His pace slowed, the crunch of dry branches and vines underfoot fading into silence.
Lu Li stopped, frowning.
Before him stood an enormous tree, a stark contrast to the withered trunks all around. The Shadow Swamp was a lifeless, grim expanse of gray and black—a dead marsh.
But this tree radiated a strange vitality. Despite its lack of green shoots and hurricane-battered branches, the uncanny feeling persisted, as if the tree were alive, breathing.
“Is that... a hand sticking out of the hollow?” Anna whispered, as if afraid to disturb the strange tree. She felt the sa uncanny presence, perhaps even more acutely than Lu Li.
Sensing no hostility from the tree, Lu Li lowered his hand from the Spirit Gun and fixed his gaze on the hollow.
The hollow was dark, its interior obscured. Only a hand, wrapped in tatters of cloth, reached out from its depths, as if trying to grasp sothing.
“I’ll take a look...” Anna offered, but Lu Li was already walking toward the strange tree.
It was a badly decomposed hand, with bone protruding through rotting flesh. The arm was extended, palm facing up, as if it had been trying to hold on to sothing.
About five ters away, Lu Li paused and raised his oil lamp. He still couldn't make out what was inside the hollow, so he moved closer.
“Be careful...” Anna whispered, following close behind. She enveloped him in her aura, prepared for any sudden danger.
Lu Li focused on the tree before him, but his peripheral vision scanned the surroundings. Deeper in the woods, he could see several more of the sa strange trees.
It seed he had trespassed into their territory, or perhaps the deeper swamp was filled with them.
All these trees shared a common feature: a hollow large enough for a person to hide inside.
As for what these hollows were for...
Lu Li stopped again, now less than two ters from the trunk, close enough to reach out and touch it.
In the lamplight, he could now see a decomposed body inside the hollow.
“It's...” Anna gasped.
Curled up inside the hollow was a heavily decomposed body in a filthy dress, an utterly incongruous sight in this place. The head was bowed, the right arm extended out of the opening.
“Our target,” Lu Li said. “She’s dead.”
A thin, nearly invisible red thread extended toward the back of the corpse’s neck—the Bloody Tentacle was inside her brain.
Just like the one in his own.
The head gave a sudden, unnatural twitch, and a writhing tentacle slithered out from the hair at the nape of her neck.
Before Lu Li could react, the Bloody Tentacle lunged, having sensed a living presence. But Lu Li was no ordinary man who would scream and flee. Before the tendril could touch him, Anna seized him and lifted him into the air.
Lu Li drew his Spirit Gun with practiced ease. A single swing, and the Bloody Tentacle dissolved into a cloud of bubbles that instantly vanished.
It was ironic, he thought, that such a fragile thing was now lodged in his brain like a ticking ti bomb, forcing him to scramble through this wretched swamp.
The Bloody Tentacles descending from the sky began to flicker and fade away.
It looked like Richard would have his hands full for a while.
Lu Li glanced up at the eye of the hurricane. They were no longer at its center. The downpour would soon resu.
As he turned to leave, Lu Li suddenly rembered sothing. He stepped back and looked down at the spot the hand had been reaching for.
Vines and branches covered a layer of rotting leaves and soil. Lu Li scraped away the debris with his boot, revealing the dull glint of tal in the dirt.
Lu Li bent down and picked up the tal object. It was a silver locket.
It was a photo locket. Lu Li wiped the gri from its surface with his thumb and pried it open. Inside was a tiny black-and-white photograph.
The photograph was blurry, a product of the era's limited technology. An inscription was carved at the bottom:
"Edward and Louise."
Lu Li's gaze shifted back to the outstretched hand, still seeming to reach for sothing. Without a word, he crouched and placed the locket into its decomposed palm.
“Let’s go back the way we ca.”
As he stood, Lu Li turned from the tree and walked away without a backward glance.
Anna floated behind him and glanced back over her shoulder. Her eyes widened in astonishnt.
She saw the outstretched hand suddenly withdraw into the darkness of the hollow, disappearing from sight.
Anna froze, watching as she and Lu Li moved away from the strange tree. Was it her imagination, or had the vitality radiating from it grown even stronger?
...
The eye of the hurricane was passing.
The brief respite from the rain ended as a drizzle began to fall, carried on a rising breeze.
The sky took on a sinister, deep-red hue, painting the already grim swamp in shades of blood.
Lu Li ntally calculated the ti it would take to reach the swamp road and realized they would never make it before the downpour returned in full force.
That ant he had to return to the hut and, most likely, spend the night.
That wasn't good.
In just a few hours of daylight, Lu Li had already faced a host of strange occurrences. As darkness fell, that number was bound to increase.
Worse still, if the hurricane passed completely, the foul weather that suppressed the swamp's malevolent entities would be gone, exposing Lu Li to even greater danger.
Twelve minutes later, the stumps of felled trees and the dark outline of the hut ca into view through the woods.
They were back.
By now, Lu Li had already devised a contingency plan.
“The body’s gone!” Anna exclaid the mont they stepped out of the woods. She had noticed that the praying woman's corpse was no longer at the entrance to the hut.
“It doesn't matter. The downpour will be here soon. The hurricane will deal with it.”
Anything with a physical form is subject to the forces of nature.
The rain intensified, and flashes of deep violet lightning crackled within the dark clouds blanketing the sky.
As Anna brought in firewood, Lu Li thought of the Masked Figure he had encountered earlier. Was she hiding sowhere nearby, waiting for the hurricane to pass? It seed unlikely that soone so powerful and mysterious would perish in a simple storm.
The wind stirred the hair on his forehead. Clutching an armful of wood, Anna floated into the hut. Lu Li went to the doorway and took one last look at the ominous, deep-violet sky. He watched it in silence for a few monts, then pulled the door firmly shut.
“We’re on the edge of the hurricane's eye,” Lu Li told Anna by the fire. “The western winds are about to pull us back into the storm. I plan to wait it out. As soon as we reach the periphery of the hurricane, we'll head for the swamp road.”
Having accomplished his mission, Lu Li had no desire to spend a second longer in the Shadow Swamp than necessary—it was tantamount to dancing with wolves.
“Which ans we leave before dark.”
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