Both start in hell: but their talents are multiplied a hundredfold.

Shen Jue simply raised his head slightly, looking at the approaching balloons with his own face on them with the gaze of someone looking at ants.

In the past, the human head balloon, as a terrifying curse spreading as a meme, caused Shen Jue great distress.

Japan Island is no longer simply an island.

It is a breeding ground for curses, a symbiotic entity of thousands of horrors.

Deep beneath Black Vortex Town, something older and more fundamental has been breathing for hundreds of millions of years—that is…

The vortex ruins.

Shen Jue did not try to destroy it again.

The power of the Great Sun can burn the physical structure of the ruins into glassy slag, but the invisible smoke rising from the slag will still swirl into a vortex shape.

As long as this shape exists, the curse will sprout anew from the cracks in the ruins like vines.

So Shen Jue changed his approach.

He stuffed strange things into the ruins of that vortex curse.

Hundreds of thousands of people, the Tomie Aberration Type 1, set off from Kurozuchi Town, covering the entire Japanese island like a giant white spider web.

Their operating logic is simple: capture any balloon that floats in the air, has a human face, and is dragged by a twisted rope.

Regardless of cost or loss.

The speed of a human-shaped balloon can reach tens of kilometers per hour, but the running speed of the mutated type is 1.2 times the speed of sound.

As the balloons were still leisurely drifting over the rice paddies and hills, a pale shadow swept in from the other side of the horizon.

With one hand, he precisely gripped the string at the bottom of the balloon, while with the other hand, he pinched the balloon without popping it, simply holding it in place. Then he turned around and returned at the same speed.

A round trip usually takes no more than thirty seconds.

Human head balloons captured from various parts of Japan Island are continuously transported back to Kurowa Town.

The method of transportation was very primitive: each Aberration Type I would carry three to five human head balloons at the same time, wrapping their strings around its own arm, like leading several shapeless kites.

The balloons were being dragged along at supersonic speeds, the airflow distorting their faces, stretching, twisting, and contorting their features into a jumbled spiral, making them look like grotesque scribbles drawn in the sky.

They are screaming.

They don't scream; the head balloons don't have vocal cords, or rather, they don't need them.

Their "screams" are high-frequency pulses that act directly on the nervous system. Ordinary people exposed to these pulses for more than three minutes will experience severe dizziness and hallucinations.

However, aberration type I lacks the human nervous system.

Or rather, their nervous systems have been completely transformed into something of another dimension by the variant T-virus.

As a result, their response to this pulse was almost zero.

The people's Tomie-Type Aberration simply dragged one human-head balloon after another into the underground ruins of Black Vortex Town with a blank expression, mechanical and tireless.

The entrance to the underground ruins was originally a dry well, but Shen Jue dug a vertical shaft with a diameter of fifty meters from another direction.

Spiral metal steps are nailed to the well wall, but the people's Tomie Aberration Type 1 does not need steps.

They jumped down, letting go of the struggling human-shaped balloons as they fell, throwing them into the darkness below. Then, they lightly touched the well wall with their feet, using the momentum to bounce back to the ground. The whole process took less than two seconds.

Then they turned around and continued running towards their next target.

The terrifying vortex curse of the Vortex Relics was not enough to immediately twist Shen Jue's bio-weapon into a vortex-shaped sculpture in the face of the bio-weapon containing Shen Jue's consciousness sub-body.

Shen Jue had long since given up on counting the number of head balloons.

The underground ruins of Black Vortex Town are larger than imagined. It is a naturally formed dome-shaped cave with swirling patterns on the walls, as if someone had used an enormous drill to spin through this rock layer for tens of thousands of years.

Deep within this cave, the human head balloon meme that Shen Jue found is struggling against the curse of the vortex.

It took Shen Jue a long time to confirm this.

His decapitation balloon removal operation was highly effective in the first few days.

With the speed of the Aberration Type I, the sky over the entire Sun Island became completely clear within three days, without even a trace of a balloon.

But on the fourth day, new human head balloons began to reappear from every corner of the island.

They didn't reproduce, nor did they escape; rather, they appeared out of thin air, from nothing, defying the law of conservation of mass, as if they were "spit out" by something.

Scorched earth policy is useless.

Shen Jue cleared out all living and non-living things in the area, burned them to ashes, leveled the ground, and poured cement over them.

But the human head balloon would still slowly drift across that empty ground a few days later, its surface imprinted with the features of a poor person whose face had been copied in their sleep.

The root cause is not in humanity itself.

The meme that replicates human faces is spreading uncontrollably throughout the Japanese island and even the entire world.

Shen Jue realized that physical destruction was completely ineffective against the human head balloon meme.

What he needs is to stop the production of new human head balloons at this source.

After spending some time and relying on his superhuman sixth sense, Shen Jue successfully found the original human head balloon meme in an underground area.

So Shen Jue placed the meme itself inside the underground vortex ruins.

The human-headed balloon meme itself was constantly fighting against the terrifying, twisted curse of the vortex, and lost most of its ability to spread.

Now, all that remains is that balloon with Shen Jue's face etched on it, which will appear in the sky above Shen Jue's head after a while.

Shen Jue paid no attention to this futile struggle.

The human head balloons that were constantly captured and placed in the underground ruins have long since become part of the cave walls and sculptures of the vortex ruins.

The swirling patterns on the cave walls became denser and more three-dimensional, and the raised parts of the patterns even revealed the outlines of a human face that was painfully distorted and with dislocated features.

Shen Jue took a few seconds to understand the process.

The vortex remnant is unconsciously distorting the human head balloon meme, which can also be considered as digestion.

Those human head balloons are themselves sub-components of the human head balloon meme.

When they were brought to the main body, they were twisted by the vortex relics and transformed into patterns and sculptures.

That would be equivalent to fulfilling its ultimate purpose: to hoist cloned humans into the sky.

Therefore, the number of human head balloons gradually decreased due to the hard work of the Tomie Legion until they disappeared.

In the struggle against the Vortex Curse, the spread of the human head balloon meme was almost completely blocked.

Shen Jue briefly suppressed the spread of the human head balloon meme.

Although the human head balloon meme itself was quite strange, Shen Jue didn't have time to investigate the reasons behind it.

The ever-approaching Hell Star consumed most of Shen Jue's energy.

Above Shen Jue's head, those balloons bearing his likeness and twisted smiles were already approaching.