At the same time, the dense red dots spreading across Milluki's screen like a plague all went dark in an instant.
It was as if an invisible hand had wiped them clean off the map.
"They're... gone?" Milluki stared at his terminal in disbelief. "Every signal source I marked... they've all disappeared!"
The city fell utterly silent.
It wasn't the quiet of monsters hiding. It was a clean silence, as though they had never existed at all.
"Do you know what happened?" Bai Zhu asked Milluki.
"I think it played us."
"What do you mean?" Camilla asked nervously.
"It never intended to fight us head-on." Milluki drew a circle on his terminal screen, then filled it with countless tiny dots. "Those Devouring-type Monsters and that Flesh Mountain were all bait."
He crossed out the dots one by one.
"They were there to create chaos and swallow more creatures' abilities while we were distracted. The bigger the commotion, the more of our attention they drew."
"But now they're..."
"It's full. Or it decided it doesn't need them anymore." Bai Zhu looked up at the dark Financial Center tower. "It no longer depends on hosts or needs to parasitize ordinary people. It concentrated all the abilities its hosts swallowed into its Paper People. With its Sacred Body, thinner than paper, it can slip through any gap in this city. All it has to do is recover those Paper People to complete its evolution. It doesn't need any one host to do the swallowing."
Bai Zhu remembered the shriveled red membranes he had found in the kitchen vent.
They were probably skins it had shed after reclaiming their power.
"We may have been walking around inside its body this whole time."
A chill ran down Milluki's and Camilla's spines.
"Then that building..." Milluki