At 7:30 PM, Tang Siqing moved the cabinet aside, left the room, and exchanged news with Zheng Ying and Zi Jiang in the lobby.
Zheng Ying whispered that the corpses lying outside remained unchanged, showing no signs of mutation or movement.
Dinner time had passed. Though everyone had been frightened by the ugly and terrifying Red Tongue Monsters, their bodies still faithfully signaled hunger.
Zheng Ying had gathered all the food on the inner sofa area of the lobby, where there was a water dispenser that could heat water. She didn’t hold back and told everyone to help themselves when hungry.
Others had wanted to eat meal replacement bars and pastries to ease hunger, but Zheng Ying insisted they should first eat the instant noodles. Those needed hot water and couldn’t be eaten anytime, so they weren’t suitable as dry rations for the road.
There were four buckets of instant noodles and about ten individual packets. The Beauty Salon had a small electric pot for boiling noodles, so eating them wasn’t troublesome.
Tang Siqing had plenty of food in Space and didn’t plan to share their rations. She said she had food in her backpack and quietly ate a chocolate cake and a small pack of beef jerky while they enjoyed their steaming hot noodles.
At 9:30 PM, the mall began playing a familiar gentle tune — the closing-time music automatically set to play.
The originally soothing melody now echoed through the silent mall, making people’s hearts race with fear again.
Sure enough, the Red Tongue Monsters, which had been quietly waiting around the mall because they couldn’t find “prey,” started stirring again.
They ran around the wrecked mall, stretching out their slender red tongues, flicking them everywhere.
The glass door of the Beauty Salon was struck several times. Tang Siqing found the farthest corner to sit down, neither standing nor making a sound, just quietly holding her folding knife and carefully examining the damage to the glass after each strike.
The glass hadn’t shattered completely but the cracks were definitely spreading.
At 10 PM, the bright mall lights dimmed — probably set to turn off automatically.
Large malls didn’t cut power at night but did switch off the main lighting. Some indicator lights and emergency exit signs remained lit, but compared to the daylight-bright lighting before, this was almost negligible.
Tang Siqing silently approached the rolling shutter, not daring to lift the curtain but instead listening carefully.
There were still sounds of monsters outside, but fewer than when the music played.
She found paper and pen at the front desk and recorded the outside situation during her night shift. She planned to pass this to the next guards, Zhang Yu and Chu Yi, to keep them informed and encourage them to monitor and record developments.
She wanted to know if these monsters were like zombies that maintained perpetual activity even outside “hunting” times, or more like beasts that needed rest.
The room she returned to rest in had previously been used by Zhang Yu and Chu Yi. From now until 6 AM, the seven hours were hers alone.
After closing the door, she again checked for cameras and moved the cabinet to block the door.
Inside were two beauty beds and a sofa. One bed showed no signs of use, probably left intentionally by the other two — one slept on the bed, the other on the sofa.
Tang Siqing thought for a moment, then went into the bathroom to take a quick ten-minute shower, changing into clean underwear, socks, and underclothes.
This was also a lesson learned from Eclipse Rituals — never waste any available resource. If the rescue forces came tomorrow, this might be her last shower for a while.
She didn’t leave the bathroom afterward but closed the toilet lid, cleaned the sink, and ate dinner there: a curry beef rice and kelp soup.
The double-layer door better contained food odors.
She had packed this meal from a famous Curry Rice Restaurant in the previous city. The business hotel she stayed at was above the Shopping Mall, making it easy to get takeout or order delivery anytime.
She stocked two portions of every type of curry rice they sold.
Based on Space’s time flow, these cooked meals would lose freshness in about twenty-four days and start spoiling after forty-eight days, so she didn’t stock too many.
Two days had passed — equal to two hours in Space. The curry rice and kelp soup were still fresh but cold. Under normal conditions, she could microwave or heat them on the kerosene stove.
Now, it wasn’t convenient, so she made do.
Eating the cold yet still tasty curry rice, she felt a twinge of regret and wished Space’s time flow were completely stopped.
In the novels, Space was either completely frozen, allowing unlimited storage of cooked meals and hot drinks without worrying about expiration; or time flowed normally but allowed hiding inside anytime; or it was huge enough to farm and raise animals.
Her Space was none of these — odd-shaped and not very big — now she found it somewhat of a mixed blessing…
The curry rice was a large portion. Normally, she could eat about two-thirds. The curry sauce was finished, leaving one-third of the rice.
With Disaster unfolding, every bite was precious. She planned to eat half of the curry and rice, filling up with the rice, and save the rest for later.
She watched countless brutal, unedited end-of-the-world clips of zombies and monsters every day. She thought she was immune to gore by now.
But even after her eyes and brain adjusted, her body’s natural reactions were beyond control.
When she had eaten a quarter of the food, her hunger was completely sated, and her appetite dropped sharply.
Her worries and doubts about the Disaster bubbled up again.
She felt her stomach clog, sighed, covered the curry rice, and put it back into Space.
After leaving the bathroom, Tang Siqing glanced at the beauty beds and sofa, finally choosing the unused bed — probably intentionally left for her.
She moved the beauty supply cabinet next to the bed, placed her backpack on it, then found two clean blankets from the nearby cabinet — one to lie on, one to cover herself.
The scented candle was extinguished, and she slept in her clothes, surrounded by complete darkness.
This place was on the city’s edge, with few people around. The Grey Fog blocked all sightlines from afternoon till now.
Those who escaped and hid remained silent and well-behaved.
The surrounding silence was so profound she could faintly hear noises from the city center: car engines, sharp honking, crashes, and distant explosions…
She closed her eyes but her mind spun with thoughts and she couldn’t sleep.
Finally, she put on earphones without noise cancellation, found her ongoing Eclipse Ritual audiobook, set a playback timer, and slowly fell asleep to the familiar AI voice.
The perilous night was restless. Strange sounds echoed in her ears.
She dreamed chaotic, horrifying dreams filled with monsters. She seemed to run endlessly while people around her were skewered by the monsters’ red tongues and eviscerated… blood-soaked scenes so close they made her nauseous.
She fell, bruising her wrist, got up, and kept running, only to suddenly feel the ground disappear beneath her feet and plummet downwards.
She woke up instantly.
The feeling of weightlessness hadn’t fully faded. Her heart pounded wildly; her wrist still ached slightly.
The darkness had lifted, and a faint light filtered through.
Probably because she just woke, the bloody images from her dream still haunted her.
She lay still. Just before sleep last night, the crucial overlooked detail suddenly became crystal clear in her mind!
She only needed a chance to verify it.
Tang Siqing checked her phone — 5:32 AM.
Daylight was near. She had slept this long without incident, so the outside situation hadn’t worsened overnight.
She got up quickly, put on her sneakers, sensed something was wrong, and hurried to the window.
The faint light she felt earlier was coming through the gap at the bottom of the curtains from outside.
But it was still dark outside, and the thick fog was heavy. How could any light be shining through?
She cautiously pulled the curtain aside just a little and looked out.
What she saw shocked her deeply.
The Grey Fog — had lifted!
Beyond the glass, not a trace of fog remained.
Though the sky was still dark, the horizon had lightened, much brighter than yesterday evening when the fog was thick.
The parking lot below, the greenery across from it, the roadway beyond that, the overpass above the road, and the cars overturned from the accident on the overpass — all clearly visible.
The bodies and bloodstains scattered on the road and parking lot were all distinct.
Had everything returned to normal?
No — not at all!
Tang Siqing’s brief joy was crushed as her heart sank again.
The Red Tongue Monsters still roamed the parking lot below.
The Grey Fog had brought them, but now the thick fog had receded and yet had not taken them away.
More than that, the Grey Fog seemed to have left something behind…
Trees, buildings, even the distant overpass and the cars on the ground — parts of them had strangely changed. Their shapes — distorted?
She couldn’t describe exactly what she saw. These objects and buildings looked like they’d been kneaded and twisted by some invisible force.
A straight tree was split from trunk to treetop in two, with branches overgrowing in a large, messy clump that looked like thick black sludge had been splattered on it.
Nearby, a lamppost bent into a strange shape, draped with thick vines hanging and wrapping around it.
Somewhere on the overpass, a huge rusted, decayed billboard had suddenly appeared. It didn’t look like it had fallen there but seemed to have grown out from the concrete surface, stretching across the bridge’s roadway, standing among the scattered overturned cars.
The once-flat parking lot ground seemed split open by some force, with cracks spreading out. Some cracks caused the ground to rise or fall unevenly.
Cars parked there now leaned or were lifted. Some vehicles were ripped apart by some sticky substance like that on the tree — shattered glass, half-open doors — all clearly totaled.
Even the shopping mall she was in had strange vine-like plants hanging from the smooth glass walls, seemingly growing abruptly from the upper building walls.
All of this before her eyes — the once normal reality — had become surreal overnight.
It was as if they had anxiously watched the attacked human corpses outside for mutation, but in the end, humans hadn’t mutated.
Instead, the outside world had begun to mutate…