Damn it, why were a bunch of barely grown kids discussing this stuff so enthusiastically? The freezing wind whipped around them, yet their voices remained heated, filled with a misplaced fervor that made the hair on the back of Jing Shu's neck stand up.
Did they seriously think she, a blooming young girl, didn't exist right there beside them? She sat just a few feet away, her silhouette framed by the dull, gray light of the post-apocalyptic sky, yet they spoke as if she were a piece of the landscape.
Didn't they know how to feel embarrassed?
Then again, why did Jing Shu know so much about this weird kind of knowledge anyway? Her mind was a crowded library of facts that felt increasingly out of place in this desolate world. As she listened to their clumsy theories, a strange, prickling sensation rose in her chest.
She even had the urge to correct the two of them. Her fingers curled slightly into her palms as she suppressed the technical corrections bubbling up in her throat.
It wasn't supposed to be done like that. It should be like this, and this... The mental images were sharp and vivid, a stark contrast to the bumbling conversation happening in front of her.
Jing Shu shook her head, the movement tight and controlled.
She was overthinking things. She forced the thoughts aside, letting the cold air clear the clutter from her mind.
Sure enough, after getting scolded once, both of them sighed in unison. The sound was heavy, a synchronized deflation of their previous excitement.
People always said that after the apocalypse, men could hug countless women left and right. The rumors painted a picture of lawless indulgence, a dark fantasy that seemed to flourish in the ruins of civilization.
Too bad they didn't have the qualifications... or the guts. They were just boys playing at being men, caught between the memory of the old world and the harsh reality of the new one.
How enviable those novel protagonists were. Those fictional heroes always seemed to have the world at their feet, navigating the end of times with a grace and luck that felt impossible here.
"What we are practicing isn't technique, it's loneliness." Jin Baba stopped talking after that. He stared out at the horizon, his expression turning somber, his bravado vanishing like mist.
What a pity. He had trained up all these abilities yet had nowhere to use them. It was suffocating, a localized pressure in his chest that seemed to grow with every silent minute.
Li Chenglong ignored the heavy atmosphere, focused entirely on gnawing his yogurt curd. His jaw worked rhythmically, the muscle in his cheek twitching with the effort.
Good heavens, he had never eaten anything this fragrant before. The scent was concentrated and sharp, cutting through the stagnant smell of damp earth and rot that clung to the air.
It had the pure richness of milk combined with the mellow acidity of fermentation, the flavor lingering endlessly on his take buds. He closed his eyes, savoring the way the taste bloomed across his tongue, momentarily forgetting the gray world around them.
Most importantly, the yogurt curd was unyielding, almost like vulcanized rubber in its durability.
A steamed bun that size would disappear in one bite, but after chewing the yogurt curd for half an hour, it would only shrink a tiny bit. It was the ultimate survival food, a dense block of calories that demanded patience.
If you got hungry, you could just pull it out and nibble on it. It was a constant, reliable companion in an unreliable world.
It stood up to the biting cold, filled your stomach, and lasted forever.
Absolutely perfect.
"It's so good! It's even tastier than the milk tea at my house," Li Chenglong mumbled, his voice muffled by the curd. "If only my family could make yogurt curds too. Sigh, too bad our cows haven't successfully bred recently, so we have barely got any milk. We are lucky if we even get a little every day."
As he spoke, his voice trailed off into a pathetic whine, his shoulders slumping.
"No, no, I can't act this pathetic."
Jin Baba immediately slowed down his eating and put on an arrogant expression. He straightened his back, lifting his chin to look down his nose at the mudslide sea.
"Sigh, I don't want yogurt curds. I want hotpot. When will I finally get to secretly eat hotpot again?"
The three of them were lost in their own thoughts. The silence that followed was not peaceful; it was heavy with the weight of things lost and things desired.
For a long while, nobody spoke.
The only sounds were the quiet smacking noises of eating and the distant, wet groans of the shifting mud.
Every so often, the steel rebar fishing rod twitched slightly. The metal vibrated against the stone where it was braced, a sharp, rhythmic sound.
Jing Shu raised an eyebrow, surprise flashing across her face. Her eyes sharpened, focusing on the dark, churning expanse before her.
It wasn't because a fish had bitten.
It was because she had discovered something strange in the mudslide sea.
She slowly closed her eyes, turning her focus inward. Her consciousness expanded, reaching out through the connection she shared with her swarm.
Countless tiny bugs linked together one after another, forming a living chain. They followed the fishing line deep into the mudslide below, their tiny carapaces scraping against the grit as they descended into the lightless depths.
Jing Shu frowned slightly, her lips thinning into a line of dissatisfaction. The feedback she received was murky, a kaleidoscope of gray and brown textures.
Splash.
The sound of the water was dull and thick. She stood up, her boots squelching in the muck, and tied over a dozen more ropes onto the steel rebar before throwing them into the mudslide sea.
Very quickly, the bugs followed along, spreading outward like a giant web. Through their thousands of tiny legs, she could feel the vibration of the mud, a low-frequency hum that vibrated in her very bones.
Jin Baba opened his mouth, his eyes wide as he watched her unorthodox methods.
"I have seriously never seen anyone fish like this before."
Li Chenglong immediately argued back, his loyalty flaring. "Sis is doing something important. You just don't understand."
Jing Shu ignored the two of them, her entire being focused on the mental map being drawn by her bugs.
She narrowed her eyes slightly as an image gradually formed in her mind. The connection was growing stronger, the darkness beneath the mud starting to resolve into shapes.
The bugs reflected everything happening beneath the mud, their collective senses acting as a sonar system.
This time, the image was much clearer than before, when she had only had a single line of vision. It was as if a light had been switched on in a dark room, revealing a hidden landscape.
One tiny white dot after another appeared in her awareness. They pulsed with a faint, ghostly light, scattered throughout the thick sludge like drowned stars.
This was the strange part.
Why were there weird white things inside the mudslide?
Jing Shu felt it was necessary to bring one of those white dots over and study it. Her curiosity was a sharp, nagging thing that wouldn't let her rest.
Naturally, she didn't need to fish them out manually. She had far more efficient tools at her disposal.
As long as the bugs touched the white dots through the fishing lines, she could instantly move them into her space, a seamless transition from the physical world to her own private domain.
But just as she directed the bugs toward one of the white dots, suddenly, a giant mouth rushed over. It was a blur of movement in the slow-moving mud, swallowing both the white dot and all the bugs in one bite.
At first, Jing Shu could still receive signals from them. She felt the sudden, wet warmth of a gullet and the frantic scratching of tiny legs.
But as the giant mouth started chewing, her vision quickly cut off. The connection snapped like a frayed wire.
All the bugs near the white dot died.
Jing Shu's expression darkened, a shadow passing over her features. She felt the loss of her swarm as a physical ache, a void in her mental map.
She immediately directed more bugs toward the other white dots, her jaw set in a grim line.
This time, she cautiously waited nearby like a hunter stalking prey. She slowed the advance of her swarm, keeping them hidden in the thickest parts of the silt.
Only then did she finally see clearly.
Near every single white dot in the mudslide sea, there was a sludge siren!
Normally, they remained completely motionless, their skin the exact color and texture of the surrounding filth. They blended perfectly into the mudslide itself, invisible even to the most discerning eye.
You couldn't see them at all. They were ghosts made of silt and malice.
Only when they opened their mouths to feed could you tell they were actually sludge sirens. The movement revealed the dark cavern of their throats and the gleam of their teeth.
In the blink of an eye, several white dots vanished.
All of them were eaten by the sludge sirens, along with the surrounding mud. The creatures were efficient, leaving nothing behind but a swirling eddy in the sludge.
So the sludge sirens didn't just eat mud.
They also ate these white dots.
That only made Jing Shu more curious. The mystery deepened, a cold knot forming in her stomach.
What exactly were those white dots?
Now that she had experience, she controlled even more bugs and sent them charging toward the white lights underground. She pushed her consciousness to the limit, managing dozens of living threads at once.
As long as they could touch the white lights, she would instantly transfer them into her space.
But Jing Shu had clearly underestimated the sludge sirens underground. They were faster and more territorial than she had anticipated.
It seemed every single white dot had a sludge siren guarding it. They were like sentinels protecting a treasure.
As soon as anything approached the white light, the sludge sirens would immediately swallow the white dot along with everything nearby in one bite.
The most horrifying part was their teeth.
They had six rows of gear-like teeth, a mechanical nightmare of bone and enamel. They functioned like a giant blender spinning inside their mouths without any blind spots, grinding everything that entered into a fine paste.
Originally, Jing Shu thought her apocalypse-evolved bugs feared nothing. They were hardy, resilient creatures that had survived the collapse of the old world.
At the very least, they should have survived inside the monsters' mouths long enough to touch the white dots and complete their mission.
Unexpectedly, the sludge sirens' saliva was actually corrosive mucus. It sizzled against the carapaces of her bugs, dissolving them before they could even find their footing.
Jing Shu's face turned ugly. She could almost feel the burning sensation herself, a phantom pain echoing through her connection to the swarm.
After several attempts, she still failed to retrieve even a single white dot. Each failure felt like a slap in the face.
Instead, she had lost several beloved bug generals. These were her elite, the most intelligent and responsive of her swarm, and now they were gone, dissolved in a monster's belly.
What a huge loss.
"Just how many sludge sirens are down there anyway...?"
A chill crawled across Jing Shu's skin, a cold ripple that had nothing to do with the wind.
The feeling was like floating alone on a tiny boat at sea while countless man-eating sharks circled beneath the water, their dark fins cutting the surface just out of sight.
Even someone as powerful as Jing Shu felt her scalp go numb. The scale of the threat was staggering, a hidden army waiting just beneath her feet.
She hadn't thought much about it before. She had seen them as pests, obstacles to be cleared.
But now that she knew the entire area beneath the building was packed with dense hordes of sludge sirens, her mood instantly worsened.
It even made her feel uncomfortable, a physical restlessness that made her want to pace.
Looks like the group that attacked the building before had only been a tiny fraction of them. They had been the scouts, the outliers.
There were far more circling beneath the building, a vast, churning mass of hunger.
But the building itself had constantly been moving. It was a massive structure, drifting through the wasteland.
So what about the sludge sirens?
Were they moving too?
Or...
A thought suddenly appeared in Jing Shu's mind, dark and intrusive.
Then she felt it was far too twisted. It was a nightmare scenario that defied logic.
Could it be that these sludge sirens had never moved at all?
Had there always been this many of them here, carpeted across the earth?
If that was true...
That was terrifying. It meant they weren't being followed; they were simply passing over an endless sea of monsters.
"Sis, you don't look too good. Are you cold? Maybe we should head back. It's getting chilly outside." Li Chenglong looked worried, his eyes scanning her pale face.
Jin Baba shivered too, pulling his coat tighter. The arrogance had drained from his face, replaced by a genuine discomfort.
It really was cold. The temperature was dropping fast as the gray sun dipped lower.
Recently, he had completely stopped caring about appearances. He wore every military coat his uncle managed to get him, looking like a bulky, green mountain of fabric.
"Let's go back."
Jing Shu nodded and quickly reeled in the steel rebar fishing rod while recalling all the bugs underground. She could feel them retreating, a soft vibration in the earth as the survivors returned to her.
The three headed back toward the building, their footsteps heavy and echoing.
Jing Shu turned around to look at the black mudslide sea behind them. The surface was deceptive, appearing still and lifeless despite the horrors lurking below.
"I will come back and investigate properly after I'm more prepared."
Suddenly, she had a feeling. It was a sudden intuition, a spark of certainty in the dark.
Those white dots might actually be treasures.
They might even be similar to dimensions.
The upgrade path for her space was no longer about simply practicing with the Rubik's Cube anymore. That had reached its limit, the progress slowing to a crawl.
It now required absorbing massive amounts of energy.
And that energy was very likely energy from different dimensions.
"Maybe... this is an opportunity."
But just as the three returned to the building, the lobby was already in complete chaos. Voices were raised in anger, and people were pushing against one another in a frantic, disorganized crowd.
Jing Shu originally wanted to go see what all the commotion was about, her hand resting on the hilt of her knife.
Unexpectedly, the source of the commotion was herself.
Because someone wanted to search Jing Shu's villa.