Fuck it!
A disclaimer first: multiple women, so die-hard pure-love fans can leave now. Don't come after me cursing later; I can't take it.
Entirely handwritten, entirely handwritten, entirely handwritten. Important things bear repeating three times.
Darkness shrouded the land beneath an eerie blood moon. Underfoot lay a winding mountain road that stretched all the way down to the foot of the mountain.
Everything around the road was gray, obscured by churning gray mist. Nothing was visible.
A year ago, a crimson meteor had streaked across the sky, and the whole of Blue Star had undergone a transformation. Gray Fog had appeared out of nowhere in its cities.
In Huaguo, Capital City, Shanghai, Flower City, and Peng City had been the first to fall. Four bustling metropolises had been swallowed whole.
The authorities had sent in exploration teams and ultimately reached a conclusion: people could enter the cities swallowed by the Gray Fog, but they could not leave.
Any city shrouded in Gray Fog became a forbidden zone.
After that, the Gray Fog had kept swallowing cities... Su Nian had gone straight back to the old house his grandfather had lived in, but even that had not escaped. It had been swallowed a week ago.
Then he had ended up in this other world.
There were no zombies, no mutated beasts, no goblins, and certainly no aliens.
Instead, there were eerie creatures that could not be killed.
The owners of the three off-road vehicles at the very front had told them that these creatures could not be killed.
Those three had been among the first survivors transported into this world. They were "veterans," and they were not ordinary people, either. They were Awakened.
Faint sobbing and cries for help drifted from the mist, luring humans inside to save someone.
The moment someone left the road, their living presence would be exposed. Their fate could be summed up in one word.
Death!
The convoy's first ironclad rule was to never leave the road.
After they rounded a bend, the view suddenly opened up. A large patch of ground lay exposed to the right of the road.
There was a large willow tree, with two enormous woven plastic sacks beneath its roots. One sack had already come open, spilling instant noodles, sausages, Snickers bars, water, and all sorts of other supplies.
Weeds and thorny brush grew behind the willow.
A woman's hand reached out through a gap in the weeds and thorns.
"Help! Please help me! I'm stuck! Whoever saves me can have half my supplies!"
One of the two sacks was about five feet from the roadside, while the other was less than three feet away. Anyone could simply reach out and take it.
"Holy shit, look at all that food! Those two big sacks could last two or three months."
"Are you crazy? I could tell at a glance she wasn't human."
"Exactly. The captain said not to leave the road."
Just then, an older woman's eyes shifted, and she turned to her husband beside her. "Old man, it's so close you could just reach out and scoop it up. There's no danger at all. Go get it. The bold eat their fill while the timid starve."
"If you ask me, those people are just cowards."
Hearing that, Su Nian hurried over to the left, squeezing through the crowd toward the front.
There were always a few smartasses. He was currently in the middle of the group. If those supplies had been there all along, why hadn't the Awakened taken them?
If they had only just appeared, that was even more fucking reason not to touch them.
"I'll get it," a young man said. "Dad's getting old, and he isn't quick on his feet. I'm young. If there's danger, I can still get back."
He did not want to take the risk either, but his wife and parents had gone hungry for two days. Who knew how long it would take to reach the supply point the captain had mentioned?
As long as he was quick, one grab and one pull should do it. Only part of his body would leave the road, and only for a few seconds. Even if a creature caught the scent of his "living presence," it would still need time to react.
The young man walked over. The people around him immediately grew jealous and surged forward.
If neither you nor I took it, that was fine. But if you were going to take it, I'd be terrified you might actually succeed and start living the good life.
That was human nature.
The young man reached the roadside and quickly grabbed for the nearest woven sack. It felt real beneath his fingers...
Suddenly, an icy vine wrapped around his wrist. It was a branch of the willow.
An irresistible force followed, yanking the young man off the road.
"Aah...!!"
His terrified scream shattered the still air.
"Son!" the old woman shrieked in horror.
The moment Su Nian heard it, he broke into a run.
The group descended into chaos in an instant, terrified screams ringing out everywhere.
A vine brutally thrust into the young man's screaming mouth. His body convulsed, and countless tightly packed ripples writhed beneath his skin. His skin split open, spilling out a torrent of maggots.
Several survivors who had tried to grab the sack were also dragged off by willow branches. They met the same fate.
"Dear..." The old man grabbed his wife as she was dragged away, and both of them were pulled off the road.
Masses of maggots fell to the ground. The mist parted, revealing a white, eerie creature beneath the tree that looked like a bloodstained pig's large intestine. One end was attached to the lower half of the willow's trunk.
At the other end was a head. Its empty eye sockets crawled with writhing maggots, and a hand grew out of its mouth, with a hideous set of mouthparts in its palm.
Those mouthparts kept tearing into the maggots on the ground.
"Smack... smack."
The dense squirming sounds mingled with splattering juices, like a mouthful of pomegranate seeds being crushed all at once, spraying bright red juice.
"An eerie creature! It really is one! It's terrifying!"
Some of them had only arrived a few days ago and had never seen one of these creatures. Su Nian was no different.
Although he had never seen one, he was utterly certain this was a world beyond his comprehension.
If he wanted to survive, he had to "follow the rules" and stay close to the veterans up ahead.
Until he could protect himself, falling behind meant death.
Shriveled human skins fluttered in the wind from the willow, still bearing expressions of terror and agony. Under the branches' control, they were pressed onto the trunk, one after another.
The creature resembling a bloodstained pig's intestine crawled straight onto the road. The willow's roots pulled free of the ground and stepped onto the road as well. They were living limbs like octopus tentacles.
Mist surged out again, filling the patch of ground that had been exposed.
The creature kept devouring survivors. The willow donned a full suit of human skin, while the intestine at its other end chewed through a mountain of maggots.
Su Nian sprinted without looking back. The main group ahead seemed to have noticed the disturbance too and picked up speed.
The people on the road fled down the mountain like a huge, broken line of a python.
"Holy shit, the creature's on the road!"
"You fucking idiot, get out of the way!"
Hearing the commotion behind him, Su Nian cursed up a storm inwardly.
Even the road was not completely safe.
At the very front of the group, Captain Yang Kang sat in the front passenger seat. He glanced at the rearview mirror and pushed up his glasses.
"People can tell you over and over, and you won't learn. Experience only has to teach you once."
His voice was cold. They had lost quite a few people this time, and he deeply disliked such pointless losses.
Fucking morons.
They ran for more than twenty minutes. The convoy descended the mountain, and a flat, straight road stretched before them. The sound of a flowing stream drifted through the gray mist.
Su Nian gulped down air and kept running, cursing as he went.
If he fell behind, he was dead.
The unluckiest were those from the middle of the group back. Who knew how many would survive?
Sure enough, choosing a place in the middle had clearly been unwise. He needed to move farther forward. Only staying right behind those Awakened would keep him safe.
He had to find some kind of vehicle. There was no way he could keep up on two legs alone.
Just then, a voice rang out in his mind.
[Ding! Escaped the Maggot Willow's pursuit. Gained 200 survival points.]
Before you continue