Next, Shen Hai lifted his foot and, holding Xu Tingfang's curled-up corpse, walked straight into the body of the monster blocking the alley entrance, ignoring it completely.
Yet when his whole body collided with it, the hideous monster, which had seemed solid, turned into a cloud of gray fog with a bang.
The densely packed "Black Lines" scattered and fled. "Frog Eggs" rained onto the ground, wriggling a few times before turning into a puddle of foul-smelling sewage.
The alley entrance opened up before him, and the Nursing Home was right ahead.
[Nine-Bend Alley], cleared.
Clatter-
A phone tumbled to the ground.
Shen Hai looked down. Xu Tingfang's hands, which had been clenched tightly against his chest, had quietly opened.
His expression calm, Shen Hai said softly:
"What an idiot."
It was late at night.
There were always strange sounds in the fog, sounds that grew terrifying the more one thought about them. Qin Manjiang followed the faintly visible concrete path beneath his feet.
Only when the view suddenly opened up before him did he raise his head.
When he did, he saw someone walking back from the opposite direction-
Shen Hai.
Both men froze.
Qin Manjiang carried the unconscious Yu Ruoli on his back, while Shen Hai held the dead Xu Tingfang in his arms.
The two men stood before the Nursing Home gates, beneath a dark, low-hanging sky, amid an oppressive atmosphere of terror.
"Is she dead?" Qin Manjiang's eyes dimmed.
Yan Xiao had said he would not let anyone in Fu City's [Eye Realm] die.
Yet deaths still kept happening.
"She left a phone behind. That's worth something, at least." The corner of Shen Hai's mouth lifted, as though he did not care.
Qin Manjiang glanced at Xu Tingfang's phone, which Shen Hai now