Lord of Prayer

Chapter 38: Chapter 35: Shattered Happiness

Zhou Chen stood frozen, almost thinking he had misheard.

’A Corrupter… asking me to kill it?’

After corruption, the thing inside the shell was no longer human. It was replaced by a ferocious monster possessing the original’s memories and personality, one that had become cruel, twisted, and evil—filled with a malice identical to that of an Abyssal Creature.

’Shouldn’t it be mindlessly pouncing on me, trying to eat me? Then we’d have a desperate, life-or-death battle, and in the end, I’d pull off some incredible maneuver for a clutch victory?’

’Or is this a trap? The moment I step inside, will it toss its head back as a signal and shout, “Rats, get him! Take this kid down!”?’

Zhou Chen frowned, not acting rashly. He stood his ground, tightened his grip on the dining knife in his hand, and chose to wait and see.

“I… I killed her…” he choked out, his voice breaking into sobs. “I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t control myself… I really couldn’t… I killed her…”

Li Guangjun cradled the rotten head, his cries bitter and heart-rending. The self-blame and regret in his voice were so clear they were moving.

As he wailed, his Ability seemed to spiral out of control. Sinister, deep-red strands of rotting flesh began to spread from beneath him, squirming outwards in all directions. In the blink of an eye, they had formed a purplish-red, fleshy blanket over the bed.

All the worms, flies, and cockroaches it touched were devoured by the squirming, aberrant flesh, which then bulged into pustules. The rats, however, were completely unaffected.

Zhou Chen’s eye twitched violently. ’If I’m not mistaken, this must be some kind of mutating breeding ground that causes organisms to warp. It probably won’t be long before rats start bursting out of the pustules.’

Transforming worms, flies, and cockroaches into rats was basically tap-dancing on the coffins of biological researchers.

This was the pollution and Twist spread by a Corrupter!

At first, it was just a bed, then it slowly covered a room, then an entire apartment, and then spread to an entire floor. If not contained, it could eventually transform the whole building into a foul, damp, fleshy breeding ground—a nest for a swarm of rats.

“I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to…” Li Guangjun repeated, tears dripping onto the head, which was too rotten to be recognizable.

“…What happened?” Zhou Chen asked softly, probing for information.

“I don’t know, I really don’t know… I couldn’t control myself… I killed her… Why, why, why did it turn out like this…”

Anyone could hear the grief and despair in Li Guangjun’s voice as he begged incessantly, “Kill me… Please, kill me… I’m begging you…”

“Kill it.”

Jiang Che’s calm voice sounded in his ear. “Corruption is irreversible. It will become a threat sooner or later. Take care of it now, while it wants to die.”

“I know…” Zhou Chen responded over the comms channel. He pushed open the door and entered the room. The dining knife in his hand drew a cold, sharp arc through the air, flashing past the human-faced rat’s throat.

Foul, black blood flowed out.

Seeing that Li Guangjun had no intention of resisting, Zhou Chen followed up by plunging the knife into his heart, then twice more to puncture his lungs.

Killing a Corrupter was no easy task. Fortunately, there were differences among them. Some weaker Corrupters were still biologically conventional in their anatomy, perhaps even more fragile than humans. As long as you found their vitals and weaknesses, you could kill them easily.

Li Guangjun soon felt the pain of suffocation, letting out a gurgling sound. Amidst the rapid Erosion of his Life Force, his tear-stained face was filled with relief. His lips opened and closed silently, as if to say:

“Thank… you…”

At that moment, two brilliant stars appeared in the Wish Bottle. The wish from this single soul was comparable to the small wishes of a hundred people.

He had so desperately longed for death and release…

Zhou Chen lowered his gaze. Suddenly, a dreamlike, scarlet light bloomed in Li Guangjun’s eyes. In a daze, Zhou Chen saw flashes of the man’s former life.

·

Just as the intel described, Li Guangjun had been an ordinary person his whole life. He had assumed he would live out his days in quiet mediocrity, but one day, his life was changed forever.

“Are you short on cash?”

At the lottery shop, while waiting for the “Double-Color Ball” drawing, a flamboyantly dressed, flirtatious man struck up a conversation with him. “You and I are linked by fate, I see. Here, I’ll give you this lottery ticket. It should win you about three hundred thousand, enough to buy the latest base model Floating car. If you want to contact me, you can call the number on this.”

The man’s words were incomprehensible. Before Li Guangjun could ask any questions, the man shoved the lottery ticket and a slip of paper into his hand, got up, and hurried away.

“How bizarre,” Li Guangjun muttered. He glanced at the ticket and the note, saw nothing special about them, then stuffed them in his pocket and went back to playing on his phone while he waited for the drawing.

Five minutes later, he stared blankly at the lottery ticket the stranger had given him.

It actually won!

As an adult, he wasn’t naive about how lotteries worked. The winning numbers were basically fixed. Ordinary people hoping to get rich overnight were just an endless supply of suckers to be fleeced. Winning was nothing but a daydream. But… how did that man know this specific ticket would win?

Li Guangjun immediately thought of the Ascenders, those with Extraordinary Abilities. ’Could that man be an Ascender?’

After cashing in the ticket, he spent several days at home, ecstatic and hesitant in equal measure. Finally, as if guided by some unseen force, he dialed the number. He felt this was his chance—a chance to turn his life around, to completely reverse his fortunes.