The earthworm Gu, slick with mucosal secretion, did not burrow into Jiaying's nostril—it rammed.
The delicate alar cartilage splintered inward with a wet, crunching snap.
A visible lump, the diameter of a man's thumb, distended the skin of her nasal bridge, then travelled upward.
It forced its way beneath her eyeball, pressing the globe forward in its socket until the white sclera bulged, veined and staring.
The lump travelled down her throat, making her breast tips jerk and convulse against the worm's passage, before descending to nestle against the hard, chitinous form of the scorpion Gu already coiled in her stomach sac.
The Beetle Gu entered through the ear. It did not scuttle; it chewed.
The tympanic membrane tore with a sound like ripping silk.
A thin trickle of pinkish cerebrospinal fluid mixed with blood seeped from the canal as the Gu shoved its way into the middle ear, its barbed legs scraping bone.
The bulge it made beneath her skin was jagged, a shifting, angular tumor that traveled across her temple, pressed her eye shut from the outside, and then distended her cheek before it forced her jaw down with a muffled pop of the temporomandibular joint.
It plunged down her throat, leaving a trail of internal bruising that bloomed purple beneath her pallid skin.
"Start," Fang Yuan said, as he placed the primeval stones on the concave plane of her stomach.
The lumps—now clearly defined as the earthworm coiling, the scorpion lashing its tail, the cockroach digging—began to tear into each other through her organs.
Her stomach skin quivered and jumped as if being struck from within.
The primeval stones shattered, their energy ripped out in violent gasps, and the sound was not of crumbling but of sucking, as the life was drained from them.
He dumped another pouch of stones.
Her abdomen inflated like a parasitic growth.
First, the hen's egg size: a firm, localized tumor.
Then the ostrich egg: the skin stretched so taut it split in hair-thin, bleeding fissures.
Then, he added more stones. Her belly swelled to the hard dome of a third-trimester pregnancy, the skin becoming translucent, a greasy parchment.
Beneath it, a nightmare silhouette was visible: a thrashing knot of segmented limbs, a barbed tail, and a slick, coiled tube, all churning in a soup of pulped viscera.
The veins in her stomach stood out like purple ropes, some rupturing, creating subcutaneous lakes of black blood.
As time passed, he poured more stones.
The swelling accelerated.
Her rib cage groaned, individual ribs bowing outward.
The lower ribs snapped with a sound like stepping on wet kindling, their sharp ends tearing through her diaphragm from within.
The mound grew to a monstrous, nine-month size, then surpassed it.
The pressure turned her torso into a taut, groaning drum.
A low, gurgling keen emerged from her torn throat—a sound made by air escaping her collapsed lungs, forced through mangled vocal cords.
Fang Yuan placed another pouch.
Bang!
Her entire stomach exploded open with a bang.
The over-stressed skin split first with a sound like a sail ripping in a gale, revealing the glistening, yellow fat beneath.
Then the abdominal muscle wall, shredded by internal trauma, gave way in a torrent of released pressure.
The gore was horrendous.
A geyser of clotted blood and serous fluid shot upward, hitting the ceiling with a slap.
Her entire intestinal tract, grayish-pink and studded with half-digested matter, slithered out in a heavy, steaming coil onto the bed.
Her stomach sac, torn open, disgorged a slurry of blackened blood and acidic enzymes that began to sizzle on the linen.
Her liver, a heavy, dark-purple lobe, lolled out onto her thigh, one edge neatly punctured by a scorpion stinger.
Her spine was exposed from the mid-thoracic region down, a white, bloody column amidst the carnage.
Shattered fragments of her pelvis, some still bearing ragged strings of ligament, were scattered like bloody gravel in the crater of her torso.
And Fang Yuan was painted like a demon in that gore.
A thick strand of small intestine, torn at one end, had whipped across his shoulder like a grisly sash.
His face was a mask of warm, coppery blood, a finer mist of it beading on his eyelashes.
A piece of recognizable tissue—a section of her pancreas, pale and glandular—slapped wetly against his chest and stuck.
Jiaying's face was frozen in a terminal scream, her jaw unhinged, her bulging eyes clouded with burst capillaries.
Her lower body has fully decayed.
The flesh of her thighs and calves blackened, liquefied, and slid from the bone in greasy, putrid sheets, as if doused in a powerful acid.
The exposed femurs, gleaming white and stained with yellow marrow, were pitted and scored with tiny, frantic bite marks.
The stench was another matter altogether: the fecal reek of ruptured colon, the metallic tang of fresh blood, the high, sweet perfume of exposed visceral fat, and the cloying, rotten-fruit stink of necrotizing flesh.
And in the epicenter of this anatomical cataclysm, cradled in the bowl of her ruined pelvis and resting on the shredded remnants of her uterus, was the cocoon.
It was not merely black.
It was a depthless void that seemed to drink the light and the blood around it.
Its surface was perfectly smooth, but it throbbed with a slow, deep rhythm that echoed through the wreckage of bone.
Fang Yuan blinked, a slow movement that sent a trickle of blood tracing a path through the gore on his cheek.
But... he did not wipe it away.
His gaze moved from the organic devastation of the vessel to the pristine product it had yielded.
Liters of blood, kilograms of flesh, one intact human nervous system, and twenty pouches of primeval stones.
But to him...
"The result is… unsatisfactory."