Chapter 26: New Ingredients

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The overwhelming terror instantly extinguished every last spark of anger in Zhao Cheng’s heart.

Amid that extreme fear, his mind suddenly became clear. One question in particular left him utterly baffled—

The experts on the forum had clearly said that the supernatural entities in this world operated according to rules.

Like NPCs, they possessed only empty shells, with no true inner life—living corpses in all but name.

The reason he had managed to seize a coin earlier was that he had cleverly exploited one of those rules.

But now, as he looked at the smile on the old woman’s face, then at the young man beside her gazing at him with pity, Zhao Cheng realized in an instant that this world was nowhere near as simple as he had imagined.

The Weird Era was not a game governed by rules alone!

These supernatural entities could actually think independently. They possessed emotions almost indistinguishable from those of real human beings!

In the blink of an eye, Zhao Cheng seemed to understand everything. Summoning all his strength, he forced an awkward, hideous smile onto his face.

“Ahem… Granny, we young people can be a little thoughtless. We were only joking with you!”

“It’s just that none of us happened to bring any money today…”

“Why don’t we pay you back tenfold once we earn some? Ten times over!”

The others immediately realized that the chestnut seller could communicate. Once they grasped what was happening, they hurried to chime in.

“That’s right, that’s right. We all forgot to bring money today. We’ll definitely compensate you several times over, and recommend your stall to our friends so that more customers come and patronize your business!”

“My friend was only joking just now!”

“Exactly, it was only a joke. Granny, you’re already so old. Surely you wouldn’t hold it against a bunch of youngsters like us?”

The young men forced smiles onto their faces, doing their best to soften their voices. Yet their words sounded even more sarcastic and insincere.

They were attempting to force an unreasonable act into sounding perfectly justified.

The old chestnut seller smiled without saying a word. With her eyes, she indicated the sugar-roasted chestnuts scattered on the ground, smeared with filthy mud.

“Young people…”

“There are some jokes that must not be made carelessly.”

“Who knows how much toil goes into every grain of rice in one’s bowl?”

“I have always been broad-minded and forgiving. But there is one thing I have hated all my life above all else—wasting food.”

Zhao Cheng and the others felt their hearts sink to the bottom.

At last, they understood how serious the situation was.

They had triggered a death rule!

One foot had already fallen into the abyss. There was hardly any room left for them to claw their way back out.

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“What do you want from us…?” someone asked in a trembling voice.

By now, the fleshy growths on their lower bodies had continued spreading upward, reaching all the way to their chests.

The growths had nearly filled both armpits, swelling them grotesquely. Their arms hung limply at their sides, unable even to be lowered properly.

They looked like hideous cloth dolls dangling from invisible strings.

Aside from the fact that they could still stand upright, more than half of each person’s body had become bloated masses of flesh, leaving them without sensation or control.

They had never witnessed anything so horrifying. Their minds had been reduced to nothing but an instinctive will to survive, driving them to attempt some sort of explanation.

But the words they uttered now had lost all semblance of composure.

Even from a purely logical standpoint, they could find nothing to say that might allow them to argue with the old chestnut seller.

It was as though the Grim Reaper were dragging them away, and they were still exhausting themselves trying to force a final sound from their mouths. At this stage, however, every struggle seemed utterly futile.

The old chestnut seller let out a sigh.

“Children, don’t you know that wrongdoing must be punished?”

“What punishment?”

“There is an old saying: ‘You are not a fish—how could you know the joy of a fish?’ Pain is the same. Human joys and sorrows can never truly be shared. Since you do not know how to cherish food, I have no choice but to punish you by making you experience what it is like to be food…”

The moment she finished speaking, the fleshy growths suddenly began expanding at terrifying speed.

“No!”

Desperate cries burst from Zhao Cheng and the others.

But in an instant, the rapidly growing masses of flesh spread across their necks, flooding into their mouths, then covering their noses, eyes, and ears…

Their wails stopped abruptly.

Flesh continued sprouting across their faces, merging all their features together until their heads resembled swollen balls. Only sticky, blurred tissue remained visible, fused into one hideous mass.

The flesh rotted, black and crimson intermingling like carrion dried beneath scorching heat.

A faint, rancid stench drifted through the air.

At the same time…

In Chen Ye’s eyes, the halos of fortune above the heads of the men before him had changed. What had begun as black malevolent energy, coiling around blood-red halos, had now vanished into complete nothingness.

From beginning to end, Chen Ye watched the entire process with rapt attention, keeping his mind utterly calm.

He knew that he had to seize every opportunity to observe the structure of the world of the Weird Era—to understand its rules, and what would happen if those rules were violated.

As for the gruesome deaths of Zhao Cheng and the others, Chen Ye could not honestly say that he felt nothing.

After all, they were players, just like him.

Before the blood-red countdown descended, they had all been living, breathing human beings.

But Chen Ye had not reached out to help them.

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To survive in this world, one had to truly understand how its rules functioned—to comprehend them, master them, and ultimately become the rules themselves.

The ignorance and recklessness displayed by Zhao Cheng and the others doomed them to become nothing more than a group of losers in a game like this.

Even if Chen Ye had intervened to save them, there was no way they could have survived in a world filled with danger at every turn.

After a brief disturbance in his heart, he forced himself to regain his composure at once, extracting from the scene whatever knowledge might prove useful to him.

It was as though he had detached his soul from within and allowed only his consciousness to descend into this body, observing everything around him from the perspective of an outsider—calmly understanding, analyzing, studying, and internalizing it all.

He carefully observed the entire process, constantly comparing it with the game’s information as he analyzed the situation in his mind.

“The old chestnut seller should possess at least three different types of abilities.”

“First, she possesses the Chef sequence. There is not much more to say about that.”

“Second, she has an ability related to language, something akin to a Bewitcher. She can not only manipulate people, but also think with extraordinary clarity and cite classical sayings with ease. She is nothing like an ordinary old woman from a market. She is more like a highly educated female scholar who retired in old age and came to the market to use her overwhelming verbal skills to haggle with people far beneath her intellectual level.”

“Third, these foods seem to possess the ability of Mutation, causing tremendous changes to the structure of the body.”

“However, when this Mutation follows the principle of equivalent exchange, it does not erupt.”

“Even when the price is unfavorable, the equivalent exchange offsets the negative consequences, allowing one to escape the death rule.”

“These young men would not have died originally. But their minds were eroded by the Bewitcher’s words, causing them to violate the principle of equivalent exchange. That was what triggered the death rule.”

“Reduced to food…”

“Damn… The effects produced by combining different abilities are truly terrifying.”

Chen Ye became even more certain that the old chestnut seller was no ordinary supernatural entity.

Just today, she had already displayed at least three distinct abilities.

Most terrifying of all, those abilities could work together, each link connecting seamlessly with the next to form a method of killing.

After witnessing the old chestnut seller use nothing but words to drag several players into the death rule, Chen Ye finally understood the meaning of the saying: “The most frightening thing is a thug with an education.”

The old chestnut seller lowered her head and looked at the sugar-roasted chestnuts coated in mud. She sighed.

“What a fine delicacy. To think it was ruined like this. It truly breaks my heart.”

The next second, her gaze shifted toward the players standing not far away, transformed into masses of flesh and rigidly upright like grotesque meat sculptures.

Her face broke into a smile so broad that it filled with wrinkles.

“The good news is that I have new ingredients now!”