Chapter 534: Overlay

Beyond the intersection, mist blanketed everything, making the distant street scene appear hazy and grotesque. The far-off streetlights swayed faintly like living eyes, and in the interplay of light and fog, suspicious shadows frequently flickered past—they could be entities born from the mist, tactical walking robots patrolling the Special Services Bureau, or simply pure illusions.

Without a doubt, charging into that fog alone was an extremely dangerous act.

So Li Lin obediently stayed within the “safe zone” around No. 66 Wutong Road, observing this fog-shrouded foreign realm while waiting for Zheng Zhi and Yu Sheng to return.

The good news was that he wasn’t entirely alone in the wait—thanks to the widespread use of the new “Spirit Fox” relay nodes, he could still contact the real world and also connect to the Special Services Bureau’s dedicated channel within the Fog City. At this moment, hundreds of deep-dive squads were moving through this enormous alien city of confusion. Even though the thick fog separated them all, watching the messages from various action teams refreshing in the public channel from time to time gave him some sense of security.

“…So anyway, I’m holding down the fort here,” Li Lin sat at the entrance of the courier collection point, phone in hand, typing messages in the Second Brigade colleagues’ group chat. “Honestly, this dense fog is a bit creepy. If you stay alone for too long, you start feeling like something’s going to come out of it. No wonder the Bureau issued orders banning solo exploration of this place.”

The phone buzzed, a new message popped up. Xu Jiali replied in the group: “Don’t even talk about solo; even teams are risky. The last time I led a team and encountered ‘Joker,’ we almost got rolled. That thing teleports in the fog so fast even the bells couldn’t lock on to it. Lucky I had a trick up my sleeve…”

“There’s a deep-dive squad active near Wutong Road. Did you see them?” another colleague asked.

“They passed by my place about fifteen minutes ago and said hi,” Li Lin typed quickly. “Squad leader Liu’s team—they were pretty startled because they didn’t know No. 66 Wutong Road had arrived. The squad originally planned to take a shortcut through the alleys around here, but now they couldn’t take the shortcut, and they’ll have to write a report when they get back…”

“What report?” Ren Wenwen suddenly chimed in—as a logistics clerk, she was especially sensitive to those words.

“The contact report for No. 66 Wutong Road. They crossed into the warning zone,” Li Lin grinned. “Even though Brother Yu isn’t here, that’s the rule. They weren’t on the authorized list.”

Xu Jiali: “…The world is a big shoddy stage.”

Ren Wenwen: “Who says it isn’t.”

Li Lin chuckled as he watched the group messages, then unconsciously rubbed his fingers together.

The temperature around him had dropped unnoticed—a slow, subtle cooling. A strange, bone-chilling cold was seeping into the fog, making his fingers feel numb.

His spiritual intuition suddenly stirred. Li Lin snapped alert, quickly put down his phone, and looked around.

Everything seemed normal. No change in the fog.

But that faint, chilling sensation was gradually seeping from the mist, becoming more and more pronounced.

Something’s wrong—better take cover indoors.

With that thought flashing through his mind, Li Lin didn’t hesitate. He turned and headed for the outpost disguised as a courier collection point.

Just as he was about to take a step, the corner of his eye caught a shadow emerging in the mist.

High above No. 66 Wutong Road, in the thick layers of fog, a huge, slender shadow suddenly swept past.

Then two more equally slender shadows appeared nearby.

Shadows moved slowly across the sky, stirring the mist at higher altitudes.

In the next few seconds, Li Lin felt a terrifying paralysis spreading through his brain—human imagination went out of control, completing some possible, hidden structure in the mist based on that fleeting glimpse of limb shadow. His mind fought against the sudden fear surging from his subconscious, letting that terrifying image fully form in his mind. Finally, he realized what it was he had seen.

A giant spider. An alien god. Strolling through the sky of Fog City.

Huge black cobwebs flickered in and out of the mist, and the alien god crawled slowly across them. Or perhaps because the fog obscured it, or because it itself hadn’t fully “entered” this dimension, no matter how wide Li Lin opened his eyes, he could only see a part of its existence—he could only see several massive, jointed limbs moving blindly above Wutong Road as if sleepwalking, and every swing of those limbs seemed to cut through the space-time around them, stirring layers upon layers of ripples at the edges of the web.

“Holy shit…”

Li Lin desperately tried to look away, to move his legs, but found his entire body frozen, unable to move. The eerie cold had seeped into his bones. The moment he saw the web, he seemed already to have become an insect caught in it. After a futile struggle, he could only watch those limbs slide across his field of vision again and again. Then, suddenly, the huge shadow stopped in the mist.

He saw two clusters of scarlet radiance.

After a few seconds, he realized those were two eyes—the spider had lowered its torso from the sky, revealing a vague female upper body, surrounded by large swaths of black drapery, preventing Li Lin from seeing its features clearly. Only those eyes, like the apocalypse, looked down through the mist at the little insect on the ground.

The end was near.

In one second, Li Lin figured out where he should be buried, then quickly listed all the unfulfilled wishes he had in this life. He tried his best to strike a brave posture, so that when the body collectors arrived, they might say a few good words about him in the action report—not hoping to become a beautiful girl in a gacha game in a few years, but at least to strive to be a positive example in the year-end Special Services Bureau work summary, the uplifting kind…

He felt his brain trembling, his reason evaporating, his blood freezing drop by drop, his soul beginning to uncontrollably escape from this shell.

But suddenly, those scarlet eyes seemed to blur for a moment—the terrible pressure abruptly lifted.

Li Lin heard a vague muttering sound from the mist.

“Heehee…”

Li Lin: “…?”

“Yu Sheng’s friend oh…”

The giant spider shook its body, muttering to itself like a sleep-talker, then inexplicably laughed, with a hint of eeriness: “Heehee~”

It seemed very happy, swaying on the web, then slowly crawled deeper into the mist, mumbling and talking to itself as it went.

“Still not home oh… where’d the silly fox and the C-clip go… weave the web, weave the web, oh, stick it together, stick it together and fix it… everyone worked hard to make it, gotta fix it, first collect the pieces… heehee, last hit, awesome, crawl, crawl, crawl past %￥%#@…”

The giant spider slowly crawled away along the web, muttering all the way, as if saying whatever came to its dream.

The bone-chilling cold suddenly vanished. The nearly boiling rationality quickly calmed down. Li Lin took a sharp breath, feeling his control over his body return in an instant—without even taking time to sort out the chaotic information in his mind, he immediately pulled out two large-dose rational suppressants specially issued to Special Services Bureau operatives from his pocket, injected them with muscle-memory accuracy, then ran straight into the outpost. At the same time, he quickly took out his phone.

His first instinct was to dial Yu Sheng, but no one answered.

So he called Zheng Zhi next.

This time the call connected quickly.

“Something’s happened here!” he said rapidly as soon as the call went through. “I saw a giant spider crawling across the sky—lower body of a spider, upper body of a human! I tried calling Brother Yu but couldn’t get through. Tell him about this, you guys need to come back!”

Zheng Zhi was obviously startled by the sudden news, and after a two-second delay, he hastily replied: “Ah, we’re heading back now. Brother Yu, he…”

Zheng Zhi suddenly hesitated, as if momentarily unable to find the right words. Then Ai Lin’s rowdy voice came through the receiver—she seemed to have snatched the phone. “Hey, Yu Sheng had somewhere to go, he’ll be back soon. First find a safe place and stay there—go to No. 66 Wutong Road, I’ll open the door for you.”

Li Lin was taken aback, quickly came out of the outpost, and saw the gate of No. 66 Wutong Road open from the inside—three Ai Lins stacked on top of each other opened the door for him.

As the gate opened, the topmost Ai Lin couldn’t let go in time and ended up hanging on the doorknob, swinging there while shouting over at him: “Hey hey, little Linzi, take shelter here…”

Li Lin took two steps forward then stumbled, his face twisted: “Can you change the address?”

“You’re still being picky!” The Ai Lin hanging on the door turned her head and glared at Li Lin. “Or do you want to keep standing outside?”

Those scarlet eyes, through the thin mist at the intersection, were like two bouncing stars.

Li Lin’s steps toward No. 66 Wutong Road faltered for a moment. For an instant, he even felt as if he had seen the phantom of that giant spider again.

But the sight of that little dwarf swinging on the doorknob quickly washed away the tension and hesitation rising from the depths of his heart.

He exhaled and hurried forward.

After all, staying alive was what mattered—if he could avoid being a textbook example, it was definitely better not to be one.

The gate of No. 66 Wutong Road slammed shut. Ai Lin jumped down from the doorknob and casually said to Li Lin, who had just entered, “Help yourself to something to drink. The living room TV is mine, the dining room TV is mine, the sofa is mine, the coffee table is mine—aside from that, find yourself a spot to stay.”

Another Ai Lin pattered over to the living room window, climbed up onto the windowsill, and looked through the glass at the fog-shrouded block outside.

“Where’s the spider…” The little doll sat on the windowsill muttering, her scarlet eyes flickering dim and bright.

In the doll’s eyes, as translucent as rubies, the phantom of the giant spider was slowly fading away.

(End of chapter)