He looked down and saw his own distorted reflection in the light of the wooden floor - under the mask, his pupils were contracting and dilating unnaturally, and a sickly blue-green color appeared around the edge of his irises.
"I..."
He opened his mouth, and a sweet and fishy taste of rust rose in his throat.
The dark clouds outside the window suddenly split and reorganized into countless swimming black shadows in the field of vision. Those shadows had familiar faces - the faces of three groups of exploration team members, but each face was covered with fish-scale herpes.
The illusion was fleeting, but it caused a layer of cold sweat to break out on his back.
Blore frowned and took a step closer.
In Ma Tuan's suddenly dilated pupils, he saw a translucent tentacle shadow emerging behind him.
"There's something wrong with you."
Blore reached out and pressed down on Ma Tuan's trembling shoulders. The touch was as cold as that of a deep-sea fish.
"That thing outside... is affecting you?"
The emergency light in the laboratory suddenly turned a dark blue, casting a flowing water-like light spot on Ma Tuan's face.
He took a deep breath and found that each breath carried the smell of sulfur like a hot spring on the seabed.
Some ancient syllable stirred at the root of the tongue, almost bursting through the throat - it was the guttural sound used by the deep-sea people to call the tide.
"nothing."
He forced himself to swallow the strange feeling back. His skin beneath the mask felt tingling, as if countless microorganisms were crawling under his skin.
But when he met Bai Di's inquiring gaze, he quickly adjusted his breathing rate and gave a reassuring look.
This simple action made his temples throb, as if a parasite were crawling on his meninges.
Ma Tuan's breathing suddenly stopped.
Those translucent tentacles had wrapped around his limbs at some point, and the cold and flexible touch seeped into his skin through his uniform.
A faint glow like star sand flowed inside each tentacle. As it made contact, the strange feeling surging in his body was soothed by some power from a higher dimension.
The blue-green color at the edge of the iris gradually faded, and the ancient syllables stirring under the tongue also subsided.
"It's okay, cub. Don't be afraid."
The sound resonated directly in his cranial cavity, like a whale song coming from the deep sea, carrying a tenderness that spanned millions of years of vicissitudes.
Ma Tuan could feel the sound waves materializing into glowing runes in his mind, and those characters automatically reorganized his disturbed mental picture.
What was even more bizarre was that the sound seemed to exist in another phase - Blore and Bai Di, who were nearby, were unaware of it and were still vigilantly looking out the window.
"Sesame balls?"
Ma Tuan exclaimed in his consciousness, his Adam's apple rolling.
Only then did he discover that the tentacles wrapped around his wrists had tiny siphon cups at the end, and in the center of each cup was a miniature, intelligent golden pupil that winked at him playfully.
An exceptionally slender tentacle suddenly reached behind his ear and touched it gently.
In an instant, Ma Tuan saw it - in the ancient rock strata three hundred meters below the college, there was a huge creature made of liquid starlight.
His body penetrated seven dimensions, and some of his tentacles even extended into the computing gaps of quantum computers.
What appeared beside him at this moment was nothing more than a projection of this existence deliberately compressed to a scale understandable to humans.
"I didn't expect that."
Those golden pupils curved into crescent shapes at the same time, and there was a chuckle in the voice like cosmic dust.
"You are the only one among the Apernisel race who dares to come out."
Ma Tuan suddenly realized something and looked out the window.
The angle of the "sacrifice" staff on the cloud shifted at some point, and all those ferocious eyeballs showed an evasive posture.
The corners of the Dean's Star Track robe were faintly gleaming with the same star sand light as the sesame ball's tentacles.
A tentacle gently curled around his trembling fingers.
"Don't be afraid of the cub."
Sesame Ball's voice suddenly became three-dimensional, and Sesame Ball felt that more dimensional information was compressed in this sentence - it was a promise from ancient times, a contract of protection between stars.
A tiny star tattoo suddenly appeared on the skin at the back of his neck and then quickly disappeared under the skin.
Blore turned around at this moment as if he had realized something, but he only saw Ma Tuan standing alone in front of the window. He had put the mask back on, but there seemed to be a few vaporizing starlights remaining between his fingers.
Footsteps were heard at the end of the corridor, and the three of them tacitly stopped talking.
Ma Tuan took one last glance out the window - the being called "Si" in the clouds was pointing the tip of his scepter towards the direction of the college's medical department. All the eyeballs on the scepter turned to his position and blinked synchronously.
But it seemed like he didn't find anything and quickly passed by.
At this moment, the defensive light curtain outside the base groaned under the heavy burden, and the gray-gold energy field was dyed with a sickly purple-green color.
With a light tap of the scepter, the tsunami wall in the distance suddenly solidified into a crystal shape, and densely packed compound eyes opened on the crest of the wave.
The figure in the clouds leaned forward slightly, a movement that created spider-web-like cracks in the air. The glance he cast was like liquid nitrogen pouring into the spinal cord—that sight contained indifference towards ants, as well as a more terrifying, awakening hunger.
Bai Di's tactical tablet suddenly automatically played images that they had never recorded: in the deep-sea pyramid, a box inlaid with non-Euclidean geometric gems was glowing in the hands of the team members.
In the corner of the picture, the fish-tailed human-shaped totem carved on the stone wall perfectly overlaps with the shadow in the clouds at this moment.
In an instant, the electronic equipment throughout the base emitted sharp beeps at the same time, as if forcibly taken over by some higher-dimensional existence.
All the screens—whether they were the giant holographic projection in the tactical command center or the simple electronic clock at the corner of the corridor—flickered with distorted snowflake noise, and then suddenly switched to the same eerie scene:
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