“Teacher Sang.”
In a small mountain village nestled between hills and water, a crew member shouldering a camera waved at the young man standing under the eaves.
Sang Ning stood sheltered beneath the eaves, lashes lowered, his jade-white frame wrapped in a traditional long robe, like snow piled against the village backdrop, quiet and serene.
The sun shone brightly over the little village, it was autumn, the hillsides heavy with rice, the sky a clean, unpolluted blue-white, clouds drifting lazily overhead. Everyone was basking in the sunlight, feeling the peace of it.
Sang Ning was waiting for the production crew and the local heritage-craft inheritor to discuss the shooting schedule. He’d rushed to finish an announcement and catch a flight the night before, and now, drowsy in the warm sun, he was nodding off.
He leaned against the eaves as the tracking cameraman aimed the lens at him, and the director urged him to hurry into position for filming.
Prompted once, Sang Ning stepped forward a few paces, when the cameraman in front of him suddenly let out a scream.
Sang Ning turned toward the sound, and in an instant his pupils contracted, his face draining with fear.
A thick shadow swept in from the distant sky, and out of nowhere a “tsunami” reared up before them, flinging spray high into the air, an enormous shadow engulfing everything in a single sweep, crashing down toward them with unstoppable force.
Everyone screamed and cursed, scattering to run in every direction.
The next instant, floodwater surged in, houses toppled, and human strength was reduced to the struggling of ants against nature.
Someone yanked Sang Ning by the arm, before he could even steady himself in the water, a huge wave rolled over him.
From tsunami to flood took barely a minute or two, the spray raced ahead of the surge, smashing the oncoming water against the rocks of the hillside.
The flood, arriving from nowhere, came together with a violent earthquake, shaking the high mountains and rivers. The once-peaceful little village was swallowed by the towering flood, and the steel cities humanity had taken such pride in collapsed and drowned in the quake.
“Beep beep—”
The disaster alert system screamed to life in an instant. Before rescue personnel could even respond, more and more alarms crashed onto the screens, overwhelming them completely.
But no one had the energy left to pay attention. They simply stared, dazed, up at the sky.
Fiery red burning clouds spread out from the horizon, painting the entire field of view in creeping flame. The blood-red light bathed the cities and mountains, rendering everything in scarlet, but what everyone truly noticed was the black shadow beneath those burning clouds, drawing steadily closer.
“What… what is that…”
“Monsters! Monsters!”
Winged monstrosities swept across the sky, the beat of their wings far more piercing than any low-flying plane. They rode the red clouds in, sweeping recklessly across the human world.
“Riiip—”
People snatched up by sharp claws screamed, the sound of flesh tearing turning into a bloody rain that fell mercilessly from above, soaking and waking the trembling, panicked crowds below.
Dusk descended over heaven and earth wrapped in catastrophe, and no one had any energy left to spare for the sudden floodwaters or the earthquake still to come.
They wailed, and in their despair tried desperately to hide themselves inside buildings.
But that wasn’t safe either. The creatures crawling up the walls had legs like lizards, scaling glass with ease, their dripping saliva corroding away everything humans had built.
A man hiding inside his room had his arm seized in a monster’s jaws and was hauled bodily out of the house.
He screamed, thrashing, pounding his fists against the creature.
“Crunch—”
The monster’s jaws worked, as if chewing on prey already near death. The man struggled and kicked inside its mouth, until at last his limbs went slack and dropped.
…
The cities were overrun by monsters, outside them, floodwaters buried the mountains, the surging tide tearing houses apart without mercy, unending quakes ripping the earth open. People struggled in the water, fled from the tremors.
Heaven and earth were swept bare. Countless cries of anguish echoed, desolate and shrill, while black crows circled overhead, screeching out their final dirge over the empty, drowned waters.
“Caw—”
Sang Ning was slapped down into the water by a wave, choking suddenly on a mouthful. His mouth and nose submerged, bubbles rushed up past his lips, his eyes lost focus, and in his daze he saw a dazzling blue light rippling upward, ring after ring, before his eyes.
The tide roared in his ears, the crowd’s wailing never ceasing. In his stupor, Sang Ning thought he saw a strange, thick tentacle reaching toward him out of the endlessly churning sea.
Disjointed, unintelligible murmurs kept layering and smearing themselves inside his mind, over and over, until his head felt like a water balloon swollen with blood. He could only stare blankly upward at that dim blue halo drawing nearer and nearer.
—Like some monster’s own mimicry-colored glow.
…
Was it a hallucination?
The extreme suffocation of oxygen deprivation sent his lungs into frantic spasms. In the next instant, an urgent surge of water lifted him up.
“Cough, cough, cough—”
He broke the surface abruptly, held up and suspended above the water in a thoroughly unnatural way.
A burning sting spread across his waist and belly. He pulled his clothes open to find the skin beneath ringed over and over with red marks.
—As if something with tentacles had wrapped around him and sucked, maliciously.
Sang Ning shivered without meaning to, his amber eyes hazy and damp with confusion, glancing frantically around. The rippling water reflected back at him, nearly level with the mountains it had submerged.
He covered his mouth, coughing until the corners of his eyes reddened, his long lashes soaked. His expression was dazed, as if he could barely stand it, he pressed his lips together with effort, faint distress showing in his brows.
Ever since being discovered by a talent scout and rising to fame, Sang Ning had rarely had an experience that could be described as “disaster.”
But clearly, he had fallen into one now.
Fallen into—
Sang Ning looked up. The tall mountain before him now had only its peak still standing above the water, looking further down, the rushing current had swallowed everything in sight.
Crying, cursing… all of it had dissolved now into the murmur of flowing water, an unrecognizable natural sound, its clamor somehow terrifying.
Before Sang Ning could even feel proper grief, the “current” beneath him suddenly shifted, and he was abruptly hoisted skyward.
“…What?”
Before he could react, he tumbled backward down the tilting stream, back into the water.
Just before his consciousness blurred entirely, the strange creature that had propelled him upward came into full view beneath the sun.
Colors like flowing water rippled and pulsed across its body, patterns shifting with each movement. A vast, umbrella-like skirt spread outward in rings before his eyes, countless tentacles trailed from it, strange and ethereal, drifting through the water.
Abruptly, it rotated its “eyeballs,” turning toward Sang Ning with a posture that inspired dread.
A “jellyfish”?
—A monster.
For a moment Sang Ning’s scalp went numb, his blood-swollen brain finally seeming to give out. He swallowed, forced to gulp down more and more floodwater.
His struggling limbs suddenly lost all strength, his eyes glazed over, and as he sank, only a single thought remained in his mind.
He was going to die.
“No, help me, cough, cough, cough—”
The floodwater receded from around him at an unnatural speed. Saved once again, Sang Ning coughed so hard the world seemed to turn upside down.
He was hauled bedraggled out of the water by the “monster,” bent forward, his overly thin body visible even through the thin fabric of his clothes, his spine nearly showing through.
The water-colored monster made no move, simply drifting along with the current.
Jellyfish were plankton, they only moved by riding the pull of the water.
The thought surfaced in Sang Ning’s mind, unbidden.
Sang Ning wasn’t a particularly cheerful or lively person, perhaps because of growing up isolated in an orphanage, he’d developed a certain weariness toward crowds.
His one hobby had been keeping jellyfish: rare ones, beautiful ones, short-lived ones.
He’d kept a great many jellyfish, but never one this… big.
This…
Sang Ning’s mind turned the thought over and settled on a word: gorgeous.
Like a spirit out of the water, its water-blue currents shimmering and rippling, its semi-transparent body still clear even amid the flood. Its umbrella-skirt spread wide and lovely like a girl’s dress hem, its drifting tentacles swaying gorgeously like a fairy’s silk sash.
It seemed to have borrowed too much brilliance from the light itself—Sang Ning had only stared at it for a few minutes before he felt dizzy, his vision full of glittering brightness.
It was probably poisonous.
Sang Ning couldn’t help but think.
He might not be entirely normal, he wasn’t feeling nearly as much fear as he should have.
“…I’ll probably die soon.”
If this jellyfish’s venom was strong enough.
Sang Ning lifted his head from where he lay sprawled across the jellyfish’s bell, his reddened eyes tilting upward to a pale blue sky.
The high mountains that, seen from the village, once seemed to have no end, now seemed level with him. Looking further down, the surging current, in a way almost impossible to describe, poured down the mountain paths into the tangled forest below.
Sunlight, filtered through the sky’s covering of red clouds, cast an ominous color across his face. Sang Ning felt momentarily disoriented, the floodwater, visibly, was going down.
It was like watching a disaster film on fast-forward.
The “jellyfish” drifted with the current, seeming entirely indifferent to the tiny human curled on its bell, floating and sinking freely in the water like a piece of driftwood, a plastic bag.
The receding floodwater provoked no reaction from it. It remained quiet, faintly harmless, and possibly still a little poisonous.
Drip—
Tears slid down his jaw and fell into the water, sending ripples through his own reflection. Only then did Sang Ning realize he was crying.
He was going to die.
Sang Ning bent forward, watching, somehow detached, as his own reflection in the water wept.
He simply cried quietly for a while, expression faint, pressing his lips together, holding back sob after sob that still escaped his throat.
He was going to die.
The rippling river surface suddenly stirred, a translucent eyeball abruptly surfaced, blinking once, then fixed itself unwaveringly on Sang Ning as he wept over his own reflection.
It rotated the eyeball, and a few small bubbles popped softly.
“Glub, glub…”
Sang Ning never noticed that the ripples on the water in front of him weren’t from his falling tears at all.
An unseen tentacle greedily caught the liquid spilling from the corner of his eye, an unfathomable transparent eyeball pressing close to his eye, licking at that warm wetness.
After he finished crying, Sang Ning’s mood, strangely, improved considerably.
Perhaps it was because a giant jellyfish was keeping him company. Sang Ning stroked its bell, and his stomach growled with hunger.
But more terrifying than hunger was the coming of night.
The burning clouds hadn’t faded—quite the opposite. Sun and moon hung in the sky together, an almost light-polluting red bathing the entire world.
From the distant peaks came several monstrous howls, a cold wind rustled the branches and leaves, and thick shadows wrapped Sang Ning in a nightmare of terror, the faint, intermittent roars seeming both very far and very near.
The flood had receded to the mid-slope of the mountain, but he didn’t dare climb ashore, staring in fear at the blood-red forest.
The deep woods, scoured by the flood, showed a strange, eerie dark green beneath the crimson sky. In his daze, Sang Ning felt as though some monster were watching him.
Full of hunger, of bloodlust…
He clenched his fingers without meaning to, and like when he’d been a child shut in a storeroom, he hugged his knees and buried his face in the crook of his arm.
The solitary, lofty moon shone down over him like a hazy veil, standing in for the imagined comfort of a blanket.
Children always think: hide under the blanket, and the monsters hiding in the dark can’t hurt you.
Sang Ning quietly comforted himself, his mind blank, biting down hard on his lower lip.
He stared blankly up at the moon, his gaze unfocused. The moon before him seemed to change shape, unfurling into something beautiful and strange, twisting, dreamlike.
Tentacles wrapped in moonlight coiled around his body, in his daze, Sang Ning felt himself being drawn upward, floating toward the sky.
What was in the sky?
Bathed in moonlight, the presence before him rippled with hazy, weightless color, coiling around his wrists, his waist.
He danced with a fairy in a moon palace, letting the pale tentacles caress his skin, letting that strange eyeball press close to his own…
It was all imagination.
Was it really imagination?
Sang Ning tilted his head, sitting in an awkward posture as he slept on his “island.”
Moonlight lit the monster’s form, the enormous jellyfish rose and sank in the water, rippling waves washing over it as, page by page, pairs of eyes opened, weighing down every tentacle.
The monster turned over, its gentle bell drawing Sang Ning deep into its body, its water-soft form swaying its fairy-like tentacles, humming an unintelligible murmur.
【Wife wife wife wife wife wife wife】
【Wife, cuddle close~】
【Poor, pitiful wife, so cute, so cute, so cute…】
【Be a little more pitiful, depend on me a little more…】