When the Wild Beast is Trapped in the Nightmare Cycle (BL)
Chapter 428: Suspicious Hole

Chapter 428: Suspicious Hole

While Shen Nianzu was going through a fairly peaceful dinner, Jin Jiuchi was locked in the room he had first woken up in.

Rather than a bedroom, the space resembled more of a storage room. It was pitifully narrow, barely enough to fit in a single bed and wardrobe. Cracks could be seen on the wooden floorboards, and the paints on the wall had peeled off due to the passage of time. The air was humid and stale as if the door had not been opened for months, and the lightbulb flickered once in a while. On top of that, there were also dense cobwebs on the corner of the ceiling.

All in all, it was a standard room for a horror movie where the canon fodder would be mysteriously found dead the next day.

Had it been any other person, their mentality would have been distorted by the ominous atmosphere. The four narrow walls seemed like they were gradually closing in, evoking an unbearable feeling of dread and suffocation. Alas, for Jin Jiuchi who was sprawled lifelessly on the bed, he only had one thought in mind:

"Hungry... I’m so hungry..."

As though echoing his words, his stomach released an earth-shattering growl, a sound so thunderous it seemed to reverberate through the very walls.

Jin Jiuchi rubbed his stomach while sniffing the air like a starving hound that had not been fed for weeks. "I can smell freshly baked bread, meat... sausage... and BBQ sauce..." the more he said it, the more aggrieved he was and he almost cried out loud with water slipping from the corner of his mouth.

Tilting his head, Jin Jiuchi’s ravenous eyes honed in on a gray and plump mouse scampering across the floor. He licked his lips, "Should I just eat that to pad my stomach?"

"Ciit—!" The mouse’s fur exploded in response to the heavy predatory gaze it sensed. Driven by a surge of survival instinct, it summoned all of its strength and scrambled away with a speed almost invisible to naked eyes, leaving only a faint afterimage behind.

"Tsk," Jin Jiuchi clicked his tongue. "Forget it. Nian’er wouldn’t want to kiss me again if he smelled rats in my mouth."

He shifted his gaze back to the ceiling, trying to empty his mind of thoughts. It was a practice he was extremely familiar with. After all, he had lived almost all of his life accompanied by this gnawing and maddening hunger. As long as he could shut off his senses, time would swiftly pass, and the next feeding time would soon arrive.

However, now that he had known how it felt to indulge to his heart’s content, to be pampered endlessly by a stunning jade doll who sweetly asked whether he wanted to eat more... Jin Jiuchi found it hard to adjust himself back to those dark and dull times.

Sighing, he brought his hand in front of his face, clenching and unclenching it. "At least back then, we could still talk to each other to pass time, couldn’t we?"

Since he swallowed that black marble fed to him by Shen Nianzu, he had reclaimed a portion of his childhood memories, and the two incomplete souls had begun to fuse into one. There was no longer silver-eyed Jin Jiuchi or black-eyed Jin Jiuchi – only Jin Jiuchi. It also meant no more second voice in his head who could talk to him.

"Aughh!!" Jin Jiuchi kicked his legs wildly, causing the fine particles of dust hidden beneath the mattress to erupt into the air. "How boring!"

It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to escape. Given his rebellious nature, it would only be weird if he could stay cooped up in this small room even if it was only for five minutes.

As soon as Madam Vivianne left after dropping that threat which entered Jin Jiuchi’s left ear and exited through the right, he immediately leaped from the bed and tried to break down the door.

Alas, his efforts were all for naught.

The old wooden door, which looked as if it would crumble with a single kick, did not budge no matter how hard Jin Jiuchi threw himself at it. Despite the loud ruckus he created, not a single servant had come to check on him. It stood to reason that Shen Nianzu’s hearing as an Elite player had exceeded the capabilities of a normal human, yet the jade doll did not appear to have noticed anything either.

It was as if... this room had been cut off from the outside world.

Only one window remained in the room, yet it was far too small for Jin Jiuchi’s body to squeeze through, so he was left with no other choice but to lie down for the time being.

Jin Jiuchi’s gaze once again fell on the door beneath his feet, doubt flickering in his eyes. "No, it’s impossible for the door to stay so firm, so... is this the ’plot’ Shen Nianzu was talking about? Is there something I need to discover in this room?"

After mulling over it for a while, Jin Jiuchi pulled himself into a sitting position with a groan. He would usually prefer to be as idle as possible and aim to be number one salted fish, but... it was really boring! He had no idea when Shen Nianzu would finish his meal, and if he continued to wait, he would grow mold and become one with the walls!

Huffing and puffing, Jin Jiuchi began to turn his small room upside down. He sniffed here and there, knocked his knuckles along the walls, stomped his feet on the floorboards a few times, and...

"Wait," he suddenly recalled something. "Where did that mouse go?"

Standing on the bed, he rubbed his chin and concentrated on his hearing. Previously, he could still hear the mouse’s small and quick heartbeat resonating within the room, but sometime during his meticulous search, the sound had vanished without a trace. Narrowing his eyes, Jin Jiuchi jumped down, crouched, and peered under the bed, only to inhale a lungful of dust and almost choke himself to death.

"Cough, cough—damn it!" Straightening up, he waved a hand in front of his face to disperse the dust.

Nevertheless, his perseverance finally paid off!

Jin Jiuchi easily lifted the entire bed and leaned it against the wall. Lo and behold, he discovered a suspicious small hole on the ground, just large enough for a mouse to drill through!

Excited, Jin Jiuchi ignored the thick dust that almost killed him earlier, flopped himself down on the floor and peered into the hole with one eye closed.

"Hmm..." he observed. "It’s totally dark down there. I can’t see—"

The darkness abruptly shifted as he spoke, revealing an eyeball. Its size perfectly matched the hole, seemingly as if it could pop out at any moment. Thin red veins crawled along the white sclera, and a blood-red pupil – which couldn’t possibly belong to a human – stared back at him.