Forbidden Zone of Deception

Chapter 163 The Invaded Materialist Layer

At this moment, in the Dingyou Reincarnation Camp on the outskirts of Muxu City.

In the living room of Blood Lord's villa, an 85-inch LCD TV was playing a live midday news broadcast.

On the screen, the Muxu City delegation is holding a public press conference to announce the phased results of the fight against meme contamination.

At this point, it was the deputy head of the delegation, Liang Zhiyuan, who spoke.

He was wearing a custom-made suit, and his obese body looked just like Chihiro's father, who turned into a pig in Spirited Away.

"The meme pollution control efforts have achieved initial success, with no new infection cases reported in Muxu City for eight consecutive days... All recent claims about Manhattan memes affecting meme-affected areas in our country are irresponsible rumors..."

In front of the television, Wu Ge gripped the Coke can tightly, making a series of crunching sounds in his palm.

The boy stared intently at the bloated, obese deputy imperial envoy on the screen, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.

"Godfather, does this corrupt official even deserve your personal service to pour him wine?" The boy's voice was filled with suppressed anger. "A few months ago, he came to our school for 'inspection,' and the way he stared at the female students' gym uniforms was no different from that of a male dog in heat. What inspection? He was just here to see if I, the hostage, would behave myself."

Blood Lord was dressed in ordinary home clothes, swirling a whiskey glass in his hand.

"Keep watching." He took a sip of his drink. "The show's about to begin."

On television, Liang Zhiyuan paused suddenly as he said, "We will do everything we can to ensure the safety of citizens."

His fat cheeks twitched, his right hand scratched his neck awkwardly, and his tie was pulled crooked.

"Ah, ah..."

Liang Zhiyuan's voice became hoarse, and large beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.

Before the reporters on the scene could react, the deputy imperial envoy suddenly let out a scream that was not human.

"ah--!!!"

He ripped open the buttons on his shirt, revealing his bare belly in front of the live stream camera.

Then, dozens of small, moving bumps suddenly appeared under his skin, as if something was moving wildly beneath it.

Upon seeing the numerous small packages, Wu Ge exclaimed in surprise, "Madam Pustules?"

Liang Zhiyuan scratched his abdomen with his fingernails, and several extremely terrifying and disgusting Gu worms crawled out from the bloodstains!

The scene immediately descended into chaos, the live broadcast signal abruptly cut off, and emergency music was switched to play.

However, it's difficult to stop unauthorized live streams. This press conference was held outdoors, so many video bloggers were also on-site to live stream. They could continue watching as soon as they turned on their phones, and it took the security personnel some time to disperse them.

In the live stream, Liang Zhiyuan's eyeballs suddenly burst open, and two streams of black insects gushed out from his eye sockets.

From his wide-open mouth, countless Gu worms poured out like a burst dam, landing on the platform!
Even more terrifying, his belly collapsed like melting ice—

Wu Ge, who was familiar with the Gu reincarnation practitioners, knew that at this moment, tens of thousands of Gu worms were gnawing at his internal organs from the inside.

This is the terrifying power of Gu worms; they can easily traverse both the material and polluted layers without diminishing their power, and their effectiveness is unrelated to your SAN value. Because of this, Gu worm reincarnators are highly feared, and Lady Pustules is a top-tier reincarnator who causes the imperial court considerable headaches.

Wu Ge dropped the Coke can in his hand to the ground. The boy stared wide-eyed at the humanoid insect nest that was still twitching on his phone screen, and couldn't help but feel a chill run down his spine.

"Godfather, those Gu worms... could they be you?"

"After I extracted the Gu worms from Sima Jin's body, I incorporated one of them into a 45% pure resentment crystal." The Blood Lord revealed a sinister smile. "I didn't expect this fat pig to be the first to win."

After seeing the video blogger's phone being forcibly shut down by security personnel, Wu Ge turned to look at his godfather, who was leisurely adding ice to his wine glass.

"Godfather, how could you..."

Murdering an imperial envoy is a capital offense.

Blood Lord imitated Liang Zhiyuan's greasy tone: "'Blood Captain is too kind. You should remember to serve the court in the future'—the old man never knew that when I poured him wine, I flicked insect eggs that were invisible to the naked eye into the cup."

Blood Lord actually injected insect eggs into these officials' bodies multiple times, but theoretically, the insect eggs he injected could not have given birth to Gu worms, because he was not a Gu reincarnation practitioner.

For Gu worms to operate within the material world, they require the professional skills of a Gu reincarnation practitioner. Otherwise, the imperial court would have long ago been able to tame and cultivate Gu worms through various means.

The mother of these Gu worms was infused with a fragment of resentment crystal, thus imbuing her with meme rules. The eggs would be randomly activated by the meme, but it was uncertain which individual would be implanted into the egg and hatch into a Gu worm. Furthermore, these Gu worms could not survive long in the material world. The only thing he could control was the timing of the Gu worms' birth.

The Blood Lord had made ample preparations for this day.

He had already planned this scheme when he took action against the Kirinuma team.

Using Sima Jin to extract Lady Pustuca's Gu worms, and having Xia Yu attack the patrol team to reinforce the misconception that the worm den team was going against the government, were all part of the plan. Testing Jiang Jin was just one of the objectives.

Wu Ge suddenly stood up, his knee almost hitting the coffee table.

"Godfather... I thought you were really trying to curry favor with these corrupt officials..."

Blood Lord waved his hand: "When your father died, I swore an oath. Every single one of those corrupt officials who killed him will die a death worse than one contaminated by memes."

An emergency announcement began playing on the television, and the female news anchor's voice was visibly trembling.

Wu Ge stared at his godfather's left little finger—there was a shocking scar there that he had deliberately left untreated. He remembered that it was a wound his godfather had sustained when he single-handedly fought the insectoid team years ago.

"You deliberately used Lady Pustuca's Gu worms..."

“Smart.” Then, Blood Lord walked to the wine cabinet, opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne, and the bubbles merrily flowed out of the bottle. “Now the government must think that this is the Insect Nest team provoking us. So, I will incite them to fight each other, and our Bloody team can reap the benefits. No matter who dies, it will be beneficial to us.”

In truth, this method might not go unnoticed by everyone. But he only needed to ensure that no one suspected him. The government had long wanted to crack down on the insect nests, but internal opinions had always been divided.

He humbled himself before those corrupt officials, flattering and fawning, asking them to take care of Wu Ge—a strategy of feigned retreat. If they genuinely cared for him, all the better; but if any of them eventually developed the Gu worm within their bodies, it would be difficult for others to suspect them, since their motives would be elusive.

To successfully achieve one's goals, sometimes it is necessary to hide one's true intentions and play the fool to outmaneuver the enemy.

He poured two glasses of champagne, handed one to his godson, and said, "To your father."

Given Wu Ge's constitution as a professional reincarnator who is averse to evil, even though he is not yet an adult, drinking some champagne is not a problem for him.

Wu Ge's wrist trembled slightly as he clinked glasses; he would never forget his father's death.

Those who killed him were the corrupt officials of the Yanjing court who treated human life like dirt!

"Oh, right," Blood Lord suddenly remembered something, "what was your ranking in the last monthly exam?"

"Seventh in the grade," Wu Ge answered reflexively. "Asking this at a time like this..."

"Remember, you must study hard." Blood Lord became serious. "A reincarnator's life can end in an instant, and your godfather might die at any time. You need to leave yourself a way out."

Just as the boy was about to respond, the living room door was suddenly pushed open. Long Cang strode in, his expression unusually grave. He glanced at the emergency news playing on a loop on the television, then hesitated, as if he wanted to say something but couldn't.

"What's going on?" Blood Lord realized that something might have happened to Crimson and Shadow Blade.

Long Cang leaned closer to Blood Lord and whispered in his ear, "We can't contact Zhou Chen and Qin Mei anymore."

Blood Lord paused, his champagne glass raised to his lips: "What do you mean by 'cannot be contacted'?"

"The last time I made contact was at 11 o'clock. After that, every time I called back, it showed 'Target is not in service area'."

Wu Ge keenly noticed that his godfather's fingers tightened—an extremely rare outburst.

Blood Lord put down his wine glass and tapped it lightly on the coffee table.

"Wu Ge, please leave for a moment."

“Okay, Godfather.” Wu Ge had been studying in the city recently and only came here on Saturday. Therefore, he was completely unaware of his godfather's pursuit of the Nirvana team. The others, acting on his orders, wouldn't tell Wu Ge about this murder-for-treasure scheme.

After Wu Ge left, Blood Lord said, "The cell phones I gave them all have cross-dimensional communication capabilities, and the Reincarnation System ensures communication."

Blood Lord and Long Cang exchanged a glance.

“Yu Tianlun,” Blood Lord gritted his teeth, “I underestimated him. After all, he was once a Level 4 guild leader!”

Meanwhile, abandoned chemical plants on the outskirts of the city.

Sima Jin was chained to a drainpipe, his wrists raw and bloody. This former core member of the "Insect Den" team was no longer human—his skin was covered with honeycomb-like holes, each pore crawling with rice-grain-sized Gu worms.

The warehouse's iron gate creaked open, and a figure in protective clothing pushed an equipment cart inside.

The vehicle contained various surgical instruments and more than a dozen glass jars labeled with biohazard symbols.

……

Wu Ge went to his room, turned on the TV, and wanted to continue watching the news.

But this time, I saw an international news report: the remote control in my hand fell onto the exquisite Persian carpet.

The television footage cited an emergency special report from Japan's NHK television station, and the aerial view of the former Tokyo Bay in the Edo Special Ward sent shivers down his spine.

The once bustling Odaiba Seaside Park is now covered with wriggling black dots. What is revealed after the tide recedes is not the sand, but tens of thousands of strange fish with metallic limbs that walk at high speed!

"Breaking news!" The female anchor's voice lost its usual composure. "Large numbers of unidentified creatures have been discovered in the Oedo Special Ward and along the coast of Busan and Incheon in South Korea..."

As the camera zooms in, you can see that these fish don't have legs; instead, their bodies are attached to a strange walking device!

Wu Ge could almost smell the stench of rotting corpses through the screen. Even more terrifying, several large fish with metallic limbs were climbing up the edge of the breakwater.

"This is... Junji Ito's 'Fish'!"

Wu Ge immediately swore. Those walking fish monsters, in Junji Ito's manga, were a product of the Japanese military's development during the Pacific War, a combination of biological weapons and mechanical walking machines. They used the stench emitted by dying animals infected with bacteria as a biological weapon to counter the American forces, and developed these walking machines to make them move!

The special report suddenly cut to a live interview with a reporter on site.

A male reporter wearing a gas mask stands on the Rainbow Bridge, with thick smoke billowing over Tokyo Bay behind him.

"The Edo government has issued a Level 1 evacuation order... Strangely..." The reporter's voice was interrupted by electromagnetic interference, "The waters in China, including the Shandong Peninsula and the Zhoushan Islands, are completely normal... This does not seem to be a hallucination caused by meme contamination; people with normal SAN values ​​can also see these walking fish. Nevertheless, many people online still believe that this is related to the previous Manhattan Island hallucination."

"The strata in our country's waters are indeed very stable..." At this moment, Wu Ge was still very proud of his motherland.

The reporter suddenly bent over and gagged; the mask filter clearly couldn't block the increasingly strong stench of the corpse.

Why did the walking fish from Junji Ito's horror story appear in the materialist waters of Japan and South Korea? This puzzled Wu Ge greatly.

"It seems our country won't be affected for the time being... And thankfully it's a walking fish; if it were a human head balloon, that would be terrifying. This is definitely related to the Manhattan meme!"

……

The red of the sky over Black Crow Town became even more intense.

Yu Tianlun and Xu Yinqiu were on their way to meet up with Jiang Jin.

Since they might enter a scenario where mobile phones are not yet widespread, each of them purchased a special mobile phone in advance so that they could communicate even if the scenario's timeline was in ancient times.

“I’m not too comfortable with Tomie,” Xu Yinqiu said with a worried look. “I know her pretty well. She’s charming when you look at her as a fictional character in a manga, but she’s terrifying when she comes into real life.”

“I understand your concerns, but we are short-handed right now, and every step we take is a risky move.”

Yu Tianlun is currently under the most pressure in the team. He is very clear that this battle is extremely dangerous, and the possibility of them all leaving the instance alive is almost zero, with an even greater than 0% chance of the entire team being wiped out.

This is a crisis for Yu Tianlun that is second only to the Night Parade of One Hundred Ghosts in its magnitude.

“Rust Town, I really didn’t expect that besides the seven restricted areas, there would be a place like this in Muxu City.” Xu Yinqiu exclaimed, “Even if we can defeat the Bloody Team, leaving this instance will not be easy.”

This instance doesn't have a main quest, so there's no way to leave once you complete a quest. They must find a way back to Rustyshire.

Fortunately, Liu Yan had already explored Red Rust Town before and obtained a considerable amount of information.

That's how she learned that when the clock tower chimes at noon and she looks up at the sky, she will see floating objects in the distance. Then, she will enter the terrifying [Headed Balloon] instance.

Unlike the Quarantine Zone, Red Rust Town is not a containment area for the Reincarnation System, so you won't be given a quest to find the dungeon entrance.

Whether entering or leaving a instance, you need to find patterns.

According to Liu Yan, there is a garbage incineration plant in Red Rust Town. Every day when the garbage is burned, swirling clouds can be seen in the sky. If you stare at them for more than 9 seconds, you will be sucked into the [Vortex] instance.

Her first visit, which led her to enter the [Tomie] instance, was also an accident.

The underground of Red Rust Town is itself the nest of Gu worms, and when she entered the sewers to search for the Three Corpse Brain God Pill, she saw flesh-colored metallic flower stamens growing on some side paths.

She later discovered the pattern: touching the metal flower's stamen would trigger the following effect: for every 10% decrease in SAN value, she would encounter a different form of Tomie. All Tomies shared memories, and killing any one of them would trigger a group hunt.

There, she also obtained a note left by a reincarnated sorcerer who had been here before: those who drink the rusty water will spit out metal slugs, and their tongues will also become completely slug-like. Following the slugs' crawling path will lead to the terrifying dungeon of [Slug Girl].

If you collect 99 slugs, you can synthesize a rotten fish head ship that leads to the [Fish] dimension. In that terrifying instance, a large number of rotten fish will land on the beach and be controlled by walking machines. In the end, after a large number of humans die, their corpses will become the power source for the walking machines.

Another crucial point is that you must not fall asleep in Rusty Town. Because if you do, there's a 17% chance you'll enter an extremely long nightmare, waking up to find yourself in the [Long Dream] dimension. The time spent in this dream will accelerate the metallicization of your physical body in reality.

All of the above are horror manga created by Junji Ito.

Therefore, the only way to leave this instance is to find the pattern. They don't necessarily have to kill all the Crimson and Shadowblade members; trapping them in this instance would be just as effective.

Ten minutes later, Yu Tianlun, Xu Yinqiu, Jiang Jin, Liu Yan, and Fu Jiang met up.

Yu Tianlun arrived at the dilapidated gate of the Sato family's courtyard, the Five Emperor Coins burning hot in his palm.

This old house, built in the Showa era style, looks eerie and sinister at this moment.

“The material layer here is as thin as a sheet of paper,” he whispered to Jiang Jin. “The entire Black Crow Town is now a giant meme culture dish.”

"Don't you guys find it strange?" Xu Yinqiu suddenly asked as she was checking the silver thermal blanket. "All the rules about 'balloons' in this instance seem to be training humans to cope with cognitive hazards, and there are even cognitive stabilizing pills in reality."

Jiang Jin suddenly looked at Xu Yinqiu and said, "Sister Yinqiu, I just realized something. You said you bought the Tomie co-branded lemon tea a couple of years ago... But five years ago, Edo fell, and all terrorist-related products were banned worldwide. How did you manage to buy it?"

“Oh, that was in a horror-themed dungeon world,” she replied. “I bought it at a shop near Shanghai when the dungeon quest ended.”

“So it’s a dungeon world,” Jiang Jin suddenly realized. “Speaking of which, I noticed this a long time ago. No horror dungeon that takes place in the 21st century timeline has a history of memetic outbreaks.”

Yu Tianlun nodded: "Yes, that's very strange. You should remember, right? In 2014, the World Cup in Brazil was canceled and postponed to a year later because of severe molybdenum pollution in South America. Brazil ended up winning the championship."

“Yes,” Jiang Jin suddenly thought of something, “Then in the horror dungeon?”

Yu Tianlun replied: "I have verified all the horror replicas of the timelines after 2014. The 2014 Brazil World Cup proceeded as scheduled, and in the semi-finals, Brazil still lost 1-7 to Germany. In the end, Germany defeated Argentina to win the championship."

"Huh?" Jiang Jin was completely stunned. "Are you kidding me? That's the Samba Army, not the Saudi Arabian team in 02 who conceded seven goals to Germany? And that was with the Samba Army playing on their home turf in Brazil?"

Liu Yan also found it unbelievable: "Is every horror dungeon like this?"

"Yes. Without exception."

All the horror stories are completely identical to the historical and real world from ancient times to the present, with almost no differences.

To put it almost, in the 21st century, the landmark event—the global meme contamination outbreak—never happened in any of the copies.

It gives the feeling that... it's as if the real world is an alternate history in an IF (what if) scenario!
(End of this chapter)