Tang Siqing was woken up at around three in the morning and never dared to sleep again. The Red Tongue Monsters weren’t as easy to kill as zombies.
Outside, the fog was thick with near-zero visibility, and even with firearms, aiming was nearly impossible.
Moreover, even if the fog limited the monsters’ vision, their hearing was far sharper than humans’.
As long as the gray fog persisted, even the Self-Defense Forces wouldn’t dare recklessly go out to face the monsters, let alone civilians.
Outside, the monsters seemed provoked and kept battering at building doors and windows. The hotel where she was safe was fortunate because the main entrance had iron gates, and her room was on the third floor with high windows, far from the main door.
The monsters couldn’t reach her room in a short time.
But those staying on the first floors of other buildings were in trouble. Once the glass was broken, even though people knew the monsters’ poor eyesight, it was hard to remain perfectly still and quiet.
Especially when accompanied by others, if even one person lost control and made noise, it was like pointing the monsters straight to them in the dark.
In cramped indoor spaces, keeping a safe distance was almost impossible. The Red Tongues, probing everywhere, quickly caught their prey.
Tang Siqing felt something was wrong. Even if the quarantined hospitals and shopping center in the safe zone had problems, or the defenses were breached by monsters because of the fog, the number of monsters they saw traveling from the Suburb here wouldn’t be enough to cause such a massive night assault.
And yet, the constant howls outside sounded like a responding pack, with so many monsters that it made her scalp tingle.
Could it be the corpses had mutated?
No, there weren’t that many corpses, and most had been cleared outside the guarded perimeter.
So, was the fog itself somehow bringing the Red Tongue Monsters?
Like some kind of—portal?
She wasn’t sure if this description was accurate, but it was the only explanation she could think of.
Around five in the morning, a tremendous rumbling came from somewhere in the city—louder than before and lasting for quite a while.
Tang Siqing noticed the sound came from the west side of the hotel—the direction they had driven in during the day.
The entire hotel trembled from the noise, and she was so scared she thought an earthquake was happening. She quickly hid under a table with the hotel blanket. Fortunately, the shaking lasted a while but did not intensify.
Because of the loud, long-lasting noise, most of the monsters roaming in the gray fog moved toward it.
The small electric plug-in night lamp Tang Siqing had taken from her space suddenly dimmed, as if the power went out.
She lit her phone screen, checked the outlet, and tried charging her phone with the charger. Then she went to the door, moved the heavy chair blocking it, and peered carefully through the peephole.
Even at night, the hotel’s corridors and lobby had dim yellow lighting. Now she realized that the lights had probably attracted the Red Tongue Monsters to batter the doors and windows.
But now, the hallway outside was as dark as her room.
Sure enough, there was a power outage.
The gray fog still thick outside the window, the street below and nearby roads were quiet, and with the power outage, the street lamps were off. The whole world seemed swallowed by blurry darkness.
This silence was not the peaceful quiet she had felt before sleep but a strange, eerie deathly silence—as if everyone in the world had vanished.
Tang Siqing could clearly hear her own heartbeat—rapid, panicked, uncontrollable.
After an unknown amount of time, the room remained pitch dark, but the night lamp in the corner flickered back on. The emergency exit sign outside the room also lit up.
She guessed the hotel must have a backup power supply, which had just kicked in, though she didn’t know how long it would last.
She leaned back on the sofa and closed her eyes for a moment’s rest.
This gray fog did not dissipate until the afternoon of the following day.
The hotel’s backup power had stopped soon after dawn, probably because the generator had run out of fuel. Given the situation, no one would go to refuel the generator.
When the fog cleared, she was doing Plank Pose on the yoga mat laid on the room floor. Suddenly, gunfire rang out outside—at first a few shots, then more frequent, some near and some far, mixed with the monsters’ howls.
She immediately stood up, put the yoga mat back into the space, grabbed her jacket from the sofa, and stepped to the window, just parting the curtain slightly to look out.
The fog had lifted, but the weather remained poor, with thick cloud cover. On the street below were the corpses of Red Tongue Monsters and humans alike.
What had been a smooth road the day before was now cracked and uneven, with fissures stretching across the pavement. The concrete had broken apart, revealing the same black substance seen near the shopping center. Strange vines also grew and drooped from buildings across the street.
The city was indeed starting to mutate, though not severely.
On the street, a jeep was blocked by a few Red Tongue Monsters in the middle of the road. The windows were tightly shut, but the roof vent was open. Two Self-Defense Force soldiers in combat gear leaned out back-to-back, aiming their suppressed submachine guns at the monsters closing in.
The submachine guns fired rapid bursts, and with the two working together covering all angles, they killed the monsters before they could leap onto the vehicle.
Once the small group of monsters was cleared, the jeep moved forward again. From the buildings on both sides of the street and nearby alleys, more monsters emerged, only to be gunned down by the soldiers sticking their heads out of the vent.
This was clearly the method they had refined through multiple attempts, minimizing their casualties while clearing monsters. They probably used this tactic to carve out a small Temporary Safe Zone yesterday.
Although slow, this approach saved ammunition. After all, this area had a limited number of police officers and a finite supply of guns and bullets in the armory.
Until reinforcements arrived, this was the only way.
The number of monsters now was relatively small—only about a tenth or so compared to the howling horde Tang Siqing had heard during the early-morning fog. These must be the stragglers that had not been drawn away by the loud noises.
But what was that noise that had attracted most of the monsters away from the fog?
Thinking of this, Tang Siqing unlocked and pushed open the window, leaning out to get a better look.
The third floor was not very high, so her view was limited. She thought she wouldn’t be able to locate the source quickly.
But the moment she leaned out, she spotted it clearly.
A huge, abrupt shadow appeared several hundred meters to the left.
It was a—mountain!?