Yu Sheng raised his head. Deep within the dense fog, he saw the monster crawling—or, more accurately, "flowing"—down along the glass curtain wall of the shopping mall.
It looked like a huge mass of "ink" given physical form. It covered the building, its surface constantly rippling and undulating like an unstable liquid surface. At the same time, limbs resembling arms and legs kept splitting off from the edges of that puddle of "liquid." Each one waved meaninglessly through the air before vanishing in the blink of an eye and retracting back into the pool of ink. Every so often, it opened structures resembling mouths, revealing sharp teeth and tongues within. Those mouths occasionally emitted muffled, low mutterings, but most of the time, they simply gorged themselves on the surrounding fog.
The liquid-like thing slowly wriggled down along the mall's outer wall, horrifying to behold.
After finally getting a clear look at it, Little Red Riding Hood let out a cry of alarm. "Ink Mark?!"
Yu Sheng immediately turned around. "What the hell? You know this monster?"
"Dangerous Entity, Ink Mark. Hostile toward living creatures. It attacks through split bodies." Little Red Riding Hood rapidly recited the information she knew, but the astonishment and confusion on her face only grew more intense. "But... this isn't right! Ink Mark should only manifest in the Otherworld's Lakeside Town. This place—there's no way this place is Lakeside Town?!"
Yu Sheng listened with a blank look, but this clearly wasn't the time to keep asking questions. The huge mass of "ink" flowing down the mall's outer wall had obviously noticed the "uninvited guests" in the square. In the blink of an eye, its edges began violently trembling and swelling, and countless slender "branches" extended in every direction from its constantly undulating outline.
The sight looked