Blood Moon and Changes

"There seems to be a blood-red moon in the sky..."

This was the first thing Old Li struggled to say after waking from this not-so-brief spell of unconsciousness.

His voice was hoarse, and his breathing was still unsteady.

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It was clear to see that the bloodshot veins in his eyes had become incredibly dense, covering nearly most of the whites.

Even his pupils seemed to have shrunk somewhat.

At that moment, supported by the Indian man who had stayed by his side, the still-weak Guide was 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 dark gray concrete beneath. The windowpanes were also riddled with sprawling, spiderweb-like cracks that stood out sharply.

Fortunately, they had not shattered completely and still provided a measure of shelter from the outside.

"Mm, I know."

Someone answered flatly.

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

Having Old Li as a cautionary example, everyone had already avoided the areas near the windowsill and wisely concealed themselves within the broad shadows of the room.

Only the bespectacled young man remained unmoved, standing several meters from the windowsill at the sharply defined boundary between the indoor shadows and the light spilling in from outside.

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

Usually, he withdrew it the instant it touched the light.

The half of his face faintly illuminated by the light was cold and detached. He stood upright and straight, more like a statue than a person.

He... seemed somewhat different from before?

A vague instinctive unease warned the old man who had only just regained consciousness.

"...What are you doing?"

He had not noticed earlier, but the moment he spoke, Li Qingzhi realized that his own voice had somehow become hoarse as well.

Along with it came an inexplicable sense of sluggishness.

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

The young man merely turned and glanced at him.

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

"As for what I'm doing... isn't it obvious? I'm testing something."

The hand that had remained under the pale red moonlight for barely five or six seconds had already begun to tremble unnaturally, its joints stiffening as though subjected to an invisible erosion.

As time passed, certain areas beneath the skin also began to swell irregularly, as if a ball were being inflated.

Before everyone's eyes, those slight bulges seemed to gain lives of their own, slowly writhing and rolling beneath the skin. At times they protruded, at times they subsided, tracing deeply unsettling outlines.

It looked as though... something alive were twisting beneath the skin.

Yet that face seemed completely unfeeling, showing no particular reaction as it 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. "Sir, this is very dangerous."

It was the bearded middle-aged white man from Russia.

One of the man's hands had inconspicuously settled on the baseball bat behind him, his eyes full of vigilance.

After a moment's consideration, Li Yun merely nodded impassively. His other hand swiftly clamped down on the hand exposed to the moonlight, which had begun to display a strange autonomy and was no longer quite willing to obey, then pulled it back into the shadows.

The increasingly tense situation eased just like that.

Most of those present let out a breath of relief.

Still, as they listened to the increasingly distinct sounds coming from below the window, few of them looked particularly good.

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

Without moving fully near the window, he stood on tiptoe and peered down at the ground outside from above.

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

He tried hard to observe for a long while and described what he saw through unclear speech, but he ultimately could not explain it very well.

Only then did the boy crouch down with an ashen face. With someone helping him, he climbed back down onto the office's tiled floor.

There was no choice. After further building and reinforcing the platform, nearly everyone present forced themselves through hunger and exhaustion and took turns climbing up to inspect the situation outside the building.

When they came down, not a single person had a pleasant expression.

It was not merely because of the situation they faced, but also because of their mounting hunger and fatigue.

After all, everyone got tired.

Over the past half-day, they had eaten virtually nothing. At most, they had reluctantly used rainwater to replenish a little moisture.

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

By now, almost everyone was in an extremely exhausted state. They were merely holding themselves together through the desire to survive and their profound fear.

...In the end, few people could look at the sight outside without feeling afraid.

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

It was as though some evil vitality had been forcibly injected into it, and it was struggling to come alive bit by bit!

Even from a floor twenty or thirty meters above the ground, under the increasingly bright and glaring blood-red moonlight, human eyes could still easily make out the tiny black dots on the distant ground—forms crawling out from all directions, from places unknown.

Shadows, cracks, buildings...

These things surged out like a tide, gathering into groups amid the ruins and wandering everywhere. Beneath the scarlet moon above, they let out waves of inhuman roars and shrieks, some low and some high!

It was chilling.

Amid the rising and falling strange noises, those black dots would occasionally begin tearing, biting, and pouncing upon each other without warning, tangling together in an utterly primitive and brutal manner!

They devoured and slaughtered each other without restraint, heedless of twisted limbs and damaged bodies, their movements frenzied. Every collision between monsters sent indistinct blood and fragments flying from the other's body, like an endless bloodthirsty feast!

...Even more terrifyingly, after everyone else had looked, Li Qingzhi still forced himself to endure the discomfort and climbed onto the platform, straining to peer outside as well.

As the saying went, once bitten, twice shy. This time, he carefully controlled the angle of his gaze and resolved not to casually look upward again.

Yet despite the obvious swelling pain in his eyes, perhaps because his vision had improved somewhat after an enhancement exchange, the veteran still caught sight of something he absolutely did not want to see during his observation—

One of the Newcomer Visitors who had fallen behind earlier!

It was the freckled blonde girl who had broken down and sobbed uncontrollably on the road that afternoon, then gradually fell completely behind the already stretched-out temporary group.

He saw her...

She was now near the building!

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

Moonlight... if that ominous blood-red glow could even be called moonlight. A figure exposed to it for a prolonged time had naturally begun to leave the realm of humanity.

Along with her familiar clothes, now torn beyond recognition, her body and the framework of her limbs had visibly expanded—or rather, thickened as though enlarged two or three times over.

He saw it clearly...

Beneath her abnormally increased height, many of her joints had bent backward at unnatural angles. Her fingers were curled and deformed, her knuckles thickened, and her nails had hardened into two pairs of long black hooked claws that scraped against the concrete as she moved, leaving white streaks behind.

Even more disturbing was that much of her skin had, at some unknown point, become covered in sparse dark-gray bristles like those of an ape, humanity's distant relative.

At a glance, the muscle and skin beneath them visibly writhed and surged unnaturally, as though countless earthworms were squirming under her flesh.

This was far beyond the little commotion that had appeared in the young man's hand just now.

Among the few patches of skin that had not yet grown such ape-like hair but had clearly begun to harden and turn scaly, bluish-black blood vessels of varying thickness knotted and throbbed like tangled masses of tree roots, faintly carrying the coloration of a corpse long dead.

The sight made Li Qingzhi clench his teeth tightly, his stomach beginning to churn.

His earlier unconscious experience had not felt entirely real. Only now, facing the red moonlight scattered everywhere outside, did he finally gain a more direct understanding of it.

Especially when he saw that increasingly distorted face, its lips split all the way to the ears like the Joker from some classic comic-book film. Within the torn flesh, sharp fangs kept growing from the gums, exposed directly to the air as cloudy saliva dribbled uncontrollably through the gaps in her teeth.

Only within those blue eyes, clouded by deep shadows, had the pupils nearly shrunk into trembling blood-red slits, where madness and instinctive agony intertwined and flashed.

The consciousness once confined within that real body had long since died. What remained was an abomination gradually bred by the Blood Moon's light.

Honestly, from this distance, Li Qingzhi could not hear her roar at all. But merely seeing that grotesque face and that huge blood-filled mouth torn open on its own was enough to make him imagine many things.

Humans were creatures capable of empathy.

After only a few looks, cold sweat began to form on him, and his mind seemed to sink beneath a heavy haze.

Too terrifying...

It was a fate even worse than death...

That thing, more monster than human, now staggered across the ground with its back hunched, half-crawling and half-crouching. Every movement tugged at the body undergoing its horrifying transformation, as though something were struggling to burst free.

Something hidden beneath that flesh and muscle kept swelling...

Rolling...

Struggling...

Writhing...

For some reason, he saw it more and more clearly, more and more closely. He could almost make out the lively, writhing flesh on her body, almost see the faint, indistinct shadow within those murky eyes, red as though they might drip blood...

That hazy...

With a slap, a hand suddenly landed on the shoulder of the man whose eyes were practically bulging out.

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

The heavy pat made Li Qingzhi stagger, and he nearly fell straight off the platform.

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

Once he came to his senses, the veteran let out a startled cry and discovered that the young man, who moved without a sound, was somehow standing beside him again.

When did he climb up here? How did I not feel anything at all?

He had not even realized what he had just seen. His mind felt as though it had blanked out for a short time, leaving behind almost no coherent thoughts.

Li Qingzhi merely stared at the man before him like a stunned goose, as though all thought had stopped.

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

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

Especially after noticing that the man's eyes were now redder than any case of conjunctivitis, nearly showing faint signs of physical mutation, Li Yun did not know what to think for a moment.

If not for this mild visual mutation, he might have been like the other Visitors and unable to see those dangerous things at all.

What a nuisance.

Even his normally calm face could not help revealing a trace of helplessness.

...Based on the information Li Yun had obtained so far, this Newcomer Trial should theoretically be a mission that could be cleared through gathering intelligence and avoiding danger, fundamentally closer to an information-solving puzzle.

In modern gaming terms, it was the sort of design with no mandatory combat encounters.

Like the daytime, which had held almost no obvious danger; or after night fell, when they could avoid the blood-red moonlight by hiding indoors. Especially from high floors, they could avoid those abnormal creatures that clearly preferred to remain under the moonlight and only began moving at night...

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

And when faced with the situation outside below, where an ordinary person would die no matter how many lives they had if exposed, what was required was clearly not for Newcomer Visitors to try clearing it through brute force!

After all, Li Yun had noticed the problem the moment he entered the mission world.

Was it normal for a city ruin that clearly showed no signs of human activity to also display no obvious signs of wild animals moving around on the ground?

He quickly realized that the city beneath their feet itself most likely had certain problems. At the same time, this fit perfectly with the selection theme required by the Main God's trial.

Yet the crisis had not arrived as promptly as expected.

That was somewhat surprising, but it also meant—the threat was likely still brewing further, or temporarily hidden in the dark, with its true nature not yet revealed.

The calm before a storm was always more peaceful.

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

Because this situation itself meant... that the unknown threat within this ruined city was likely something even birds could not escape.

Even more direct evidence—something that could practically be called an explicit warning—was the black scars in the sky. The moment the newcomers woke up and opened their eyes, they could notice those seemingly harmless yet extremely abnormal marks.

They practically had the words "I'm a problem" written plainly above these Visitors' heads!

—Very good. This was most likely an irresistible threat. Try hiding first.

Thus, an utterly ordinary Visitor arrived at his preliminary conclusion.

Run!