"Cough cough... Damn it, it hurts like hell!"

  Several minutes after the explosion, Zhang Xu was finally pulled up from a pile of broken bricks by Lin Tao. He stared in shock at the rge hole in the wall in front of him, nearly four or five meters in diameter. He didn't even bother to tend to the wound on his forehead that was bleeding; he just asked bnkly, "Did I... did I hit a gas tank? Why did it explode so fiercely?"

  "It's not a gas tank. It must be some kind of psychic storm used by that creature!"

  Lin Tao was also covered in dust and dirt, with a finger-width wound on his neck from a piece of debris during the explosion. If that stone had been just a little higher, at that force, it would have pierced Lin Tao's throat mercilessly.

  "A psychic storm? What's that?"

  Zhang Xu shook the dust off his head and staggered out of the rubble. He looked miserable, not only with a rge bruise on his forehead but also multiple injuries on his body. His cheeks were smeared with dark red blood, making him look more like a ghost than a human. He limped from the pile of stones towards the edge of the hole and suddenly stopped, asking, "Brother Lin, is that thing dead?"

  "It should be. Look!" Lin Tao shook the dust off his head, walked over with a fshlight, and shone the beam on a pile of grayish-white objects.

  Curious, Zhang Xu followed and poked away some of the debris on the object with his foot. When he saw what it was, he immediately felt nauseous and excimed, "Damn~ What the hell is this thing? No hands, no feet, and such a big head, it looks like a big brain sitting on a pile of rotten pig intestines... Brother Lin, its eyes are also big and bck, why do I feel like it looks like an alien?"

  Lin Tao walked over and shone his fshlight on the unknown creature. Indeed, as Zhang Xu had described, it had a head shaped like an alien's, with almost no visible limbs, as if all the nutrients had gone to that rge head. Its skin was grayish-white and sticky, as if coated with a yer of transparent gastric juice, making it look like a paralyzed alien patient. There was a very distinct gunshot wound on its right brain, which was probably the fatal shot that Zhang Xu had accidentally fired.

  "This is a living dead that has mutated after direct contact with an infection source. Although I've never seen one before, I've heard about them from others. People have even given them a fitting name based on their appearance, calling them 'Big Head Living Dead.' Big Head Living Dead have almost no powerful offensive capabilities and are not contagious. Their only method is to affect our brainwaves, causing us to experience various hallucinations, thereby achieving their goal of predation!"

  Lin Tao crouched down without any disgust, examined the corpse of the living dead again, and frowned, saying, "This living dead doesn't have teeth? I guess this long trachea in its mouth is used for sucking blood. I really don't know what hallucinations Liu Fei had before she died; her face was so distorted, it looked like she died of fright!"

  "By the way, Brother Lin, what did you mean by psychic storm just now?" Zhang Xu asked curiously.

  "It's a kind of shockwave with offensive capabilities formed by strong brainwaves. However, that must have been its st resort. I guess even it can't release it easily. Fortunately, there was a wall between us; otherwise, Zhang Xu, you might have suffered several times worse!" Lin Tao turned back and said with a smile.

  "Damn, monsters are just monsters. It was still struggling to death even after I shot it in the head! But even if this thing didn't have any storm, I think it's troublesome enough. If I weren't clear-headed and knew my sister couldn't come back to life, it almost made us kill each other!"

  Zhang Xu frowned with a sense of after-fear, then asked suspiciously, "Brother Lin, why didn't it do anything when we passed by st night? Could it be smart enough to know we were going to rescue people, waiting for everyone to come down together for a massacre?"

  "It's very possible!" Lin Tao stood up and nodded, saying, "This thing is not only smart, but it can also read our memories. Otherwise, it couldn't imitate people we are familiar with. It has a kind of telepathy that allows it to know our fears and concerns, so it can easily prescribe the right remedy. I guess even if we all turned into corpses, it wouldn't turn them down!"

  "Yeah, living dead always have a good appetite, but this time its greed killed it! By the way, Brother Lin, what exactly did you notice was wrong from the start? From beginning to end, I thought its performance was just too perfect, at least that little girl it conjured up really scared me!" Zhang Xu patted his chest with a scared expression.

  "Shadows and corpses!" Lin Tao smiled slightly, looking at the corpse on the ground and said, "It unnecessarily conjured up a shadow behind the little girl, but with three or four fshlights shining on her, there was only one shadow. And have you noticed the hundreds of corpses piled up around? Every so often, there are repeated corpses, the same posture, the same features, like pictures copied onto each other. This is completely different from the corpses we saw at the beginning of st night. I guess this living dead's psychic power wasn't enough to deal with so many of us at once, so it made the hallucination a bit rough!"

  "Fortunately, that's all it is. Otherwise, it would be almost heaven-defying. If it could imitate my mother as well, I might go crazy too!" Zhang Xu looked at the living dead corpse, which resembled a pile of rotten organs, and spat out in disgust.

  "This guy's legs are gone; it must have been trapped here before. The only thing it could move was its oral cavity, which could suck blood and drag people. If its body were intact, we would be in big trouble!" Lin Tao shook his head in admiration, deeply wary of this inconceivable mutated creature.

  "Brother... brother... are you guys okay?" Just as Zhang Xu finished speaking, the two saw Gao Chujiang carefully moving over with a fshlight in one hand and a piece of stainless steel pipe he had broken off in the other. Gao Yuanyuan followed behind him like a little shadow.

  "What do you think? Do I look okay?" Zhang Xu said dejectedly, showing Gao Chujiang his miserable state.

  "Yo! How did you end up like this? Did you throw grenades?" Gao Chujiang looked at Zhang Xu, who looked like a beggar, with great surprise.

  "Damn, even if I'm stupid, throwing grenades wouldn't blow me up, would it? Sigh~ I can't expin it to you in a moment, just don't ask. But that monster that was pying tricks on us is dead. Go gather everyone and let's get out of here quickly!" Zhang Xu shook off the dust on his body again, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and didn't want to stay in this creepy tunnel for another second.

  "Okay! But..." Gao Chujiang hesitated for a moment, looking at Zhang Xu with a heavy face and said, "Gao Hai wants you to come over; he has something to say to you!"

  "Gao Hai?" Zhang Xu nodded and followed Gao Chujiang deeper inside.