Chapter 265

Chapter 265: The Entity That Shouldn’t Exist

Yu Sheng looked up. Deep in the thick fog, he saw a monster crawling down the mall’s glass curtain wall—or, more accurately, flowing down it.

It looked like a huge smear of ink spread over the building. Its surface rippled like unstable liquid, and from the edge of the black puddle it kept splitting off arms and legs. Each limb only flailed uselessly in the air before vanishing in a blink, shrinking back into the ink. Now and then, something like a mouth opened in its surface; sharp teeth and a tongue appeared inside. Sometimes it muttered in a muffled, low voice, but most of the time it simply gulped down the dense fog around it.

The liquid mass oozed steadily down the mall’s outer wall, and the sight made Yu Sheng’s skin crawl.

Little Red Riding Hood finally got a clear look and blurted, “Ink Mark?!”

Yu Sheng snapped his head toward her. “What the hell? You know this thing?”

“Dangerous entity. Ink Mark. Hostile to living things. Attacks through split bodies,” Little Red Riding Hood rattled off what she knew, but the stunned confusion on her face only deepened. “But… this isn’t right. Ink Mark should only form in Lakeside Town. This place—this can’t possibly be Lakeside Town, can it?!”

Yu Sheng listened, expression blank. This clearly wasn’t the time to interrogate her.

The huge smear of ink on the wall had noticed the uninvited guests on the plaza. In a blink, its edges shuddered and swelled. Countless thin branches stretched out from its shifting outline.

It looked like invisible pens dipped in thick ink, suddenly sketching wild lines across paper. Those thin branches shot from the monster’s body and stamped onto the glass, forming all kinds of strange marks. Then… the marks fell like rain, hit the ground, and lunged through the fog toward Yu Sheng and the others.

Now Yu Sheng understood how it got its name.

What he was facing was an attack from an Ink Mark that had come alive off a two-dimensional surface—countless bizarre black split bodies, all sharp edges and unpredictable movement, surging in like a maddened pack.

A phantom shadow wolf pack flashed into existence beside Little Red Riding Hood. Freed from the restraints of the fairy tale curse, she moved with a new ease. Far more shadow wolves than she usually controlled rose in great waves inside the fog, howling as they charged the oncoming split bodies without fear.

Black silk threads spread in an instant. Irene raised both hands, and the writhing strands wove into a huge spiderweb that stretched toward the densest cluster of split monsters. The creatures looked like mindless marks, but the moment they touched the silk, each one went rigid, trembling in midair. The wolves tore them apart one by one, turning them into droplets that scattered into the fog.

Foxy didn’t waste a word. She fired a volley of fox-carrot missiles at the monster’s main body clinging to the mall’s outer wall.

After stuffing herself at the Special Operations Bureau, the nine-tailed fox was brimming with confidence. Before the smoke even cleared, she fired a second volley.

The explosions were deafening. The shockwave even shredded the dense fog for a moment. Yu Sheng saw the patch of ink swallowed by blazing fox fire and smoke, and it seemed to let out a short, chaotic hiss. Right after that, the mall building that had taken the hits head-on began to screech with a string of cracking, collapsing sounds.

In the unbearable noise, the entire building started to crumble. Blue fox fire raced along stairwells and corridors, burning through every structure in its path.

Irene was still weaving her web, but when she heard that, she whipped around and shouted, “What the hell?! Silly Fox, you blew the building down—and it’s falling toward us!”

Yu Sheng reacted instantly. “Run!”

Before the word even finished, a flash of silver moved beside him. Foxy transformed into a massive nine-tailed demon fox. With a sweep of her tail, she scooped Yu Sheng and Irene up and dropped them onto her back, then took off at full speed, sprinting beyond the collapse zone.

As she ran, the demon fox shouted, “Sorry, Benefactor! I failed Firepower Control and Directional Demolition back then!”

Yu Sheng and Irene clung to her silver fur, looking back at the building as it collapsed into a roaring avalanche. Yu Sheng’s eyes nearly popped out. “Why were you learning that in elementary school?!”

“Dad signed me up for an after-school class!” the demon fox girl yelled. “He said a girl has to learn to control her firepower, and only then can she be a lady!”

Yu Sheng was too shocked to speak. Somehow, he felt a strange, sincere respect for her fox dad. How the hell was controlling firepower supposed to make you a lady… and he wasn’t even going to ask why she had that much firepower to begin with.

Out of the corner of his eye, a black shadow darted by. Little Red Riding Hood burst out of the fog riding a shadow wolf, barely keeping up as she yelled, “Don’t make it this big! What if Big Nephew is hiding nearby—wouldn’t you kill him too?!”

Foxy glanced over while running. “I swept with divine sense. There aren’t any other living people around. Teacher also said a lady won’t use missiles to blow up her own side.”

Little Red Riding Hood stared at her, speechless, then urged her wolf harder and shouted, “Slow down! I can’t keep up!”

“She’s already going slow,” Yu Sheng said with a grin. “She hasn’t even used a booster. If you want, I can show you what a supersonic fox looks like.”

Jokes were jokes, but Foxy still gradually slowed. They were already clear of the danger zone. After another few dozen meters, she came to a full stop and looked back toward the mall.

The fog was thick; visibility was awful. From here, they could only make out leftover fox fire burning in the rising dust and chaotic rubble. Yu Sheng guessed the entire building had already collapsed, and the split bodies that had attacked them were either buried in the wreckage or burned away by the fox fire flowing everywhere.

As for the Ink Mark’s main body, it probably couldn’t withstand a sudden saturation bombardment like that. It didn’t feel like an upgraded Hunger-type—one of those that came with stats and nasty mechanics all at once.

For the first time, it seemed like they could breathe.

Yu Sheng got about two seconds.

A strange, low muttering drifted through the fog. He looked up and saw countless figures slowly emerging.

They weren’t Ink Mark. They were something new—a crowd shaped like people, yet faceless, with limbs all wrong. Each figure was stitched together entirely from jittering, chaotic, colorful geometric lines. Tall, short, fat, thin—they moved in groups and waves out of the fog like a mindless tide, drifting in from the far side of the street.

“…Are entities always this abstract?” Yu Sheng got goosebumps and turned to Little Red Riding Hood. “What is this now? Do you know it? Can we fight it directly?”

Little Red Riding Hood stared at the crowd coming out of the fog. Her expression was strange, but it was obvious she recognized them.

“A swarm-type entity: Carnival Revelers,” she said quickly, voice low. “Whenever they appear, there are between one thousand and ten thousand of them. They follow a fixed route through the carnival grounds. They may randomly approach or even attack living people, though sometimes they leave without doing anything. Their danger level fluctuates between level two and level three.”

She swallowed, eyes hard. “Be careful. Don’t let your bare skin touch them. Once you do, their lines will dye you. After more than three contacts, you’ll become one of them. Don’t act rashly yet—they don’t seem eager to attack for now…”

Irene and Foxy immediately held back. All of them followed Little Red Riding Hood cautiously to the roadside, watching the crowd sketched in shaking lines. Yu Sheng caught one word and latched onto it.

“You said ‘carnival’?”

“…Yes. A carnival,” Little Red Riding Hood said grimly. “These things shouldn’t be here either. They’re entities that only form in Nameless Carnival, yet they’re showing up in this fog. And the Ink Mark just now, too. What is this place…”

She cut off mid-sentence.

Because the line-drawn crowd walking down the street suddenly stopped.

Countless hazy figures froze in place inside the fog.

After a few seconds of skin-crawling silence, one small figure slowly turned its head toward them—like a child walking beside an adult, distracted by something interesting on the roadside.

As it turned, Yu Sheng clearly heard several paper party-popper bangs from inside the swarm.

Bright confetti appeared out of thin air. As it fluttered down, every line-drawn figure slowly turned their way.

Then they started walking over, as if inviting the trespassers to join the dance. The jittering colored lines had no faces, yet within the chaotic shapes of their heads, terrifying, twisted smiles seemed to form.

Irene enunciated clearly.

“What the hell?!”