An ordinary day.
The post-Christmas sunlight carried a touch of laziness as it filtered through sparse clouds and fell over the fields outside town.
"If things could stay like this forever, that wouldn't be so bad."
Scarecrow stood quietly on the ridge between the fields, its straw body wrapped in a faded homespun shirt. Two black pebbles had been set into its hollow eye sockets, yet it could always precisely track Li Dan's every movement.
Li Dan turned to look at the silent figure and called out with a smile, "Don't you think so, Xiao Dao?"
Scarecrow did not respond. It merely swayed slightly, its straw rustling with a soft "shh-shh," as though agreeing.
This kind of everyday life truly was pleasant.
But too much of it could become tiresome, so after Christmas, once he found Art and dealt with the Umbrella Corporation, he planned to take a look around Southeast Asia.
Li Dan, who had been leisurely lying flat, suddenly sat up and stared at a spot in the field.
Something was rapidly approaching from there.
Scarecrow sensed that something was wrong as well. Its body abruptly tensed, and its straw arms suddenly extended, transforming into several thick tentacles that swept toward the depths of the field.
The tentacles tore through the air with a whooshing sound, smashing small craters into the earth when they struck.
Li Dan's gaze fixed on the wheat field fifty meters ahead. The seedlings there were collapsing at a visible rate, as if something were burrowing underground—or as if an invisible force were crushing them flat.
Then, a gray-black mass drilled out from among the wheat and sped along close to the ground.
It had no fixed shape. It looked like a puddle of melted asphalt, or ink spilled across the ground. It moved