Night fell.
The wind over the sea began to pick up.
The searchlights on the four ships swept across the sea and the dozen or so wrecked boats along the shore, then turned toward the charred-black forest on the island. The light was clearly bright, but once it reached the shore, it always seemed to be covered by a layer of gray, illuminating everything indistinctly.
From a distance,
it really did look like a group of people standing at the edge of the forest.
The patrol teams had changed shifts twice. Wang Peng had just finished checking the guard arrangements with a Special Ability User named Chen Hu when he saw Jiang Qiao step onto the deck. He was about to say something when his gaze suddenly froze.
"Hm?"
"Something's wrong."
"Are there people standing in that forest?"
The several team members standing nearby immediately followed his gaze toward the shore.
The charred-black trees that had looked crooked and twisted at dusk had changed in outline beneath the night sky. The more one looked at those gnarled branches, the more they resembled human arms.
The charred, cracked trunks looked like the bodies of dead people.
Even the black, lumpy growths at the tips of the branches increasingly resembled human heads.
With their heads tilted to one side and their arms stretched out, they stood stiffly where the forest had once been. They looked like a vast crowd of dead people waving at them.
"Fuck."
"That's creepy."
Chen Hu was badly startled.
"Don't panic." Wang Peng picked up his binoculars and looked for several seconds before frowning. "It is a little creepy. These strange trees actually turn into people at night."
Through the binoculars, he could see clearly.
The forest was still there.
But the trees were "covered" with "people" wearing