Autophagy

"You see..."

Song Lei took a deep breath and waited for her to finish the rest of the sentence.

"I have no idea. Do you really think that I would be here if I had one?" She asked with a helpless expression on her face. Hearing her words, Song Lei felt angry for a second and disappointed for another. In the end, she was just a normal university girl.

'Why did I even think that she would be able to help me?' Song Lei asked himself. Not finding the answer, he decided that it was the time he should take the reins into his hands.

"Well then. That's not a problem," Song Lei said. "Unfortunately, this case seems to be too much for the two of us."

He touched his chin and decided that the best idea was to leave. He had overestimated his capabilities because of how well he had fared so far. If he met the monster again and couldn't manage to escape, he didn't know what would happen to him. He could always summon Guyaa to fight for him, however, he didn't know if it would be enough to beat the monster. He wasn't sure about its power.

"Oh well..." Sugihara muttered.

"We need to find Nishimura and get out of here," Song Lei said.

"How do we plan on leaving?" Sugihara asked while raising one of her eyebrows.

"We just need to relocate into our starting point," Song Lei said. "Although we can't be sure how many sub-spaces there are in this place, we can only hope that it's a manageable amount."

"It can't be too much," Sugihara suddenly said. Song Lei turned his head towards her without saying anything. "After all, I've met two different people after relocating 110 times," she said.

"Oh really? Is Nishimura counted as one of those people or is it someone else?" Song Lei asked.

"Nope. We came here together with Nishimura. There are more people here actually," she said while raising one of her fingers. "While we were searching through the rooms in one sub-space with Nishimura, someone suddenly opened the door and threw dust at our eyes. They must've closed their eyes too as we were relocated without being able to see who it was," she said with a somewhat angry expression on her face. "Fortunately, we were still in contact with Nishimura so we didn't get separated until later when we encountered the monster."

Hearing her, Song Lei awkwardly averted his eyes and decided to change the topic.

"By the way, how does this monster you're talking about look like?" Song Lei asked. Sugihara proceeded to explain how the monster looked. From what Song Lei heard, the monster was the same one on the upper floor of the dorm.

"I think that the monster can relocate too," Sugihara said. "Although I don't know if it does it intentionally, it can definitely relocate."

"You may be wrong on that," Song Lei said.

"Really? How so?" Sugihara looked at him with a puzzled expression on her face.

"You were just in the same instance with the monster before you met me right?"

"Yes?"

"Well... I was too. That means that either there is more than one monster or it can be in two different places at the same time." Song Lei said with a grim expression. Just remembering that monster was enough to make him shiver.

"That complicates a lot of things," she said. "And they could still have the ability to relocate like us. If they were to relocate into the same instance at the same time, what would happen?"

"I don't know. I definitely don't want to meet one of those things," Song Lei said. He sighed. "What intrigues me more is how they relocate. We can relocate if we stop observing this place. When there is more than one person in the same instance, they all have to stop observing. However, that doesn't seem to be the case for those monsters. We both could escape them by relocating."

"That is a reasonable question," Sugihara said. Song Lei didn't say anything anymore and kept walking silently. As they were walking, Song Lei's nostrils widened for a second.

'Fresh blood,' Song Lei quickly understood. He had gotten so used to the smell of blood that he could easily smell it out.

Smelling the blood, Song Lei quickly grabbed Sugihara's arm. She turned around and was just about to ask what Song Lei was doing before being silenced by him.

Seeing Song Lei silencing her, she quickly understood that something was wrong. She played along and stopped talking. Even her breathing had gone silent.

Song Lei kept smelling as best as he could and tracked where the smell was coming from. Normally, he would've pulled Sugihara into a room and quickly made her relocate. However, he knew that they weren't in immediate danger. He could somewhat feel that they weren't in the same instance with those monsters.

'Is it the soul points?' He thought while looking at the system. He had realized that his sixth sense was becoming better and better with time. He would get hunches from seemingly nowhere and they would almost always come out as true.

Right now, his sixth sense was very calm. This indicated that he was relatively safe. Although it was always good to be careful, he would lose his chance to escape when the time came, if he acted like a coward, avoiding every single danger he met.

Trailing the smell, they entered a room. Unlike Song Lei, Sugihara had to pinch her nose and breathe from her mouth to bear the smell. Song Lei raised his phone to properly see the insides of the room.

"Blergh..."

As soon as the room was illuminated, Sugihara started puking and crying after a second of shock. Song Lei sighed deeply and patted her back to calm her down. The two officers he had met when he entered this place were dead.

And in the most gruesome way they could. One of the officers had died in a pretty normal way. There was blood coming out of all of his orifices. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot. He seemed to have died from shock, as his pants were covered in feces and urine.

The other officer was in a slightly worse state. All of his limbs had been twisted in very unhealthy ways, making him look like a broken toy that had been played with and thrown to the side. His eyeballs had been slit open clumsily. This sight was disturbing even for Song Lei, who had lived in the New World for a good amount of time. For Sugihara, who seemingly had a similar, if not a bit better mental fortitude than your average university student, it was impossible to bear.

"H- How can you be so calm?" Sugihara asked. She was still sobbing so it was a bit hard for her to properly speak.

"I'm used to it," Song Lei said nonchalantly while he kept inspecting the officer's bodies. Sugihara looked at him with a weird expression on her face.

"What do you do normally to get used to this?" She asked. She seemed to be recovering very fast. Human adaptability was really surprising.

"I deal with the supernatural a lot. I don't have my tools with me currently. If I did, we wouldn't be in this situation," Song Lei explained. Although it wasn't exactly the truth, it wasn't a lie either.

"There are more? How much is the supernatural mixed up with our lives?" Sugihara asked. Her explorer soul was vibrating, urging her to learn more about the situation. If she wasn't in such a bad state, her eyes would be shining with excitement.

Thinking about the fact that this remnant world was a sub-space inside the New World, he answered by saying, "A lot actually. I can't elaborate more on the topic but it's a lot."

"Why is it? Is there some kind of restriction on you? Will you die by poisoning if you talk about it? Is your soul going to be destroyed?" Sugihara asked question after question. She was forgetting that there were two corpses right in front of her.

"It would be bad for you," Song Lei said annoyedly. As he didn't want to talk about this topic further, he decided to not answer any further questions. Although she wanted to keep going, seeing his expression, Sugihara reined her curiosity and stopped prying.

"Well, Mr. Ghost Hunter, what do you suggest we do in a situation like this?" She asked with a smirk on her face. Seeing her expression, Song Lei facepalmed. He was now somewhat wishing that she took a bit more to recover from her shocked state.

"I've already said it right? We have to leave this place. Our aim hasn't changed," Song Lei said. He left the room to go to the bathroom.

"Don't you have a way to fight those monsters? Like, by using a talisman or something?" Sugihara asked.

"No. I don't have anything. That's why we're trying to leave."

"Uhmm... So? Why did we come to the bathroom again?" Sugihara asked. Song Lei opened the leftmost cubicle and took out the gloves from the inside.

"Why? I need to search some corpses...."