Blood Moon and Changes

"The sky... seems to have a blood-red moon."

This was the first thing Old Li said after waking from that far-from-brief stupor, struggling to force out the words.

His voice was hoarse, and his breathing still unsteady.

It was clear to see that the bloodshot veins in his eyes had become extremely dense, densely packed across most of the whites.

Even his pupils seemed to have shrunk slightly in proportion.

At that moment, supported by the Indian man who had stayed by his side, the still-weak guide had been helped by the others to the eighth floor of the building, into a run-down office that had long since lost most of its soundproofing and insulation.

The walls were mottled and peeling, exposing the gray-black concrete beneath. The windowpanes were covered in sprawling, spiderweb-like cracks that stood out sharply.

Fortunately, they had not shattered completely and still retained some ability to block out the outside.

"Mm, I know."

Someone answered blandly.

The cold night wind kept pouring in through the gaps, stirring the dust on the floor and scraps of rotten paper in the corners.

After seeing what had happened to Old Li, everyone had wisely avoided the areas near the windowsill, concealing themselves in the broad shadows of the room.

Only the bespectacled young man remained unmoved, standing several meters away from the window, right at the distinct boundary between the indoor shadows and the light coming from outside.

Under Li Qingzhi's incomprehensible gaze, the other man would occasionally thrust his hand out of the darkness and into the reddish glow shining in from outside, then pull it back even faster.

Most of the time, it was no more than a brief touch.

The half of his face faintly illuminated by the light held only an exceptionally indifferent hardness. His posture was upright and straight, more like a statue than a person.

He... seemed different from before?

A vague unease in his instincts warned the old man who had only just regained consciousness.

"...What are you doing?"

He had not noticed it before, but as soon as the words left his mouth, Li Qingzhi realized that for some reason, his voice had become hoarse too.

Along with a strange sense of sluggishness.

It was like the delayed response of a brain that could not quite function properly while suffering from a feverish flu.

The young man merely glanced back at him.

"Old Li, your injuries shouldn't be serious, but your nerves have probably suffered a severe shock. You'd better rest quietly for a while first."

"As for what I'm doing... isn't it obvious? I'm conducting a test."

The hand that had remained under the pale red moonlight for only five or six seconds had already begun to tremble unnaturally. Its joints stiffened, as though suffering some invisible corrosion.

As time passed, parts of the skin also began to swell irregularly, like a ball being inflated.

Before everyone's eyes, those faintly raised patches seemed to possess lives of their own, slowly writhing and rolling beneath the skin, protruding and receding from time to time, tracing deeply unsettling outlines.

It looked as though... something alive were twisting around underneath?

Yet the face seemed entirely unaffected, still showing no great reaction as he silently watched the scene in thought.

Li Qingzhi was nearly horrified by what he saw and was just about to warn him when someone nearby spoke up. "Sir, this is very dangerous."

It was the middle-aged white man from Russia, with a face full of beard.

One of his hands had already rested inconspicuously on the baseball bat behind him, his eyes filled with vigilance.

After considering it for a moment, Li Yun merely nodded indifferently. His other hand swiftly clamped down on the hand exposed to the moonlight, which had begun to show a degree of abnormal autonomy and was no longer quite willing to obey him, then pulled it back into the shadows.

The increasingly tense situation eased somewhat.

Most of those present let out a sigh of relief.

Still, listening to the faint sounds below the window that were gradually becoming clearer, very few of them looked well.

Considering the threat posed by the red moonlight, they dragged over two broken chairs and a tabletop, barely stacking them into a taller platform. Then the lightweight South Asian boy was shakily pushed up onto it.

Without moving fully close to the window, he stood on tiptoe and tried his best to peer down at the ground outside from above.

"...Some strange black shadows are coming out of the houses along the road. They're standing in the moonlight... And farther away, lots of strange things are moving. They're running around and fighting too..."

He struggled to look for quite some time and slurred out a description of what he saw, but ultimately could not explain it very clearly.

Only then did the boy crouch down, his face ashen, and with someone helping him, climb back down onto the office's tiled floor.

There was no other choice. After continuing to reinforce the platform, nearly everyone present endured their hunger and exhaustion as they took turns climbing up to look outside the building.

When they came back down, not a single face looked anything but grim.

It was not only because of the situation they faced, but also because hunger and fatigue were wearing them down.

After all, people got tired.

Over the better part of the day, they had barely eaten anything. At most, they had reluctantly used rainwater to replenish a little moisture.

Even that had been discouraged by the Russian man, who said the rainwater still contained plenty of filth and should not be drunk too much unless mixed with vodka, otherwise it could easily cause diarrhea and so on...

By now, almost everyone was exhausted to some degree. They were only holding themselves together through their desire to survive and their profound fear.

...After all, few people could look at the scene outside without feeling afraid.

The entire city, thoroughly bathed in that bizarre red moonlight, no longer resembled the silent, peaceful ruins it had been during the day.

Now, as though some evil life force had been forcibly injected into it, it was struggling bit by bit to come alive!

Even from twenty or thirty meters above the ground, under the blood-red moonlight that seemed to grow brighter and more glaring by the moment, human eyes could still easily make out the tiny black dots on the distant ground—the forms crawling out from every direction, from nowhere anyone could tell.

Shadows, cracks, houses...

These things poured forth like a tide, gathering into packs among the ruins and wandering everywhere. Beneath the scarlet moonlight overhead, they let out waves of inhuman roars and shrieks, some low and some piercing!

It made one's blood run cold.

Amid the rising and falling strange noises, those black dots would occasionally begin tearing into and pouncing on each other without warning, entangling in an extremely primitive and brutal manner!

They devoured and slaughtered without restraint, heedless of twisted and damaged limbs, their movements crazed. Every pounce between monsters sent indistinct sprays of blood and debris flying from the other's body, like an endless bloodthirsty feast!

...More terrifying still, Li Qingzhi, who had endured the discomfort and climbed onto the platform after everyone else had already looked, strained to peer outside as well.

They said that once bitten, twice shy. This time, he had originally been extremely careful about the angle of his gaze, determined not to raise his head carelessly again.

But even though his eyes were clearly suffering severe swelling pain, perhaps because his vision had improved somewhat after being enhanced, he still spotted something that he absolutely did not want to see—

The newcomer tourist who had fallen behind earlier!

It was the freckled blonde girl who had broken down crying on the road that afternoon, and who had eventually become completely separated from their already stretched-out temporary group as she walked.

He saw her...

She was now near the building!

But now, she was clearly no longer the helpless, fragile girl from a few hours ago.

Moonlight... if that ominous bloody color could even be called moonlight. A figure exposed beneath it for too long had naturally begun to leave the realm of humanity.

Along with her familiar clothes, already torn beyond recognition, her body and skeletal frame had visibly expanded—or rather, thickened as if enlarged two or three times over.

He saw it clearly...

Beneath her abnormally increased height, many joints had twisted into unnatural reverse angles. Her fingers had curled and deformed, her knuckles swollen, and her nails had hardened into two pairs of long black hooked claws that scraped against the concrete as she moved, leaving white marks behind.

Even more unsettling was that most of her skin had somehow become covered in sparse dark-gray coarse hair, similar to that of an ancient ape, humanity's close relative.

At a glance, the layers of flesh and muscle beneath it writhed and undulated unnaturally, as though countless earthworms were burrowing beneath her skin.

This was far beyond the little commotion on the young man's hand just now.

Between the few patches of scaly skin that had not yet grown that ape-like fur, but had clearly begun to harden, thick blue-black veins knotted and bulged like tangled masses of tree roots, faintly showing the color of a corpse long dead.

The sight made Li Qingzhi clench his teeth tightly as his stomach began to churn.

His earlier experience of losing consciousness had not felt all that real. Only now, facing the red moonlight spilling across everything outside, did he finally gain a more direct understanding of it.

Especially when he saw how her increasingly distorted face had split from the corners of her lips all the way to her ears, like Joker from some classic comic-book film. Inside the torn flesh, sharp teeth continuously growing from her gums were exposed directly to the air, while murky saliva dripped uncontrollably through the gaps between them.

Only in those blue eyes, deeply shrouded in shadow, had her pupils nearly shrunk into trembling blood-red vertical slits, madness and instinctive pain flickering and intertwining within them.

The consciousness once trapped in that real flesh had long since died. What remained was an abomination slowly spawned beneath the Blood Moon's light.

Honestly, at this distance, Li Qingzhi could not hear her roar at all. But merely looking at that grotesque visage and the bloody maw that had torn itself open was enough to make him imagine far too much.

Humans were creatures capable of empathy.

After only a few glances, cold sweat began to form on his body, and a heavy haze seemed to settle over his mind.

Too terrifying...

It was a fate even more horrifying than death...

The thing that was less human than monster now hunched over and staggered across the ground in a half-crawling, half-crouching posture. Every movement pulled at that body undergoing dreadful changes, as though something were struggling to burst out from within.

Something hidden beneath that flesh kept bulging...

Rolling...

Struggling...

Writhing...

For some reason, he saw it more and more closely, more and more clearly. He could almost make out the active, writhing flesh on her body, almost make out the faint, indistinct shadow within those cloudy eyes so red they seemed ready to drip blood...

That hazy...

With a smack, a hand suddenly landed on the shoulder of the man whose eyes were nearly bulging out of their sockets.

"Old Li, you just woke up. Don't push yourself so hard."

The heavy pat sent Li Qingzhi stumbling so badly that he nearly fell off the platform on the spot.

Someone beside him could not bear to watch and casually grabbed him, allowing him to barely regain his footing.

Once he came back to himself, the veteran let out a startled yelp and realized that the young man who moved without making a sound was somehow standing beside him again.

When did he climb up here? Why didn't I feel a thing?

He had not even realized what he had just seen. It was as if his mind had blanked out for a moment, leaving behind almost no clear thoughts.

Li Qingzhi simply stared at the man in front of him like a dazed goose, as if all thought had stopped.

"Brother, seeing things too clearly isn't always a good thing."

Looking at the old man before him, who had unknowingly stepped on two landmines in such a short time.

Especially after noticing those eyeballs, now redder than even a severe case of conjunctivitis and nearly showing slight physical signs of mutation, Li Yun did not know what to think for a moment.

If not for this slight mutation in his vision, he might have been like the other tourists and unable to see those dangerous things at all.

What a hassle.

Even his ordinarily calm face could not help showing a trace of helplessness.

...Based on the information Li Yun had gathered so far, this Newcomer Trial should theoretically have been the kind of mission that could be cleared by gathering information and avoiding danger, one fundamentally closer to an information-solving puzzle.

In modern gaming terms, it was a design with no mandatory combat encounters.

Like the daytime before, when there had been almost no obvious dangers; and after nightfall, when they could avoid the blood-red moonlight by hiding indoors; especially when they were on higher floors, where they could also avoid these abnormal creatures that clearly preferred to remain beneath the moonlight and only began moving after dark...

The reasoning was simple. Under normal circumstances, the Main God would not assign a mission that guaranteed death.

And when faced with the situation outside below, where ordinary people would not have enough lives to survive if exposed, what was needed was clearly not for the newcomer tourists to try brute-forcing their way through!

After all, Li Yun had noticed the issue the moment they entered this mission world.

Did it make sense for a city ruin that clearly showed no signs of human activity to have no obvious signs of wild animals moving about on the ground either?

Someone quickly realized that the city beneath their feet itself most likely had some kind of problem. Likewise, this fit perfectly with the Main God's trial-selection theme.

Yet the crisis had not arrived as promptly as expected.

While that was somewhat surprising, it also meant that the threat was likely still brewing further, or lurking temporarily in the shadows without having truly revealed itself yet.

The calm before the storm was always quieter.

Furthermore, when they had found almost no traces of birds in the city aside from remains on the ground, Li Yun had vaguely guessed that this might be a hint aimed at newcomers—there might also be some issue involving factors such as flight, the sky, or altitude.

Because this situation itself meant that... whatever unknown threat existed in this ruined city was likely something even birds could not avoid.

And the more direct evidence—something that might as well have been an explicit warning—was the black scars in the sky that every newcomer would notice the instant they opened their eyes, seemingly harmless from beginning to end yet utterly abnormal.

They practically had the words "I have a problem" written right above the tourists' heads!

—Very well, this was most likely an irresistible threat. Try hiding first.

Thus, an utterly ordinary tourist arrived at his initial conclusion.

Run!