The moment Lu Chuan’s hand covered his ears, the unbearable noise echoing all around suddenly weakened.
The pressure on his eardrums gradually eased. Only then did Qin Guan vaguely realize that thin streams of blood seemed to be slowly trickling down both sides of his cheeks.
Before him, the severed head of the human-faced mouse still lay on the ground, screaming in a twisted manner. However, Qin Guan could no longer make out the actual sound. In its place, Lu Chuan’s voice clearly and calmly entered his mind, and his tone seemed to carry a hint of helplessness.
“Is it really that hard to just say, ‘I need help’?”
“Do you know that if you had waited a little longer, you’d have been at risk of permanent deafness?”
Qin Guan opened his mouth, only to feel his throat so dry and raw that it was almost unbearable. Even he was not sure whether he had actually made a sound.
Whether he had heard something or not, Lu Chuan gave a subtle smile.
The man half-held him and quickly retreated, putting distance between them and the mouse head on the ground.
Perhaps realizing that its attack had no effect on the two of them, the expression on the woman’s face grew even more resentful and vicious.
She took a deep breath, and her head visibly swelled. Every inch of skin puffed up like an inflating balloon, and her eyes bulged so hard they looked ready to burst from their sockets.
Then she suddenly opened her mouth and let out the most violent, terrifying scream yet.
『Aaaah… !! Save me, my ears!!』
『The viewers’ ears are ears too!! Someone save me!』
『Why do I feel like throwing up all of a sudden?』
『Can someone tell the System to turn the pollution filter up a bit?』
『Already told it. It says it’s handling it now. Hopefully soon, because my ears really cannot take it anymore.』
Although the Filth Room live stream came with a built-in pollution filtering System, the human-faced mouse’s sonic attack was far too overbearing. Even through the broadcast, a portion of it was inevitably transmitted to the viewers watching the live stream.
『Total System Announcement: We have received your viewing feedback. We have raised this floor’s pollution source filtration index. We apologize for affecting your viewing experience. The System will continue to monitor the instance’s situation.』
『I’m really speechless. I didn’t expect this human-faced mouse’s attack to be so strong. You can actually get hit through the screen.』
『Exactly. I can’t even imagine what I’d look like if I were there in person…』
『To the person above, you’d probably go deaf on the spot…』
『Forget that, look at the screen!』
Someone in the livestream room cried out in alarm.
Only then did everyone turn their attention back to the screen. In the image, after the human-faced mouse threw its head back and let out a shrill wail, whether because of the sound waves or for some other reason, the entire food storage room seemed to begin trembling slightly.
Qin Guan felt the arm around him tighten a little, and then he heard Lu Chuan let out a dry laugh.
“Are you afraid of rats?”
“Not really?”
Qin Guan said cautiously.
“You’d better not be.”
Lu Chuan paused. “Remember what I said? Once these things gather… they’re very deadly.”
Before he could finish speaking, a dense swarm of tiny bright spots suddenly appeared all around them.
From the ceiling to the floor, from the storage shelves to their feet.
Almost everywhere the eye could see, piles of rats had appeared at some unknown point. Head to head, tail to tail, packed tightly together, they stared fixedly at the two people standing in the middle.
Qin Guan slowly scanned the rats surrounding him and shuddered for no reason.
Their faces ranged from old to young, some delicate and some ugly, some fully formed and some incomplete. But without exception, every single one of them had a woman’s face.
『Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, my trypophobia is acting up』
『One was fine just now, so why are there so many all of a sudden? Help me, ahhh, I think I’m kind of dying』
Seeing that all its companions had gathered, the severed woman’s head in the center let out a few short screams. Instantly, the surrounding rats surged up like a tide, leaping from every corner of the room and swarming toward the two of them in waves!
Lu Chuan acted with lightning speed. He grabbed Qin Guan by the waist, lifted him face-down in one motion, dodged the oncoming rat tide, and leaped onto another, higher shelf.
“Ugh… !! Lu Chuan, let go of me!”
Being half-carried while being held up was not a pleasant feeling, but the gap in their body size was simply too great. Qin Guan’s tiny struggle looked to him no different from a kitten throwing a tantrum.
“Stop rubbing.”
Lu Chuan patted him, half soothing and half teasing.
On the other side, the rat tide pressed head against head, body on body, still pouring endlessly in through every crack and gap into the room. They flung themselves onto the fragile, aging storage racks, baring grotesque, tragic woman’s faces, climbing upward while biting each other’s tails.
The fragile racks were quickly covered by the huge, terrifying swarm of rats, emitting creaking sounds as they struggled under the strain.
Although the swarm was enormous, it moved extremely fast. Before long, it had reached Lu Chuan’s ankle.
Yet by now, there was no longer any other place in the entire storage room where either of them could stand.
House of the White Mountain, there is a woman of wondrous purity, divine and elegant in appearance. Do not approach or touch her.
Even Lu Chuan was far from as relaxed as he appeared.
His identity as a Grotesque allowed him to sense far more keenly the malevolent energy hidden within these creatures.
In many legends and stories, rats are usually symbols of disease and plague. The burly man’s earlier crazed expression and bizarre behavior might well have come from accidentally coming into contact with these things in the kitchen.
The storage rack beneath their feet shook even more violently. Several fat rat heads had already poked out from the edge of the railing. Lu Chuan casually grabbed a rock-hard ham from the side and knocked each of them down one by one.
In fact, with his own strength, dealing with these things would not have been difficult at all.
The problem was that the 421st floor itself was only a B-rank instance.
This also restricted Lu Chuan’s abilities to the so-called “B-rank.”
And because he was a player, his ability to act was even more limited. When a guaranteed-death scenario such as a “rat tide” was triggered, there was no way he could have too many means of escape.
“Now this is really getting troublesome.”
Lu Chuan murmured.
“Put me down first!”
Something seemed to bite his arm.
Lu Chuan looked down. After a hard struggle, Qin Guan had finally broken free from his grip. He glared fiercely at Lu Chuan with thick resentment, then reached up to smooth his hair.
“191.”
Qin Guan spoke.
From the void, a familiar little octopus dumpling popped out with a whoosh, waving its two short little arms and spinning around smugly.
Time came to an eerie halt at this moment. A rat that had been about to pounce on Qin Guan’s foot froze in midair, its fur still bristling.
Qin Guan casually nudged it aside with his foot.
This was also one of the System’s abilities. When a player summoned the System, it had the right to pause the entire instance for up to one minute.
Of course, this had to be based on the player strongly protesting the instance’s content or mechanics. If it was discovered that the player was using the pause maliciously to evade the game, the player would also suffer severe punishment.
『Are you serious? He used the one-time pause opportunity for each instance just like that?』
『Does this newcomer even know what the pause is for?』
『Last time, some guy with nothing better to do called the System out to mess around with the pause, and he was completely erased…』
“Ta-da! A dazzling entrance meow~ Host, what can I do for you, meow? But let me say this first: if you want me to help you cheat and get through this, that’s not allowed…”
“I know,” Qin Guan interrupted its long speech. “But I have objections to the instance difficulty.”
191 froze. “Objections… to the instance difficulty? But this is already a very low-difficulty B-rank instance…”
『Exactly. A newcomer who can’t even clear a B-rank instance dares to raise objections? What a joke.』
『Can’t even beat B-rank and he wants to lower the difficulty even further?』
『I think that ‘guest’ must have misjudged this time. So many points, what a pity. Tsk tsk, gone down the drain.』
191 also wore a cautious expression, but unlike the barrage comments, as the System that had accompanied Qin Guan for so long, it had always held deep respect for the man’s strength.
It had a strong feeling that this person was about to say something incredible…
Sure enough, the next moment, Qin Guan said calmly:
“I request that the instance difficulty be raised to S-rank, in my capacity as an investor.”