At the same time Lou Xiaoning leaned toward the keyhole, Gu Jun’s heart started to tense. It felt like an outside power was reaching into his body, and his consciousness was wavering… He could hear a whispering just beyond the realm of consciousness. It spoke with chill, attraction, and resonance. It came from the deepest of darkness.

“This woman doubts you even after you have saved them. She pointed her gun at you. She does not trust you. She never treated you as a teammate. She still harbor suspicion toward you…”

Suddenly, Lou Xiaoning gave off a low yet manic strange guttural noise. Her whole body started to shake, but her body was still stuck to the wall. The noise she made was too disconcerting. It was even more spine-chilling than if she had shouted from pain or despair. It seemed she had witnessed something maddeningly scary but could not pull her gaze away.

“Pull her back now!” Xue Ba ordered in a hurry. He did not have the others follow Lou Xiaoning due to concern of an explosion, but that did not mean that the rest were not already standing in place. With Xue Ba’s order, they immediately jumped into motion. Yang Henan and Zhou Yi grabbed Lou Xiaoning on each side and attempted to drag her away, but to their consternation, they found they were unable to do so. Lou Xiaoning was the main marksman, but she was ultimately a female. Her strength was lower than any of the male members, but now, even though she was shivering, she was frozen onto the door like an immovable statue. Seeing this, the other rushed to help. The other five of the assault team had to use all their strength before they managed to pry Lou Xiaoning away from the red door.

The moment she was disentangled from the door, everyone saw it.

“Ah…”

“Sister Ning!”

Lou Xiaoning’s rather pretty face was covered in popped veins. Fear was frozen on her face. Whatever she had seen had left her depleted and wasted mentally. The right eye that peered through the hole was still widened in horror. The socket was bulging, and blood was flowing, but the gaze was dull from fear. It felt like she could not see anything anymore because her sight was caught in the scary image that had held her captive. Seeing her in this state, everyone was chilled to the core. A well-suppressed terror overwhelmed the claustrophobic stone tunnel. It felt like everything around them was twisting awry.

“Move away from the door now!” Xue Ba still managed to keep his cool. With a shout, he had the team move Lou Xiaoning up the stairs. Lou Xiaoning did not struggle; it was as if rigor mortis had already set in, even though she was still alive and making that strange noise from her throat. Her face was turning pale, and her right eyeball was almost covered in red blood vessels. The eyeball was protruding out of her skull. The whole thing was ill and sickening…

“Medic!” Xue Ba shouted with anger and anxiety.

Uncle Dan and Zhang Huohuo were already ready. Lin Mo was leaning against the wall on an old mat, surrendering the stretcher. So, Yang Henan and the rest quickly placed Lou Xiaoning on the stretcher and strapped her into place.

“Miss Lou, Miss Lou, can you hear me? Can you see me?” Uncle Dan observed his patient, but Lou Xiaoning did not respond. “Damn it, she is not conscious. She might be hallucinating…”

Then, he picked up the flashlight to inspect her eyes. The left eye was still working fine, but the right eye had died from necrosis. The more Uncle Dan studied the right eye, the more unsettled he felt. There was something odd about this eye, but he could not tell what… Uncle Dan took a deep breath and made a medical decision. He shouted, “Ah Jun, I need you over here to apply anesthetic! We need to remove her right eye now! We might lose her if we don’t move fast!”

The group turned to Gu Jun at the wall. For a while, he had been spacing out like this whole thing had nothing to do with him.

Yang Henan and Zhou Yi lit up in anger immediately. Even though they were told to trust Gu Jun and even though they knew that Gu Jun had tried his best earlier, the horrid state that Lou Xiaoning was in had scrambled their minds. Perhaps Gu Jun was not doing this on purpose, but they needed to consider the possibility that Gu Jun was just a pawn in someone else’s sinister plot. They had no idea who the mastermind was, nor did Gu Jun. Was this whole operation a set up, just like what happened to the Action Department? The suspicion started to fester. From Gu Jun, they started to eye each other nervously. In this operation, could any of them have been made a pawn without them knowing?

Ever since they entered this space, it felt like they had been following someone’s designated plan, but the plan needed to work with Gu Jun’s ability to activate the foreign characters. What was their goal? They did not think anyone was coming for their lives. As important as a team from the Special Mobile Force was, they were not that irreplaceable. If it was not their lives the enemy was after, what could it be?

“Focus on saving her first!” Xue Ba clapped his hands and shouted. He could sense the change in the group’s emotional state. Even the trust he had placed in Gu Jun had started to fray.

“This requires regional anesthetic.” Uncle Dan ordered as he washed his hand to disinfect. Due to the rarity of water source, they had not done this during the earlier preparation. He shouted at Gu Jun, who walked toward him, “We need 4.5 ml in total, two percent lidocaine to 0.5 percent bupivacaine!”

Considering the state that Lou Xiaoning was in, a full-body anesthetic would be safer, but Uncle Dan had the precedent of the Malformed Banyan Disease’s surgery to consider. Over eighty percent of victims who had full body anesthetic applied still lost their consciousness even though the surgery was successful. Even though the correlation between the two had not been made, Uncle Dan did not dare make such a rash decision since this place was closely related to the Malformed Banyan Disease.

“O… okay…” Gu Jun walked to clean his hand. With Zhang Huohuo’s help, they swiftly prepared the anesthetic. They then moved to Lou Xiaoning’s side to apply it.

“Apply it behind the eyeball,” Uncle Dan said in a hurry. “Three injections, one to the upper surface, one to the lower surface, and the last to the upper inside. One mil at the apex and then 0.5 mils at the half hemisphere! Ignore the bulbar conjunctiva. Those blood vessels are too strange, just ignore them for now.”

“Understood.” Gu Jun reached the stretcher, and he was given a close glimpse of Lou Xiaoning’s bizarre mask and that disformed right eyeball…

Her strange mumbling was still echoing in the stone tunnel. The dark whispers whipped at his heart and soul like the gale from before.

“It is this woman who is suspecting you. In fact, all of them doubt you. Even if you save her, they will still doubt you. The only thing waiting for you is the barrel of a gun…”

The whispers were like a lullaby from hell. They danced on a strange rhythm, one that was strangely alluring. Gu Jun’s heart was beating alongside the beat.

“She suspects you, but now she needs you to save her. Such despicable worms. You are not the same as them. You never have been, not since you were born…”

Gu Jun’s head pulsed with pain, like something was trying to break out from it. He had… experienced this sensation before. It was when he was sitting inside the banyan tree hole being worshipped by the people in black and red robes.

Back then, he was not only Gu Jun. He was also the Son of Misfortune.

“Ah Jun? What are you doing!” Uncle Dan urged when he realized Gu Jun had stopped moving. Xue Ba and the rest noted this and turned to Gu Jun with suspicion.

“Move out of the way!” Zhang Huohuo could not stand this anymore. He grabbed the needle with the anesthetic away from Gu Jun, leaned forward, and injected it into Lou Xiaoning’s right eye. But he had only finished two injections when Zhang Huohuo felt the world sway around him. “Uncle Dan… there is abnormal energy in this eyeball. It has influenced my mental state. You mustn’t look too long at it…”

Zhang Huohuo pushed through to finish the third injection before he forced himself to turn his face that had been drained of color away.

Uncle Dan had already observed that earlier. He just did not expect this effect to be so strong, and he noticed the effect was getting stronger. After he came back from putting on the scrubs, cap, and gloves, Uncle Dan almost collapsed to the ground after a glance at the eyeball. Human organs were just part of the human body; they were technically dead, but the eye was the sole exception. It was the window to one’s soul, and Uncle Dan appeared to have seen a soul in deep torment in Lou Xiaoning’s right eye. The soul was his own.

“Uncle Dan!” Ignoring the need for sterility, Xue Ba reached forward to catch Uncle Dan. Everyone was truly panicking now.

“Everyone needs to stop looking at Miss Lou’s eye…” Uncle Dan breathed out between gasps. His face appeared to aged decades in those few seconds. “I can’t do this operation. Ah Jun, Ah Jun, you have to do it…”

Gu Jun was a person with high spirituality, so the influence of the eye on him would be higher, but Gu Jun might be Lou Xiaoning’s only hope. This was because the rest of the team noticed that even though Gu Jun had kept a steady gaze on the eyeball, he did not appear to be affected. However, there was a different resonance of the grotesque on his face.

His expressionless face was detached and conceited.

“Oh,” Gu Jun answered slowly.

The whispers were still echoing around his ears.

“These worms suspect you, but ultimately, they need you to save one of them… such despicable worms…

“Let her die, allow death to embrace her because only through death that she can achieve true ascendency.”