Deep Within the Living

Chapter 54: The Rescue

Time: Forty-five minutes before the fitness test

Location: Entrance of No. 4 High School

Students who had left campus to eat or inject stimulants were gradually returning to school. The entrance adopted a checkpoint system similar to airport security: wristband verification, fingerprint scanning, blood tests, and a final manual comparison by security personnel at each gate.

Among the crowd was a female student wearing light makeup and unaccompanied by any guardian. Passing all the checks, she successfully entered the campus. As she did, her lips curved into an almost grotesque smile, wrinkles appearing beneath the exaggerated expression.

Instead of heading to the track field, she veered off at a fork in the path, moving quickly toward a small wooded area and finally arriving at the northwest corner of the campus.

Szzzz... electromagnetic interference.

As she approached, a streetlamp nearby dimmed, as though disrupted by an unseen force. The power, however, remained active, and no campus alarms were triggered.

Standing upright, patches of her heavily powdered skin began peeling off her face, revealing the deeply wrinkled visage of a middle-aged woman. Perhaps it was the success of infiltrating her daughter's school and reaching the "designated location," or the faint scent of long-lost youth in the air, but she burst into maniacal laughter, the sound echoing from deep within her skull.

"Let Mommy help you start the graduation exam!"

Rip!A crack suddenly appeared from her forehead to her lips, forming a vertical Z-axis. The tearing extended to the corners of her mouth and split along her jawline, creating an X-axis and Y-axis.

The Flesh-and-Blood Corner was thus formed.

However, this wasn’t the only anomaly taking place on campus…

Time: Present

Location: Girls' Dormitory

Luo Di and Li Xiaoying were descending through a hallway that should not have existed.

The twisted, spiraled remains of dorm supervisors, extra dorm rooms that shouldn’t be there, and a staircase extending deeper than the building's specifications—all signs indicated that the dormitory was affected by a Pseudo-Corner Space, but this one seemed different. Its scale was far larger than what Luo Di had previously encountered.

Additionally, the windows inside the dorm rooms were not sealed, meaning they could theoretically leave. They were not trapped in a fixed space.

The campus-wide dimness and the vortex looming in the sky conveyed another layer of information to Luo Di. But for now, finding the class leader took precedence.

“Luo Di, I feel like we’ve gone deeper than five floors…” Xiaoying’s voice quivered, the suffocating darkness of the stairwell planting seeds of fear in her mind.

Luo Di’s response was a cold, emotionless "Mm."

After descending approximately ten stories, the lamp in Luo Di's hand illuminated the end of the stairs—a door painted in black.

"Give me your hand," Luo Di said, his rough and calloused hand extended toward Xiaoying, leaving no room for refusal.

"Alright."

As Xiaoying slowly placed her smaller, more delicate hand into Luo Di’s palm, a strip of white cloth fell from above and quickly wrapped itself around their joined hands. The fabric was stained and carried a faintly unpleasant odor.

“Luo Di, what is this?”

“A shroud. We’re in a special space. If we’re not careful, we might get separated. We’ll untie it when the impersonators attack or when we find the class leader.”

“Oh... okay!”

Despite being a precautionary measure, the contact eased the growing fear in Xiaoying’s mind.

Luo Di then revealed his true demeanor. Without a sound, he delivered a powerful kick to the black wooden door.

BANG!

The door crashed open, slamming against the wall.

Basement.

Dim and damp.

In a curved corner of the basement, the class leader was tied to a steel pipe with hemp rope, unconscious.

“Class leader!” Xiaoying cried out excitedly, but she didn’t rush forward. She and Luo Di cautiously examined the room first.

Once certain there were no dorm supervisors or other threats, the shroud binding their hands unraveled.

Xiaoying was just about to step forward when Luo Di beat her to it, slicing through the rope with a single stroke.

After confirming that the class leader was breathing normally and showed no visible injuries, Luo Di hoisted the leader onto his back.

At that moment, a noise came from the basement entrance.

The wooden door they had kicked open was now shut again. This time, it was reinforced with chains, completely blocking their exit.

Whatever had been following them had entered the basement, now better prepared than before.

The two twisted dorm supervisors had returned, their bodies now spiraled together. Unlike before, they were no longer crawling but standing upright on four limbs.

Each of their four arms wielded a deadly tool scavenged from a toolbox: a handsaw, a hammer, a metal crowbar, and a battery-powered nail gun.

The most grotesque part, however, was the dorm supervisors’ head...

The two middle-aged women’s heads were nearly fused together. One, a frail and elderly dorm supervisor, seemed to be merging into the heavily permed head of the other.

Beyond that, the latter’s unnaturally long tongue unfurled repeatedly, curling outward and dripping copious amounts of saliva.

For Li Xiaoying, it was her first time seeing a real impersonator, and the face it wore was all too familiar—a dorm supervisor who used to greet her with a smile. The memory sent a shiver down her spine, her body trembling slightly.

At that moment, a hand gently tapped her shoulder. Luo Di’s deep voice followed, hammering into her mind with an undeniable authority:

“Take care of the class leader.”

The unconscious leader was placed back into the curved corner.

Luo Di pressed a hand against his right shoulder, rolling it as he turned to face the dorm supervisors blocking the doorway. With ten stories’ worth of narrow, claustrophobic stairs behind them, escaping while carrying the class leader was impossible. The only option was to eliminate the threat ahead. The latest_epɪ_sodes are on_the novel·fire·net

“Yaaaah!”

The dorm supervisors screeched at the sight of Luo Di, their voices swirling with a vortex-like intensity that radiated pure hatred. The injury he had inflicted on them earlier seemed to fuel their rage.

Twisted like grotesque reptiles, their bodies lunged toward him with alarming speed. One of them raised a high-pressure nail gun, aiming directly at Luo Di’s head.

Click! The trigger was pulled.

A thin metal nail shot out of the gun. While not as powerful as a bullet, at close range it could inflict severe harm—or even prove fatal if it hit the skull.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

The sound of metal striking metal echoed as nails fell to the floor, their ends bent.

Luo Di remained motionless, his right arm raised in defense. Beneath his clothing, the skin of his arm was veined with black lines and exuded a dark, ominous hue.

“Zombie Hardening.”

When he lowered his arm, the frenzied dorm supervisors were already upon him. A handsaw, a hammer, and a crowbar swung at him from three different angles.

Luo Di’s expression didn’t change. His cold, mask-like face mirrored that of a horror movie killer about to deliver judgment.

Yet, a trace of doubt flickered in his mind. These distorted dorm supervisors—despite their grotesque appearance—lacked the speed, intellect, and sheer menace of Wu Huazhen, an impersonator he had encountered before.

As his attackers closed in, Luo Di switched to a two-handed grip on his blade. Ignoring their incoming strikes, he stepped forward and swung in a sweeping horizontal arc.

Buzz!

The twisted, spiraled bodies of the dorm supervisors offered little resistance, lacking the skeletal structure to withstand the blow.

A black streak slashed across their midsection.

Thud! Their bodies split into two, the lower halves flying backward from the force of the blade. The tools—hammer, saw, and crowbar—that had struck Luo Di fell uselessly to the ground, leaving no visible damage on him.

The upper halves of their bodies landed nearby, still writhing and flailing in a frenzy.

Luo Di knelt on one knee, switching his grip on the zombie blade to reverse.

Stab!

The blade pierced one of the dorm supervisors' skulls with precision, destroying its brain and the spiraled pituitary gland within—key to its anomalous nature.

Impersonator eliminated.

Behind him, Li Xiaoying was frozen in shock, her mind unable to process the scene.

But Luo Di felt no triumph. His expression remained grim, devoid of any satisfaction. Staring at the blood pooling on the floor in a strange vortex pattern, he was filled with unease.

“This… doesn’t feel like a fully developed impersonator. Its strength was far too weak.”

While scrutinizing the corpse, Luo Di tentatively touched the swirling blood on the ground with the edge of his zombie blade.

Unbeknownst to him, the unconscious class leader in the shadowed corner had silently risen to their feet.