IWBL: Chapter 262

The woman didn’t want to take the other person’s meat at first, but he was too enthusiastic and she couldn’t bear it. Xiao Li held it out to her three times and finally stuck it in her hands as he promoted it without changing his expression. “Try it. This was made by… my husband.”

Perhaps the woman saw that she would be able to get rid of the other person by doing this. She held the edge of the plate and took the meat from the neighbour’s hand. Then she looked at everyone else in the room. “If I take this, you should eat my meat, eat all of it.”

As she said this, her hair that had fallen due to Xiao Li’s actions floated up again. She raised her scarred face and blocked the door, as if blocking the only way to live.

Xiao Li asked bluntly, “Is there a time limit?”

The woman was originally staring at Luo Shan in the middle of the room. Now she turned to face Xiao Li and smoothly repeated it, “Time?”

“I promise, before tomorrow night.” Xiao Li reached out to push away the hair covering her eyes, his voice no longer as cold as it was before. “All the meat will be eaten.”

The nameless woman took a step back. Her waving hair rose to the ceiling in an instant before falling back. She squeezed the plate in her hand. “Yes.”

She went back to her room and started cooking the next batch of ingredients.

***

The next morning, the door opened next door and the man’s cursing ensued. Everyone could listen to this drama without missing a word just by sitting in the living room.

Fu Jianlin’s voice was drowsy. “It’s so late. Didn’t  you make breakfast?”

There was immediately the sound of pots and pans being smashed. It was obvious that the man hadn’t been able to rest well yesterday due to the pen fairy. Now he was looking to trouble his wife in the morning.

The woman hurriedly said, “I did it, did it. It will be ready soon.”

“What are we eating today?” Fu Jianlin asked.

“P-Porridge and olives.”

Fu Jianlin was obviously dissatisfied. “Why are you so perfunctory? In addition, there is your son. I didn’t sleep well all night. I will kill him and you sooner or later!”

The woman stuttered, “N-No, you, don’t do this…”

Her voice lowered and she went to take care of the child again. Fu Jianlin turned on the rice cooker in a dissatisfied manner and took out a white bowl from the cabinet, ready to grab the porridge himself.

He had just finished serving himself half a bowl of porridge and was ready to take out the olives from the refrigerator when he suddenly saw a bowl of fried meat on the table. The smell was very fragrant and it was still warm. It was covered with oil and had cumin sprinkled over it.

In an unnoticed corner, Tan Li took back her hair from ‘delivering food.’

“Damn, this dead woman. She secretly cooked meat and didn’t give it to me? What man is she going to give it to?”

Fu Jianlin’s anger rose instantly. He glanced at the room where his wife and child were with a grudge. He was about to go and hit them. Then he looked at the baby’s face, hesitated a bit and simply backed out.

Somehow, since yesterday, Fu Jianlin’s heart had always been a bit uneasy. He always felt like…

He forgot something.

In addition, it was something he absolutely didn’t want to remember. However, this type of amnesia made him feel extremely uncomfortable and at the same time, he subconsciously wanted to remember. The two impulses combined together and made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t even want to go to work today. Fortunately, there was no more sound of meat being chopped next door.

Fu Jianlin stepped into his slippers and brought the meat back to the table. He dipped a piece into the porridge and swallowed it in one bite.

Across the wall from him, Xiao Li tossed a coin leisurely—

It was tails. Heads was facing down. In front of him, a notebook was struggling to write something. Zui Tian was recording this story.

Fu Jianlin chewed two mouthfuls of meat. This meat was a bit old but it was better than nothing. “Damn woman, she doesn’t know how to fry it.”

He drank the half bowl of porridge. Then he picked up another piece of meat and swallowed it.

This piece of fried meat seemed to have some magical power. The more he ate it, the more delicious it became and the more he wanted to eat. Unknowingly, he emptied out the whole bowl. He stretched out his chopsticks only for the chopsticks to collide with the edge of the empty bowl.

It was all gone.

Fu Jianlin put down the bowl, spread out on the chair and pulled his feet out of his slippers. The strange thing was that although the fried meat was gone, the smell of meat was still lingering in the air. It wasn’t just a residual smell. It was like an invisible person was frying more meat in this room. The meat smelled filled the room and it was suffocating.

His mouth was constantly secreting saliva even if Fu Jianlin was full. He couldn’t bear it and jumped up. He opened the door and walked into the corridor to breathe but no matter where he went, the smell followed him.

Fu Jianlin realized in a daze that he was the source of the smell, not his home. He was dizzy by the smell and was unable to think normally. He instinctively searched his pockets to see if a piece of meat had fallen inside. Soon, Fu Jianlin was horrified to find that the smell was coming from inside him. It was from his throat, his mouth and his nostrils.

“No no no no—”

The smell became stronger until the meaty fragrance completely surrounded Fu Jianlin. He collapsed on the stairs and once away from his house, he completely remembered! He was dead. He was chopped into pieces and put into the freezer. In addition, the murderer was his submissive wife! His body was dismembered and his soul locked in this residential building, constantly reincarnating and wandering between day and night.

The moment he recalled everything, the entire building went through an abnormal change, including himself. The corridor was filled with a decadent atmosphere and the door on the first floor reappeared. It had returned to reality from the domain.

Fu Jianlin watched his hands become smaller, his bones shrank and he eventually became a baby.

The beautiful young man walled out from the next room. Fu Jianlin remembered that the pen fairy had called him Sherlock. He wanted to crawl away crying. It was just a pity that his body didn’t allow him to perform such difficult movements. Sherlock stayed in front of him, staring at him for a long time.

The pieces of meat that Xiao Li had Tan Li pass over were the fried meat by the woman in her ghost state last night.

In the transition between day and night, Fu Jianlin’s roles were reversed. The memory of the woman in the day was before the woman’s death and night was the reality. Between the two, Xiao Li believed that the key to breaking the game was this piece of meat. It could remind Fu Jianlin of ‘reality.’

Xiao Li watched Fu Jianlin who had transformed into a baby for a while. Then he reached out, picked up the baby and handed him to the woman.

The baby in the room had long since turned into bones and the unknown woman was full of scars. She sat next to the remains of the baby and stared up at Xiao Li. Then she took the baby in his hand.

The nameless woman and the baby beside her entered the little yellow book and there was a blue light on the opposite side. Xiao Li opened the little yellow book and found a lone of words in it:

[Nameless female corpse, you can view the source.]

The scenes of the memories appeared in front of Xiao Li before he could click on it.

The story of the nameless corpse was simple.

At first, it was just an ordinary family. The woman had a cowardly personality since she was a child. She was the youngest daughter of the family and her parents took a gift of 50,000 yuan and married her to Fu Jianlin.

She had several older brothers and in the early years, her parents still contacted her. Every time they contacted her, they either asked for money or help. It wasn’t until she had a child and her parents couldn’t get anything else that they broke off contact with her.

Before the woman had time to grieve for the disappearance of her parents, the change in her husband took her full attention.

Fu Jianlin couldn’t say he was good in his early years but his personality was okay. Then after the child was born, a colleague joked ‘Why doesn’t this child look like you?’ and he became suspicious. His treatment of his wife changed to occasional beatings and scolding and became more fragrant. He even suspected that she had an affair with other men. Once he started having this idea, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about it.

Fu Jianlin started scolding her every day, constantly criticizing her from all aspects.

The woman chose to be patient at first for the sake of her child. It wasn’t until Fu Jianlin felt the baby’s crying was too annoying and wanted to plug the baby’s mouth with something that the woman chose to resist for the first time.

However, she couldn’t beat Fu Jianlin at all. Fu Jianlin was so strong that she could only cry with sorrow and grief as she pulled at his clothes. The woman thought, ‘Well, at least the baby is fine.’

The residential building they lived in wasn’t soundproofed. Neighbours knew exactly what happened in their house every night but it was no use.

In the beginning, some people tried to persuade him and brought along a mediator from the neighbourhood committee. It was just that Fu Jianlin wasn’t crazy in front of outsiders. He explained that he was just impulsive and pushed all the blame on the woman. He pacified the neighbours and got the understanding of the mediator while secretly threatening to kill the child if the woman spoke out.

The woman had no money or access to external information. She had no higher education qualifications and could only rely on Fu Jianlin. She had no choice but to endure it. She lived step by step every day, enduring the taunts from her husband.

Sometimes neighbours would come to comfort her and say they wanted to help her. Then they saw Fu Jianlin and there was no follow up.

Her neighbour’s daughter was studying at a university in the coastal S City. Once she came back for summer vacation, she brought a lot of souvenirs from S City. There were shares for the neighbours, including the woman.

The woman received the souvenirs and opened the box once she came home. Not only was there a commemorative sign inside, there was also a light blue ball. It was very exquisite like it was a combination of the universe and the sea. The woman really liked it and strung it as a string of beads on the child’s wrist.

Things broke out one day when the woman went shopping for groceries. She encountered a road closure and came back late.

For some reason, Fu Jianlin believed that the woman’s late return was due to her meeting with another man. He had a bad temper and cursed her. The woman didn’t want to fight with him so she pulled out the frying pan to make fried pork pieces.

However, Fu Jianlin became more irritated as he watched her. He believed the woman had cheated him and the child wasn’t his own. On that day, he pressed the other person’s face into the boiling hot pan of oil. Before the woman died, he grabbed the crying baby and also put him in.

The woman died and Fu Jianlin threw her at the entrance of the vegetable market late at night.

After the woman died, she turned into a fierce ghost. The fragment of chaos power magnified her ability. She killed Fu Jianlin, killed him into many pieces and added her own meat to make a dish for all the neighbours to taste.

Her meat was mixed with her own resentment, forming a domain. The power gained by those who ate her flesh was essentially a parasitic part of her body. She could control these people at any time and turn them into her own ‘children.’

Later, she entered the Sun house.

***

The power of the domain belonging to the female corpse disappeared and the reincarnators also left the residential building. The young man from the funeral home was still asleep on the trolley but the bed with the nameless corpse was empty.

Xiao Li held the fragment of chaos power in his hand. The light blue crystal was so beautiful floating in the air that it looked like a fluorescent jellyfish at the bottom of the deep sea.

They walked out of the funeral home and stopped at the gate. The rain above their head hadn’t stopped. It had instead become bigger and seemed to have the intention of drowning the whole world.

Back in reality, the phones of Wang Huai and the others rang immediately. Several WeChat messages and missed calls flooded in. They had to pause to check under the roof out of fear they might miss some news.

Ye Zeqing still maintained his cold, noble image when around outsiders. He didn’t plan to read the messages on his mobile phone. Instead, he came to Xiao Li. “What should we do next?”

Xiao Li ignored him and stared at the rain curtain in front of him. He suddenly grabbed the crystal as if he had caught something and raised it in front of his eyes.

Through this thing, he could clearly see the crack. It was like a scene from a movie. The real sky started to split and there were many cracks visible to the naked eye. They were like lines that crisscrossed and spread to the distance. They were either densely gathered together or scattered. Once these gaps cracked to a certain extent, the gods could invade.

The existence of the rain made it too easy for people to ignore these gaps. They weren’t eye-catching and were slowly nibbling away at reality.

Xiao Li held out a hand to catch a drop of rain while also touching the gap. He directly penetrated the past. Reality and the gap seemed to be in two different dimensions and didn’t completely overlap.

Shen Chenzhi watched him through the crystal.

“There is no time.” Xiao Li put away the crystal fragment. His voice had become a bit heavy and he removed his gaze from Shen Chenzhi’s body. “Let’s go.”

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Proofreader: Tofu