Main God: I can't save them. I really can't...

It was already past midnight.

Standing in the patch of shadow closest to the window, Li Yun continued quietly watching the activity below.

One particularly interesting thing was that, by now, he had confirmed that the Blood Moon overhead clearly possessed additional properties he had not noticed before—properties that defied conventional physics.

For example, no matter which side of the building he looked out from, he could now see that bloody light shining straight down with an almost brilliant radiance.

Considering that this "moon" should actually have been moving all along, it seemed to have no distinct "angle" relative to the land below.

Yet the terrifying moonlight, which had deepened from its initial pale red to a heavy crimson that seemed ready to drip blood, apparently had its effects easily blocked by almost any inanimate object, rather than spreading and scattering in the more straightforward manner of normal light waves...

As he pondered this, footsteps sounded behind him.

He turned his head slightly and looked at "Old Li." The man looked terrible, his pallor tinged with an unhealthy flush, his eyes half-closed, but at least he had regained consciousness.

Li Yun shook his head.

"In your condition, you'd better get some more rest."

He was not worried about this veteran collapsing on the spot. He was simply considering how troublesome it would be if the man caused another accident and ended up turning into one of those things outside.

"Brother Li, thank you. If it weren't for you, I reckon I'd have been done for."

Unexpectedly, the man opened with a decidedly courteous expression of thanks, catching Li Yun slightly off guard.

Sure enough, nobody was truly a fool.

"No need to be so polite."

Too much explanation could sometimes only make things more conspicuous. Naturally, Li Yun had no intention of pursuing the subject.

Seeing how stubbornly "Old Li" kept his eyes narrowed, he knew just how red those eyes behind the lids were. Pushing up his glasses, the young man took the initiative to change the subject. "Did you need something?"

Li Qingzhi hesitated. The other man's refusal to take the conversation any further had instantly rendered most of his prepared speech useless.

After a few pauses, he finally spoke. "I took a look outside just now. Those things are getting stranger and stranger. To be safe, should we consider going up a few more floors?"

Noticing the furtive glances from the people around them, who looked indifferent but were actually listening intently, Li Yun showed little reaction. "Your concern is justified, but I'm afraid we can't."

He could certainly understand how "Old Li" and the novice tourists around them felt.

After all, of everyone present, Li Yun had the clearest view of what was happening.

...By now, as the crimson within the moonlight grew deeper, that increasingly uncanny radiance flooded the world, and the situation outside was clearly reaching an ever greater "boil."

The figures bathed in that thick moonlight—or rather, bloody light—were undergoing further, horrifying transformations.

Outlines that might once have retained a few barely recognizable features had now veered entirely beyond comprehension.

With frenzied twisting, elongation, swelling, and contraction that exceeded anything imaginable for flesh-and-blood life... they were even assuming grotesque forms that could only be called "indescribable."

These were horrors that had never appeared even in people's darkest nightmares.

Some monsters had just leaped down from buildings, and "something" was visibly extending and multiplying furiously beneath their skin.

Then, in less than half a minute, it tore straight through the old hide, which had become abnormally dry and shriveled. Long limbs tipped with sickle-shaped feet unfolded into the air, producing teeth-grating cracks.

Other monsters crouched on all fours, having won their brief struggles, and were frantically gnawing at their fallen "kin" beside them. Meanwhile, slender, wormlike tubes emerged from their skin, constantly reaching out to greedily draw in the great pools of blood flowing across the ground nearby.

At that moment, anyone could see their extreme thirst for that bright red substance.

As they tore apart and devoured their prey, sparing no effort in this feast, dense clusters of fine bone spurs kept bursting from their spines, joints, and elsewhere, gleaming eerily in the bloody light that seemed to pour from the sky;

Even monsters that were clearly already dead continued to split open rapidly at their shattered heads, limbs, and abdominal cavities. As their flesh mutated over large areas, they came to resemble giant rotting sunflowers, or masses of predatory hydras fused together.

But what actively emerged from those "wounds" were constantly quivering new organs, and even sucker-like mouths lined with sharp teeth...

The boundary between life and death was beginning to blur.

And this endless mutation had bred even more extreme brutality.

Among these "living things," which now bore scarcely any trace of natural creatures, attacks on one another were no longer sporadic. They had become the most overt theme of this frenzy.

By now, virtually anything that showed obvious signs of movement—even the shattered remains of their own kind flying through the air—was enough to instantly ignite that most primal urge to kill.

The sight made one observer frown slightly.

In fact, aside from their bloody slaughter of one another, even the act of "devouring" was growing increasingly bizarre.

To his eyes, some of the particularly aberrant monsters on the ground no longer seemed to be merely "eating." It looked more like... hunting and merging?

Those strange things, which seemed relatively less eager to fight, accepted practically anything, haphazardly stuffing all the severed limbs they had just torn off into cracks somewhere on their bodies, or into inexplicably opened wounds and cavities.

As these foreign "parts" rapidly integrated into their bodies in a plug-and-play fashion, more and more bloody light naturally converged within them.

And as the bloody radiance bathing their surfaces intensified, seemingly acting as some kind of "catalyst," their entire bodies ultimately began to undergo extremely unstable swelling and mutation.

...Li Yun could see that some portions of those bloated, writhing masses of flesh were actually rotting even as they grew.

The two or three largest specimens had gradually "swelled" to several stories tall in the process. From a distance, they resembled terrifying amalgamations crudely assembled from countless chunks of corpses, still constantly writhing and restructuring themselves.

A kind of... living colossus.

Even looking down from the eighth floor, one could feel their slowly approaching "height."

No wonder everyone was growing uneasy.

But regardless of whether it was the shrieking, the hissing, the grinding of bone, the collision of flesh, or the splitting of hides—even those "mountains of meat," whose every "gaping mouth" was still frantically searching for new food, wholly absorbed in "devouring" from beginning to end, somehow emitted a deep, resonant vibration from within, as though some organ buried deep inside them was still functioning...

Amid all those chaotic, grating sounds of madness...

Perhaps it was because he had indirectly seen that "blood-red pupil" in the sky through someone else's eyes, and had likewise been affected to some degree.

He could now faintly distinguish, beneath those seemingly patternless, almost purely bestial roars and strange noises, a constantly repeated trace of a "cry" that held nothing but obsession—

"Blood..."

"My blood... give it to me..."

"...Where's the blood? Blood..."

These pitiable things had long since lost their reason and sunk utterly into the abyss of madness and pain. Even after death, some instinct lingering in their bodies still drove them to lament and pursue what they could never reach.

Without end.

It was enough to make one's skin crawl.

...Withdrawing his gaze, he glanced sideways at the veteran beside him. From the man's baffled reaction, he confirmed that the veteran either could not hear the sounds below clearly or could not understand those "words."

Li Yun nodded.

In any case, since this "honest fellow" apparently had no intention of blundering into another trap for the moment, that was at least some good news.

Still, to be safe, he needed to calm these people down.

"...Old Li, you need to understand that we can still hide here most likely because the 'owner' of this place hasn't decided to bother with us yet."

Seeing that the fellow before him still looked utterly confused, he spread his hands and explained mildly, "Guests ought to know their place. Getting too close to the host would be a little rude."

"Brother, what are you talking about? What ow—"

As though something had suddenly occurred to him, the guide's voice stopped abruptly halfway through.

In its place came an expression of confusion mingled with dawning realization, and even disbelief.

"Yes, you should have noticed it earlier too... that feeling of being watched."

"After all, those things down there might be making quite a racket."

"But when you really think about it... where in a city would the moonlight reach most thoroughly, with practically nothing blocking it at all?"

Hearing the young man's words, he almost lost his composure entirely.

Even his eyelids opened, exposing his red eyes, yet the veteran now wore a complicated expression as though he had swallowed something utterly revolting. "You mean... above our heads..."

He pointed upward and even lowered his voice, looking for all the world like a spy exchanging intelligence.

"It's fine. No need to be so nervous."

Seeing him like this, Li Yun instead offered a few considerate words of comfort. "Being nervous won't help anyway."

"The host is probably busy sunbathing right now. Oh, no, I should call it 'moonbathing.' That's why they haven't had time to bother with insignificant little pests like us who slipped in through the cracks without permission."

"But if they happen to be cranky when disturbed, bothering them at a time like this would be rather tactless, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, yes, absolutely. We'd better not go upstairs and disturb them..."

He nodded like a bobblehead, agreeing over and over, but before long, something else occurred to the veteran.

"But that's not quite right either, brother... Even if there really is something alive up there, how can you be sure it's the same sort of thing as those creatures outside? What if there are people? Survivors hiding inside this pitch-black building, just like us?"

Even if he was currently suffering from a degree of literal "brain damage," his ability to think had merely deteriorated. He had not become an idiot.

But at those words, the young man watching the window turned back again and stared at him in silence.

The face behind those glasses clearly held no expression, yet for some reason, Li Qingzhi vaguely sensed a peculiar undertone of, "See? This is what a brainless fellow looks like."

Uh... surely I'm imagining it?

As he comforted himself with that wishful thought, the other man spoke again, his voice cool. "We've seen almost no birds in this city. Judging by those things below, creatures exposed to this moonlight undergo obvious mutations and even retain some features of their original species at first, but the exposure doesn't kill them."

"So where did all the mutated birds go?"

"Did those things crawling around on the ground leap straight into the air, catch them, and eat them on the spot?"

He watched the other man make a gesture suggesting something being "instantly consumed."

"The absence of birds in this ruined city means it's most likely a 'no-fly zone.' Setting aside any threats on the ground that we failed to discover during the day, there's a strong possibility that, above a certain altitude, some 'factor' in the air has either killed virtually all the birds exposed to this bloody moonlight or forced them to leave the city to avoid it."

"And excluding the special possibility of a 'king of raptors' claiming this place as its 'territory,' as happens in nature—a situation we would have virtually no chance of escaping or surviving if we encountered it, and thus one not worth discussing..."

"I'm more inclined to believe there's something in the high places of this city that restricts the presence of those blood-mutated birds."

"...And as things stand, the only places in this ruined city that still have much height are mostly these buildings that haven't fallen down yet."

A sliver of bloody light from outside reflected off his black-rimmed glasses, making it impossible to even see the look in his eyes.

"I admit this is still only a deduction. It's understandable if you don't believe it. But at least while we're new here and still don't know what's going on, we'd better not go looking for complications."

At this point, seeing the unmistakable confusion slowly spreading across the veteran's face, the young man finally shook his head, knowing that the man's thinking really was impaired.

"...When you're scraping by in the cracks, not using your head is hardly a good thing. Go get some rest first. Don't let yourself get too muddled."

"...All right."

Hearing the clear dismissal, and finding it awkward to refuse this "kindness," Li Qingzhi could only agree. Fighting the grogginess and thinking back over what he had just heard, he returned to the nearby wall and sat down to rest.

Li Yun paid no further attention to the injured man.

Looking up at the ceiling, which was covered in large patches of gray mold, he narrowed his eyes, then simply turned back to continue observing the changes outside.

Just as he had said, his group's current mission amounted to nothing more than "scraping by in the cracks."

It seemed like a situation they could get through without any direct combat, clearing the mission simply by holding out for three days. In reality, stepping into any "hidden pitfall" they had not gathered enough information about could spell instant disaster.

By now, Li Yun was fairly certain that individuals like himself and "Old Li," whose mental potential exceeded that of ordinary people, had most likely been deliberately assigned by the Main God to "lead" Newcomer Trial missions like this one.

After all, in troublesome situations where certain information might be acquired late, or where the entire temporary team might lack anyone actually thinking things through, "intuition" and perception alone could undoubtedly help fill part of that gap.

Unlike "Old Li's" half-baked Psychokinesis, although Li Yun's current mental power was also exceptionally weak, the "quality" of what he projected remained relatively high. In terms of sensitivity in particular, he was leagues ahead of the other man.

From the outset, combining his deductions with that strange feeling of being "watched," he had realized that there was probably something wrong with these high-rises.

As he deliberately slowed their ascent, he had checked the safety of his surroundings while maintaining a subtle thread of mental perception to probe outward.

Sure enough, after reaching the eighth floor where they now stood, he had sensed a vague difference at the hazy limit of his mental reach—six or seven floors above him, around the fourteenth or fifteenth floor.

In the space higher up, an exceptionally vigorous "life" signal had already been radiating outward without his noticing. It even carried an aura that was seventy or eighty percent similar to the red moonlight outside.

He had barely managed to extend his perception far enough to confirm that, at least as high as the sixteenth or seventeenth floor, the vague fluctuations of this unknown living consciousness persisted, occupying virtually every space he had been able to probe.

That was when Li Yun knew they probably could not go any higher.

Taking the Blood Moon's influence into account, it might even have been an enormous anomalous creature occupying everything above the fourteenth or fifteenth floor—in other words, most of the upper portion of the building.

He could not determine the precise range of its perception, or whether the other similar buildings in this ruined city held the same situation.

But he knew very well that under these circumstances, even a "dabbler" like Old Li, who might only sense something wrong after getting as close as the thirteenth or fourteenth floor, could undoubtedly be the key to avoiding such a hidden "deathtrap."

Or rather, only an "insider" like Li Yun, who understood the relevant operating mechanisms, could clearly see—

While objectively enforcing certain predetermined "selection" criteria, and clearly finding it impractical to lower the difficulty of the Newcomer Trial any further, the Main God could only work on selecting more suitable combinations of people. It had even arranged for veteran "guides" to participate, revealing its faint intention to "go easy" on them...

Like certain university lecturers who finally could not help roaring in frustration after the final exams, yet remained helpless to do anything about it, it really had done everything it could to "throw a lifeline" to these novice tourists of every description and wildly varying ability.