Strange game designer.

Chapter 739 Madness
The strange fish, as long as an adult's arm, was devoured in an instant, leaving only the cleanly sucked fish bones on the plate. Several older children began to fight over the ugly fish head.

"You think this place is dirty because you haven't gotten used to the darkness yet, and you haven't grown eyes that belong to the darkness." The cook held a small metal plate with two fish eyes on it in his dirty left hand. He carefully picked up the fish eyes with his right hand and put them into his mouth little by little, with an expression of enjoyment on his face.

Pulling on the rope, the driver still couldn't hold it in and started retching by the dark river.

"Do you think the food you eat on the ground is clean? Do you think what you eat and use is really what your eyes see?" The cook felt the driver was being impolite, interrupting his enjoyment of the meal. "Different eyes see different truths. The things on the ground are all manifestations of the ugliest malice. So many people die from illness in the city every year. Do you know how those corpses and garbage are disposed of? Use your brain and think carefully. Why is the Second District, responsible for garbage disposal, the richest district in the city? Why is the cleaning company the largest and most well-established company in the city?"

"Is the secret in this garbage?" Gao Ming stared at the cook. After eating the fish eye, the cook's eyes, hidden beneath his tattoos, became even brighter and more lively, creating a contrast with his filthy appearance.

"Hehe, I can't tell you, you'll have to see for yourselves." The cook put the bottles and jars back on the cart and walked towards the side of the garbage mountain.

Is this your home?

“This is everyone’s home. You can even dig a hole here and sleep here.” The cook opened a damp wooden plank, crawled inside, and as he closed the plank, poked his head out and said to Gao Ming, “You look a lot like a child from many years ago, when my father and I first came here. That child taught us how to fish…”

Extending his arm, now missing a portion of its flesh, the cook chuckled and said, "Use my flesh."

"You must have mistaken me for someone else."

“Of course, I was just kidding.” The cook writhed into the cave. “Don’t go any further in. The closer you get to the darkness, the easier it is to become part of it. Many people have gone there and never come back.”

"Haven't you been deep inside the abandoned water network?"

"No, I'm just barely surviving here with my children, like rats in the gutter, worms crawling on corpses, but we are a million times cleaner than you."

The cook rambled on, then shut the wooden board completely.

In the distance from the garbage mountain, some dirty children secretly watched Gao Ming, both curious and afraid.

"This person has lived underground for too long and has gone mad. He can't distinguish between good and evil, beauty and ugliness." The driver never expected there to be such a world underground, and he instinctively felt disgusted.

"What if what he said is true?" Gao Ming has two different perspectives, but he restrains himself from using them, afraid that he might not be able to distinguish between them.

After crossing the garbage mountain and heading deeper into the passage, the number of strange things in the passage gradually increased. Gao Ming saw a crawling corpse, a living person making insect-like noises, an exaggeratedly long water snake, and bits of hair that kept growing on the wall.

The driver is much luckier in comparison; it's too dark here, there's no light, and he can't see anything.

Gao Ming once asked him if he had seen anything strange. His answer was that he hadn't seen anything, but it was too dark and oppressive. He felt a little short of breath, his body felt very cold, and he was always shivering.

"Hey! Don't go any further, it's a restricted area." A woman's voice suddenly rang in his ears. Gao Ming searched for a while and finally looked at a dilapidated bathtub on the underground river.

A rope made of tattered rags secured the bathtub to the pipes. Inside, a completely naked silicone doll lay half-reclined, appearing strikingly beautiful amidst the grotesque and deformed creatures of the underground. "A doll with its own consciousness?" Gao Ming wasn't sure if he was hallucinating. He patted the driver: "Did you hear a woman's voice?"

"I heard it, it sounds beautiful." The driver stood close to the wall, afraid of falling into the river.

"Hahaha, can't you believe your eyes?" The doll's fair arms rested on the edge of the bathtub, its silicone face sticking out. "I don't know why I can think. Maybe it's because there are too many seeds of life inside me?"

She cupped the doll in her palm, revealing two life flowers blooming on its body. She seemed unaware of the doll's value on the ground, innocently displaying her secret.

Simple, beautiful, and kind, Gao Ming never expected that the kindest "person" she would meet in this gang-ridden city would be a silicone doll.

"The Life Flower has this kind of ability?" Gao Ming was somewhat surprised; he seemed to have underestimated the importance of the Life Flower.

"I don't know either." The silicone doll lowered her arm and looked at the driver with a grin. Compared to Gao Ming's composure, the driver, who was pale and trembling, interested her more: "He's so funny. If I had known he was so timid, I would have waited for him to pass by and suddenly yelled 'Ah!' to scare him."

The silicone doll revealed all her wicked thoughts. Seeing such an innocent "person," Gao Ming also spoke up decisively: "I want to ask you something. Have you ever met someone called 'Auntie' in this underground place?"

The doll, who had been smiling, seemed to have been pricked by a needle; her smile vanished, and her body, which had been sticking out of the bathtub, shrank back in.

"Have you seen your aunt?"

"never seen it."

"Then why are you afraid?"

"Because..." The silicone doll almost burst into tears, unable to give a reason for a long time.

“If you tell me about my aunt, I won’t tell anyone about our conversation; if you don’t say anything, then when I find my aunt, I’ll say it was you who gave me the directions.” Hearing Gao Ming say this, the silicone doll really cried.

Gao Ming was quite helpless; he had fallen so low as to threaten silicone dolls in the sewers.

“Auntie isn’t a person, Auntie has a kind of madness.” The child wiped away her tears and said pitifully, “I really don’t know how this disease started. It seems that after contact with something, you lose yourself. Your past memories will turn into a crazy woman, tearing at your consciousness until you become her. Auntie can only infect one person at a time. After the next person comes into contact with Auntie, the disease will be transmitted to the next person.”

The silicone doll probably wasn't lying; her words stirred up some memories deep within Li Sansi's heart.

When Li Sansi was sent to his aunt's house by his father, his aunt would say a lot of crazy things to him whenever she had an episode. It was after being adopted by his aunt that Li Sansi's personality and inner world completely changed.

"Madness?"

(End of this chapter)