"These wards are completely different from when we arrived."
The interior of the Rear Building was no longer empty and quiet. After night fell, the doctors at Lishan Hospital began their shifts. Mutated patients moved back and forth between the wards, and long lines formed at the pharmacy and payment counters.
Everything resembled a hospital in the real world, provided one ignored the various mutations growing from the patients' bodies. Some of them were no longer even human-shaped, merely masses of flesh with human faces.
"Don't disturb them." Big Dog saw the shadows coiled around the patients. They were all residents of the shadow world. Now that shadows completely covered the Rear Building, they were simply wandering around their own "home."
"We're already deep inside the shadow world. In a place completely occupied by shadows like this, the longer we stay, the more likely we are to be assimilated." Big Dog's gaze was wary. "Normally, I don't dare enter buildings in the shadow world at random, for fear of encountering a place like this that can breed shadows on its own."
"Breed shadows on its own?" A question suddenly occurred to Gao Ming. "What exactly are the shadows in the shadow world? You can hide freely inside them, so you must know a lot about them, right?"
Big Dog shook his enormous head. "Shadows are like an emotion. When people get angry, they feel rage. These shadows are like the emotions a world left behind just before it died. They contain so many things—despair, pain, but above all, sadness."
Big Dog's fur drifted in the shadows like weeds on a riverbed. "The reason I can merge with the shadows is that the emotions I produce are very similar to theirs. But that's also what scares me, because I know what