I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood
Chapter 301: The Brain Could Not Comprehend

All motion stopped.

The texture of their skin faded. The wrinkles in their clothes smoothed out. The luster in their hair vanished. The entire food street—this living, gargantuan aberration—had finally, at last, turned its attention here. Toward this one foreign body. The only one still awake.

Trying to disrupt its feeding.

The diners I was staring at—their bodies began to stretch. As though invisible hands had seized them by both ends and were pulling, hard.

Their skin tone shifted from pallid to a filth-tinged grayish-white. And their faces… those blank faces. A seam split open down the center.

The seam widened, blooming into a writhing, brutal maw. Their bodies went soft, collapsing—losing all skeletal support—like squirming…

Maggots. Human-shaped maggots.

The temperature inside the dessert parlor plummeted. Hell. This place was hell.

I stood in the center of hell, gripping Clara’s wrist.

And the most terrifying thing of all… I turned my head and looked at the girl I’d fought so desperately to protect.

Clara’s body was trembling violently. Her pupils had dilated from extreme shock. But the emotion in her eyes… it wasn’t fear. At least, not entirely fear. It was mostly confusion. An incomprehension beyond her grasp.

“W-What… is this?” she murmured, her voice quavering, yet laced with a strained effort to stay calm. “Some kind of… new street performance? A tech show? An immersive horror theater?”

Her brain was frantically searching for a rational explanation for everything she couldn’t understand. Even if the explanation sounded just as absurd.

I stared at her pale face, at those eyes filled with bewilderment and the desperate attempt to comprehend.

What I felt wasn’t anger. It was despair. Profound, helpless despair.

Even if I threw my life on the line to shatter the false peace, even if I ripped the bloody truth open and shoved it in front of her eyes…

I still couldn’t wake her from the “normalcy” she’d woven for herself.

……

But even so. Even if it was pointless. Even if she would never truly understand.

I still… wanted her to live. To survive.

“RUN!!!”

I roared that final word, pouring every ounce of strength I had left into dragging her forward, smashing aside a dining table of solidified maggot-people and charging for the dessert parlor’s exit!

In my peripheral vision, the scene behind us twisted and flowed like melting oil paint. Colors turned putrid. Lines lost their shape. The entire street was “waking up,” reaching for us with filthy, viscous tendrils.

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I dragged Clara, sprinting through this collapsing reality, this waking nightmare.

The ground underfoot turned soft and slick, like treading on rotting viscera. The surrounding air grew thick as glue, trying to bog down our every step. But I couldn’t stop.

I held Clara’s wrist in a death grip. It had to be hurting her, my hold, but this time she didn’t struggle.

She just ran with me on pure instinct, her face a tangled mess of profound confusion and primal, bodily terror.

Using the “truth” only I could see, I dodged the densest—and thus most dangerous—clusters of the crowd, veering around several toothed tentacles sprouting straight out of the ground.

I saw the boundary of the street.

To normal eyes, it was just a street corner connecting to another unremarkable road. But in my eyes, right now, it was draped in a thin gray-white mist.

Behind that mist was the light and shadow of a world that was, relatively, still normal.

“There!”

I pointed at the mist, practically dragging Clara, burning the last reserves of my strength as I charged toward that direction!

The hissing, the squelching, that invisible dragging force—it all grew stronger. Like countless freezing, slimy hands grabbing at my ankles, my back. That layer of gray-white mist was right there, right in front of me.

I shut my eyes, pulled Clara, and lunged!

……

No impact. Just a fleeting cold dampness brushing over our skin. Then my feet hit solid ground. We’d burst through the mist’s boundary.

Momentum carried us stumbling forward several more paces. I nearly fell. I forced myself upright, gasping, my lungs burning, my heart hammering against my ribs.

Instinctively, I turned my head back to look behind us.

Behind us… everything had returned to normal.

That food street we’d always called Firefly Lane was still brightly lit. Soft halos of light illuminated the bustling crowds. The aroma of food faintly drifted through the air.

Laughter, chatter, the shouts of vendors… it all wove together into a lively, vibrant tapestry of sound.

As if that hellish scene just now… had been nothing more than a nightmare. Too vivid. Too real. A hallucination that only I had seen.

Only that thin, nearly invisible gray-white mist clinging to the street’s entrance seemed to serve as a silent reminder.

And in that dazed, half-tranced state, I thought I saw… deep within that hazy mist, at the very center of the food street… two human silhouettes still standing there.

They hadn’t moved. They were just standing there, quiet. As if waiting for something. Or maybe it was just a trick of the mist.

“Who the hell are you…?” I whispered, my voice so hoarse it was barely audible.

……

“Hah… hah… hah…” Heavy, ragged gasps sounded right beside me.

Clara had finally caught her breath. She was bent over, hands braced on her knees, sucking in air in huge gulps, her face still frighteningly pale. Her blonde bangs were plastered to her forehead with sweat.

Only after a long moment did she manage to straighten up, leaning against the cold, rough brick wall, and look at me.

The terror hadn’t faded. The confusion had deepened. Mingled now with the bewildered relief of survival.

And maybe—just maybe—a trace of something else. Some faint admiration for the string of mad things I’d just done?

“That… that was so realistic,” she murmured, her voice still weak. “The… the lighting effects. And those… deformed dummies...”

“Which immersive art exhibit was that? Or some horror-themed experience project?” She forced a strained, trembling smile for me. “That was… that was terrifying.”

“But… the way you grabbed me and ran…” she added. “That was kind of cool,” she said.

I gave her a wan smile back. My heart sank into a frozen abyss.

I had saved her body. Dragged her, by sheer force, out of that living street. But her mind… her mind was still locked tight inside the cage of cognition she’d built for herself.

I stood before her, just looking at her. Looking at that innocent smile plastered on her face. A loneliness and confusion I had never known before drowned me completely.

My mouth opened. It wasn’t an art exhibit. It was all real. This world is broken.

But all the words jammed in my throat. Not a single one could come out.

I’d saved her again. And she would never understand me.

I couldn’t guarantee… that the next time some aberration just as bad, or worse, came for her… I’d be able to pull her out of it. Like today.

In silence, I pulled my gaze away. Slowly, I lifted my head. I stared up at the night sky overhead, tinted a washed-out lead-gray by the city’s lights.

This world… my world…

What in God’s name is happening to it?