Chapter 430 Qingliu City

Chapter 430: Qingliu City

Qingliu City was once a beautiful city with a slow pace of life. It had many lovely natural and artificial lakes and ponds, surrounded by numerous public gardens built for citizens to relax and enjoy themselves.

Some said that Qingliu City was a strange place—a modern city where the number of lakes, ponds, gardens, and parks in the downtown area actually surpassed the number of skyscrapers.

Perhaps because of this, Qingliu City had repeatedly been ranked as the "city with the highest quality of life." You rarely saw hurried crowds on the streets. Even on weekday mornings, people in Qingliu liked to sit by a nearby lake or pond, under the swaying willow trees, chatting with friends or just lost in thought alone.

The neighboring Honghuai City was a rapidly developing city. Its growth in recent years was so fast that ordinary people felt they couldn't keep up. The streets were always filled with busy pedestrians, and even late into the night, there were exhausted overtime workers and students cramming for exams.

To the people of Qingliu, although Honghuai City was constructing skyscrapers at an astonishing speed, there were so many tall buildings in its central area that they even blocked out the sky and sunlight.

What Qingliu residents found most incomprehensible was that Honghuai City would even demolish small public parks to make way for new high-rises!

Watching their bustling neighbor, Qingliu residents felt even happier.

But recently, Qingliu City no longer felt like itself.

The streets were still the same streets, the parks were still the same parks, the surfaces of the lakes and ponds remained calm, yet the entire city seemed to have lost its vitality overnight, even its liveliness.

The weeping willows by the lakes and ponds also seemed to have lost their life force. The deserted Weeping Willow Park even felt eerie.

Barricades were set up across the city. Everyone said the city had fallen ill.

But in this world, the truth will out. Even with Qingliu's internet restrictions, even though information involving certain keywords just couldn't be shared online, more and more Qingliu residents learned...

Monsters had appeared in the city!

People were injured after being attacked by those monsters, and then they turned into monsters themselves!

Such rumors, exaggerated as if from outdated zombie apocalypse movies, spread wider and wider, growing more and more credible. Some even went to great lengths to post videos they'd shot and edited claiming to show the process of a person transforming into a monster!

The secretly circulated video didn't show anyone being attacked by a monster, but the person in the video had a deep wound on their arm. At the beginning, the injured person even joked with a smile, saying they wanted to see if they'd mutate like an extra in a movie.

But just one hour later, as indicated by the video's timestamp, the treated wound was still bleeding, and the skin around it had... grown bizarre scales.

Some time later, the injured person's wound stopped bleeding.

However, the clear video showed viewers that this wasn't because the wound was healing. Instead, it seemed the injured person had lost too much blood and simply couldn't bleed anymore.

Yet, the injured person didn't lose consciousness from blood loss. They could be heard muttering over and over, "So thirsty... so thirsty... want water so badly... itchy... so itchy..." while incessantly scratching the strange scales around their wound.