Anything But Safe

After passing through several residential districts, the municipal building finally came into view.

The structure rose in three distinct tiers. The first was the main hall and its adjoining floors — a wide rectangular footprint that covered an enormous area. Above this base sat the second tier, an offset cube of floors that jutted upward at an angle from the rectangular foundation below, creating a striking architectural contrast. The third tier was a perfectly square tower that soared from the top of the cube, built for administrative offices not fully open to the public. It stood so far above the surrounding neighborhoods, streets, and residential blocks that it seemed to lord over everything beneath it.

"This area is part of our survey zone," Jingjing said, "but something about this building feels wrong to me. Have you noticed the plants? They're not growing toward sunlight — they're all pushing *inward*, into the hall. It doesn't make any sense."

Mu Nujiao also practiced the Plant Element, and she studied the dark-barked tendrils with care. They were neither quite vines nor quite branches — something unsettling in between — their trunks so grotesquely thick that some rivaled the girth of a grown man's torso. They had forced their way in through windows, doorways, and ventilation shafts, then spread in every direction through the cavernous hall below, growing unchecked in a tangle of crossing and overlapping limbs.

What had once been a bright, open hall now felt cramped and oppressive. Not a single ray of sunlight penetrated the tangle. It felt less like entering a building and more like pushing into a jungle of coiling vegetation.

Rows of public seating lay scattered in disarray, thick with dust. Moss clung in mottled patches to shards of broken glass. Several crates of documents had apparently been dropped in some frantic departure; they'd toppled to the floor and were now soaked in an unidentifiable liquid, filling the air with a nauseating reek of rot.

"One or two of you stay outside," Lu Zhenghe said to the group. "The rest come in."

"I'll stay," Mo Fan volunteered.

"Then I'll stay too," Bai Tingting added.

Lu Zhenghe and Song Xia glanced at the two of them but said nothing further, leading the rest of the team into the plant-choked hall.

The fourteen figures disappeared quickly into the gloomy interior, leaving Mo Fan and Bai Tingting to keep watch among the dilapidated flower beds outside.

Mo Fan stole a glance at Bai Tingting. His mind drifted back to the forest, to the stream — to a certain mesmerizing sway. *She can't be much older than twenty. No boyfriend either. How is it possible for someone with such a small frame to be so...* He shook himself out of it.

Had Bai Tingting known what was going through Mo Fan's head, she probably would have decided the outside of this building was far more dangerous than whatever lurked within.

As a Healing Element mage, she had no business charging into danger, and staying back was entirely natural for her. Fortunately, Mo Fan had more than enough combat ability to cover the responsibility of protecting her.

"That's strange..." Bai Tingting frowned, moving toward the edge of the flower bed.

"What is it?"

"There's a half-eaten bag of food here. It's gone a little moldy, but it hasn't fully spoiled — see for yourself." Bai Tingting pulled on a glove and picked the item up from the ground.

Mo Fan leaned in for a look. Sure enough, it was a bag of dried meat, the seal broken open — but the jerky inside looked perfectly normal, nothing like something that had been abandoned here for fifteen years.

Inside the plant-filled hall, Lu Zhenghe and his Shadowmark Berserker Wolf took the lead. The wolf bounded up the vegetation-covered steps, sharp eyes sweeping the surroundings.

The elevators were clearly out of the question. Their first priority was to find a serviceable stairwell that would take them to the upper floors.

"There are some travel bags here," Liao Mingxuan said. "Looks like someone left them behind."

"Probably some hunters passing through." Lu Zhenghe paid it no mind and led the group up the stairs to the second-floor landing.

The second floor was dominated by large conference rooms, and the plant growth here was even denser — the corridors felt almost completely choked.

Pressing forward, they came upon the elevator doors, which hung open. Twisted vines curled down into the elevator shaft, their surfaces mottled with brownish stains from some unknown liquid that had soaked into them.

"The stairwell should be up ahead." Lu Zhenghe was bold to the point of recklessness, striding out ahead with only his Shadowmark Berserker Wolf at his side.

He had barely moved forward when Mu Nujiao — more perceptive than the rest — stopped in her tracks. Her eyes narrowed on the vines coiled inside the elevator shaft.

"Something wrong?" Liao Mingxuan, who was never far from Mu Nujiao's side, asked.

"There's something wedged between those two." She pointed to the gap between a pair of thick branches.

Liao Mingxuan decided this was his moment to play the hero. Telling her there was nothing to worry about, he strode over and yanked out whatever was caught between them.

The moment it came free, he went rigid. The color drained from his face in an instant.

*A scalp!!!*

What he held in his hands was unmistakably a scalp — peeled away with the face still attached. The long dark hair had draped over the key features at first, which was why his mind hadn't registered what it was.

Filthy black hair. An entire face of skin, stripped cleanly from the skull beneath. Eyeballs dangling half-free from their sockets. Liao Mingxuan never would have imagined in his worst nightmares that he'd pull out something so utterly horrifying.

"That's — that's a dead person's head!"

Zhao Mingyue screamed beside him. Where the scalp had been torn away, wedged between the vines, was a bare skull — unmistakably human.

Grimy as the flesh was, it showed no decomposition. The eyes were disturbingly fresh. No muscle, no blood — every trace of life had been wrung from the body as if squeezed dry. This person could not have died more than ten days ago.

"There's another one over here!"

"And one more on this side!"

"What happened here? How did these people die — did Demon-Beasts attack them or...?"

Dread swept through the group. From the skeletal remains and the scattered belongings, there was no doubt: a team of Hunter-mages had come here not long ago. Every last one of them had met a brutal end.

"We already scouted this area," Shen Mingxiao said, his voice tight. "There's no trace of any Demon-Beast presence here."

Mu Nujiao and Jingjing looked at each other, and a creeping dread settled over both of them.

"Something is wrong with these plants," Mu Nujiao said aloud, warning the others.

"What do you mean, the plants are—" Xu Dalong, who had been bringing up the rear, suddenly yelped. "Wait — where's the path? Where did the path *go*?!"

Everyone spun around. The corridor they'd just walked through had vanished — completely swallowed by vines, too dense to push through.

They had all been on guard against moving creatures, sensing the air for the killing intent of Demon-Beasts — but who could have imagined that while their attention was elsewhere, the plants themselves had been silently sealing the path behind them?

Their retreat was cut off — and they had walked through that corridor mere moments ago.

"The plants — the plants are *moving*!!" someone finally cried out.

"Run!" Lu Zhenghe bellowed. "Everyone run!"

A building overrun with monstrous vegetation. The freshly stripped bones of human mages. An escape route severed without warning.

The municipal building was anything but a safe place.