Forgotten Photo Studio

Chapter 29 The Cage of Bait
The dark red tide roared in silently, carrying countless distorted and magnified expressions of sorrow and despair that directly crushed the soul.

"Zi la——!"

The Iron-Faced Woman unleashed a barrier of azure lightning from her palms, but the moment it came into contact with the dark red tide, it was instead eroded and corrupted by the viscous resentment.

The electric light was no longer pure; instead, it was filled with an ominous dark red, emitting a painful groan that forced her to stagger backward, her face turning deathly pale beneath the mask.

Her magic, ironically, became the polluted food.

"Smash it, you bastard!" the burly driller roared as he slammed the spinning drill bit into the tide, instantly clearing a small section.

But the next moment, countless arms dripping with black tears wrapped around it. The highly corrosive black tears caused the mutated metal arm to emit blue smoke and hiss, leaving pitted corrosion marks.

He roared in pain and was forced to retreat, fear appearing in his eyes for the first time.

His violence could not completely destroy this boundless compassion.

The shadow tide beneath the lamplighter's feet continued to devour the ghostly figures, but the eerie green flame in his lamp began to flicker, as if it had swallowed too much indigestible pain, emitting a dull crackling sound.

"Tsk... I'm so resentful!" he complained hoarsely, his movements noticeably slowing down.

The stealth wisp of light remained deadly, but the time it took to disappear again after each flash was getting longer, as if the polluted space was rejecting and assimilating his method of "concealment".

The battle turned into a brutal war of attrition from the very beginning, not a one-sided suppression, but a crazy collision and backlash of their respective powers.

This nursing home is a living cage that absorbs and bounces back pain.

Xu Yan did not move.

He stood relatively far back, the camera steadily held in front of his eyes. But he didn't press the shutter.

He was feeling and analyzing.

Feel the resentment frequency assigned to you, the resentment that demands your continuous output, and the resonance and hunger imprinted on your shoulders.

They were analyzing the flow pattern of the resentment.

His gaze was sharp as a knife, quickly sweeping across the structure of the corridor, the points where resentment gathered, and the frequency of the pulsating stains.

He was looking for a point, a weak point that could break this damned cycle.

The "Center's" orders were like a cold rein around his neck, compelling him to transform this scene of destruction into food to feed the monster on his shoulder.

He cannot obey.

Every time you press the shutter, you forget.

But he couldn't completely resist it.

The tides are endless.

Just then, a sharp burning sensation suddenly came from the name-binding amulet in his pocket.

A strong, malicious sense of spying is attempting to infiltrate from the opposite direction.

Almost simultaneously, the ghostly hand brand on his shoulder suddenly throbbed with pain, and an extremely cold will, following the resonant frequency, attempted to forcibly take over his arm.

[WARNING: Contractor Xu Yan of Silver III has output below the threshold. Please execute the instruction immediately. Otherwise, the L-2 process will be initiated.]

The synthesized voice rang directly in his mind.

L-2 procedure?

The target is the photo studio, and it's Chen Zhiwei!
Pressure came from all directions.

The horde of ghosts ahead, the ghostly hand on his shoulder, the threat in the center, and the worry for Chen Zhiwei were like countless cold hands trying to drag him into the abyss.

Can't give in.

Xu Yan bit his tongue hard, and the sharp pain and the taste of blood brought him a moment of clarity.

He resisted the cold, controlling force, his mind racing as he calculated the model of the resentment flow he had just observed.

That's it!

The intersection of the load-bearing wall and the main vein of resentment is a relatively weak point in the structure!
Instead of aiming the camera at the core of the ceiling, he used astonishing willpower to forcefully shift the camera at a tiny, precise angle, aiming it at the calculated point.

Then, I pressed the shutter button hard!
Snap! It wasn't a wide-area soul-capturing attack executing a command, but rather a concentrated, guided, and precise attack to dispel evil.

The blinding flash, tinged with an ominous dark red by the ghostly hand, was like a precise scalpel, not aimed at the torrent of resentment, but rather piercing the "pulse wall" through which it flowed.

"Hiss!!!!"

A piercing scream, a mixture of endless pain and rage, exploded from all directions.

The area illuminated by the flash of light instantly became chaotic and reversed in terms of the flow of resentment.

"Damn it! What's that kid doing?!" the drill arm roared.

"Heh, that's interesting," the man in the shadows commented coldly.

The stern-faced woman, however, saw through the deception and shouted, "He is...!"

Boom! ! ! !
The beam of light struck precisely at the intersection of the load-bearing wall and the dark red vein of resentment.

A violent explosion rang out, and rubble mixed with a sticky, dark red miasma flew everywhere.

The entire building shook violently.

This blow, like a red-hot iron rod, brutally pierced the weakest link in this closed cycle of resentment.

"Woo——!!!"

The entire "Tide of Compassion" emitted a painful lament.

The movements of all the ghostly figures instantly became chaotic and distorted.

The screen of the old television at the end of the corridor was filled with static, and the warm, distorted image flickered wildly.

Just before the screen went completely blackout, an old man's face suddenly zoomed in, and his mouth opened and closed, clearly and desperately uttering two words:

"Yan...er..."

—That's the nickname that Xu Yan's mother would use!

But before the voice faded, even thicker black tears welled up from around the screen, completely engulfing the face and the call, and the screen went completely dark with a "snap".

The rotting flesh and flowers growing in reverse in the vase on top of the TV quickly withered, turned black, and turned to ashes.

The core of the domain was forcibly interrupted by this precise and violent strike!

But the price Xu Yan paid was enormous.

The forceful resistance to the command, the precise guidance and release of such a massive amount of resentment, almost drained him of everything.

Large chunks of memories in my mind went blank as if they had been erased by an eraser.

...Chen Zhiwei...? The name flashed through my mind, but all that remained was a cold blur, an obsession with "I must go back" and the burning pain of the amulet on my chest.

...His mother's humming...that familiar melody resurfaced, but this time, even the melody itself quickly faded, lost its sound, and turned into a deathly silence. It was as if someone had ruthlessly scratched a nail across the record of his consciousness.

Even more terrifying, the ghost hand brand on his shoulder turned completely black, as if it had been thoroughly enraged.

Although that cold will was temporarily defeated, it left behind a deeper resentment and hunger.

He collapsed to the ground, his vision blurred, and all he could hear were the bewildered shouts of the other contractors and the uncontrollable howls of the ghostly tide.

In the last second before he completely lost consciousness, he saw the courtyard outside the event hall through the gap in the blasted wall.

The earth churned, and a pale, swollen, giant hand with mud clogging its fingernails slowly emerged from the ground, carrying with it the aura of death that would bury everything.

The moment that giant hand appeared, the brand on Xu Yan's right shoulder erupted with an unprecedented, almost soul-tearing pain and... a strange, maternal resonance.

It was as if the cold, ghostly hand on his shoulder and the giant hand that burst from the ground were originally one! And at this moment, the Mother was about to reclaim a part of itself that had been lost outside!

Sleeping beneath the tide of compassion...

An even more ancient being was awakened prematurely.

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(End of this chapter)