Chapter 6
Memories of the First Hunt
Simply put: embrace the monster that she had become, and never forget the human she once was.
With this conviction in mind, Lin Ying began her journey of survival in the city.
The greatest challenge, primarily, still stemmed from the fact that in the age of electronic information, life was incredibly difficult without a legal identity.
Another deadly obstacle was that she couldn’t get enough cash from her prey.
Thanks to the widespread use of digital payments, most people now carried little to no cash. As a result, when Lin Ying was tallying up her spoils, she could only stare at a useless smartphone and a few bank cards in frustration.
Up to this point, she had already eaten three people, but the total gain from those three hunts didn’t even add up to a thousand yuan.
The first time happened not long after she had just awakened in this world.
Lin Ying had woken up in the suburbs and was wandering around in a daze, driven by hunger and confusion.
At the time, she wasn’t very clear about her condition—just had a vague sense of control over her body. While she was drifting aimlessly along a roadside, she hadn’t even had time to react when something suddenly slammed into her and sent her flying.
The intense pain nearly knocked her out on the spot. In fact, passing out might have been better but unfortunately, her true body wasn’t the frail human one on the outside. The main body hidden in the shadow wasn’t harmed by this level of impact. That meant Lin Ying had to remain fully conscious as she was forced to endure the full combo of a 100 km/h speeding car, leaving her completely stunned after hitting the ground and rolling over three times.
Her brain was still functioning, but she was left in a daze. Who was she? Where was she? What had just happened?
Honestly speaking, this drunk driver speeding around was also quite unlucky in a sense. Around 11 or 12 at night, in a suburban area full of unfinished and unpopular buildings—how could someone just happen to be standing on the roadside?
As the screeching brakes and the sound of something rolling finally came to a stop, the man stepped out of the car under the headlights. After a brief moment of contemplation, he calmly and decisively walked over to Lin Ying.
Still dazed from the crash, Lin Ying heard someone approaching and struggled a little to signal that she was still alive.
She wasn’t really thinking about anything at that point—not even about what to do next.
You could say the man was ruthless. Seeing that Lin Ying was still breathing and recalling that there hadn’t been any surveillance along the road, he went back to his car without a word. Fueled by liquid courage, he pulled out a knife.
Lin Ying had just closed her eyes, trying to recover from the soul-deep nausea brought on by the collision—when suddenly, he stabbed her three times.
Damn. The pain knocked her senseless.
After hearing her groan in pain and then go silent, the man—despite the boar tattoo of Peppa Pig on his shoulder—started to panic a little. He had been relying on the false bravado of being drunk, but her shout had snapped him partway back to reality.
A cold sweat broke out across his body. Realizing what he had done, he didn’t dare to check whether she was dead or try to cover anything up. He slapped his buzzing head and rushed back to the car, desperate to escape.
Naturally, Lin Ying couldn’t be killed that easily. But those three stabs had been aimed right at her torso and heart, and the pain had already numbed her senses. Though her true body in the shadow hadn’t been harmed, her mimicked human body had entered a near-death state.
Combined with the starvation of the past few days since awakening, Lin Ying slipped fully into instinct-driven mode.
The driver, unaware of the change, floored the gas pedal and took off like a guilty thief. He just wanted to run as far as possible, and didn’t notice that the "corpse" by the road had quietly vanished from his rearview mirror.
A few black, slick tentacles coiled around a mass of ominous darkness, had latched tightly onto the undercarriage of his car.
……
……
Lin Ying stared blankly at the wrecked car in front of her, now crushed and mangled from the force of her own momentum.
Her bare, pale body shimmered under the moonlight. She sat in a cute duck pose, one small hand covering her mouth, making her look unusually innocent.
Beside her legs, a long trail of skid marks stretched all the way from a distance, twisting and ending at the mangled wreck just ahead. The broken car and the tilted head of the girl together formed a strangely harmonious scene.
What the hell just happened?
Lin Ying was confused—third time's the charm version.
……
In truth, it didn’t take Lin Ying long to figure out what had happened.
Piecing together her clear memories from earlier and the more muddled ones from the act of feeding, she couldn’t help but touch her lower belly.
"I really… ate that guy…?"
—That had been Lin Ying’s first hunt.