Little Pink Starfish

Crossing the sand-covered road, it came close to the residential area. Just a few hundred meters away, its soft body dragged along the ground, making a “shhh—shhh—” sound as it rubbed against the surface.

On that smooth, pale gray membrane-like surface, there were no eyes, no ears, no antennae or breathing holes. How did it perceive the world? Hearing, sight, or maybe sonar? That would determine how they could escape.

Xibei said, “Wh… what do we do?”

Lu Feng didn’t respond. He walked to the window and reached out to push it open—but it seemed frozen or rusted. On the first push, it didn’t budge. His arm tensed, and with more force, the window finally gave a harsh, grating screech as it opened a small triangular gap.

A black gun barrel extended from the gap—not aimed at the monster, but at the street opposite.

A faint pop—a silenced gunshot. Ten meters away, it was inaudible.

The bullet flashed briefly across his retina—striking a window of a building across the street.

The bullets he used in the field were different from those for human executions—depleted uranium alloy tips, armor-piercing strength.

A loud crash as an entire pane of glass shattered, falling to the ground in shards.

The monster’s movements clearly paused.

Lu Feng raised the gun again and fired several more shots. Glass from that direction shattered and clattered to the ground.

It heard. The writhing limbs changed direction, hesitating briefly, then slowly moved toward the sound—only to stop again three minutes later, abandon that path, and continue toward their building.

Xibei involuntarily stepped back, pale-faced. “It… it… can we shoot it?”

Lu Feng’s lips pressed into a thin line. His gaze was sharp and frighteningly calm.

Then, he reached out—click—and removed the silencer.

He pulled the trigger repeatedly.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

A series of explosive shots erupted in the neighborhood! In the silence of the city, the sound was thunderous.

The monster paused again, uncertain. But just then, a sharp cry came from the far side of the city.

A massive black shadow rose into the sky—a giant eagle-like bird soared through the air, its wingspan dozens of meters wide. It glided faster than a bullet—diving straight toward the white monster, which had a similar spherical shape.

The monster screeched at a high frequency, its white membrane tearing open. Countless soft, thorn-like tendrils surged out, wrapping around the eagle’s beak.

With a heavy thump, the eagle’s steel-like wings pierced its body. The monster recoiled in pain, its tendrils twitching like they’d been shocked. The eagle pulled back and flew upward. After a moment, it circled in the sky and then dove again, wind howling sharply around it—its sharp beak stabbed straight into the monster’s center.

In that instant, white and pink fluid burst everywhere. Its beak clamped onto something inside. The monster thrashed wildly—its massive body shaking nearby buildings, causing them to collapse, the ground rumbling beneath them. In the gray human city, two unimaginable beasts were locked in combat—

Dark fluids splattered across a radius of several hundred meters. The fight ended with the white monster in shambles, its innards strewn across the ground. The eagle held a trail of viscous, dripping organs in its beak, and without lingering, turned and flew into the distance.

An Zhe let out a quiet breath. Only now did he understand Lu Feng’s true intent with those shots. There may not have been only one monster in the city—he had used gunfire to reveal its position and draw another monster in.

Then Xibei said, “You… you knew there was a bird?”

Lu Feng holstered the gun, reattached the silencer, and turned—his movements smooth and clean.

“No,” he said. “Took a gamble.”

An Zhe watched the eagle vanish. In times like these, airborne monsters seemed to hold overwhelming advantages.

They didn’t speak during the escape. In the silence, an old voice suddenly rose:

“The time is near,” Grandpa said hoarsely. “I’ve lived sixty years—that’s enough.”

Lu Feng looked toward the old man.

He asked, “What time?”

The old man opened his mouth and stared at the distant sky, a touch of madness on his face. “The arrival… the time of arrival.”

“What’s coming?”

“Unspeakable… unimaginable…” His voice was rasping with impending death. “Bigger than everything… unseen… about to come into this world…”

Lu Feng spoke softly. “How do you know?”

“I’m near the end… I can feel it, I can hear it.” His words bordered on delirium.

“What do you hear?”

“I hear…”

As he said this, the old man looked up at the gloomy sky above the city. The sky hung low—oppressively so. The green glow was lower now, mingling with gray-black clouds. Lu Feng had said it was because the aurora’s frequency was intensified.

“Humans live on the ground… die on the ground. The sky…” The old man’s expression was serene, his voice fading.
And with that final word, he gently folded his hands and slowly, slowly closed his eyes.

Xibei’s knees gave out and he knelt before the old man, placing his hands on his withered knees. “Grandpa? Grandpa?”

No answer.

The old man’s chest no longer rose and fell. He was gone.
Death had come in an instant.

Tears streamed silently down Xibei’s cheeks as he buried his face in his grandfather’s lap.

When he finally looked up again, An Zhe gently asked, “Are you okay?”

“I… I’m okay.” Xibei stared blankly at Grandpa’s face and muttered, “He always said he wasn’t afraid of death. He said everyone has their own mission. His mission was to protect everyone in the mine. Seeing it survive to today, he… he was already satisfied.”

He looked up at the old man’s dusty, withered face. His white hair was messy, some parts tangled. In this dark world, no one could survive untouched.

“I… I’ll go get a comb.”

In a daze, he stood up and walked toward the other rooms.

One life had faded.
In that room, there was another long-dead life. An Zhe turned to the living room sofa—on it lay a skeleton.

Its flesh had likely decayed naturally. The entire sofa was stained with green, yellow, and brown blotches—mold that had grown layer upon layer.

“First it was super bacteria and fungi, viruses—they spread in human cities, infecting indiscriminately. Everyone who’s been to the wild ruins knows this,” the poet had once said.

An Zhe looked out the window at the fallen buildings, the dead city, full of skeletons. Each one was a life lost.

Lu Feng saw An Zhe’s gaze—still calm, as if untouched by emotion. Under the dim sky, his quietly beautiful face showed a subtle sorrow like drifting smoke.

Shifting his gaze to the city, he said, “When the human base was completed and search-and-rescue began, there wasn’t enough power to reach all the smaller cities in time.”

An Zhe looked at the endless sea of buildings. To walk from one end of this city to the other would take hours.

He whispered, “This… is a small city?”

Lu Feng said, “Yes.”

An Zhe’s eyes widened slightly.

To him, this city was enormous. Yet to once-glorious humanity, it was just a small city that didn’t get rescued in time.

So before disaster struck, how grand had the human world been? He didn’t know.
If scattered humans were still surviving near this city, then in other places, how many more unrescued people were still struggling, despairing, dying?

This city full of skeletons, the base far from safe, and the whole human world full of weeping.
This vast collapse—imagining it was like seeing the giant sun at dusk slowly sink below the black horizon—a prolonged death.

Clang—
In that silence, a crash came from the next bedroom.

Lu Feng asked, “What happened?”

No reply, only Xibei’s trembling breath.

Lu Feng frowned, grabbed his gun, and walked over. An Zhe followed.

The room was empty—no monsters or enemies.
Xibei had his back to them, shoulders trembling violently. At first, An Zhe thought he was crying. Then, walking beside him, he saw what Xibei was staring at.

It was a comb.

A wooden comb—yet hard to describe.

Because it wasn’t just one comb. It was fused from two.
Two ordinary brown wooden combs, each with a ten-centimeter handle and fine teeth. Their handles were seamlessly grown together as if carved from the same block of wood. The teeth slanted at 45 degrees—one left, one right—like a two-headed snake flicking its tongues.

But if they’d been ordinary combs, how could they have grown together?

Wood—a simple, safe material—was now a source of unspeakable horror due to its twisted, abnormal shape.

Lu Feng strode over to the vanity where Xibei had found the comb. Clearly a woman’s room from before the disaster. On the ivory-white vanity were countless bottles and tools.

Lu Feng wiped the dust from the mirror—one layer, then another. The dust seemed embedded in the glass, turning the reflection into a foggy, distorted black mass.

An Zhe suddenly recalled the city wall he had climbed—sand kept falling, like the wall was fused from sand and steel.

Lu Feng turned from the mirror and scanned the tools. Finally, he pulled out a rusty long tweezer—no, it wasn’t just a tweezer. It had fused with a plastic eyebrow razor, their X-shaped intersection melted into one seamless piece, indistinguishable as metal or plastic, or maybe something entirely new to humans.

Clatter—Xibei’s hand trembled and the comb dropped to the dusty floor.

“This city…” he said. “Is something wrong with it? Let’s… let’s get out of here.”

“It’s not just this city,” Lu Feng said.

He stared at the fused tweezer and razor and uttered three words:

“Engine parts.”

Three ordinary words—yet they hit like thunder.

Inside an engine, countless complex mechanical components—once altered—

If engine parts fused and morphed like this comb, then the plane crashes were inevitable.

An Zhe bent down and picked up the comb. No seams. The carvings on the handle were chaotic, mad, impossible to comprehend. Just like the black tendrils in the flight manual’s twisted text.

His eyes widened. Suddenly, Madam Lu’s words—spoken before she flew into the boundless sky—echoed in his ears.

She had said, “Human genes are too weak to sense the changes happening in this world.”
“We will all die. Every effort is futile—it only proves humanity’s insignificance and powerlessness.”

A thought flashed through his mind like lightning across the sky.

If, if… when humans and monsters—or monsters and monsters—came into close proximity, contamination occurred—

No. That was wrong. Entirely wrong.

“Genes…” he murmured. “It’s not the genes…”

Genes weren’t the problem. Humans thought genetic mutation was the source of contamination. But contamination meant physical fusion and transformation. The change was expressed through genes, but not caused by them.

If living beings could be contaminated… why not everything else?

Why couldn’t wood and paper, steel and plastic fuse?

—Then all tangible matter in the world could.

It was happening, gradually. This deluge had just begun. It started with genetic contamination, now barely visible to humanity.

In the days since the magnetic field vanished, hybrid monsters had eaten voraciously, absorbing others’ forms to strengthen themselves—like humans hoarding food for winter. Had they sensed something?

Xibei’s voice trembled. “What exactly…”

He couldn’t finish.

What kind of era was this?
What disaster were they facing?
What was happening? What? What?

A bolt of lightning ripped across the sky. The windows shuddered. A wind howled from eternity, shrieking through the cracks, whipping their clothes into a frenzy.

An Zhe looked up. He and Lu Feng locked eyes—those cold green irises as deep and dark as the sky outside.

And in that moment, thunder roared across the heavens. The sky grew even heavier.
Rain poured down in torrents.

In the rain, everything outside vanished—nothing could be seen, nothing heard.

Endless gray.
Endless void.
Endless terror.

Madam Lu’s gentle voice and Grandpa’s hoarse rasp overlapped, echoing in An Zhe’s ears—

—“The time is near.”