Listening closely, Li Xian also picked up faint rustling sounds nearby. After pinpointing their direction, he lightened his steps and approached the toilet nervously, then eased the door open a crack.
At first, Li Xian saw only a pair of feet lying on the floor and a few scattered fish scales. He shifted his position, then abruptly tightened his grip on the doorframe.
The body lying inside was none other than Hoodie Woman.
How could he tell at a glance that she was dead? Her eyes had turned completely cloudy, and something resembling a fleshy tumor had torn through her clothes and "grown" out of her abdomen.
The mass swelled at an astonishing speed, while Hoodie Woman's body beneath it rapidly shriveled like soil drained of its nutrients.
Soon, all that remained of Hoodie Woman's body was a small, grayish-black lump. The writhing ball of flesh quickly engulfed it, and the bright red, pulsating tumor stopped growing once it was nearly the size of a person.
After that, it slowly began to split, gradually forming arms and legs like a giant embryo, until it finally stood on the floor.
The entire process took less than a minute.
Its final appearance was almost identical to the monstrous form Ji Xie had taken in the earlier hallucination: a fish head on a human body, dangling organs, and a mouth packed with fangs.
Li Xian's expression grew increasingly grave as the corpse inside the toilet transformed. He realized there was probably more than one such monster aboard the ship now.
There were still those five dead crew members.
Before the monster could act, he immediately shut the toilet door and turned to leave the room.
But just as Li Xian's trailing foot cleared the threshold, the door slammed shut behind him with a