Blood splattered on Yang Qing's face, the closest young officer. His lips turned pale instantly, his expression shifting from pain and regret to anger and hatred.
He wiped the blood off his face and turned to Rachel, snarling: "This is all your fault! Not content with cruelly persecuting Xiaoxiao, you manipulated me into doubting her and drove her to death. You vicious woman, you deceitful murderer!"
As he spoke, his eyes reddened, just like Zhang Xiaoxiao's had.
Rachel suddenly recalled that when she had kicked the criminal named Wang Bing, his eyes had also turned bright red, as if he had lost all reason.
Could this be one manifestation of contamination?
Rachel pondered, preliminarily deducing that this contamination spread through bodily fluids. The first symptom was bloodshot eyes turning bright red; the second was making unfounded accusations, or rather a loss of rationality combined with paranoid delusions.
Yang Qing ordered the other City Guardsmen to eliminate these two criminals, but surprisingly his subordinates didn't act. Instead, they quickly backed away, widening the perimeter, and immediately fired an emergency flare into the sky.
"What are you doing? Have you been blinded by her words too?" Yang Qing stared at them in disbelief, as if deeply betrayed.
One guardsman opened his mouth but said nothing. He wasn't blind or deaf - the bizarre turn of events was clearly problematic. It was better to wait for professionals to handle this.
Yang Qing let out a cry of grief. He knelt down and closed Zhang Xiaoxiao's lifeless eyes. "Rest in peace, Xiaoxiao. I will avenge you, no matter the cost."
As soon as the words left his mouth, Yang Qing swiftly drew his sidearm and smeared blood on the muzzle.
When he made his move, the other guardsmen also pulled out their guns. Though firearms were largely ineffective against most supernatural entities, they were quite effective against ordinary people or contamination-derived entities.
But they were still a step too slow. Perhaps they hadn't expected Yang Qing's reaction to be so extreme, drawing his weapon without warning. Or maybe they hesitated to execute their commander and comrade on the spot, fearing they might wrongly kill Yang Qing if he could still be saved.
In that crucial second or two of delay, a blood-smeared bullet erupted from the gun barrel, flying towards the one Yang Qing saw as the root of all evil.
Rachel raised her eyes to the young City Guardsman, her gaze focusing for an instant. Then, as everyone watched, she stopped the bullet in midair.
Yang Qing gaped at the suspended bullet, then at the gun in his hand, momentarily unable to process what had happened.
The other guardsmen stared wide-eyed at the scene before them, their eyeballs nearly popping out in disbelief.
A bullet, stopped in midair.
No external force, no magic trick, just... floating there.
They clearly knew this bullet had just left the gun barrel, fired by Yang Qing at that woman!
What was going on?
What had happened?
Was it a mass hallucination?
"What... what did you do?!" Yang Qing exclaimed, his shock even overshadowing his murderous intent, as if his entire worldview was being reshaped in that moment.
A young guardsman swallowed hard and stammered: "Is this the power of a contaminated entity? This woman really is something unclean?"
But someone quickly retorted: "Don't be ridiculous. You might say 'supernatural entity,' but if contaminated entities could do this, our firearms would have been useless against them long ago."
"Then how do you explain this? My God, the bullet just... just stopped in midair?!"
"How should I know? I'm half convinced I'm seeing things..."
"It's impossible, it's completely unscientific!"
Rachel also found it very unscientific, and quite odd.
While the Awakened Ones had varying levels of strength and different types of abilities, controlling a bullet like this, though rare, shouldn't be cause for such amazement, should it?
These people looked shocked, as if seeing an Awakened One for the first time.
"What the hell are you?!" Yang Qing had nearly lost his mind. He began firing wildly, not just at Rachel, but even at his subordinates around him.
Even though the City Guardsmen all wore standard-issue bulletproof vests, at such close range they risked contamination from the blood-tainted bullets if they didn't dodge. But if they dodged, they feared stray bullets might hit innocent bystanders.
Finally, someone opened fire on the man who had clearly lost control. Some bullets were stopped by his vest, but others struck his head.
The young man collapsed to the ground. The last thing he saw was all the bullets he had fired suspended in midair, not a single one reaching its intended target of contamination.
Disappointment froze in Yang Qing's pupils. Even at the moment of death, he never regained the rationality of a normal human being.
The City Guardsmen caught their breath. They wanted to secure the bodies, detain the criminals, disperse the residents, but none dared move, as the blood-tainted bullets still hung in the air.
Rachel looked at the man and woman on the ground and asked in a calm, gentle voice: "What should I do now? Cooperate and go with you for questioning?"
Silence fell over the scene. After a moment, one guardsman finally mustered the courage to respond, his tone more persuasive than forceful: "Ma'am, while we don't know what ability you used - it's truly remarkable - anyone who wants to live in Suhai City must abide by its laws. We sincerely need your cooperation regarding this incident."
Rachel contemplated these people thoughtfully. There was no bullying or forced detention, but her question wasn't merely probing their attitude.
Rachel turned sideways, her clear eyes betraying no emotion as they swept over the criminal held by two guardsmen, apparently in a deep coma.
She remembered someone had said this attacker was named "Wang Bing," a wanted fugitive.
Rachel made a subtle gesture. The suspended bullets converged, then in the next instant flew towards the City Guardsmen.
Watching the bullets shoot towards them of their own accord, the guardsmen's hearts nearly stopped. One instinctively cried out: "We mean no harm-"
The dull sound of bullets entering flesh was like piercing rotten meat. The guardsman who had spoken realized the bullets' target was the criminal Wang Bing he was holding.
Rachel narrowed her eyes and said, "I meant, shouldn't I be helping to dispose of the real source of contamination now?"
"W-what?" one guardsman stammered.
"Ma'am, we don't quite understand your meaning..." another added hesitantly.
"Does 'contamination source' refer to Wang Bing? Isn't he human? At most he'd be a contaminated entity," a third guardsman ventured.
"That's right, the anomalous trees in high-risk zones are contamination sources," someone else chimed in. "I heard one went out of control and started attracting contaminated entities. An aerial patrol found one crawling on the trunk. Luckily they destroyed it with a black fire bomb in time, otherwise who knows how many contaminated entities it might have drawn in. If those things gather in numbers, it could be a major problem."
Rachel's sharp ears caught this. Her movements halted involuntarily - surely they weren't talking about her? The black fire bomb did match up.
But weren't those trees just rapidly growing due to influence from another dimension?
Rather than attracting contaminated entities, it was more like wanting living things to come fertilize it...
Before she went to sleep, those anomalous trees wouldn't even have qualified as contaminated entities. With proper artificial fertilization, their attraction to contaminated entities could actually help eliminate some that were good at hiding.
Rachel deeply felt how out of touch she was with the times. Just how long had she slept? She felt like a country bumpkin in the big city, her understanding completely overturned.
Rachel couldn't casually reveal her cryogenic revival. She estimated she'd been frozen for quite some time. The mastermind behind it all might not even be dead yet. Even if they were, she didn't want to be taken to a lab and dissected.
If it was confirmed she'd been frozen for decades or a century and woke up alive and kicking, that would be the "immortality" so many dreamed of. Even if she said the cryo-chamber was destroyed, no one would believe her.
So with a slightly guilty conscience, Rachel walked steadily towards Wang Bing collapsed on the ground. She borrowed an electric baton from a guardsman and smashed open Wang Bing's skull.
The guardsmen instinctively stepped back at the bloody, violent scene. They half-raised their guns but didn't quite dare aim. But they also heard that the sound was odd - not like a skull being crushed, but more like cracking open a thin eggshell, crisp and hollow.
Rachel used the baton to lift up something that looked soft and squishy, very much like brains. It was pink and clean, like choice ingredients for a hotpot.
But she knew this was a supernatural entity that liked to lurk in human brains, feeding on the cerebral fluid to control thoughts, then spreading through various bodily fluids including blood, saliva, and other bodily fluids.