Hunter of Mysterious Creature-Chapter 384 - 36: Stress Response

"Gloves? Bloodstains?" The Hunter was visibly taken aback, then looked down at his own hands.

His eyes were filled with confusion.

"Blood... Why is there blood?"

"You tell me," Sun Hang said. "If you’re not injured, then it’s either your teammate’s blood or the blood of that mysterious creature... But speaking of that, you didn’t even see what that mysterious creature looked like. How could you have hurt it?"

"Blood? Whose blood?" The Hunter muttered with a bewildered expression.

This guy looked very out of sorts... Sun Hang wasn’t sure whether he’d been scared out of his wits by the mysterious creature or his mental state was affected by some unknown force.

"Why don’t you take off your gloves and take a look?" Sun Hang suggested.

The Hunter hesitated for a moment, then removed his gloves.

While looking at the Hunter’s hands, Sun Hang’s pupils slightly contracted.

These hands were still essentially "human hands," but the surface skin wasn’t smooth like a normal human’s, instead, it was covered with various sizes of fleshy nodules... There seemed to be something wriggling inside these nodules, and from afar, they looked like worm eggs encased beneath the skin.

"What’s wrong with your hands?" Sun Hang asked immediately.

He couldn’t be sure if the Hunter was infected by the mysterious creature... After all, these hunters were themselves infected. To use a popular phrase online, apart from retaining human thought processes, mysterious creature hunters aren’t much different from mysterious creatures.

"My hands?" The Hunter raised his hands, "What’s wrong with my hands?"

His reaction seemed a bit slow. After examining his hands for several seconds, he suddenly widened his eyes in horror: "What are these things? When did they burrow into my flesh?!"

He began to frantically pick and dig at these nodules with his fingers, as they ruptured, small, curled up fleshy tendrils fell out from the nodules.

"Parasitic tentacles again?" Sun Hang squinted.

He wasn’t unfamiliar with parasitic tentacles; this type of mysterious creature wasn’t strong at all... Even an entire team of seasoned hunters, no matter how careless, couldn’t possibly be wiped out by parasitic tentacles, right?

Most of the parasitic tentacles that fell from the nodules landed in the mud on the ground, while the remaining few clung to the Hunter’s skin by mucus. Under the corrosion of the mucus, the Hunter’s skin became extremely fragile, like wet tissue paper, and the tiny tentacles easily pierced his skin, burrowing back into the flesh.

Though called tentacles, they looked more like parasitic worms within the human body.

The Hunter had completely lost his mind; he clawed and scraped his hands until they were bloody, but the more frenzied he became, the deeper the worm-like tentacles burrowed... Until he dug down to expose his bones, he still couldn’t completely remove the tentacles parasitic in his flesh.

"Help me! Help me!" The distressed Hunter pleaded with Sun Hang, "Get these worms off me! Please get them off! I’m begging you!"

Sun Hang did not approach but remained in place, silently activating his memory-reading ability.

The Hunter had gone mad, his brain in an extremely abnormal state of activity. Sun Hang could read only distorted, false images, mixed with many imagined scenes from the Hunter—but amid these jumbled memories, Sun Hang still captured some valuable insights.

He witnessed the Hunter pulling the trigger behind his companion’s back and saw the Hunter plunge his hands into another hunter’s chest, violently tearing open the other’s torso... The "almost wiped out" fourth squad referred to by this Hunter was, surprisingly, slaughtered entirely by him.

"You just said that the mysterious creature is always behind you, right?" Sun Hang suddenly asked.

The Hunter was taken aback and then nodded vigorously: "Yes! That’s how it feels! I can’t see it, but I can feel it! It’s always chasing me; I can’t shake it off! Please help me! I really don’t want to die!"

As he continued speaking, his voice even carried a trace of sobbing.

"You’re right; it indeed is behind you."

At that moment, a liquefied blade that had somehow navigated behind him swiftly slashed open the protective suit the Hunter wore, exposing his back to the air.

A creature resembling a ray was tightly adhered to his spine, its suckers already deeply embedded in the Hunter’s flesh. Through its semi-transparent body, Sun Hang could see dark red blood being drawn from the Hunter’s body in a rhythmic breathing-like motion and then circulating throughout the creature’s form.

Once the blood made a circuit within the creature’s body, it turned a deep black before being fed back into the Hunter’s body—using medical terminology, it was akin to completing an external cycle.

Except this device completing the external cycle wasn’t a familiar ECMO but the body of some unknown mysterious creature.

The Hunter also sensed something was wrong. He reached behind with a bloody hand and instantly touched the mysterious creature attached to his spine.