People on the street kept casting strange looks at the girl standing in the blazing sun, drenched in sweat.
It was the dog days of summer. Whatever her reason, surely there was no need to torture herself like this?
The girl was slight of build, a high-schooler by the look of her, with a delicate, adorable face still carrying a touch of baby fat. But what drew the eye most was the proud scale of her bosom — of which a verse might be sung:
Peaks massing like a gathering range, waves surging as if in fury, mountains and rivers guarding the road through Tong Pass.
"Little miss, have you run into some kind of trouble?" asked a kindhearted passerby, stepping up to her.
The girl took half a step back and shook her head. "I'm fine."
The passerby frowned. "You've been standing in the sun so long you're about to get dehydrated. Come rest somewhere cooler."
"I really am fine. Please, just leave me alone." The girl firmly refused the passerby's kindness.
The passerby sighed, said nothing more, and turned to walk away.
***
Once the passerby was gone, terror rose in the girl's big, limpid eyes.
What she could see was a rotting infant clinging to the passerby's chest like a facehugger, hiding from the sunlight behind the passerby's body, its two eyes glaring at the girl with pure malice.
And that was not all. The shadowed strips along both sides of the road teemed with even more horrors!
A woman in red, her limbs snapped at impossible angles, crawled about on the ground. More than a dozen semi-transparent Anomalies huddled together, whispering among themselves and now and then flicking malicious glances at the girl. And a headless man staggered along, asking everyone he passed:
"Where's my head? Have you seen my head?"
Yet not a single person answered him, for none of the pedestrians could see him, nor could they hear his voice. Only the girl could see and hear.
"She can see us... she definitely saw us..."
"Kill her... the moment the sunlight's gone, kill her..."
"I want her lips... that lovely cherry color..."
The whispers of the dozen-odd Anomalies reached her in broken fragments. The girl shook uncontrollably. She was baking in the open sun, yet a spine-chilling cold wrapped itself around her.
Then the girl took out her phone, and with quivering fingers began to write a final letter:
"Mom, Dad, by the time you read this letter, I'll already be dead. Don't try to investigate the cause of my death. The thing killing me is too terrifying — nothing that exists can stand against it, not even if the authorities send their people. I don't want to drag anyone down with me. I'll watch over you well from the other world. Your loving daughter, Chu Yao."
***
Once she was dead, her parents would log into her email and find this final letter.
Chu Yao put the phone away. Though she had already steeled herself to die, she was still terribly afraid.
She didn't know how any of it had happened. When she woke up this morning, she had sensed that the world was no longer what it used to be — Anomalies everywhere, a hundred Anomalies running rampant, every soul in peril.
And it seemed that only she could see these Anomalies.
On the way to school, she had watched a little girl viciously shove a woman into the middle of the road — thankfully a car had stopped in time, or it would have ended in tragedy.
While the onlookers were in chaos, the little girl had tried to slip away, but Chu Yao sharply called her back and demanded to know why she had done it.
"You can see me?"
The little girl tilted her head, puzzled. Then a murderous light flickered across her tender face, and she snarled, "Since you can see me, I'll have to kill you!"
Maggots came crawling out of the little girl's eye sockets, one after another. Scared out of her wits, Chu Yao ran for her life. The little girl chased her relentlessly and only stopped, seething with hate, when Chu Yao ran out into the sunlight.
That was how Chu Yao learned the thing feared daylight. She hadn't dared go to school all morning — she had hidden in the sun instead, going wherever the sunlight was.
The little girl lurked in the shadows, keeping watch over Chu Yao. Perhaps a single Anomaly found it boring on her own, because she summoned many more Anomalies to keep her company. They huddled together and deliberated over how to deal with this freak who could see them, once the sunlight faded.
***
Time slipped slowly by. Evening fell, and the dying sun on the horizon was as vivid as blood.
Chu Yao had baked in the sun the entire day without a drop of water. Her body felt weak, and only the fear in her heart kept her from collapsing.
The moment the last trace of sunlight vanished below the horizon, the dozen-odd Anomalies came alive with excitement. They closed around Chu Yao in a ring and crept in toward her, baring their teeth and snarling.
Snap.
A solar-powered streetlamp suddenly burst into warm, pure light, and the encroaching Anomalies shrank back in alarm.
"Damn it!"
Furious, the Anomalies threatened Chu Yao. "We're going to eat you for sure! No one can save you!"
"Come here and let us eat you like a good girl!"
Chu Yao shook her head hard. She wasn't stupid — how could she possibly walk over and let the Anomalies eat her?
"Go call over a few more Anomalies. I don't believe she can make it through tonight!" the little girl fumed.
Chu Yao pressed her back against the lamppost, lips clamped tight. The prolonged terror had left the high-schooler incapable of any reaction at all.
As time wore on, more and more transparent Anomalies came drifting in from the far end of the street. By the dead of night, a full fifty or sixty Anomalies surrounded Chu Yao, gnashing and clawing, vicious and hideous, as though they had crawled up from the depths of hell.
But the solar streetlamp held them off, and they always stayed three meters away from Chu Yao.
"Put out the streetlamp!" the little girl suggested viciously.
The Anomalies gathered their Anomalous force, and before long, with a "pop" of an explosion, the streetlamp shattered, its warm, pure light snuffed out entirely.
In the gloom, Chu Yao at last closed her eyes in despair and waited for death to come.
Yet she waited a good while, and the pain she expected — the Anomalies tearing into her — never came.
She opened her eyes in astonishment — and saw the dozens of Anomalies before her backing away step by step, their faces full of dread, as though some terrifying presence lurked behind her.
Seething with hatred, the little girl glared at the thick fog behind Chu Yao and ground out through her teeth:
"Damn it, what is this now..."
A tentacle shot out of the fog and, with a single lash, whipped the little girl to ash — vaporized where she stood.
Horror-struck, the remaining Anomalies scrambled back a full three hundred meters in a single breath.
Only then did Chu Yao notice the horror behind her. She turned to look — an endless expanse of thick fog hung in the air five meters away, deeper and more unfathomable than the ocean.
"This..."
Chu Yao was so shaken she couldn't speak. This fog was more uncanny than the Anomalies themselves!
The next moment, the fog parted to either side, opening a vacuum corridor. Some deep instinct told Chu Yao that it was inviting her to step inside.
She glanced back at the dozens of Anomalies three hundred meters away and swiftly made her decision. Better to seek a sliver of life in the fog than die an inexplicable death at the Anomalies' hands!