Fang Shenyan had no idea why Ji Li would ask such a question. He simply watched the rain fall from the sky into his eyes, blurring his vision.
The sky, thick with dark clouds and utterly gloomy, hung low overhead, making it hard to breathe.
On the rooftops of the shops, flesh grew chaotically over the white skeletons, then brutally degenerated again, like a malfunctioning machine.
He was already at the second stage, only one step away from the first. He knew this was because of his arrival, and because of Ji Li's actions.
They had come this far, yet Ji Li had asked a strange question that seemed completely unrelated.
But those words truly brought Fang Shenyan to a halt. His left hand was still dripping blood. It flowed into the water on the ground, quickly diluting and dissolving as though it had never existed.
Yet the very real pain told him that none of this was fake.
"Why... would you ask that?"
Fang Shenyan would not turn the question back on Ji Li, because he knew perfectly well that Ji Li was deliberately maintaining a state between the abnormalities' existence and disappearance. Keeping that state intact would be extremely difficult.
He tried to use this rare stretch of quiet to think the question through.
Ever since they had arrived at Tianming Bridge, everything had gone smoothly. At the very least, the logic behind each change in the situation had flowed smoothly, with nothing suspicious about it.
Except for Mei Sheng inexplicably becoming the abnormality of the first stage.
The bones on the rooftops grew increasingly chaotic. A third of them had already vanished, while the remaining two-thirds still struggled and moved.
They all stared at the exposed Fang Shenyan with vicious eyes, and some were beginning to stir.