Hands of Dexterity
Rarity:★
Maximum Level: 3
Current Level: 3
Gu Jun indeed felt some minute change to the bodily control of his hands. At the second level, it felt like he could carefully control and manipulate every single muscle and nerve in his hands, but now he felt a full mastery of his hands. From the nerves, blood capillaries, muscles, bones, and their combination, he felt an intensity tying them together. They were strong and flexible.
“So, I’ve finally reached the maximum level.” He opened and closed his hands. It had been four months since he performed the emergency surgery on Lee Yuerui in the submarine. He had gone through many things since then. This was a rare good piece of news.
Having reached the maximum level for Hands of Dexterity would give him more options when faced with a problem. During the operations today, Gu Jun was still affected, his hands were shaking at times from nervousness and the mental disturbance. But now, he believed if he was tasked with the same surgeries, he would perform much better with a steadier pair of hands.
The mission reward was a pair of Carlot Dissecting Scissors. Gu Jun opened his eyes to look around. There were many colleagues resting, but more importantly, there were cameras everywhere. He stood up and headed toward the nearest restroom. He entered a cubicle and closed the door. After ensuring that no one was watching him, he clicked to accept the reward.
A mysterious energy surged around him. His right hand was placed in his pocket, and something materialized in it. He took it out slowly. He was holding sharp-ended dissecting scissors that were around fourteen centimeters long. The material was the strange metal that made up all the devices from the foreign civilization. The design was soft and smooth, a feature that Gu Jun had now recognized as a feature of the Carlot brand. There were carvings of the Goddess of Life and Carlot written in the foreign language on the body of the scissors.
“Hmm...” Gu Jun’s vision blurred as his eyes landed on the pair of scissors. He held out his hands to support himself from falling. ‘What is this illusion? It should be related to the scissors. These are dissecting scissors used in autopsies, not surgery, so the illusion should be some kind of dissection scene... but what kind of creature will it be dissecting?’
Gu Jun thought about triggering the illusion. After all, this was a reward from a difficult mission. Based on his past experience, it would serve some kind of purpose. It might provide him with extremely important information. Therefore, he wasted no time in setting the scene to encourage the illusion. He shoved the scissors back into his pocket, exited the restroom, and made a beeline to the autopsy floor on the fifth level. The people there were still working on dissecting the bodies of those who had fallen to the Nightmare Illness.
He asked them for the location of Cai Zixuan and Wang Ruoxiang. Soon, he arrived in a large autopsy room. The hanging light lit up the room, and formalin permeated the air. The six autopsy tables were surrounded by doctors as they studied the carcasses on the slabs with silence and focus. There was no reason to keep this place sterile, and due to the recent constant changing of shifts, no one paid attention to Gu Jun when he walked in.
As Gu Jun entered, he studied his surroundings. The shattered bodies on the autopsy slab looked similar to the ones he had seen down in the morgue earlier. They were messes of fresh blood and meat. Perhaps it had been too long since his last autopsy, but his hands were twitching with excitement as he saw his colleagues at work.
Gu Jun did not make any sound as he moved to the table where his friends were working. They had formed a group of their own. They had just sawn through the scalp, and Wang Ruoxiang was using blunt-point scissors to snip away the sticky cerebral dura. Cai Zixuan and Sun Yuheng were helping her.
“Phew.” As he watched his friends work, more blurry images crowded his sight. He knew it was time...
His nerves were pulled taut, and his temples were pounding as Gu Jun trained his focus. Even though the mental drainage would not be as serious as before he started his treatment of his brain stem tumor, it would still tax him to a certain degree!
At that moment, he found himself missing Wu Siyu. If she was by his side then, things would be a lot easier. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Gu Jun allowed the headache to intensify as he focused his fiery gaze on the carcass on the slab. First, some indecipherable images flashed before his eyes. He saw the broken body parts slowly sew themselves back into a complete body, and then the scenery around him changed...
‘Where is this place? There are tombstones and coffins. Am I at a graveyard? Is this Nan Tang Village or the foreign world?’ He found his line of sight to be extremely limited, like he was looking through a telescope. Suddenly, an image zoomed before his eyes. It was a human carcass, but the limbs were ginormous, the stomach was bulging forward, the neck was swollen, and the skin over the body was a dirty greenish color. The subdermal tissue and muscles were bulging. It was as if air and liquid had been pumped into the body. The face was so inflated that identification was impossible. The eyeballs protruded from their sockets.
This... was the bloated carcass. It was a stage of corpse decomposition. At this stage, the microorganisms residing in the human gut would begin to digest the body, excreting gases that cause the torso and limbs to bloat. The body was blown up like a balloon. As the air inside the body gathered, the soft tissue would dissolve, and the bloating continued until the body exploded. All the putrid water, bacteria, and parasites would burst into the air like the world’s most macabre pinata.
‘Is this bloated corpse placed inside a coffin or on the ground?’ Gu Jun could not tell from his limited vision. He felt drawn toward the corpse until his eyes could make out the clogged veins on the bloated skin...
Suddenly, with a loud boom, the body exploded and purged!
“Ah!” The illusion was interrupted sharply. Gu Jun’s hands went to his head as he staggered back a few steps. He felt his legs giving. He resisted the intent to hurl as he turned his head away in an attempt to force down mouthfuls of air. But the smell of formalin and putrefaction did not help.
“Tycoon Jun.” Cai Zixuan looked over in shock. “When did you arrive?”
With the commotion he had made, it was impossible for his friends not to spot him. Holding the brain that she had just removed from the dead body, Wang Ruoxiang asked, “What is it this time?”
“I’ll explain it to you later...” With ragged breath, Gu Jun ignored the confused looks people tossed his way as he teetered his way out of the autopsy room. He dragged his body out the building. The rain had just stopped. The chilling breeze rushed into his lungs. As he looked up at the starlit sky, the unease slipped away slightly.
‘What was that illusion earlier? Was someone dissecting a bloated corpse? But it does not feel like it... Though, that was definitely a graveyard, so this must be related to the zombies somehow? Hmm... While corpse eruption is something that would make my stomach churn, could it be a tolling bell signifying a marvelous feast for the zombies? Was I occupying the sight of a zombie? That would explain the closing in of the line of sight...’ Gu Jun could not stop contemplating as he moved back to his dormitory. The prefrontal lobe, the bloated corpse, the spell, black figure, zombies, mind, dream... The whirlwind of clues ravaged his mind. He hoped that a thread would somehow tie them together.
After he reached the dormitory, Gu Jun grabbed a set of clean clothes and jumped into the shower. The water blasted down from the showerhead. He knew it was all in his imagination, but Gu Jun felt as if his body was covered in a sticky, dirty substance that could not be washed away. The warm water did not take away his sense of disgust, but it did ease his tension so much so that he almost allowed himself to collapse inside the bathroom from pure exhaustion. With the last dreg of consciousness, Gu Jun pulled himself into his bed. He closed his heavy eyelids and cleared his mind. After who knew how long, he drifted into a dream... or perhaps another illusion...
Gu Jun could hear the lapping of the waves. He could feel the prickly grass around his feet. The trees around him were wilted, and there was a large mountain in the distance. He could hear an eerie and low voice drifting in the air.
It was calling something.
It was calling him.
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