five people heard it, they would naturally have many related thoughts or memories.

At this moment, Chen Qi had already obtained the answer he wanted.

Unsurprisingly, the five of them were unaware of Mo Nan's whereabouts.

Therefore, Chen Qi directly posed the next question: "Did Mo Nan exhibit any unusual behavior before her disappearance?"

As soon as the question was asked, Chen Qi obtained the answer from the five people's inner thoughts.

Before her disappearance, Mo Nan seemed to have a poor appetite and unusually did not go out to eat with her roommates.

When her roommates went out to eat, Mo Nan was always left alone in the dorm.

Moreover, he seemed preoccupied, completely unlike his usual self.

This is clearly the norm for pica sufferers after the outbreak of pica: discovering abnormal food and falling into self-doubt.

All of this began about four or five days before the food phobia disaster broke out.

But this only further proves Momo's words: Mo Nan did indeed discover the food mutation before the pollution outbreak, but did not bring Chen Qi any useful new information.

After Mo Nan went missing, his roommates were worried and reported it to the school, but to no avail and the matter was eventually dropped.

Having obtained no valuable information from Mo Nan's five roommates, Chen Qi had no choice but to exit the dream.

Fortunately, his employees soon obtained some clues from Mo Nan's classmates.

"Besides Mo Nan, is there another person missing?"

"And they disappeared around the same time as Mo Nan!"

Upon receiving the news, Chen Qi fell into deep thought.

The missing person is a female classmate of Mo Nan, with whom Mo Nan usually has little interaction.

However, considering all the information, this female student is likely also a pica sufferer, and like Mo Nan, she discovered the food mutation before the pollution outbreak.

This means that Mo Nan was likely not the only one who discovered the food anomaly in advance!
This also suggests that the problem may not be with Mo Nan, but rather with the school or the area in question.

Chen Qi realized that he had misunderstood from the very beginning.

He thought Mo Nan was the one who broke into the Nightmare Clan's world, but upon closer reflection, when Mo Nan discovered the food mutation, it actually meant that the contamination had already begun.

Although there hasn't been a large-scale outbreak, pollution has already existed, at least within Mo Nan's small circle.

Therefore, the pollution occurred first, and then Mo Nan disappeared, which also indicates that Mo Nan was not the one who entered the Nightmare Clan's world and brought the pollution. But since the pollution appeared here first, there must be a reason for it.

Chen Qi ordered his employees to continue searching for clues in the dream, questioning all the students in the dormitory buildings in the dream.

Soon, more and more clues were reported to Chen Qi.

Chen Qi then discovered that far more than just one or two people had gone missing from the school; as many as ten people had disappeared around the same time as Mo Nan!

"Most of the missing people are students, but there are also one or two teachers."

"These missing people are all suspected to be alien eaters. Their collective disappearance and the fact that the matter has been suppressed indicate that their disappearance is related to the Nightmare Clan. They should have been transformed into parasites."

As more and more information becomes available, things become clearer and clearer.

The disappearance of these people was definitely not because they were trapped in the Nightmare Clan's world; they were most likely captured by the Nightmare Clan and transformed into parasites.

In response, Chen Qi's employees also provided some clues and speculations.

This group of people is likely the earliest parasites transformed by the Nightmare Clan.

In the early stages of the Nightmare Clan invasion, manpower was also needed to do things.

Even a first-generation Nightmare Clan member cannot do anything in the human world without a host; they cannot even pick up a single hair.

The Nightmare Clan's attempt to conquer the human world will inevitably require people to do things in the beginning. For them, the human world is also an unknown world that needs to be explored.

Therefore, the first group of ability users discovered by the Nightmare Clan became their targets.

They were both the first henchmen of the Nightmare Clan and the subjects of their experiments.

After all, the Nightmare Clan's methods of parasitizing humans and developing greater strength were not things they had mastered from the beginning; rather, they figured them out gradually.

It's worth mentioning that when the Nightmare Clan first invaded the human world, there were no second or third generation Nightmare Clan members, only the first generation.

Therefore, the earliest parasites were all parasitized by the first generation of Nightmare Clan.

Back then, the Nightmare Clan wouldn't be as picky as they are now; they would basically be willing to parasitize any ability user.

"It seems that to find Mo Nan and the others, we still have to go to the Nightmare Clan's lair in Wentang City."

Even if Mo Nan and the others weren't in Wentang City, they still disappeared from there, so the higher-ups of the Nightmare Clan in Wentang City must know something.

Although Chen Qi's employees included some high-ranking members of the Nightmare Clan, most of them were Nightmare Clan members and naturally had no idea about the Nightmare Eater Clan.

Finally, Chen Qi left the school and began searching for the source of pollution in Wentang City.

After separating Menglong and Aliang from his body, Chen Qi lost the abilities of the parasite, including his domain.

Even without the domain, Chen Qi's pollution detection capabilities remain effective, and the detection range is not much different from before.

It didn't take much effort for Chen Qi to detect the source of pollution in Wentang City.

He immediately charged forward.

The Nightmare Parasites guarding the source of pollution were also very surprised, not expecting that Chen Qi would actually come to Wentang City.

Given the numerous polluted areas across the country, the probability of Chen Qi directly heading to Wentang City is not high, considering that there are several polluted areas between Changle City and Wentang City.

The Nightmare Clan in the contaminated area of ​​Wentang City were completely unprepared, which saved Chen Qi a lot of trouble. With the safe house in place, he basically wiped out the Nightmare Clan's high-ranking members in Wentang City.

Then came the familiar process: go to the morgue to liberate humanity, then directly swallow the source of pollution, thus completely ending the pollution in Wentang City.

During this process, the captured high-ranking members of the Nightmare Clan in Wentang City were also put into the Ferris wheel.

As the city that was most likely the first to be polluted, Wentang City did not have any first-generation Nightmare Clan members; the leader was only a second-generation Nightmare Clan member.

Therefore, the conversion didn't take too much time; it was done in just over an hour.

Later, Chen Qi did indeed obtain some information from the higher-ups of the Nightmare Clan in Wentang City.

The leader of the Nightmare Clan in Wentang City, as a second-generation Nightmare Clan member and a native of Earth, has never been to the Nightmare Clan world and doesn't even know what his hometown looks like.

Even most second- and third-generation Nightmare Clan members are completely unaware of the existence of the Nightmare Clan world.

However, he was somewhat aware of what was happening in the Wentang City area.

According to this second-generation Nightmare Eater, after Mo Nan and his group of ability users were parasitized by the first-generation Nightmare Clan, they were sent to various parts of the world to help the Nightmare Clan expand their territory.

This group can be considered the elders of the Nightmare Clan; they were the ones who personally established the earliest contaminated zones.

Most of them went abroad, so the second-generation Nightmare Clan of Wentang City did not know Mo Nan's specific whereabouts.

However, it is known that Wentang City was indeed the place where the Nightmare Clan first descended.

At that time, the Nightmare Eaters had a slight advantage, being the first to arrive in the human world.

Logically, such a city should have been a key base for the Nightmare Clan to develop, and it might have become one of the most powerful contaminated areas.

However, Wentang City is not particularly noticeable among the polluted areas.

This was because the Nightmare Eater, Nightmare, and Nightmare Lover clans all settled in Wentang City at that time. Although the Nightmare Eater clan had a slight advantage, the Nightmare and Nightmare Lover clans did not fall too far behind.

At that time, the three tribes fought over Wentang City, which to some extent affected the development of the polluted area of ​​Wentang City.

Later, they discovered that there was a vast world outside, so the Nightmare and Love Nightmare clans handed over Wen Tang City to the Nightmare Eater clan and busied themselves grabbing territory outside.

The Nightmare Clan abandoned the domestic market from the very beginning and chose to go abroad, where the atmosphere was more open and more suitable for their development.

Although he didn't know the whereabouts of the elders of the Nightmare Eater Clan from back then, he still knew who they were.

One of them even spent some time in Wentang City, establishing the polluted area there before moving on to other cities.

After comparing the list of missing persons obtained from the students' dreams with the list of elders of the Nightmare Eater Clan provided by the second-generation Nightmare Clan, Chen Qi found that the identities matched one by one.

However, there was one person missing in terms of numbers!
The list provided by the students included one more person.

The extra person was named Feng Bin.

"Feng Bin disappeared around the same time, but he wasn't parasitized by the Nightmare Eater?"

"Where did he go?"

At this point, no clue could be overlooked. Chen Qi immediately contacted the authorities to retrieve Feng Bin's information. At the same time, he returned to the school and had the employees continue to enter the dream to inquire about information related to Feng Bin.

As it turned out, this question revealed something amiss.

Other missing persons exhibited some unusual behavior before their disappearance, and their classmates could recall some of it.

The only exception was Feng Bin; even his classmates and roommates weren't entirely sure when he had disappeared. (End of Chapter)