Su Jiu, Li Jin, Jin Daxiang, and the others found trash bags in the mall, tied the collected body parts up tightly, hauled them one after another to the first-floor plaza, and struggled to piece them together.
Normally, curious passersby would have stopped to watch what they were doing. Right now, however, most people in the mall were trapped in the terror of being unable to leave; no one cared about them at all.
Placed together, the body parts formed a complete body—missing only the head.
Right at that moment, Xia Ta, still standing in the center of the plaza, did something that caught everyone off guard.
She walked straight up to the massive billboard and grabbed the iron pillars beneath it. Her arms surged with strength beneath her formal dress. Accompanied by the terrifying screech of tearing metal, she forcefully uprooted the entire billboard from the ground, inch by inch.
It was simply too absurd.
It was even more absurd than the legends of Lu Zhishen uprooting a willow tree.
Xia Ta was only about 1.6 meters tall. Standing beneath a billboard dozens of meters high, she looked as insignificant as an ant. No one could have ever imagined she would actually grab the billboard and pull it up inch by inch!
Jin Daxiang and the others watched from the opposite side of the plaza, dumbfounded. Was she even human? She was more like Supergirl.
Gao Tian was even more astonished. He knew Xia Ta possessed immense strength, having acquired a Supernatural Item that increased her physical power during a certain Green Text Mission. But he never expected this little girl's strength to reach such a terrifying level.Many passersby who had been focused on the mall entrance were also left with their jaws dropping at the astounding sight, pulling out their mobile phones to record it.
Amid this bizarre scene, most people failed to notice a crucial detail: even though the billboard had been uprooted and its connecting power cables snapped one by one, the massive face of the female celebrity on the screen did not vanish after losing power. Instead, she continued to mechanically repeat the motion of applying makeup.
The screen was unnatural. It didn't rely on electricity at all!
Jiang Yang was the first to react. He grabbed two body parts, one in each hand. "Xia Ta thinks the celebrity's head on the screen is the corpse's head! Hurry! Let's get over there and place the complete headless body beneath the screen!"
This was just too fucking ridiculous.
How could the female celebrity's face on the screen serve as the sixth body part—the head?
But Gao Tian and the others had no time to ask questions. In the distance, Xia Ta—a tiny black dot beneath the massive screen—was swaying as she walked. Lifting a screen dozens of times her size was clearly a massive burden, and she was struggling to hold it up.
Gao Tian, Jin Daxiang, and the rest grabbed a leg each and sprinted toward Xia Ta at top speed. They quickly pieced the headless corpse back together right beneath her. Then, with a deafening crash, Xia Ta laid the billboard flat directly over the headless body.
She was drenched in sweat. Uprooting the billboard had evidently drained most of her strength.
Once everything was in place, the group immediately backed away, putting distance between themselves and the corpse to observe what mutation would happen next.
This was a rule of thumb among veteran residents of the Apartment: the moment a task neared completion was also when participants were most distracted. Green Text Missions loved to pull a jump-scare right at this moment, instantly slaughtering hopeful participants waiting for their reward settlement.
Gao Tian and the others stared at the "complete" corpse. The body was clearly male, but the head was the female celebrity from the billboard. They had no idea if this actually fulfilled the requirements of the Green Text Mission.
Only a few seconds had actually passed, but to them, it felt like a century.
A moment later, Gao Tian and the others witnessed an unbelievable scene. The body parts originally scattered in the black bags began to move. Like magnets, they drew toward one another and pieced themselves together.
Rotting flesh ate through the black bags, and the separate pieces connected, reforming into a brand-new corpse.
This was especially true for the female celebrity on the billboard. The figure on the screen had stopped applying makeup. She slowly turned her head, and bright red blood began to weep from her deep eye sockets.
Next, the screen went completely black. From the neck of the originally incomplete body, dense black hair began to sprout. A round head seemed to be desperately trying to force its way out from within.
The incomplete corpse had accepted the female celebrity from the billboard, making her its final puzzle piece.
"This is too fucking fake," Li Jin complained. "With a clearing condition like this, what ordinary person could ever survive?"
Xia Ta and Jiang Yang didn't relax their expressions in the slightest. Although they had indeed completed the requirements of the Green Text Mission, this task... was truly a bit too fucking absurd.
Beneath the corpse, countless streams of filthy black blood crisscrossed. As the head grew, its hands and feet began to twitch as if they were being electrocuted. Its movements were bizarre and twisted, as if it were desperately struggling to climb up from the ground.
The six body parts had already been stitched into one whole, so why hadn't the Green Text Mission announced the task's completion?
Watching the corpse twitch incessantly on the ground, Gao Tian felt an ominous premonition.
If the original owner of this body was Xu Yuan, then he must be incredibly pissed off right now.
Because this head wasn't his at all; it belonged to some random woman. Anyone would be furious in his place.
But it was impossible for Gao Tian's group to go retrieve his actual head for him. Xu Yuan's real head had already been taken by that Fierce Ghost with a penchant for collecting things. That Fierce Ghost likely wasn't even in the mall anymore, so how was Gao Tian supposed to find it?
At some point, a woman's scream pierced through the crowd of onlookers: "That dark, pitch-black thing... is it standing up?"
The corpse that Gao Tian and the others had worked so hard to piece together didn't simply rest just because the task requirements were met. On the contrary, after obtaining a complete body, the heavily decayed, indescribable entity slowly oozed through the black bags wrapping its fragmented frame and actually climbed up from the ground, as if it had been granted a new life.
The very first thing the corpse did after standing up was break into a run toward Xia Ta, Gao Tian, and the others opposite it. At first, its stance was wobbly, and it face-planted after just two steps. But when it stood back up, its control over the body had clearly improved, and its running speed grew faster and faster.
It was a deeply grotesque sight. The head atop the rotting body had fully grown into the female celebrity's radiant, beautiful face. Yet, the body itself continued to secrete black fluids, radiating a nauseating stench. Smiling like a robot, the celebrity's face closed in on the Apartment's residents.
The distance between the two sides rapidly shrank.
"What exactly is going on? Isn't the task over?"
Su Jiu was clearly participating in a task for the first time. Upon seeing this horrific scene, she suffered a total psychological breakdown. She collapsed onto her rear, staring in terror at the approaching corpse.
Boss Jin looked plump and heavily built, but he was the quickest to react to the situation. Seeing that things were going south, he had already turned around and bolted.
"We fell for it," Xia Ta muttered to herself, remaining rooted to the spot. "The Green Text Mission said that once nine o'clock arrived, the body parts would mutate. But it never said they wouldn't mutate after the corpse was completed. By putting these six pieces together, we actually accelerated the mutation process. It's fully awakened before nine o'clock."
Jiang Yang's jaw nearly dropped to the floor. "What? That's allowed?"
But no matter how hard it was to swallow, watching the female corpse drawing closer and closer, they knew they had to accept reality. In their hearts, they had already cursed the Living Apartment ten thousand times.
Su Jiu was breaking down internally. "What do we do now? I don't want to die! It's not fair, I clearly followed the Apartment's instructions and completed the corpse..."
Li Jin was even more furious, screaming curses at the top of his lungs. "Living Apartment, fuck your mother!"
Xia Ta stood coldly in front of the group. "I'll figure out a way to stall it for a while. Those of you with the ability, find your own way to survive. Figure out how to escape on your own."
She and Jiang Yang had each collected five million from Boss Jin. Since they couldn't complete the Green Text Mission, they could only use this method to mitigate the loss as much as possible.
But stall? How long could they possibly stall?
Ghosts could never be killed. Even if Xia Ta's physique was vastly superior to an ordinary person's and she had several Supernatural Items to back her up, it was absolutely impossible for her to tie down the female corpse indefinitely.
She and Jiang Yang would stall for as long as they could. Once Xia Ta ran out of options, they would directly activate their Black Cards and return to the Living Apartment, leaving them no choice but to abandon Boss Jin and the other participants.
But in that tiny window of time, where could Boss Jin and the others possibly flee?
Sapphire Mall had already been sealed off by the bizarre white fog; there was simply no way out. Playing hide-and-seek inside the mall with this complete corpse meant that all participants would eventually be hunted down one by one and brutally murdered.
This had been decided from the very beginning. It seemed this task never intended for the participants to survive. Fail to find the body parts? Die. Find all the body parts? Die early.
In the blink of an eye, the female corpse arrived right in front of Xia Ta, wearing that bizarre, mechanical smile. Xia Ta clenched her fists tightly, ready to battle the Fierce Ghost. However, the corpse's body twisted in the air at an impossible angle, completely ignoring Xia Ta, and lunged straight for Su Jiu, who was closest to her.
The complete female corpse was only interested in the participants of the Green Text Mission. For now, she had no desire to kill a bystander like Xia Ta.
Accompanied by Su Jiu's tragic scream and the gasps of the surrounding onlookers, Gao Tian—who had been silent on the sidelines for a long time—finally seized this once-in-a-lifetime opening. He suddenly exploded into action. The Ghost Transformation Spear in his hand turned into a piercing streak of white light, stabbing straight through the corpse's spine. The instant burst of power actually nailed her dead to the ground.
A strange scene unfolded. The moment the Long Spear in Gao Tian's hand pierced through her, the corpse seemed to crash like a broken machine. It lay collapsed on the ground, showing no further intention of moving.
"Congratulations, everyone. The second Green Text Mission is complete."