My Healing Games

Chapter 227 The Butcher's Knife
The black python nestled beside Han Fei's legs, feeling praised by him. Even though it was very weak, it still happily wagged its tail.

The female butcher in the alley hadn't gone far, so Han Fei didn't dare to say much and quietly listened to the sounds outside the door.

He finally breathed a sigh of relief after the heavy footsteps and the stench gradually faded into the distance.

"Survived."

Holding the limp body of the giant black python, the man and his pet depended on each other for survival in the perilous Animal Alley. They both thought of Xu Qin without prior arrangement.

"According to the information revealed by the barber, Xu Qin should still be in Animal Alley. Maybe I will run into her somewhere."

With Xu Qin's image appearing in his mind, Han Fei was no longer so afraid. He took out a blood-red paper doll from his inventory, and the doll's face, which looked exactly like Xu Qin's, slowly looked towards a certain place.

The blood-red paper doll must have sensed the location of Xu Qin's real body. Xu Qin had poured her own blood onto the paper doll, adding her own curse to its body.

"Take care of the wound first, then go find Xu Qin. After I meet up with Xu Qin and the other neighbors, we can try to take down the lone pig-faced monster."

Struggling to his feet, Han Fei leaned against the wall and looked around. Only now did he have a chance to examine the room.

After logging off, the black python must have gone through some unknown ordeal; it was quite lucky that it found this dilapidated house.

The broken bluestone bricks were covered with congealed bloodstains, but perhaps because of the ample "fertilizer," the courtyard was overgrown with weeds and even some plants that Han Fei could not recognize.

Passing through the courtyard and pushing open the dilapidated wooden door of the hall, there was no sign of any living person in the small room; all that came into view was a wooden coffin.

The coffin was placed in the center of the room, its lid smashed with knives and axes. There was no corpse inside, only a lot of blood-stained clothes scattered haphazardly.

"A cenotaph?"

The bloodstains on the clothes had turned black, indicating that the owner of the clothes must have been dead for a long time.

Han Fei wanted to continue searching, but his physical condition simply did not allow him to delay any longer.

"Come on, do me a favor and bite this side of the needle and thread."

Han Fei hid at the very back of the house, and then took out the sewing needles and thread that Huang Ying used to practice his skills from his inventory.

He recalled the methods described in the video, and his powerful memory allowed him to remember all the details. He had also trained on corpses in the Happiness Community before, so he was not too panicked.

With his clothes in his mouth, Han Fei's hands were steadyer than most doctors', considering he was threading needles through his own flesh.

It took Han Fei ten minutes to complete the simple stitching with the help of the little pet.

The stitches on the wound were crooked and looked rather scary, but at least the bleeding had stopped.

"The bleeding has stopped, but the hand bones are dislocated. What should we do?"

Han Fei tore his clothes open, then found a tree branch on campus and used it to simply immobilize his left hand.

After everything was done, he lay down right next to the coffin, his face completely pale.

"Xu Qin's food can quickly restore health and has many other special effects. Once I find her this time, I must ask her to make more of it. I want to carry it with me at all times."

In the deeper world, Han Fei's body heals much faster than in reality; he hasn't fully grasped the rules of this world yet.

He's been running around non-stop since he started playing. With survival itself a problem, he simply doesn't have time to experiment with anything else.

Lying in the dilapidated room, Han Fei rested for a while, but it wasn't safe to hide inside. He heard footsteps outside the door twice in just a few minutes.

Perhaps a pig-faced monster is lurking nearby right now.

"The doors in Animal Alley are just decorations to those pig-faced monsters. They can come in whenever they want, and the people who originally lived in the rooms were probably killed by them."

Seeing the horrific state of the room, Han Fei slowly got up from the ground and put his right hand, which he could still move, into the coffin.

Beneath the blood-stained clothes lay a family tree covered in red crosses, with names crossed out one by one, making it look slightly eerie.

Does each name represent a living person?

On the last page of the family genealogy, Han Fei found the only name that had not been crossed out—Wang Sheng.

"Could this be the name of the child found in the garbage dump?"

He tried to put the family tree into his inventory, and to his surprise, he succeeded immediately, with a system notification sound appearing in his mind.

"Attention player 0000! You have successfully discovered the quest item—Royal Family Genealogy!"

"Wang Family Genealogy: The existence of this genealogy proves that many living people once lived in Animal Alley. Figuring out how Human Alley became Animal Alley may help you escape from here."

The system's prompts were vague and ambiguous, and Han Fei had no idea what use the family tree was, so he could only put it away for the time being.

As Han Fei walked around the room, he discovered numerous scratch marks left on the walls by fingernails in the side room.

The finger marks mixed with blood on the earthen wall made it seem as if a madman who had lost his mind had once been locked up in the room, and that he would try to escape even if it meant digging his fingers until they bled.

"It seems that none of the rooms in this alley have windows. Each room is like a closed, independent box. Once the door is closed, no one outside will know if anything changes happen to the people inside."

Upon entering the room, the sight of scratches filled the room, intensifying the impact; the small room was overflowing with despair and pain.

"Is the person locked in the room a human, or a monster?"

There wasn't a single piece of intact furniture in the room. Han Fei frowned as he rummaged through the blood-stained rubble for anything useful.

When he looked under the bed, his pupils shrank instantly.

In the most inconspicuous corner under the bed, there was a hand that had been severed at the wrist.

The hand emitted a strong stench, and its skin had turned black, but even so, its five fingers still gripped a broken boning knife tightly.

"Knife?"

In Animal Alley, the knife is a very special item. All the knives in this hidden map seem to be cursed; they are all terrible cursed objects.

"Could this be an unclaimed cursed object?"

Han Fei was very bold. He took out a blood-red paper figure as a precaution, and then had the black python pull out the hand from under the bed.

The giant python reluctantly reached for the black hand. When it touched the hand, its massive body thrashed violently, as if it had been provoked by something.

Looking at Han Fei with a pitiful expression, the black python resolutely refused to approach the single hand again.

"Don't you eat everything?"

After calming the black python, Han Fei endured the excruciating pain and touched the knife with his left hand, whose bones were already dislocated.

His thinking was simple: since his left hand was already half-useless, touching it would at most ruin it completely, and his perfectly good right hand would remain unaffected.

As his fingertips slowly approached, Han Fei intended to use the system's appraisal function to see if the knife could still be used. But who knew that the moment his fingers touched the boning knife, his brain felt as if it were being gripped tightly by a dozen arms.

The indescribable pain acted directly on his soul; Han Fei felt as if his consciousness was about to be torn apart.

He tried to pull his arm back, but his body was out of control, and he couldn't even do this simplest movement.

Even with all his might, he could only manage to open his eyes.

In the room covered in scratches, in the side room overflowing with fear and pain, stood six blood-soaked remnant souls.

Their faces were grotesque, their bodies mutilated, and a part of their souls were imprisoned in the boning knife.

"The knives in Animal Alley imprison souls."

Those arms were trying to tear Han Fei apart; they had long since lost their minds.

"There are men, women, and children; they seem to be a family? Could they be the people who originally lived in this room?"

Faced with a life-or-death crisis, Han Fei didn't hesitate at all; he directly took out the family genealogy book from his inventory.

The tattered royal family genealogy fell to the ground, and a certain page was turned. The attention of the six remnant souls was slightly diverted by the genealogy.

Seizing that fleeting moment, Han Fei scanned the remnant souls and suddenly noticed that one of them looked very similar to the female corpse in the garbage dump.

"Wang Sheng! I saved Wang Sheng!"

With a gamble in mind, Han Fei shouted with all his might.

The excruciating pain in his brain lessened somewhat, and the six remnant souls pounced on him, seemingly trying to glean something from Han Fei.

A few seconds later, the six mindless remnant souls stopped harming Han Fei. They passed between Han Fei's consciousness and body and then returned to the boning knife.

At the same time, a system notification sounded in Han Fei's mind again.

"Attention player number 0000! You have discovered a damaged G-grade cursed item—a knife!"

"Knife (Broken G-grade Cursed Item): This knife once killed a family of six; it was originally a knife used to wipe out an entire family."

(End of this chapter)