Chapter 364: Adam's Acorn

Hold on a second, something doesn't feel quite right...

Upon entering the third inmate's psychic world, Adam was just about to inspect the environment around him when he suddenly noticed that something felt a little off.

He looked down to find that his entire body was covered in a layer of fur, and he felt something dragging along behind him. He turned around to discover that there was a long and bushy tail attached to his backside.

Did I fuse with something?

Adam's initial thought was that he had perhaps inadvertently fused with one of his anomalies, but that clearly wasn't the case, and he didn't have any anomalies that looked like this anyway.

Hence, there seemed to only be one possible explanation for this drastic change in his appearance.

Have I... mutated?

Adam looked down at his own hands, and in order to gauge his current appearance, he barged into a nearby house.

Once again, he had arrived in a small town, one that was populated by many residents. After breaking into a house, he made his way into the bathroom, where he was granted by the sight of a squirrel face in the mirror.

I did mutate!

Adam was finally able to confirm his psychic state upon seeing his current face.

Finally, he had mutated just like all other adapters who had suffered too much pain and adversity.

He didn't know when this mutation process had begun, but if he had to guess, it had most likely commenced after the deaths of Hook and Nie Yiyi. Due to the urgency of the situation at the time, he hadn't noticed the process setting in, and he had noticed that something wasn't quite right after his incarceration.

He had become more and more aloof to human lives, and his thought processes and actions were beginning to bear a closer and closer resemblance to those of the three psychic mutants.

There had been precursors to all of this, but he had never paid those signs any heed.

Even if he had taken notice, he would've been powerless to do anything.

He still had to continue with his mission, and that would've inevitably taken him further and further down this dark path.

He simply had no choice.

I didn't think I was already this abnormal.

For some unknown reason, the psychic bodies of the majority of psychic mutants took on an animalistic form.

Examples of this included Mice King, the three psychic mutants, Diana, etc.

This wasn't the case for all psychic mutants, but the majority of them had animalistic traits.

Perhaps it was because humans were quite closely related to animals, or perhaps it was because certain traits in animals gave them a strong correlation with mutated humans.

Looking at his own reflection in the mirror, Adam realized that he had become a very obsessive person, and his obsessive nature had only been further and further exacerbated in his plight to uncover the truth about his own past.

He was telling himself every single day that it didn't matter if he died, but he had to complete everything that he had set out to do before he met his demise.

At this point, he no longer feared anything aside from dying before he completed all of his objectives, and this fear was so intense that it made him unable to sleep on some nights.

This obsessive nature was something commonly seen in squirrels. They were willing to dedicate their entire lives to the pursuit of an apricorn, and that obsessive pursuit was very much like the one that Adam was undertaking in his life.

This obsession was what had ultimately led to Adam's mutation.

This isn't a bad thing. At the very least, my thought processes are still clear, and as a psychic mutant, I'll have better psychic recovery.

Not only was Adam not horrified or abhorred by his own reflection, he found it to be rather adorable.

This is what I've always been, and it's time for me to find my apricorn.

With that in mind, Adam turned and departed from the room.

After returning to the town, he invoked Nun and Ogress once again, instructing them to gather information for him.

The host of the psychic world that Adam had invaded was an inmate that everyone in Darvaza Prison referred to as the pig farmer, and this nickname stemmed from his past history.

The inmate in question was the owner of a small farm. In contrast with Sweetgum Town, which only had a single farm, the land in the town that the pig farmer lived in didn't have a single unified farm. Instead, there were many families that owned plots of land, and none of those plots of private farmland were particularly large, but they were big enough to sustain those families.

In contrast with the majority of farmers in the town, who liked to grow corn and raise cattle, the pig farmer preferred to raise pigs instead, and he had his own supply chain.

Southeast Asians had a special preference for pork, and pork dishes were very popular in many Asian restaurants. Hence, after securing this supply chain, the pig farmer had begun raising pigs on his farm.

Pigs were a type of animal that could eat virtually anything, including fruits, grains, hay, meat, and bones.

According to the information that Adam had obtained on the pig farmer, he had a habit of killing teenagers around 14 years of age whenever he delivered his pork to Sandrise City, and he would feed the bodies of his victims to his pigs.

It was the twisted nature of his crimes that had led to him becoming a target on Adam's list.

It didn't take long before Nun tracked down his farm, but it quickly noticed that something wasn't quite right.

Upon his arrival, Adam also noticed something rather strange.

There was a young man in the farm, and judging from the bone structure of his face, he seemed to be a direct relative of the pig farmer. In fact, there was a very good chance that he was the pig farmer's son.

The young man appeared to have only been around 20 years of age, and his face still retained some boyish features, but he was very tall, standing at at least 195 centimeters. His tall frame was also quite strong and muscular, but unfortunately, he was mentally handicapped.

After possessing one of the town's residents and tracking down the pig farmer's residence, Nun had found the pig farmer's son in the house, sitting by the side of a bed with a dazed expression.

There was a young teen on the bed who had clearly just been assaulted, and both their face and their sensitive regions were severely mangled, to the point that they were completely unrecognizable.

Meanwhile, the pig farmer's son was spouting a bunch of completely unintelligible gibberish at the corpse.

At this moment, the pig farmer wasn't home, but he was on the way back home. Ogress had already spotted him driving into the town in his truck.

The timeline doesn't seem to add up... Was this one of his victims from his last trip to Sandrise City? But the body's degree of decomposition doesn't seem to be severe enough.

Adam didn't have much time to think about the situation, and he quickly found a hiding place to conceal himself.

Before long, the sound of a rumbling truck rang out outside, heralding the pig farmer's return.

The first thing that he did upon his return was to enter his son's room, where he immediately caught sight of the body on the bed.

"How many times do I have to tell you? Stop doing this!"

The pig farmer was furious at the sight of the body on the bed, and he slapped his son on the head while swearing incessantly.

Even so, he still carried the body down from the bed before dragging it into the pigsty.

Inside the pigsty was a huge mixer for making animal feed, and normally, things like pumpkin, hay, sweet potatoes, and corn were thrown in there to be blended into pig feed.

However, on this day, the pig farmer was going to throw the body into the mixer, but right as he was about to do so, Adam appeared.