Chapter 19: Rotting Fish Heads

Janet rolled to the side, and Nora hid in the corner, curling up as much as she could. Janet blurted out, "The boss was defective; he was desperate and saw the recruitment for the experiment from Forever Pharmaceuticals. Forever Pharmaceuticals sent him a culture bin and a healing agent, and the direction of the experiment was probably to inject the contaminating factor in small doses to make the body slow. But the experiment failed." Janet stared intently into the mirror, the room changing with every word she spoke. The figures of Janet and Nora disappeared from the mirror. The mirror became less like a mirror. Nora realized that Janet's words weren't meant for her. She was meant for the Pollutant. "The boss started to have mutations in his body, and he started to look strange. So he had to move to the basement to avoid people, and only Tony could go to the basement every day to take care of him. He agreed with Tony to ask him to kill him immediately if something happened to him." The store's beeping bell was a hospital bed call bell. The guillotine may have been prepared then, and the owner of the fondue store got himself a safety device in case he turned into an uncontrollable contaminant, asking Tony to press the mechanism immediately. "He thought he could keep out of harm's way by hiding. But he didn't realize that once he became a contaminant, he sustained radioactive contamination and mentally contaminated other people." "The first to be contaminated was Hailey, who felt like she had fingers all over her drawer when she was cashiering and suspected that something was wrong with the meat her boss was giving to his customers. She went into a trance every day." Janet didn't entirely dodge the fourth attack as the guillotine slashed across her back. Janet was more experienced than last time. She quickly patched it up and continued with the healing agent. "Then Hailey left; she probably didn't even die at the store; she just simply left. The owner let her go after she offered to leave. But after she left, panic spread, and the others started to panic." "Jack was already mentally contaminated, and Hailey's departure was death in his eyes. He begins to speculate: has Hailey been killed? Has Hailey been shagged into the fondue pot?" From the beginning, Yummy Fondue was just a mass mental contamination event. Janet surveyed the room, looking for a way to break the ice as she spoke, "Jack suspected that he was next to die, so he started watching the owner, wanting to make the first move. So he went into the boss's medicine room and learned that he had been injecting potions and experimenting with body modifications." "Jack smashed a hole in the floor of the drug room and saw the boss's secret, realizing that the boss turned out to be handicapped." Boom. There was a very strange rattling coming from the mirrors, and Nora noticed that they were starting to move. If Janet and Nora didn't move, they would turn into compressed cookies. Nora subconsciously looked up at the broken hole in the ceiling, trying to escape through that opening again. But when she looked up, she saw dozens of eerie eyes in the hole. Pigman and the others had recovered, and they were gathered around the hole in the ground with blood-covered faces, looking over with smiles on their faces. SHIT. Their paths of escape were blocked. Janet pissed off the Pollutant, and the contaminated area started to go into hunting mode. Janet dodged the guillotine attack again, and she kept her eyes on the mirror. "Jack had a murderous plan in mind. He sneaked into the basement while his boss slept and stood next to his bed, then raised the knife." Jack's recording said it backward; he told the boss to stand by his bed when, in fact, it was Jack who stood by the boss's bed holding a knife. The four walls suddenly began to distort, and a pig's face was reflected in the mirror, their eyes bulging out like three-dimensional reliefs. The guillotine in the room was getting less and less potential under inertia, and Nora carefully crawled toward Janet. "The boss is dead, but he was contaminated before he died. So, he precipitated contamination spores after he died. Blood-red contamination spores instinctively seek out hosts, and Jack didn't even protect himself before he killed, so he was parasitized by the contamination spores." The pigman in the mirror started to struggle. They seemed enraged by Janet and wanted to break through the shackles of the mirror. Janet was definitely here to provoke. She spoke faster and faster, "Jack didn't lose his mind immediately after being parasitized by the contaminated spores, but he could clearly feel something inside him. He didn't realize that killing his boss's nightmare didn't end it but instead brought out a new one. He didn't know how to get the contaminating spores out of his body." "Then Jack's contamination symptoms became more and more pronounced." "Then he thought that the difference between a contaminant and an alien was that the latter could retain his sanity. He thought he had found the right solution to the problem, so he offered a heavy bounty for the contaminant's genes." "But no one paid any attention to this ridiculous bounty." "Shut up!!!" The pig's face in the mirror gradually distorted. It worked, Janet thought. She'd finally gotten the Pollutant riled up. "An ordinary human's will cannot resist the contaminant's erosion. The next day, the contaminant in your body begins to take over; the contaminant's instinct is to reproduce, and they find ways to contaminate more people." Janet changed her storytelling persona, and she now spoke directly to Jack. "Your sanity collapsed, and you became the source of the Fondue Shop's pollution source." The interior of the Hot Pot Shop was a pyramid structure, and Jack stood at the tip of the pyramid. "You put the boss's body back on the hospital bed and pretended he was still alive. Everyone in the Hot Pot Shop is so mentally contaminated and delirious that they can't tell the difference. Even Tony forgot what the boss explained earlier." "You cut up the boss's flesh, thus being able to contaminate more people. Meanwhile, you continued the tradition of the hotpot restaurant by continually hiring new employees. Until one day, the contaminated area could no longer be contained and attacked the guests who came to eat." On that day, tentacles burrowed inside the hot pot curled around guests' chopsticks, and then yanked people into the hot pot. A severe accident shut down the Hot Pot. Thirty years ago, the contaminant rows in the corners of the federal districts were incomplete. With limited human resources, they could only know that there was a source of contamination on this street but not its exact location. However, the hot pot store was very stable, and they formed a perfect ecological closed loop inside the hot pot store. They were internally brutalized, and only the occasional few customers who couldn't get enough of the Hot Pot Restaurant to come and eat would become their new kind. That's why the Federation only posted a warning sign here. Until Nora's arrival. At the same time, Nora crossed into the Fondue Shop, and a gray graveyard sticker appeared on the Cleaning Center forum. The Fondue Shop had managed to attract Janet. "Are you finished?" A face slowly emerged from the center of the mirror. His face had been cut and stitched together, twisted and huge. It was a full two meters tall. It was Jack. The natural source of contamination appeared. Jack's face and Janet's were two meters apart, and one could even see Jack's disc-sized eyes. With four walls crushing in, the area where Janet and Nora were was only five meters wide. There was no way for them to escape. Janet stood up. Four walls surrounded her. The source of the contamination appeared, but Janet didn't move, and she didn't raise her gun. Nora could only raise her gun herself and shoot at the mirror. But the bullets were sucked in by the mirror. It turned out that you couldn't kill the source of contamination in front of you with a gun. This was a class C contaminated area. Shooting would only hasten one's death. "I'm done," Janet responded calmly. Click, click. The sound of the mirror breaking was ear-splitting, and broken lenses smashed everywhere. Nora's face went pale as she watched a behemoth of a man burrow out of the mirror. The man's head was the size of a wall, the stitched-up wounds on his face were visible, and several broken lenses were stuck in his face. All Nora could see was Jack's black tongue. What's he trying to do? He's going to swallow us whole. Janet suddenly asked, "Do you feel guilty about killing your boss?" "You said in the recording that you suspected you killed the customer. You were scared and guilty." Janet said. The recording was a trap left by Jack to mentally contaminate the people who entered the contaminated area behind him. The monster's large mouth suddenly stopped opening. It worked. Nora just had a moment of joy in her heart. Then she heard a sharp ringing sound. The sound was as if hundreds of hands were scraping the blackboard at the same time. "He was the one who tried to kill me," shouted Pollution Source. "He was the one who tried to kill me first!" "I just fought back first. What's wrong with me?" Along with his words, Nora saw hundreds of black flying insects pouring out of his mouth. Hundreds of flying insects came at him head-on, looking for any tiny loophole allowing them to burrow in and nibble on people's skin. Janet was wearing a protective suit and a black, fully encased helmet. She stood in front of Jack, looking small, like a mole cricket standing in front of an elephant. Janet looked up. Her voice was calm. "He didn't try to kill you; it was all in your imagination." The owner of the hot pot store never wanted to kill anyone. Janet asked, "Did he not struggle at all when you killed him?" Jack's brow wrinkled. Nora sensed as if Jack was in more pain because of that statement. Jack stood in front of the boss with his knife raised, his expression fierce. He looked at the boss as if he were looking at a mortal enemy. But the boss looked at him with a calm gaze, at peace with his own death. The boss died without a ripple, so he wasn't a polluter, and polluters must have obsessions. Now Nora felt the whole basement shudder. The man lying in the hole in the ceiling was smiling and applauding, and the boss's body expanded indefinitely. "Shut up!" "Die!" The blood of the Pollutant slowly trickled down from the ceiling. Nora couldn't help but yell at Janet, "He's crazy! Shoot him!" Janet pissed the man off. The Pollutant lost his mind, and the entire fondue restaurant shook. Janet still didn't move. Janet had watched some hunter's instructional videos before she came here, and a contaminant of level C or above was utterly unafraid of the power of a standard gun. The best thing to do at this time was to blow up the place, but the basement now formed a confined space. Once it exploded, Janet was immune to explosives, and Nora would die instantly. So, she had to finish the mission in another way. Janet tapped her system panel. [The system has opened the "Rotting Fish Head"; this prop will consume five life points. Do you want to use mental pollution on Jack? Janet: "YES." Since Jack was profoundly mentally polluted, Janet would help pollute him a little more.