Only thermal images flickered through the snakes' vision. Clusters of crimson energy moved rapidly across the mental map in Jing Shu's mind, but the Darklife themselves barely registered as solid forms.
She realized quickly that these things either had no body temperature or it was so low that it blended into the freezing environment. The bugs' vision was even simpler, showing massive, distorted shapes rampaging through the corridors and scaling the internal scaffolding of the building.
She checked the area immediately outside the villa. Everything looked calm, though the silence was deceptive. Patrol teams were already rushing back inside, their torches and weapons casting long, jagged shadows against the walls.
Ever since the first invasion, the perimeter of the building had stayed lit with flickering fires and portable floodlights because the creatures clearly feared light and heat.
Jing Shu got up immediately, her movements fluid and silent. She grabbed two machetes, the cold steel heavy in her hands, and carefully cracked open the villa door. The people in the other two villas across the exhibition hall also peeked out, their faces pale and eyes wide with terror as they gripped their doorframes.
One of Li Yetian's men shouted for her to stay hidden and call if anything happened, then he hurried off toward the stairs. For now, the lobby remained a pocket of eerie stillness.
The first floor hall was quiet, but the New World Tower had a hollow center, allowing a clear view of the upper tiers. On the fourth floor, a shadow sprinted along the railing, screaming for a life that was quickly slipping away. With nowhere left to go and the sound of something heavy dragging behind them, the person jumped.
Midair, a huge, gaping mouth shot out from the darkness of a nearby pillar. It bit clean through the person's waist, severing the body in a single, wet crunch. The ugly, crawling Darklife fell along with the remaining half of its meal, crashing onto the exhibition floor with a heavy, sickening thud.
"Ahhh!" a woman in a nearby villa screamed. She had caught a glimpse of the twisted shadow in the dying firelight.
"Shut up," Jing Shu snapped. Her voice was low and sharp, but the woman's panic didn't stop.
The creature had landed right near the exhibition area. Despite falling from such a height, its massive body had turned into a puddle of foul-smelling sludge upon impact.
Within seconds, the mud gathered itself back together, thickening into a solid form as it began to crawl again. It wasn't made of flesh and bone in the way she understood. It was like living mud.
Jing Shu frowned. This was the first time she had seen something this grotesque in person. The corpses they found before had only left skeletons behind, but this one looked like a pile of rotting, gray sludge shaped into a massive fish head.
It had the clawed limbs of a lizard and a torso that tapered off into a thick, slimy tail, looking like some twisted mermaid born from a sewer. She decided to call it a mushy mermaid.
The thing kept chewing the flesh in its mouth, the sound of grinding bone echoing in the hall, and then it slowly turned toward the other half of the corpse.
Jing Shu moved forward, her blades held low at her sides.
"Miss, what are you doing? Run! Get back into the villa and wait for rescue!" a man from another villa shouted, his voice cracking with fear.
If no one had been watching, Jing Shu would have simply dropped a massive boulder from her Rubik's Cube Space and crushed the thing into a permanent stain on the floor. There was no way it would survive that kind of pressure.
But there were witnesses nearby, so she had to rely on more conventional methods to find its weakness. In this world, even with government protection, survival ultimately depended on the individual. Ordinary people died because they didn't know how to fight.
They didn't understand her. Why not wait for the soldiers? Because waiting was often just another way of choosing how you died.
She wasn't stupid enough to charge in blindly. She had the Tier 7 ability of her Rubik's Cube Space. As long as a creature possessed even a flicker of consciousness, she could interfere with its thoughts, distort its perception, and bend its will toward her own.
She had gained this power after her recent upgrade and had spent hours refining it through constant practice. Now, she could handle multiple targets at once.
The mushy mermaid noticed her. It let out a low, gurgling growl and kept eating, as if fear didn't exist in its primitive world. Jing Shu lunged forward, her eyes locked onto the creature's oversized head. The moment it bared its jagged teeth to snap at her, she swung.
The head was enormous. Even with the largest blade she had purchased before the apocalypse, she couldn't cut all the way through in one strike. Her physical strength was terrifying, yet the blade met a strange resistance.
The creature's hide was sticky and elastic, like thick rubber. She forced the machete down harder, the metal sinking deep into the gray mass until half the head split away.
There was no blood and no fluid. It was like cutting into wet clay. Even with the bone and flesh separated, the creature's limbs kept twitching, trying to drag its bulk toward her. Now she understood why bullets had been useless. Even if a person riddled it with holes, the mud-like body would simply seal back up.
The creature seemed to feel pain now. It roared, a wet and gargling sound, and lunged at her. It abandoned the flesh it had been chewing and lashed out with its claws.
Jing Shu activated her ability. Within the range of her Rubik's Cube Space, she seized control of the creature's simple mind. The mushy mermaid froze for a split second, its eyes glazing over.
That was all the time she needed.
She swung again, her blade whistling through the air. She severed the remaining half of its head, completely separating the skull from the torso. The creature's body twitched a few times, a final, violent shudder, and then it went still. She nodded to herself.
This level of Darklife hadn't yet reached the terrifying, near-invincible stages she remembered from years five and six of the apocalypse. Without a head, it died. It was manageable.
After the creature died, the sludge quickly collapsed into a heap of ordinary-looking mud, revealing a framework of thick, white bones underneath.
Behind her, the screaming stopped abruptly. The woman from the villa stared in shock, her hand over her mouth. The man was also stunned, his eyes darting between Jing Shu and the pile of mud.
Two strikes. That was all it had taken.
He couldn't believe it. This woman had just cut down a monster that size as if she were chopping wood.
Upstairs, the screams continued to echo through the hollow center of the tower. Jing Shu frowned, looking up at the higher floors. Logically, these things should have climbed in from the outside, which meant they should have passed through the first floor first. Why was there not a single one here, yet so many had managed to breach the upper levels?
Fortunately, the supervisors on each floor had begun to organize the survivors. Patrol teams and Li Yetian's armed forces were rushing upward, their shouts and the clatter of gear filling the stairwells.
Jing Shu crouched down and touched the massive, sun-bleached bones. "What a waste," she whispered.
The man from the villa cautiously stepped out onto the platform. "What is a waste? Let's go! If more of them come, we won't stand a chance. We should hide in the villa. They probably can't open the doors."
She shook her head, her gaze fixed on the skeletal remains. "Such a huge body, but there's no meat on it. You can't even use it as food. That's the real waste."
If these things were edible, this building would have been a goldmine. No one would have to worry about the starving crowds or the price of soup anymore. Honestly, once she got out of here, she might even hire people to hunt these mushy mermaids.
===
The original term is 烂泥人鱼.
烂泥 (lànní) means something like "rotten mud" or "sludge," while 人鱼 (rényú) translates to "mermaid" or "human fish."
In this chapter, I used "mushy mermaids" because of how they are described. They do not have proper flesh and feel more like rotten mud or play dough, with a grotesque, fish like humanoid shape.
But like the other Darklife species, I am giving them a more fitting name: sludge siren. "Siren" comes from mythology and carries a darker, more dangerous tone compared to "mermaid," which often feels more whimsical. Since sirens are known for luring people to their deaths, it fits this kind of creature much better.