I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood
Chapter 298: Perhaps, I Am the Abnormal One

The vendor took a sliced long roll, tonged up one of those “sausages,” and laid it inside. Then he squirted on yellow mustard and pickle relish. But the condiments looked too thick, their colors dark and murky. The cut face of the bread wasn’t smooth. It had a… fibrous, stringy texture, like muscle tissue revealed when something living is crudely sliced open.

Clara cheerfully bought two and handed one to me. “Here! My treat!” Her smile was radiant and innocent.

I took it. The paper bag radiated warmth, but all I felt was a chill. I forced down the nausea churning in my stomach and managed a weak smile. Clara had already taken a huge bite.

“Mmm! So good!” She shut her eyes in satisfaction, a dab of yellow mustard clinging to the corner of her mouth.

And yet, I clearly saw…

Several faint cyan lines—like tiny blood vessels or sinews—rippled faintly beneath the fair skin of her cheek for just an instant. Then they quickly subsided.

Like a trick of the eye. But I knew it wasn’t.

My breath caught.

“Wait!” I practically lunged, snatching the hot dog from her hand. The movement was abrupt. Clara froze, staring at me, bewildered.

The vendor stopped too. He looked up. His gaze crawled over the counter and settled on my face. That gaze… was calm. Too calm. A calm that made my skin crawl. Like he was looking at an inanimate object.

“What’s wrong?” Clara asked, confused.

My mind raced. “There’s… there’s a bug.” I heard my own voice, dry and brittle. “I think I saw something moving in the hot dog.”

The vendor just kept staring at me, silent. Clara leaned in, peering carefully at the hot dog I’d taken, then at the one in her own hand with a bite already missing. “No there isn’t?” She tilted her head. The faint cyan veins beneath her neck’s skin pulsed subtly, now visible, now not. “You’re seeing things. Are you too tired?”

The vendor finally spoke, his voice flat. “Young man, my food is clean.”

Pressure. Invisible pressure radiating from that silent vendor. The surrounding noise seemed to hush for a heartbeat.

I drew a deep breath and forced an apologetic smile. “Maybe… maybe I saw wrong. Sorry.” I rubbed my temples. “Haven’t been sleeping well. Eyes playing tricks. Sorry, sir.”

I set the untouched hot dog gently back on the counter. The vendor said nothing more. He just retracted his stare and went back to flipping the “sausages” on his griddle.

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Clara didn’t scold me. She just looked at me, concerned. “Are you okay? You look pale. Want to find somewhere to sit down?”

The more normal she acted, the more she worried about me, the sharper and more shrill the alarm inside me shrieked.

I looked into her clear blue eyes. At the worry on her unclouded face. A terrible thought rose up, unstoppable:

Maybe… the problem isn’t this world. It’s me.

There was no reason for everyone else to be the “patient” and me the only “normal” one. Maybe this world was never the problem. Maybe the only problem… was “me” myself.

Dizziness washed over me. “Yeah… yeah. Let’s… find somewhere to sit.” I heard my own voice, weak.

We found a seat by the window. It was a dessert shop that still looked reasonably clean. White tablecloths. A few fake flowers in a glass vase. The window reflected the street outside—a distorted, kaleidoscopic smear of color and light.

I didn’t look at the menu. I just stared through the glass, studying the diners on the street.

The vendors were clearly wrong. Their movements were too fluid. Their smiles held at fixed angles, curves that never deviated a single degree. Their gazes were hollow. When they looked at customers, it was like looking at slabs of walking meat.

Yet the customers… they weren’t normal either. Maybe they’d once been ordinary people. Wearing the common work clothes or suits of this city, carrying briefcases, holding a child’s hand. But now their movements had become… too synchronized. The rhythm of their chewing. The cadence of their swallowing. All laced with an unnatural synchronicity.

Their chatter, their laughter—it all blended into the street’s background noise, becoming part of that cyclical soundtrack playing from the vast, warped “scratched gramophone.” They were being assimilated. Becoming permanent diners of this food street. Forever.

Now, on this entire block, the only person left with a clear, waking mind… was probably just me. And Clara.

Yet in Clara’s eyes, everything was perfectly normal and beautiful.

I tried a few more times, hinting at it with careful words. “Clara, don’t you think… this street feels a little different from before?”

She blinked. “No? It’s still bustling. The food seems even better!”

I even tried being slightly more direct. “The food… it looks a little…”

“A little what?” She looked at me curiously, then laughed. “You’re way too tense! Relax a bit!”

She just thought I was nervous because we were out alone together. That I was grasping for conversation or cracking an awkward joke.

A wave of helplessness hit me. And a coldness seeping from my very marrow. Sorrow… terror… confusion…

Just then, I suddenly spotted two girls walking in from the other end of the street. Their clothes jolted me with a shock of familiarity.

It was the standard Ashford Heights Modern High School uniform. Dark-checked knee-length skirts. White blouses. Small crimson bow-ties at the collar. That unmistakable air of meticulous propriety unique to an elite high school.

Were they my classmates? I had absolutely no memory of them. But that uniform style was unmistakable.

Clara noticed them too. “Oh? Are they from our school?” she murmured, a trace of camaraderie in her voice at seeing fellow students.

In Clara’s eyes, they looked just as they did to me — normal people. They walked with a lively bounce, their expressions animated, curiously eyeing the stalls on either side. A stark contrast to the gradually “synchronizing” crowds around them.

I watched them approach the very same hot dog cart from before. They stopped. They seemed drawn in by the sizzling sound and the tantalizing aroma.

The vendor looked up at them. Still with that calm, skin-crawling gaze.

Instinctively, I glanced at Clara. Those faint cyan marks beneath her cheek—traces of whatever had surfaced before—still hadn’t faded completely. Like subtle capillaries under the skin, just a shade lighter now.