Chapter 73-Game Descent: I Am the Sole Player
Chapter 73
Her hand with the dark-green bracer pressed against the car window glass. The aging cityscape slowly retreated in Bai Shan's view, and more and more skyscrapers entered her line of sight.
Lin Huijun had stumbled into keeping one item by sheer luck. Bai Shan's abilities still worked for now. To be safe, she was considering pulling out her most useful items in advance.
As for the Game Panel — no one in Hai City used the channels. Bai Shan saw no need to risk being attacked by opening it.
She was, however, somewhat interested in the Leaderboard player surnamed Shen that Yan An had mentioned. This man had already lost his Talent abilities. If she killed a former player inside Hai City, would she still receive their Talent and items?
The moment he lost his abilities, his name should have vanished from the Leaderboard — possibly sparking a minor buzz out in the world.
Bai Shan recognized the surname "Shen" from the Leaderboard. She reached for the backpack beside her seat and pulled out a blue notebook.
It was filled with Leaderboard intelligence gathered by Huang Yuci, who transcribed the full roster every three days and even maintained a dedicated page for players who had dropped off the list or died. Extremely thorough.
On Huang Yuci's most recent page, Bai Shan found "Rank 90 — Shen Yuanzhi," with a note scribbled beside it:
[Finance bro. Stereotypical profit-above-all type. A species with minimal humanity.]
Bai Shan chuckled softly at the notebook. The next moment, a premonition made her look up.
The smile vanished from her face, replaced by a flash of cold steel in her eyes.
"Stop the car."
The slow-moving RV halted. Lin Huijun had just turned her head to ask what was wrong when the RV suddenly lurched violently, its height shooting upward—
Two powerful tentacles wrapped around the vehicle. Suction cups densely lining the tentacles clamped onto the windows. Bai Shan could clearly see the suckers contracting and expanding as if breathing, latching tighter and tighter.
The four-ton RV was hoisted into the air by two tentacles!
Lin Huijun braced herself against the dashboard. She could see the tentacles but not the creature attacking them.
Was its body hidden beneath the vehicle? Lurking in the buildings on either side?
Lin Huijun tried to push the window open to hack at the tentacles with the [Frozen Tilapia], but no matter how much strength she put into it, the window wouldn't budge an inch. The tentacles were squeezing the vehicle so tightly that the suction cups had sealed the windows shut like industrial adhesive.
Seeing this, Bai Shan unbuckled her seatbelt, ran to the rear cabin, opened the ceiling hatch, and leaped onto the roof.
The vehicle was tilted at a 45-degree angle, yet Bai Shan moved across it as if on flat ground. She sprang to the raised front end, and through the pelting rain surveyed her surroundings.
The [Breathing Bracer] could sense that the mutant was right near them — ahead of the front end. But when Bai Shan looked forward, all she saw was a stretch of churning water, dark and ominous, its waves hinting at something terrible beneath. A closer look revealed nothing at all.
Each tentacle was roughly a meter and a half wide. The visible length above the waterline was about three stories tall. A mutant of that size had to be enormous.
Yet scanning the area, Bai Shan couldn't locate the creature's main body.
Her expression was icy, a hint of confusion in her eyes, but she remained calm and composed.
The young woman stood alone atop the vehicle. Behind her, one of the tentacles wrapped around the chassis quietly rose and lunged at her back with blinding speed!
Bai Shan sensed it. She didn't even bother turning around.
[Reverse World]
Gravity inverted within a subspace centered on herself. The tentacle closing in on Bai Shan couldn't sever itself in time, and along with its mysterious main body, it was wrenched into the reversed subspace!
As the one who activated the ability, Bai Shan and the vehicle beneath her feet remained firmly anchored to the ground, no different from the normal world. She looked up and saw a deep-red "sheet of silk" billowing high above in the sky.
It was incredibly thin, its translucent edges rippling. At the same time, this "silk sheet" was so vast it blotted out half the sky. Bai Shan squinted and made out a small, pointed head.
Two powerful, freely moving tentacles extended from beneath the pointed head, while the remaining tentacles were connected by membranes as thin as cicada wings — like a bolt of silk, like a blanket.
No wonder it had hidden so well. Its body, though massive, was paper-thin and flat, able to lurk effortlessly beneath the shallow floodwater. Its two agile tentacles could strike at any time.
Bai Shan recognized it now — a mutated Blanket Octopus.
The Blanket Octopus's most distinctive feature was its blanket-like body, drifting through the ocean like a cloaked phantom. Under normal circumstances, males measured only a few centimeters, while females could reach two meters. This mutant specimen was at least fifty meters long!
The inverted gravity pulled the mutant octopus toward the sky, but its powerful tentacles clung stubbornly to the vehicle, preventing itself from falling upward into the void.
Octopuses were remarkably intelligent. It retracted its tentacles, reeling itself downward like pulling in a kite string. The red blanket descended visibly toward the ground above Bai Shan's head.
Despite its valiant effort, once its vulnerable head was exposed before Bai Shan, the outcome was decided.
A soft head with no shell, no skeleton for protection — no need for [Inextinguishable Sun Flame]. Several guns materialized simultaneously around Bai Shan, every muzzle aimed at that small, pointed head. A torrent of firepower roared skyward.
Before long, the tentacles released the vehicle. The mutant's flat body drifted upward like a broken kite, sailing into the sky above.
[Reverse World] deactivated.
"Ahh!"
Gravity snapped back to normal. The vehicle, which had been suspended in midair, plummeted. Lin Huijun, still processing everything, let out a yelp.
Before the vehicle hit the ground, Bai Shan set it down with a gentle landing.
"Bai Shan, what were you doing up there?"
Lin Huijun watched Bai Shan climb back in through the rear cabin, her tone carrying a rare note of complaint.
She had been sitting inside when the world suddenly flipped upside down — like a roller coaster going inverted without warning. If not for her seatbelt, she would've been flung against the ceiling along with the backpack and water bottle.
Even with the seatbelt, she'd been thoroughly disheveled, hanging from her seat like a boiled shrimp.
"Taken care of."
Bai Shan said nothing more. She silently picked up the water bottle from the floor, set it back beside Lin Huijun, then rebuckled her own seatbelt and sat obediently, waiting for departure.
Lin Huijun shook her head in resignation. Bai Shan was going to be the death of her!
Her emotions surging, she pressed the accelerator too hard. The black RV shot forward at full speed, kicking up enormous waves.
Bai Shan watched the spray batter the windows, still thinking about the mutant octopus.
The creature itself hadn't been difficult to deal with, but the fact it represented was impossible to ignore — marine creatures had already made their way into Hai City.
Bai Shan recalled the situation in Tomorrow's Dominator 1.0.
In her eighth playthrough, she had ventured beyond Nanzhou City but had not entered Hai City — she had deliberately detoured around it.
In a coastal village, she had discovered traces of mutated marine life and realized the game was about to ramp up the difficulty. Hai City sat near the river's estuary; by all logic, marine species should have already invaded.
But that wasn't the reason Bai Shan had given up on Hai City.
Because long before the game officially began — before the protagonist even set out on her journey — Hai City had already sunk. Cause unknown.
*
"Look! Has the water level risen again? Yesterday you could still see the store names on the second floor. Today it's nearly swallowed the whole level."
A young woman and a young man leaned against the railing, peering down at the floors below.
"Why aren't you saying anything? Did I remember wrong?"
The young woman secretly rolled her eyes in annoyance. Ever since that morning, when the old professor had been pushed off the building by his own grandson — and that grandson had actually gained special abilities — word had spread, and everyone in the building had been acting strangely.
Including her boyfriend, who had visibly zoned out multiple times in a short span, probably thinking he was hiding it well.
Those absurd teachings, repeated a thousand times over, held no real power to bewitch — and yet even she had felt her resolve waver...
But now wasn't the time to tear off masks. The young woman turned her head, only to find that her boyfriend wasn't watching the situation below at all. He was looking off to the side at something. She followed his gaze, and the color drained from her face.
"What are we looking at? It's prayer time now."
The smiling old woman approached. Her gray eyes held no trace of warmth.
"We — we were..."
The young man scrambled for an explanation. His brain worked frantically but couldn't produce a single convincing excuse, so he forced out an ugly smile.
"Dishonest people will be struck by the five thunders."
Both their faces went even whiter. On any normal day, young people would laugh off such superstitious curses. But the old woman standing before them might — just might — be capable of making "struck by five thunders" literally happen.
"W-we just heard some noise and thought something was happening downstairs. We were about to report it to you!"
The young woman's quick thinking produced a passable excuse.
"What noise?"
Liu Chaoyun asked with an air of unflappable composure.
"Uh, a big fish — a crocodile, black, really huge, very scary—"
Just as the young woman was desperately fabricating details and Liu Chaoyun's smile was fading, a deafening crash suddenly erupted from below!
The three at the railing instinctively looked down—
Glass shards flew everywhere. A heavy black vehicle had smashed through the mall's glass wall and come to a stop in the center of the ground floor, a terrifying behemoth that shattered the stagnant silence.
Liu Chaoyun tilted her head slightly.
She watched as the vehicle's roof hatch was thrown open and a figure emerged.
As if sensing the searing gaze from the fifth floor, the figure looked up, revealing a face that Liu Chaoyun found disagreeable, unlucky-looking — and yet one she knew all too well.
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