Chapter 103: Inheritance
After bidding farewell to Fu Xuesheng, Lu Jinzhao closed the door.
She approached the workbench and placed the already air-dried human skin on the surface.
Probing it, Lu Jinzhao picked up the human skin and gently placed it on her arm. In the next second, the human skin, which had been completely air-dried, suddenly came alive and spontaneously adhered to her skin.
But before the human skin could do anything, Lu Jinzhao immediately took it away.
She confirmed that even though this thing appeared completely dead, she still could not relax her vigilance even a little.
“This thing wouldn’t have any origin with you, would it?”
Lu Jinzhao took out the parchment and placed it next to the human skin. From the outside, the difference between the two was quite significant.
The parchment appeared somewhat casual, with a rough and heavy exterior, while the human skin was obviously much more refined.
[Look closely, does it? We’re not the same species! What origin could it have with me?]
The parchment clearly felt that Lu Jinzhao’s words were dragging it down. It had been silent since entering the station, but at this moment, it couldn’t hold back.
“Oh~” Lu Jinzhao let out a meaningful “oh.”
“One parchment, one human skin, both skins, so how are they not the same species?” Lu Jinzhao said deliberately.
[?]
[If you don’t understand, shut up!]
The parchment was clearly somewhat angry, but it didn’t reveal anything more.
Lu Jinzhao put away the parchment, lost in thought.
The parchment’s reaction was a bit strange.
She remembered at the funeral home, during her transaction with the wooden box, the parchment’s somewhat exasperated and obviously disdainful attitude toward the wooden box.
But when she deliberately compared it to the human skin, the parchment did not show the same emotion as toward the wooden box.
In its understanding, this human skin, or rather, the thing represented by this human skin, was not simple?
At least, the parchment wouldn’t think it was lowly, but there was also no particular emphasis in its words.
The probing yielded mixed results, good and bad. Lu Jinzhao didn’t hesitate much and took out the bell she had brought from the funeral home.
For this bell, the train’s warning was that it could not be worn for more than ten minutes.
Lu Jinzhao was guessing what would happen if it exceeded ten minutes, and also thinking, if inside this platform, she wore it and it caused some damage to her body, then when she returned to the train and repaired the harm from those side effects, would the wear time limit for the next platform reset to ten minutes?
These all needed to be tested in practice to know.
However, the bell’s effect was very significant. Using it before any danger occurred seemed a bit wasteful, but Lu Jinzhao had no reluctance at all.
She didn’t even complete today’s mission first but planned to try it first.
After placing the prepared tools nearby, Lu Jinzhao tied the bell around her ankle.
The instant the red rope closed, a chilling aura instantly spread from her ankle throughout her body.
At this moment, Lu Jinzhao felt as if she had become a corpse, pushed into the cold storage of the morgue.
Her body became stiff, her thinking unaffected. She could clearly feel that her heartbeat had stopped.
Probably, the flow of blood had also stopped.
Her body temperature was probably already at corpse level.
She was indeed slowly “dying.”
Lu Jinzhao didn’t act immediately; she even had the leisure to stand in place and think.
“Is this the feeling of using other supernatural props?”
Compared to the wooden box, the bell at the start of use had almost no discomfort, except for the cold.
But she knew this was just the feeling after putting on the bell. Now, her body had indeed stopped most living people’s physiological activities. Once she took off the bell, her body couldn’t possibly return to the state before putting it on.
She no longer delayed and picked up the human skin from the table, sticking it on her arm.
The human skin showed no reaction.
“It’s not interested in me, which means my body now is indeed no longer that of a living person.”
Confirming this, Lu Jinzhao picked up the knife and aimed it at her thigh. She prepared to remove the human skin from the front of her left thigh to use as a “substitute.”
She couldn’t extract the bones from her body here, but for human skin, at least she couldn’t use the skin from that corpse.
While stripping the skin, Lu Jinzhao thought about whether she could chop off a finger as “bone,” but after thinking, she rejected it.
Making a shadow puppet was a delicate task; she had to keep her fingers.
Soon, a complete piece of human skin was removed from her leg. The process wasn’t pretty; she didn’t have Ji Xiangchen’s skill, resulting in her thigh now looking quite flesh and blood blurred. But fortunately, because most of her body’s functions had died, not much blood flowed out, and she didn’t feel much pain.
However, the human skin stripped from her body was much more normal compared to the skin from her master, and she chose to strip first because she had anticipated this. She needed to process her own skin first, giving it time to air-dry.
Even though Lu Jinzhao’s actions were quick and she didn’t spare herself much care, by the time she finished stripping, eight minutes had already passed.
Fortunately, this was within her expectations.
And at this moment, when Lu Jinzhao looked at her body, she had already noticed some fine corpse spots in various places.
She quickly untied the bell. Even with preparation, the instant the red rope left her ankle, her body instantly became uncontrollable.
It wasn’t her limbs going soft; on the contrary, her limbs became extremely stiff. She knew this was probably “rigor mortis.”
She could hardly control her body to make any movement. The bone-chilling cold made her lips tremble, her heartbeat extremely slow, and her breathing the same.
She now knew the worst side effect of this supernatural item.
After use, for the next two hours, she could hardly move a single finger!
She could only lie on the ground like this, like a corpse, waiting for the blood to gradually flow through her body and bring back some body temperature.
Fortunately, during these two hours, she was probably no different from a corpse. The human skin wasn’t interested in her, so it didn’t jump onto her.
When her body temperature warmed slightly and she could finally control her body, Lu Jinzhao discovered another terrible aspect of the side effect.
Her body felt as if it had suffered some irreparable damage—heavy, fatigued, like a car whose lifespan had reached its limit, with every part’s components wailing. Merely starting to move looked like it was about to fall apart.
Her skin color now was as pale as a corpse. Even though she had regained mobility, her body temperature was still terribly low. She tried to exert force but found she couldn’t muster much strength.
The skinned area on her thigh still hadn’t bled much, enough to show that her body now had not fully recovered to that of a living person.
“In this platform, this doesn’t seem like a bad thing.”
