Chapter Eighteen: The Twisted Abomination

Bearing the title “World Breaker,” Tang Tianjie was brimming with pride when he suddenly realized that a mass of hair had snaked around his legs.

“What are you doing?”

No answer came. In the next instant, the hair spread across his body, splitting into countless strands, each glimmering with a metallic sheen, sharp as the finest wire. Under the bloodshot, contorted gaze of Li Zang’ai, every strand contracted violently.

“Ahhh!”

A wretched howl tore through the air as boundless agony surged along his nerves. The tightening hair sliced through Tang Tianjie’s skin, severing tendons, blood vessels, and sinews beneath. Each strand dug deep, binding itself to the very bone.

In a heartbeat, the handsome young man was transformed into a ghastly figure of raw, bleeding flesh—a human-shaped mass of gore.

It was nothing short of being flayed alive.

“Die!”

A torrent of crimson sprayed forth. As blood gushed and chunks of flesh—shorn as if by blades—fell away, the metallic hair bored into bone, snapping tight before rebounding with force. In an instant, more than seventy percent of his flesh was stripped away.

His head, untouched by the hair, retained Tang Tianjie’s face, now frozen in utter disbelief and terror. He looked down, seeing his own body reduced to a skeleton.

“This must be a lie… How could someone like me die? I’m supposed to be the protagonist…”

With a faint crack, the skeleton, robbed of flesh, collapsed under its own weight. Tang Tianjie was dead at last. Only the head on the ground still bore an expression of shock, unable to accept the impossible. The luck that once let him transcend human limits was now a thing of the past.

Li Zang’ai, eyes blood-red, erupted into manic laughter. The wound in his abdomen, pierced through by the boss, had been staunched with a spray, closing for now. But as he laughed, the wound reopened, spilling blood in streams and letting intestines protrude. He seemed to feel nothing.

His laughter grew weaker and weaker…

“What… what is happening?”

Guide Mu Bai stared in horror at Tang Tianjie’s wide-eyed, unyielding head on the ground, and at Li Zang’ai, who died laughing, breath fading away.

Chu Qingfeng, missing his right leg, was helped upright by Xu Han. He exhaled heavily.

Fate Talent: Suggestion.

Among the three with mental vulnerabilities—Wang Dongwei, Zhu Xiaoyong, and Li Zang’ai—he had planted psychological suggestions. They were weak at first, but could be strengthened at need, like seeds ready to sprout.

So Li Zang’ai’s anger and resentment swelled to the extreme, plunging him into a frenzy of hatred.

That lucky bastard who broke through human limits—his ability was too much of a bug. No one wants a godlike protagonist in their midst; such a person shouldn’t be allowed to live. He was as loathsome as the other outlandish upstart.

Let them die together. That was the best outcome!

As a psychologist, his strength lay not in combat, but in the mind.

Chu Qingfeng had always believed:

“Demonstrating your worth with your mind is much safer than with your fists. If you can solve something with your brain, there’s no need to use your hands.”

Just as now—without lifting a finger, and without anyone knowing the true reason, two newcomers died.

Mu Bai had no time for shock, for the world around them was undergoing violent changes. Between the shattered, fractured sky and the earth, space and time warped abruptly, as if cards were being flipped in a mad game. Countless spheres of shifting light—black, red, gold—bathed the space in a chaotic, unnatural glow.

“Could it be…”

A look of terror overtook the face of the Black guide. He turned with difficulty toward the ground, where, after being blown apart, Dr. Smith’s head remained. The gray-white brain matter had swollen into a mass over three meters wide, like an enormous walnut.

The grotesquely enlarged brain floated above the ground, its surface veined with a net of blood vessels. Limbs began to float as well.

One eyeball, torn from Dr. Smith’s skull, had grown to the size of a washbasin. A thick, knotted nerve dangled below it. The whole thing looked like a beholder out of a fantasy game, floating beside the brain, with several tendrils linking the two together.

The jaw had also grown, sprouting countless teeth—some sword-shaped, some barbed. The jaws, covered densely with teeth, now took on the size of a millstone and the appearance of a monstrous sandworm’s maw. Nerve tendrils held it aloft beside the brain.

One of Dr. Smith’s hands, left after the grenade blast, began to swell, twisting into a hideous, monstrous claw. The skin turned brown-black, covered in coarse keratin and even scales in places—a truly evil appendage.

In this dazzling, kaleidoscopic space, the blood-veined brain mass, floating eye, monstrous jaw, and claw formed an abomination beyond description—a horror that defied imagination.

“It’s a Twisted Abomination!”

Mu Bai’s pupils quivered violently, and his body trembled. The other newcomers, except for Yan Luo, stared in shock at the monster and the bizarre, shifting space. As humans, they could not help but feel an instinctive dread before such incomprehensible horrors.

Yan Luo glanced at his phone’s program. The monsters were named:

F-Class Twisted Abomination (Chaos Contamination)

Biochemical Aggregate—
Biochemical Aberration: Brain Eater
Biochemical Aberration: Eye Eater
Biochemical Aberration: Jaw Eater
Biochemical Aberration: Claw Eater

Mu Bai was also checking his phone. F-Class was the weakest of the Twisted Abominations, born from the smallest “box world” after contamination, yet even so, only a Level 4 World Tuner could hope to confront it.

He was Level 3.

Though Level 3 seemed just one rank below Level 4, the gap was vast. Levels 1 to 3 were considered low-level Tuners; Level 4, intermediate.

“Why has a Chaos Contaminated Twisted Abomination appeared? I finally found a box world—I merely wanted these newcomers to gain more benefits and greater challenges from their first mission… Why…”

A man of the Lawful Good alignment, Mu Bai fell into self-recrimination. If only he hadn’t been greedy, if only he hadn’t pushed the newcomers to challenge the box world boss… They would all have returned to the surface world by now.

A sizzling sound broke his reverie.

The Claw Eater suddenly shot the nails from its monstrous claw—five ashen-black talons, sharp as blades, whirled through the air, tearing into Mu Bai’s chest and shooting out his back.

A grievous wound!

Yet the blow snapped Mu Bai out of his turbulent emotions. His face twisted between laughter and tears, his eyes fierce as a starving wolf. The gaping wound in his chest became a vortex of energy, his body shifting to an energy form and instantly healing.

“Ever since I became a Level 3 World Tuner… gave up adventuring to guide others… I’ve led seventy-two newcomers…”

“Every time, I completed the mission perfectly. I won’t fail now! The consequences I caused, I’ll bear myself! Everyone—now that the Twisted Abomination is here, the world’s collapse has stopped, and the portal remains. Run! Escape through the portal—leave this world!” Mu Bai bellowed. “Run for your lives! I’m the guide—I’ll hold it back!”

“Even if I die, I’ll see you all out alive!”

Fierce wind gathered around Mu Bai. Twin daggers appeared in his hands as he charged the Biochemical Aggregate. Five more talons shot out from the Claw Eater; three he dodged, two he parried with flashing blades.

His gene system—psionic side—was attuned to “wind element.” His main energy was wind. Gale Step! Accelerating, he dashed past the massive claw, his daggers flashing cold as lightning as they slashed across its fingers, leaving long, bloody gashes.

With a spray, murky blood erupted from the wounds, splattering Mu Bai’s face and head. Immediately, his vision blurred; bizarre lights flooded his eyes, his ears rang with screeches and warped music—chaos and distortion assailed all his senses.

Chaos Contamination!

One of the Twisted Abomination’s most terrifying powers. Mu Bai could neither see nor hear clearly now. He howled in despair, like a she-wolf defending her cubs against a lion. Wind energy swirled and spun his body like a top.

Enshrouded in wind, his daggers traced lines in the air—so many in just two seconds that they wove a dense web.

“Ultimate Technique: Wind Wheel Dance!”

The Claw Eater was shredded by the wind-woven net, its fragments dissolving into the gale. But behind him, the Jaw Eater’s layer upon layer of teeth, petal-like on its millstone-sized maw, snapped down and swallowed half his body.

Razor teeth tore his flesh. The agony brought clarity.

“Phase Shift!”

He shifted his body from flesh to energy, but the Twisted Abomination could harm both matter and energy. Countless tiny teeth, glowing blood-red, sliced through his spectral outline.

“Soul Burn!”

Just as the famous “Demon Disintegration” destroys the body, Mu Bai now ignited his very being. Blue-white flames burst from his energy form as he unleashed “Wind Wheel Dance” again.

Countless teeth shattered; the Jaw Eater was also destroyed. An LV3 Tuner, by burning his soul and using his ultimate technique, had destroyed two parts of the Twisted Abomination!

But he was finished.

Utterly spent, his soul grievously wounded by the burning, Mu Bai could no longer maintain his energy form. As he returned to flesh, the last thing he saw was the massive, bloodshot white eyeball and crimson pupil looming over him—a sight that chilled the soul…

“Run!” he roared one last time.

A thick beam of light shot from the Eye Eater.

Boom!

In a flash of radiance, his body was blasted to countless fragments.