The Tentacle Monster I Brought Home Always Says It Wants to Fix My Bones at Night - Chapter 9

Chapter 9

My memories of what happened next are fragmented.

I only remember that after the lab completely shut down, alarms blared throughout the entire building.

Among the subjects who had been released, some called for an ambulance, some rushed upstairs to report to the police, and others uploaded the secret footage they had recorded along the way.

Su Jingyao was taken away on the spot by the arriving police and regulatory authorities.

Xu Yichuan tried to escape in the chaos, but he was dragged out of his office as well.

Deep Tide Biotech hit the trending searches overnight, with each headline uglier than the last.

Illegal human experimentation, emotional sampling, workplace deception, and the disappearance of a project lead.

As the whistleblower and a key witness, I was kept in the hospital for three days of observation.

The doctor said I was suffering from chronic sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and high anxiety; my body was on the verge of total exhaustion.

He was very serious when he said it, but for some reason, I felt like laughing.

So, I really was about to break.

It wasn’t me being dramatic.

It wasn’t something I could just push through.

I was truly on the brink of falling apart.

On the day I was discharged, the police brought me a sealed evidence box.

“This is the residue we picked up next to you at the scene.”

“The test results are currently unclassifiable. If you’re afraid of it, we can keep it in our custody for you.”

Through the transparent lid, I saw a single strand of black filament lying there quietly.

It was only about as long as a pinky finger.

It looked exactly like Motiao did when I first picked it up-shriveled into a tiny ball.

My fingers trembled, but I pulled the box into my arms anyway.

“I’ll take it with me.”

When I got home, the house was terrifyingly empty.

There were no tentacles to turn off the lights for me, no phone automatically popping up meal recommendations, and no icy sensation slowly coiling around my neck and shoulders in the middle of the night.

I originally thought I would finally be able to get a good night’s sleep.

But that entire week, I suffered from insomnia every night.

I always felt like something was missing from the side of my bed.

It was as if someone who always dragged me back to the land of the living at night had suddenly vanished.

The company collapsed soon after.

Xu Yichuan was fired. To distance themselves from the scandal, the company sent me a compensation payment that wasn’t exactly small.

The HR representative spent the entire conversation hinting that I should “keep a low profile if I wanted to keep working in this industry.”

Looking at the notification for the bank transfer, I felt a wave of unprecedented exhaustion.

The dignity I had nearly killed myself for over the past six months was ultimately bought with hush money from a scandal.

I submitted my resignation that same day.

When my mother found out, she berated me over the phone for being inconsiderate.

“Your brother is getting married soon! If you quit now, what is the family supposed to do?”

I held the phone and stayed silent for a long time.

In the past, every time she cried or pressured me, I would soften.

But that day, the only thing flashing through my mind was the last thing Pei Yuming said to me.

Don’t just endure the pain anymore.

So, for the first time, I calmly interrupted her.

“Mom, I’m not an ATM.”

“From now on, my money goes toward taking care of myself first.”

It went quiet on the other end.

It was a silence that felt like a boundary being drawn between mother and daughter for the very first time.

After hanging up, I sat on the sofa for a long while.

As evening fell, a very soft tapping sound suddenly came from the evidence box.

I jerked my head up.

That strand of filament in the box moved slightly.

Like a tiny finger that had just woken up, it slowly reached out and touched the wall of the box.