Ince reacted quickly. While clutching his camera and dodging the man's crazed swings and stabs, he continued his science outreach:
"Look, long-term consumption of moon sugar also causes a loss of judgment, leading the user to attack anyone regardless of who they are!"
[: This is no time for a science lecture! There's no need to be so dedicated!]
[: A tribute to the legendary cameraman, Mr. Ince.]
The commotion here quickly caught the attention of other sugarheads in the building. Those numbed, wretched souls looked up blankly, thoughts drifting through their eyes as sanity clashed with madness.
Finally, within the hallucinations created by moon sugar, Ince appeared in their eyes like a piece of running, transparent candy. Their sanity was instantly submerged by primal desire, and they began to stagger after the man.
Behind him, countless sugarheads chased Ince out of the abandoned building, while Ince flashed a peace sign at the camera and the curtain before him:
"Everyone, see you later!"
With that, he disconnected the stream. The viewer count froze at three thousand, leaving the stunned audience staring at their own reflections on the black screens, reliving the content of the broadcast.
Soon, snippets of the livestream were clipped and posted to the curtain. Countless edits related to him were spread across various traffic platforms by scattered individual accounts, and the matter began to ferment rapidly.
Ten minutes after the video started circulating on the curtain, the related topic appeared at the bottom of the hot search rankings. People who had been kept in the dark gradually began to encounter the truth.
Inside Rongsen Media, things were currently in a state of frantic chaos. Every department was running at full capacity, doing everything possible to eliminate the negative impact on the corporation. One curtain communication after another was dialed and hung up as time quietly slipped away.
In a certain room, a woman's voice was sharp:
"Didn't you promise me that this matter would be suppressed quickly? What's going on now!"
The man, who was currently communicating with someone else, looked impatient. "Most of the CCA people have already shut up. We've also warned and paid hush money to those individual media outlets with some level of fame. The people in the network monitoring department haven't rested since yesterday. What else do you want me to do?"
"Then why has Lin Fan's business rushed onto the hot search again?" The woman's face was slightly twisted.
The man's expression suddenly turned cold. "Are you questioning me?"
The woman felt a sudden chill. Her expression softened a bit, and her voice became slightly gentler. "I... I'm just worried that the company's image will be affected."
"Hmph, a stray dog that doesn't value its life has run out to bite people randomly. A total lunatic." A shadow fell over the man's eyes. "I finally understand the saying that someone with nothing to lose is the most dangerous."
"Contact the people at the city radio station immediately. Ban that mad dog's Station No. 23. Put pressure on the management of the Note platform. We spend so much money supporting them; are they just there to eat for free?" The man roared at the curtain like a growling lion.
Half an hour later, a group of protesters gathered below the Rongsen Media building, surrounding it so tightly that not even water could seep through. A large number of company vehicles were blocked at the curved plaza, unable to pass, only able to protest with their horns.
Most of them were young men with a sense of justice, holding up signs and shouting for the handling of the disgraced artist, demanding that the PR team respond directly to the moon sugar incident.
A man dressed in a sharp suit stood in the rain, facing the crowd whose denunciations rose and fell like waves. A flash of disgust crossed his face. Countless reporters' cameras and microphones were shoved in front of him, with white light flashing occasionally. Finally, he cleared his throat:
"The information on the curtain is of varying quality. That video is clearly a slanderous defamation of our Rongsen Media's corporate image, a deliberate staging by people with ulterior motives. I hope everyone keeps their eyes open and exercises self-judgment. Do not gather below the company building and affect the daily travel of our employees."
He flicked a strand of wet hair from his forehead, ignored the agitated crowd, and turned to walk back inside the building.
The crowd that tried to surge forward was quickly stopped by security personnel.
Standing far off in the rain, several members of the Dawn Society watched the scene in silence. One of the youths, squatting by the roadside with a blade of grass in his mouth, raised an eyebrow:
"Is it really okay to let their emotions get so high? With this kind of psychic wave, it would be very bad if an urban legend were born at a time like this."
"Ultimately, they eat too well here in the Star of Art. In any other hive city, if people dared to gather and cause trouble under the ruler's nose, it wouldn't be strange for the enforcement agencies to kill a few to warn the rest," Chen San remarked.
"San-ge, I haven't seen you this hostile before," the youth A-Ning said, glancing at Chen San.
"The psychic waves are getting more and more intense." A rose-red figure noticed the values ticking upward on her comm-watch and looked at the youth in the black windbreaker.
"If we don't deal with it, it's about to cross the critical threshold, President."
"A-Ning, contact the tuners and the agency people. Prepare to control the scene." Standing in the very center of the group, Jian Liu held an umbrella, the look in his eyes near the mole by his eye calm.
"Understood!"
Everyone responded in unison. As if remembering something, Jian Liu frowned slightly. "Where is Tao Shier?"
"Sister Twelve?" A-Ning struck a thinking pose. "Before leaving the Dawn Society, I saw her in the curtain contacting the CCA people, cursing at them the whole time."
Jian Liu pressed a hand to his forehead in exasperation. "It's probably something related to Miss Xu. Six of Hearts, after contacting the target these past few days, is there anything noteworthy?"
"Nothing." Aivmey gave a light laugh and spread his hands. "Everything is as usual. That person... she really only has herself in her eyes."
Just then, a sudden chaos in the crowd caught everyone's attention. In the distant street, a large number of land-air vehicles collided one after another, blocking the intersection. Traffic came to a standstill, harsh horns blared incessantly, and traffic lights flashed abnormally. In a world blurred by light and shadow, a figure came running while holding a camera high, wiping the streaming water from his face as he shouted:
"Everyone, look here! Look this way! A live broadcast from the scene!"
Chasing behind that man were countless withered figures, shaped like rusted iron bars—typical lunatics high on moon sugar. Under the abnormal secretion of hormones throughout their bodies, their movements were no longer sluggish. Only madness remained on their faces as they ran on all fours through the blocked traffic, climbing onto the roofs of land-air vehicles and letting out strange roars like out-of-control beasts.
Pedestrians screamed upon seeing this sight, and the entire scene became chaotic in an instant.
The pouring rain pooled on the roofs of the cars, sending up splashes of water against the strangely curved, black claws that were as dry as tree bark.
A panicked pedestrian in the scene was grabbed by one of those beast-like figures and tossed high into the air, falling toward the roof of a land-air vehicle that was swerving out of control. The impact dented the roof slightly, and that vehicle, in its panic, crashed headlong into the sidewalk, slamming into the railing of the curb.
In the synchronized broadcast of the radio station, Ince led the sugarheads all the way toward the base of the Rongsen Media building.
Before long, those beast-like figures crashed into the crowd of protesters below the building, knocking the company security flying. They lunged straight for the man in the suit behind the cordon, pinning him down and tearing at him amidst his looks of infinite terror.
Blood splattered into the puddles like red silk unfurling, dyeing the rainwater on the brick ground red. This triggered a wave of panicked screams from the nearby people as they scattered in flight, symbolizing that the chaos had ascended to a new level.
"Damn, that guy! He led all those moon sugar brain-deads over here!" A-Ning yelled.
Jian Liu's gaze sharpened, and he waved to his companions behind him. "We have to hurry..."
"No, it's already too late." Aivmey looked at the data on his watch that had exceeded the critical threshold and murmured.
"A new urban legend has been born."
On the gray street shrouded by the misty curtain of rain, all the streetlights simultaneously flickered with electrical sparks at a fixed frequency. In a single moment, they all burst. The dim yellow halos vanished, and the shattered lamp covers exploded with a shower of sparks that fell into the puddles below.
The people's panic transformed into black smoke, converging above into a shadow, the figure of a woman.
Dressed in a luxurious black gown, the woman's neck was unnaturally long, disproportionate to her body. Beneath a mysterious black veil, water flowed incessantly over her thin, inverted-triangular face. Her eyelids were calmly closed, looking like a kind mother gazing down at the chaotic street and the terrified crowd below.
With her disproportionate body, a face as pale as paper, and lips as red as blood, she was eerily strange, yet possessed a peculiar sense of beauty.
Until a certain moment, when two streaks of black sludge flowed from the slits of her eyes. The woman in the rain slowly opened those empty sockets, and a terrifying aura of deathly silence radiated from her.
Rate on N.U.
