Blood Neon

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Summary

Lin Ying squatted on the bathroom floor, arms wrapped around her legs, expressionless, carefully counting the spoils from this operation.

A total of three sets of clothes, over five hundred yuan in cash, and three mobile phones.

——None of the three tonight would be able to leave this room alive.

.

Even the Big Brother who got scared the longest due to arriving late was, in fact, already as good as dead the moment he stepped into the bathroom and looked into the mirror.

Some of the ideas Zhang Qiming had previously suggested had given Lin Ying a lot of inspiration. So, many of the moves she made tonight also had the purpose of testing her own theories.

And as it turned out, she had guessed correctly.

Just as she suspected, her predation was not purely about physical consumption.

By using different methods to devour the three victims one after another, the feedback she received made her connection to this world significantly stronger.

The first victim was that guy called Hailong. When Er Liu went to the bathroom because of an urgent need to pee, Hailong chose to stay in the living room, continuing to make his moves.

The moment Er Liu closed the bathroom door, this top player who had pre-booked the “goddess stomach VIP seat” vanished from the room.

The second victim, Er Liu, was sitting on the toilet browsing Tieba on his phone when the closed door suddenly opened. The supernatural force Lin Ying brought with her caused him to fall into panic. After partially stuffing his body into the toilet for a round of investigative intimidation, the perpetrator finally swallowed him down—and even thoughtfully flushed afterward.

The third victim, under the direction of Lin Ying, experienced the full treatment of a classic horror film protagonist from the early 2000s. In the end, after seeing a part of Lin Ying’s body in the mirror and losing his last shred of sanity, he was swallowed whole.

The three of them served as comparative test subjects, handled separately under the categories of "no processing", "physical pain", and "psychological terror", providing precious experimental data for Lin Ying, who had long struggled with a lack of testing conditions.

The results showed that the process of devouring the third test subject was the one that gave Lin Ying the strongest sense of satiety.

It wasn’t a physical sensation of being full—this was a kind of satisfaction rooted in her very existence.

Lin Ying felt she had basically figured out what she truly was.

.

If her understanding was not wrong, then first of all, in a world that, at present, seemed rather idealistic, people’s thoughts and beliefs naturally weren’t powerless.

The way people here perceived the world was, perhaps unconsciously, also shaping it.

In a purely materialistic world, this would naturally be impossible.

In a materialist world, matter determines consciousness. Though consciousness can, through certain operations, exert a counter-effect on matter, it cannot determine it outright. One could never simply reshape the world through a casual “I think so.” Even if magic existed there, it would have to follow an internal logic—in other words, it would be a form of science.

And even in an idealist world, due to the insignificance of individuals, one person’s understanding of and influence on the world would be extremely limited. Such a person could rarely stir up any real storm, being nothing more than a drop in a vast ocean, a single point on a sine wave.

But emotions—those thoughts rooted in the subconscious—often shared a certain consistency across individuals.

For example, anger.

For example, jealousy.

For example... fear.

Fear could be considered the most primal instinct of all living creatures. The reason was simple: for most complex organisms, lacking such an emotion would make them far too easy to eliminate through natural selection.

Fear of the unknown.

Fear of death.

And more specifically, fear of certain things.

Fear of being single for a lifetime.

Fear that the elevator in motion might stop between floors.

Fear of failing finals.

...

Modern people had such an overwhelming range of fear objects that their collective complexity undoubtedly surpassed that of any era dominated by other lifeforms on this planet—unless there once existed a species more advanced than humans.

And yet, all these fears, by sheer misfortune, shared one thing in common:

That deep, internal resistance—the desire not to see it, not to acknowledge it, to wish it simply didn’t exist.

However... the very reason fear existed at all was built on one major premise:

“It really might exist.”

Just like how in nightmares, the thing you fear most always comes true.

And so, Lin Ying was born, for the sole purpose of creating more terror.

Born from people’s fear, from their attempts to flee it, from their malice.

“She” opened her eyes.

And this—was likely the reason why she needed to devour intelligent life.

//

After temporarily storing the spoils—clothes, phones, and such—into the shadows, Lin Ying wrapped herself up completely, concealing her body. Curling into a wriggling ball of darkness, she took advantage of the bar’s late-night emptiness. Picking her moment, she carefully crept along the corners, avoiding notice as she made her way out.

Throughout the entire process, Lin Ying deliberately moved through the blind spots of the security cameras. Even when entering or leaving, she slipped through the crack beneath the door to avoid triggering the door movement or being caught on surveillance.

This way, the last thing the surveillance would be able to capture would be the final person finishing his phone call and returning to the room.

In any case, they were missing now, and Lin Ying really had no way to change that fact. She couldn't just conjure three fully dressed people out of thin air and have them stroll out the door, right? So naturally, all she could do was cover things up as best she could within her current capabilities—better than doing nothing at all.

Storing items temporarily in the shadow had also been a new skill Lin Ying discovered tonight.

The principle was similar to devouring people. Because her true body had this strange trait of not consuming anything except living creatures, when she swallowed someone whole, their clothing and other belongings would float back out separately.

So, as long as Lin Ying controlled the urge to “vomit,” and resisted the reflex to immediately “retch,” she could perform this bizarre operation of placing items into the shadows.

As for questions like, “Do parts of a person count as edible?” or “Does blood count as food?”

Well—this was an idealist world, after all. As long as she subconsciously felt that it was an essential part of the “meal” as a whole, then naturally, it could be eaten without issue.

...Back to the main point—although she wasn’t entirely sure how long she could store things for, or how much, she could only experiment and find out for now.

Honestly, though she didn’t yet know the limits or side effects, just the thrill of learning a new skill was enough to excite her.

Finally... it was starting to feel a bit like a reincarnator getting stronger in another world. That kind of RPG feeling—that was the right flavor.

Crouched in the corner of a shadow, Lin Ying thought this to herself.

In fact, just earlier, while completing the third experiment, she had already used some of her newly acquired techniques.

Creating an eerie atmosphere, matching the target’s actions, adjusting and coordinating on the fly—employing the most fitting method, like a living nightmare. She focused on sensing the fear within the prey's heart, slowly gnawing away at their sanity step by step.

For example, when she saw him sitting on the toilet, she even retrieved half of a severed hand from a previous person—still holding a phone—and stuffed it into the toilet.

At the time, she had only meant to give him a scare when he glanced down. She hadn’t expected him to actually make a phone call, which caused the fright factor to stack, delivering an unexpectedly great result.

You could only say—they ended up coordinating really well this round… Though he would probably never guess that from the moment he stepped into that bathroom, Lin Ying had been by his side all along, watching from the shadows with predatory eyes.

.

After making it outside, feeling the emotions and thoughts still echoing within her body, Lin Ying found herself drifting into thought.

The beings she devoured, once inside her body, would lose their function as independent lifeforms on a conceptual level. This manifested in forms such as dismembered bodies, twisted limbs, and more.

Yes, from the moment they were swallowed, they could be considered dead. But in a certain sense—if one stubbornly insisted that only traditional brain death could be considered true death—then before their complete and total disappearance, they could still technically be considered alive.

Their dismembered bodies, their physically detached heads, somehow remained linked in this world where physical laws were meaningless—still faintly connected, struggling to hold onto their consciousness.

Even after their “death,” until their existence was completely digested by Lin Ying, her body would not quiet down for a while.

Their obsessions, emotions, mutterings, and other such unscientific remnants of their being echoed within Lin Ying, reverberating in that boundless depth that did not belong to this world—screaming, writhing, suffering phantom pain as they mistakenly believed themselves still alive.

These sorrows and resentments flowing through the shadows made her feel a faint pang of guilt.

.

To be fair, these three men did not truly deserve death.

Let alone to die in such a cruel manner—whether judged from the perspective of modern human morality or from the standpoint of law.

After all, emotionally wanting to hack a rapist into a thousand pieces and actually picking up a knife to do it were two completely different things. Just saying or thinking such things would never result in actually swallowing someone whole and hearing them scream inside your stomach.

And for Lin Ying, from her point of view, she had no way of knowing whether this was their first time doing something like this, or whether they had done it many times before. Unable to quantify the extent of their wrongdoing, she could not truly determine whether they deserved to be cut into pieces.

Of course, judging from their proficiency, Lin Ying leaned toward the latter guess—but it was only a guess, not evidence.

Besides, even if they really were habitual offenders with terrible records, their crimes would at most earn them several years to a few decades in prison. After release, they would again walk the world as free men.

After that, perhaps they would remain unchanged, continuing to bully men and women alike until they were thrown in prison once more;

Or perhaps they would turn over a new leaf, go home, live as decent people, and abandon the past completely.

Lin Ying could not foresee the future, nor could she know their past.

She did not know what they had experienced before, and she did not know what kind of people they might have become in the future.

She did not have the ability to deliver a just punishment, nor was she a judge or an arbiter of any kind.

She was neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

——So at present, the only thing she could do was play the role of a victim and engage in excessive self-defense.

Hunters always chose prey weaker than themselves, did they not?

She was like this, and every person she killed was the same.

They did not dare to seize women openly in the streets; they only dared to hunt fearfully in filthy places like this, and even then they dared not go too far—at least they did not dare to commit murder or arson.

And this was not because they were kind, but simply because they were cowards, and the cost of crime exceeded their courage.

For matters like this, for people like them, that was the truth.

Sentencing them to death would be too heavy; sentencing them to live would be too light.

Their crimes were not enough to warrant death, yet they truly died without deserving to be forgiven.

Lin Ying pitied their deaths, because it destroyed the possibilities of their future.

But she hated their actions even more, because they destroyed the possibilities of someone else’s future.

After all…

Those unfortunate victims whose lives had been violently and mercilessly altered—might they not, on some moonlit night, dream of the happy future that should have belonged to them?