The Decaying Dream of America: I Assemble Corpses and Confront Madness

Lin Zheng knew he had no way out.

Hesitation leads to defeat, while decisiveness leads to failure.

His only way out was through this monster formed from fear and filth before him; he had to get past it.

Gripping the scalpel tightly, the cold metal handle pressed against my sweaty palm, brought a fleeting sense of calm.

This knife accompanied him through countless nights, cutting through countless pieces of flesh and blood. He believed in it, and he believed in himself.

He suddenly opened his eyes wide, forcing himself to detach his attention from the monster's grotesque form and focus on its core "structure".

He activated [True Deconstruction], instantly stripping away the appearance of everything in his eyes to reveal the inner geometric distortions and energy flows, like bright structural lines guiding the foundation of its existence.

What was originally just a bloated mass of flesh was now, in his eyes, no longer merely a chaotic and disorderly pile, but a rational existence.

He saw twisted pipes pieced together from countless crushed body parts, rotting flesh with tendons stripped off and writhing in contraction, and even growths resembling organs within sticky clumps of fat.

It is no longer a dead, static blockage, but a living system that grows with a terrifying logic.

He focused his gaze on the thickest, most prominent, and brightest pulse.

This pulsation runs across the center of the "filthy corpse fetus," like the core umbilical cord that maintains the terrifying form of this enormous filth, emitting a faint yet clear energy light, which is the eerie source of its aggregation of all things and disorderly proliferation.

His intuition told him that it was its core, the source that held this terrifying entity together.

Lin Zheng took a deep breath of the foul-smelling air, and with a resolute determination to die, rushed forward.

At this moment, he was more like a madman who had risked everything.

The blade traced a cold arc in mid-air, precisely slicing into that bright, pulsating presence.

"Hiss—creak!"

The scalpel was not without its obstacles; it produced a scraping sound between itself and the mass of flesh, a mixture of the tearing of putrid pulp and the crushing of old, broken bones.

Lin Zheng used all his strength, gritting his teeth as he pushed the blade forward, his body trembling slightly from the excessive force.

"Pfft!"

With a muffled thud, the blade finally pierced through the mass of flesh, leaving a deep, bottomless cut exposed to the air, glistening with moisture.

The enormous "filthy corpse fetus" split open with a thud, revealing a nauseating mix of pinkish-white and blood-red on its cross-section, covered with translucent carrion worms and broken limbs.

An even stronger, sweet, fishy, ​​and foul stench gushed out from the cut, accompanied by a large amount of mucus, splashing onto Lin Zheng's body.

He abruptly withdrew the scalpel, and his heartbeat became clearer than ever before.

He was panting heavily, his chest heaving violently, which brought a brief feeling of weakness, but within this weakness, a sense of relief at surviving a disaster also rose.

He succeeded; he sliced ​​open the monster, and a way out seemed to be right in front of him.

However, this relief lasted for less than a second.

To his horrified gaze, the two cut surfaces did not stop wriggling; instead, they were proliferating rapidly at a speed visible to the naked eye.

"Glug... Glug..."

The sound was digesting something; a thick, gelatinous liquid was bubbling wildly, sending chills down one's spine.

New, wriggling granulation tissue emerged from the incision. It was not healing, but a cursed lesion that proliferated at an incomprehensible, malignant rate, squeezing and merging together before quickly solidifying into nauseating, deformed lumps of flesh.

Lin Zheng clearly saw that the two sections that were originally just "filthy flesh corpse fetuses" expanded rapidly and independently within a few seconds, forming a complete but slightly smaller "filthy flesh corpse fetus".

They were no longer the half-corpses, but two independent, complete living beings.

His fatal blow not only failed to eliminate it, but instead doubled the number of enemies in the blink of an eye.

Now, two slightly smaller but equally despairing lumps of flesh stand on either side of the passage.

Now it's like two ghosts knocking on the door.

These are viscous slurries, somewhere between translucent and milky white, enveloping twisted, decaying limb remains and eroded, skeletal skulls.

They struggled, wriggled, and drew closer.

They all turned towards Lin Zheng, their countless tiny holes opening and closing, spewing out nauseating slime, mocking his foolish and futile attempt.

A piece of his rationality collapsed deep within him.

His prized skill, the scalpel in his hand, pushed his predicament into an even deeper abyss when facing this monster.

Lin Zheng's further loss of rationality left him in a daze.

Suddenly—

Lin Zheng suddenly recalled a news article he had seen in an old newspaper when he first arrived in Emerald Dream City.

In the past, the municipal authorities also tried to use heavy-duty cutting equipment to clear the blockages in the sewers, which were known as "grease mountains".

Those are huge clumps formed from the kitchen waste, grease, wet wipes, hair, and other debris discharged by city residents over the years, causing localized blockages and pipe bursts every year.

Initially, the engineers were optimistic that the problem could be solved simply by using a high-pressure water gun and a cutting machine.

However, whenever they cut off a large piece of the "oil iceberg," smaller pieces would drift downstream with the water flow.

These scattered small pieces reabsorb grease and debris in the new environment, regenerating at an astonishing rate and forming new blockages.

At its worst, cutting off a "mountain of grease" can actually lead to three to five smaller but equally stubborn blockages downstream, creating an incurable "proliferation cycle."

The municipal authorities eventually had to invest huge sums of money to develop specialized chemical solvents in order to barely control the situation, but the high cost made the city's annual expenditure on "sewage management" seem like a bottomless pit.

The proliferative capacity of this "filthy flesh corpse fetus" is clearly far greater than that of the "oil mountain" of yesteryear. It is a living, conscious proliferation, rather than a simple physical diffusion.

It mocks humanity's futile cleanup efforts and satirizes all attempts to cut away the cancer of the city.

Lin Zheng's hand holding the scalpel trembled violently. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead. The stuffy heat and bone-chilling cold inside the tubes made him shiver involuntarily.

It was as if the world was telling him that some "cancers" cannot be removed, and that cutting them open would only accelerate their spread.

He was trapped, in a complete dead end.

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

Behind me, the heavy, rapid thud of military boots echoed through the pipes. It was no longer a muffled sound, but a clear, cold declaration of death that was right before my eyes.

Several bright and dazzling beams of flashlight tore through the darkness behind Lin Zheng.

The eyes of another predator are projected onto the damp pipe wall.

The beam of light flickered in the murky air, instantly illuminating the wall behind him and even lengthening his shadow, projecting his lonely figure onto the disgusting gelatinous surface of the "filthy flesh corpse fetus".

"Snap!"

The crisp sound of a bullet being chambered was amplified infinitely in the narrow pipe.

"Bang!"

A gunshot shattered the silence. The bullet whizzed past his ear and struck the pipe wall in front of him, sending sparks and rubble flying.

The two split "filthy flesh corpses" began to slowly but irresistibly wriggle closer to him, their pale tentacles, made of bone fragments and needles, waving in the air from the countless tiny holes on their surfaces.

They wriggle and stretch out their twisted, greedy tentacles, waiting to drag their next prey into their abyss of filth and despair.

He was completely surrounded; moving forward meant facing unknown madness, while retreating meant facing the cold muzzle of a gun.

The quagmire of despair swallowed up all his escape routes.

"Target confirmed! Open fire!"