Chapter 41 - 39: Secretly Learning

Chapter 41: Chapter 39: Secretly Learning

After dinner, Bai Qiang went home to grab a few things, planning to take Yin Zhen to the vet for her vaccinations. However, having memorized the location of Bai Qiang’s apartment, Yin Zhen seized a moment when the other woman wasn’t looking and decisively bolted.

There was no way she was going to the vet. What if, on top of a check-up and shots, Bai Qiang decided to have her spayed?

She still had a few days before her third trip to the Red Corpse World. The matter of learning how to use spiritual power could wait—she needed more time to think about it.

It was just past noon, and the sunlight was brutally intense. Yin Zhen darted into the shadows of the alleys, hugging the base of the walls as she ran, desperate to avoid the light. Halfway home, she suddenly stopped. She noticed that the feline shadow trailing beneath her paws had its tail raised high, swaying happily from side to side. In reality, her actual tail was drooping, flicking back and forth in irritation.

"What are you so happy about?" Yin Zhen asked silently.

The shadow immediately returned to normal, trailing obediently at her heels. Yin Zhen ignored it and continued her sprint home. She scrambled up the exterior drainpipe and slipped through the window into her bedroom. Her Assimilation Degree had already reached 48%, so Yin Zhen hurriedly shifted back into her human form.

After resting for a moment, she propped herself up against the edge of the bed. She had just finished changing her clothes when a knock sounded at the front door.

"Miss, are you home?" It was a little girl’s voice, childish and thick with tears. "Could you please open the door and help me? My mom and dad went to work... I have a fever... and I’m so hungry..."

Yin Zhen frowned. It was the little girl who lived upstairs; she had seen her a few times before. But with so many people living in this apartment building, why seek help from a disabled person whose household had recently suffered a death? Couldn’t she just go downstairs and find the friendly old security guard?

Yin Zhen’s lips curled into a self-deprecating smirk. As a member of a vulnerable demographic, she was an easy target in anyone’s eyes.

Settling back into her wheelchair, Yin Zhen rolled over to the front door. She didn’t open it immediately. Instead, she activated her Super Sensing to investigate, knowing her Assimilation Degree was still low enough to sustain it for a little while.

The little girl outside carried a very faint scent of blood and a pungent reek of alcohol. Furthermore, the security camera in the hallway wasn’t emitting its usual faint hum of electricity—it was broken. The apartment next door was completely silent. Yin Zhen was the only person home on this entire floor.

Yin Zhen opened the door. The seven-year-old girl stood there with her hair tied into two pigtails, wearing a pink dress. Her face was flushed with fever, and she looked up at Yin Zhen with tearful eyes.

"Miss, I feel so sick... Could you give me something to eat?"

"Come in," Yin Zhen said, moving her wheelchair aside to let her pass.

The little girl walked inside and stood timidly in the entryway, looking around. "Wow, your house is really messy."

Yin Zhen glanced out at the empty hallway before shutting the front door and heading toward the kitchen. "I’ll go get you some food," she said, her back turned to the child.

Behind her, the childish demeanor vanished. The little girl suddenly bared a ferocious expression and lunged at Yin Zhen’s defenseless back. She was incredibly fast, but she wasn’t using an Extraordinary Ability.

Yin Zhen lowered her gaze in disappointment. The shadow stretching behind her violently reared up like a black snake, instantly coiling around the little girl’s body.

"What are you doing?! Let me go! It hurts! It hurts so much!"

Yin Zhen turned her wheelchair around and looked at the captive girl. Her face still belonged to an innocent child, and tears were still streaming down her cheeks, but two fangs, noticeably sharper than a normal person’s, now protruded from the corners of her mouth.

"Why... why are you doing this to me... I’m just a kid..."

"There are no children in Night City," Yin Zhen said coldly. "Only members of the Blood Clan who never grow up."

The little girl’s expression froze for a split second. The shadow violently constricted.

CRACK.

The little girl’s neck snapped. Yin Zhen used her shadow to drag the corpse over to the window. The moment the intense sunlight touched the body, it instantly turned into a pile of ashes.

Yin Zhen stared at the remains, a mocking sneer tugging at her lips. "That makes three. If this were a Kaidan world, my apartment would definitely be classified as a haunted house by now."

The shadow shrank into a tight ball at her feet, its edges quivering in wave-like ripples.

Yin Zhen looked down at it. "I don’t like cowards!"

The shadow instantly snapped back to normal. It even swelled in size, looking significantly bulkier and stronger than Yin Zhen herself.

"Don’t show off in front of outsiders. If we get discovered, I’ll end up dead right alongside you!"

Yin Zhen ignored it after that, sitting back to check the kill rewards she had just received.

[Successfully hunted a Blood Clan intruder. Reward: 500 words, 3 attribute points.]

This time, the reward only consisted of attribute points and words. Yin Zhen immediately allocated the attribute points to her main body’s agility. A tingling sensation immediately surged up from the soles of her feet. She could feel the stiffness in her legs easing significantly. After pacing back and forth a few times, she confirmed that her movements were indeed much more agile than before.

Although the attribute points were incredibly useful to her, Yin Zhen had zero intention of going out to actively hunt down more intruders. If that little girl hadn’t delivered herself right to her doorstep, she never would have bothered killing her.

Nan Jiamu was already working with the higher-ups and would inevitably utilize the entire city’s resources to monitor everything. If those Blood Clan intruders dared to show their faces, they would undoubtedly be captured by Nan Jiamu’s forces.