Stranger Danger

Chapter 550: Stomach of the Finger Eating Grandma

The answer was simple. He just needed to steal one. Luckily for him, stealing was his bread and butter, and the Buddhist Hall of Joy did not care who entered their halls so long as they had an invitation letter.

Things had gone exactly as expected. It took him little trouble to obtain his first invitation letter. Then, Sixth Mouse had a genius idea.

Why don’t I steal more invitation letters and sell them?

A lot of people came today to attend Joy Bodhisattva’s Trueman feast and listen to her sermon. This was doubly true for those warriors who were stuck in a bottleneck and were looking to achieve a breakthrough.

However, it wasn’t easy to sneak past the Buddhist Hall of Joy’s defenses. The fact that no one had succeeded at slipping in was the proof of that. Despair was slowly but surely encroaching on these people.

Now then—what would happen if someone were to sell them an invitation letter?

They would pay anything to have it, of course.

He would become a much richer man, and he would still be able to enter the Buddhist Hall of Joy. It was killing two birds with one stone.

Even better, this environment was perfect for slipping away. An ordinary thief could have slipped away with little to no trouble, much less a professional like him. No one would ever be able to catch him.

And so Sixth Mouse kicked off his lucrative venture, and at first, everything went exactly as planned. It took him little to no trouble to steal a handful of invitation letters and sell them to desperate buyers, and it wasn’t long before his Nature’s Shell was filled with goods and money.

However, Sixth Mouse soon realized that the stealing part of his plan wasn’t efficient. Even before he could try anything, he must decide if his target owned an invitation letter at all, and if they were weak enough that he could steal from them without repercussions. It took too much brain power so to speak.

Another genius idea came to him then. He could just hang out at the one place where all letter holders would appear: the entrance to the Buddhist Hall of Joy! Every time someone presented their letter, he would steal it from right under their noses!

Of course, he wasn’t stupid enough to steal indiscriminately. He only picked on the weaklings. Most of these people were either juniors of a major faction who had received the invitation letters from their seniors, or people who got dogshit lucky.

He wasn’t afraid of offending these people or the factions behind them because of one simple reason: they had to find out who was the one who stole their invitation letter first, and he, Sixth Mouse, was oh-so-sneaky. Even if they found out that it was him, it still wasn’t a problem. Besides stealing, he was an expert in hiding and escaping as well. If worse came to worst, he could simply duck into a forgotten corner and sit out the manhunt.

And who in the world could find a mouse determined to stay put in its hole?

Finally, Sixth Mouse was a greedy man, but he was a greedy man who knew that overdoing something was folly. The Trueman feast would begin tomorrow, so he needed to finish processing the invitation letters he currently possessed now.

Stealing from the young man was his final heist. He would have stopped sooner, but the young man looked so innocent he probably would have lost his invitation letter to other thieves and robbers, so Sixth Mouse decided that he might as well cut his misery short.

This has been a most profitable heist. When this Trueman feast is over, I’m going to pamper myself like an emperor!

Sixth Mouse was imagining all kinds of ways to spend his newfound wealth when suddenly, he realized that something was amiss. Specifically, he noticed that many people were looking behind his back. When he succumbed to his curiosity and looked back, his mind abruptly stuttered to a dead stop.

There was no one behind him. To be more accurate, it looked like an invisible hand had pushed the crowd to both sides of the street. At the center of the street was a young man looking like he was taking a stroll in the park and walking straight toward him.

Their eyes met, and the young man blinked at him. The corners of his mouth were slowly turning up as well.

Every hair on Sixth Mouse’s body stood on end immediately. He recognized the young man, and he recognized the fact that he needed to escape now before it was too late.

Unfortunately, he had just twitched a muscle when he caught the young man rapping the space beside his knuckles out of the corner of his eyes. His consciousness immediately grew blurry, and he came to a stop instead of running away as he originally planned.

Ye Qing casually walked up to Sixth Mouse and grabbed him by the shoulder. When the thief stole his invitation letter, he immediately retaliated by attaching a wisp of demonic thought to his person. From that point onward, there was no way for the thief to escape him no matter how fast or sneaky he was.

Suddenly, Ye Qing felt something disappearing from his grip. Sixth Mouse had somehow disappeared and left only his shirt behind.

“Huh. Interesting,” commented Ye Qing with a raised eyebrow. The fact that this thief managed to break out of his “Heavenly Demon Captures The Soul” proved that his spirit was pretty strong.

The escape was only temporary, however. It didn’t even take half a second for Ye Qing to lock his gaze onto the guy once more.

To his surprise, the thief had somehow gotten a new set of clothes. His appearance looked drastically different from before as well. If his demonic thought hadn’t been attached to the guy this whole time, there was a real chance he could have lost him completely.

Turning a little more serious, Ye Qing gently planted a foot on the ground and caused the entire street to shake soundlessly. Caught off guard, most people lost their footing and stumbled uncontrollably toward the two sides of the street.

During this time, Ye Qing blurred out of existence and reappeared behind the thief. Then, he reached out to grab his shoulder.

Meanwhile, Sixth Mouse suddenly discovered that the air around him had grown as thick as sludge. Face turning ugly, he gritted his teeth and let out a growl.

The next moment, all five fingers on his left hand abruptly exploded into bits. Not a moment sooner, the blood transformed into a giant maw and swallowed Sixth Mouse whole.

The maw disappeared immediately after that. Just like that, Sixth Mouse escaped once more.

“He’s quite the slippery one, isn’t he? No wonder he dared to do such a thing!”

Ye Qing clenched his fist, causing a loud pop that sounded like a thunderclap of the biggest lightning. Everyone in the vicinity clutched their ears in pain and staggered on their feet.

A moment later, the invisible space in front of Ye Qing began to ripple. It grew more and more rapid until a strange flesh bag abruptly popped into existence.

The bag was made of blood and meat. He could see blood vessels crawling all over the thing and scarlet blood dripping from the bottom. It was also expanding and contracting rhythmically almost like it was a human heart or something.

The next moment, the flesh bag spat something on the ground. It was a man covered in slimy, sticky fluid. Some people failed to get out of the way in time and were covered in the slime as well.

“BLAAAAAARGHHHHH!!!”

As soon as the smell hit, everyone began throwing up the contents of their stomach like crazy. Even Ye Qing was frowning a little as well. The slime smelled like vomit, but a dozen times worse than normal. It was disgusting to say the least.

The man the flesh bag had spat out was Sixth Mouse, of course. Right now, he was covered in slime and still bleeding from the stump that was his left hand. It was both a sorry and nauseating sight.

The man couldn’t care less about his current state, however. He immediately climbed to his feet and ran toward the crowd again.

Regret, shock and fear like never before was clutching him in a death grip. He had never encountered such a terrifying young man in his life. None of his escape tactics were working, and even his trump card, the flesh bag, had been dismantled with ease.

The flesh bag was called the Stomach of the Finger Eating Grandma, a Soulstealer-class Strange Artifact. As its name implied, it was a Strange Artifact forged from the stomach of the Stranger known as the Finger Eating Grandma.

The Finger Eating Grandma was a Phenomenon-class Stranger with a head as tiny as a fist, and a stomach as big as a pregnant woman. She enjoyed feeding on human fingers, and every time it was the middle of the month, she would sneak into a human’s house and feast on their fingers. However, the human would not notice the loss of their fingers until they bled to death.

The reason the Finger Eating Grandma was classified as Phenomenon-class was due to her potent spatial traversal ability. She could hide herself in a different space and avoid detection from most people.

The Stomach of the Finger Eating Grandma was a pocket space that could accommodate far more things than a normal human’s stomach. Just like the Stranger it was created from, it too possessed the ability to traverse through space and conceal itself. Its wielder could use it to hide themselves in its pocket space and temporarily disappear from the real world.