The waves of the South Sea gradually subsided, the phantom of the sunken ship sank into the deep sea, and the strange phenomena on the islands slowly faded away.
But some things had changed forever.
When dawn lit up the Strait of Malacca, the surviving officers and soldiers aboard that destroyer were finally taken aboard search-and-rescue vessels and fled north in disarray.
The captain's report was incoherent, filled with phrases like "supernatural phenomena," "mass hallucinations," and "unexplainable energy attacks."
If every officer and soldier had not given the same account, and if their mental states had not clearly deteriorated so severely, they would likely have faced far harsher scrutiny:
Had someone released unknown drugs into the ship's ventilation system and gotten the entire crew high?
The situation at several island bases was even worse. Nearly every soldier who survived that night applied for an emergency transfer, citing "psychological trauma."
Eighty percent of the base facilities—including weapons, equipment, and living quarters—had suffered inexplicable malfunctions.
According to the surviving soldiers' testimony, no samples of the vines, venomous snakes, or stone faces that had appeared could be found anywhere in the bases.
Yet there was no scientific explanation whatsoever for the failures in those facilities.
And satellite images taken before and after showed that, overnight, the rainforest around the bases had advanced at least fifty meters closer to the human structures----
Tree roots had broken through concrete, vines had covered the barbed-wire fences, as though nature were silently reclaiming its territory.
Even more terrifyingly, on the day the anomalies occurred, the massive supernatural energy fluctuations detected near the Strait of Malacca had frequency bands similar to, yet not entirely the same as, those from Eastern Power's New Year ritual----
When the news reached the Pentagon, it caused another enormous uproar. But this time,