Chapter 272 - 164: Crisis in the Chinese Medicine Room! An Overwhelmed Ning Yu! Is Xu Jun’s Trio Targeted?

Chapter 272: Chapter 164: Crisis in the Chinese Medicine Room! An Overwhelmed Ning Yu! Is Xu Jun’s Trio Targeted?

SQUELCH—

The sound of vines piercing flesh echoed relentlessly, a hellish noise that grated on everyone’s ears.

Watching the students surrounded by Parasites and impaled one after another like candied fruit on a stick, Sima was on the verge of tears.

In fact, all the poisoned students at the scene were on the verge of tears...

Who could have imagined that the Parasites, seemingly wiped out just the day before, would reappear today?

And of all places, here at the teacher’s apartments!

All the teachers and security guards had become these monsters.

’What the hell is going on?’

Sima and the others couldn’t figure it out, but there was no time to dwell on it now.

When he thought about how he’d gone to all the trouble of having someone carry him here, he wanted to slap himself dead.

’How is this any different from marching to my own death?’

If he had known this was the situation, he would have rather died from the pain right where he was than come anywhere near this place...

The students who had used the vine fragments all shared nearly identical symptoms: an excruciating, piercing pain in their stomachs, leaving them weak and limp.

The only difference was the severity of the symptoms, which varied based on each person’s physical constitution.

Everyone was desperately crawling away, trying to flee the teacher’s apartments.

The teacher’s apartments were located in the very center of the campus. There were almost no other buildings nearby, just a garden and a pond encircling the complex.

This design served both an aesthetic purpose and a practical one, isolating the resident teachers from the hustle and bustle of the campus.

At the base of the building was a small open area of several hundred square meters, and it was here that Sima and the others now lay collapsed.

Those with milder symptoms could barely manage to push themselves up, moving outward with hunched backs and faltering steps.

Those with more severe symptoms crawled slowly across the ground like turtles.

The worst off had already lost consciousness on the spot, foaming at the mouth...

Although they were all suffering from the agony of what felt like food poisoning after ingesting the vine fragments, the life-or-death crisis sparked an intense survival instinct in everyone.

After all, they had seen with their own eyes the terrifying forms of the Parasites in the square. If they didn’t escape quickly, one of two fates awaited them: death, or being turned into one of those same monsters.

To them, death was a far better alternative than becoming one of those creatures.

And so, they gave it everything they had. They crawled, they shuffled, they staggered, finally reaching the edge of the open area near the garden and the pond.

They all knew that in their current condition, it was impossible to escape the vicinity of the teacher’s apartments without help.

So, to evade the Parasites, everyone resorted to desperate measures.

Some crawled into the dense garden bushes, trying to use the foliage as cover.

Others hid under trees, frantically digging at the soil in an attempt to bury themselves and fool the Parasites.

And some simply scrambled to the pond’s edge and dove in, planning to hide beneath the water...

But the Parasites were no fools.

The Bloodthirsty Vine possessed near-human intelligence. Moreover, having parasitized countless humans, it had absorbed vast amounts of their knowledge and had even mastered their very thought processes.

Finding these people was child’s play.

The first group of four or five students they targeted were already dead—or rather, their parasitization was complete.

They rose to their feet, straight as rods, the weakness that had afflicted them like food poisoning now gone. Instead, several vines now extended from within their bodies.

They had skipped the initial stage of parasitism and become advanced Parasites!

Evidently, the Bloodthirsty Vine was taking advantage of Chen Chong’s absence to completely overrun the teacher’s apartments, kill everyone, and seize his main base.

The normal process, which involved slowly absorbing nutrients during an initial stage of parasitism before developing into an advanced stage, was bypassed. Instead, nutrients were forcibly extracted from the host for rapid growth.

The drawback to this method was that it killed the host outright, preventing the vine from reading their memories on a deeper level.

The benefit, of course, was that the slow process of parasitism was no longer necessary.

The moment the process was complete, the vine could fully occupy the host, allowing its offshoots to mature and more quickly infest others...

Even if Chen Chong had been there, he wouldn’t have been able to suppress these Parasites and take them to the library for treatment.

They were already dead. All that remained were empty shells controlled by the Bloodthirsty Vine, no different from the Parasites that had been cut down in the square.

Over twenty Parasites closed in on the fleeing and hiding students.

A few managed to hide well, but most were like ostriches burying their heads in the sand—their attempts at concealment were laughably transparent.

The Parasites split up to search the garden at the foot of the apartments. A few of them, however, walked straight into the building itself, as if they had a different objective.

The parasitic slaughter began. A chorus of screams rose and fell, echoing across the open ground.

Soon, the commotion alerted those inside the Traditional Chinese Medicine room...

Inside the Traditional Chinese Medicine room.

Compared to the morning, there were far fewer patients in the room now.

The students who had come seeking treatment for minor ailments like sprains or the common cold had long since left.

Ever since they’d been brought to this world, most people cherished the daylight hours, using them to go out and scavenge for resources.

Only a few would use their free time in the morning or evening to take care of personal business.

Almost everyone left in the Traditional Chinese Medicine room now was nursing injuries from the last Blood-tooth Python hunt—wounds that wouldn’t heal quickly.

The only uninjured people present were Shen Xinrou, the Medicine Lady, a laborer, a maid, and the siblings Ning Yu and Ning Feng, who were under strict orders from Chen Chong to stay and rest.

Hearing the strange noises from outside, Ning Feng grew puzzled.

"Is there a fight going on outside? Why is there screaming?"

Ning Yu paid it little mind. For her, nothing mattered except getting stronger and keeping her younger siblings alive. She didn’t care about anything else.