The face had the deep contours unique to desert peoples, the beeswax-colored skin was covered with indigo tattoos, and under the left eye was a melting hexagram.
She instinctively raised her hand to touch her cheek, but saw five slender fingers at the edge of her vision - each nail was dyed a dark blue, and the knuckles were adorned with silver rings inlaid with eyeballs, and the chains wrapped around her wrists were actually made of miniature human teeth connected together.
"Atasha..."
The name spilled from her throat with a double timbre, as if another vocal cord were vibrating in sync.
The silver-edged material of her black dress suddenly tightened, and the runes embroidered with gold thread crawled across her skin like a centipede.
Nansong and Atasha's mixed consciousness suddenly realized that this attire was some kind of restraint device, and each pattern was a clause in the contract that imprisoned the ancient being.
The darkness suddenly had texture.
The sound of chains clashing came from all directions. Nansong-Atasha saw countless bronze shackles emerging from the mist, each of which was locked with a human-shaped shadow.
These shadows were twisted in painful yoga poses, their necks stretched to exaggerated degrees, all facing an indescribable focus in the center.
The air was filled with a strange smell of rust and sandalwood, and every breath made her taste buds taste different fragments of memory - moldy parchment, melted wax, and the cool metal of Song's fog lamp glasses frame.
"The nest breathes."
This realization burned directly into her frontal lobe. The entire space contracted and expanded with the life rhythm of some giant being, the chain pulsing like an umbilical cord.
The black fog suddenly dispersed for a moment, revealing a maddening scene below - they were suspended in the center of a huge nest of bones, and those pearly bones were constantly reorganizing and rearranging to form terrifying patterns similar to fractal geometry.
On some particularly smooth bone fragments, Nan Song saw reflections of his past and present lives: the moment when Atasha pierced the priest's throat with the dagger of time; the scene when Song Wudeng scratched his palm with a pen in the library on a rainy night.
The black fog suddenly surged violently, and something awakened from the depths of the nest.
Nansong's visual nerves began to burn, and she saw twelve nested halos emerging from the fog, each of which was made up of screaming human faces connected end to end.
As the innermost ring of light began to spin, she finally heard the chained shadows' repeated muttering: "■■■'s container is in place..."
Her spine was suddenly pulled into a bow shape by an invisible force, and a crisp sound of a shell breaking came from the back of her neck.
Some multi-segmented creature was emerging from between her third and fourth cervical vertebrae, its barbed appendages scraping against her collarbone with a teeth-grinding sound.
Before completely losing consciousness, the last thing Nansong's mixed vision captured was Song Wudeng - or rather, a being with the appearance of Song Wudeng - floating at the highest point of the nest. Behind his glasses flowed the nebulae of the entire Milky Way, and in his hands was Nansong's original, still beating heart.
＊
Time is like crushed mother-of-pearl, countless points of light explode in the air and roll to the ground like tears.
Nan Song blinked, and tiny beads of liquid hung on her eyelashes, emitting a faint blue glow in the darkness.
The wet and cool touch on her face made her feel as if she was back to the summer when she was ten years old - when the little jellyfish "Xiao Tao" was swimming in the fish tank, the splashing water also gently fell on her cheeks.
The moment she opened her eyes, three neem-flower-colored tentacles were wrapped around her jaw.
A color somewhere between rotting lilac and newly born wisteria, with a mother-of-pearl sheen in the darkness.
The tentacles are short and chubby, and the suction cups are as soft as a baby's fingers, with a slightly brackish smell of sea water.
Nansong's breathing stopped - the arc of the tentacle's swing was exactly the same as Xiaotao's.
"Xiao Tao..."
She instinctively reached out, but froze in mid-air. Memories flooded back: the moon jellyfish floating in a clear plastic bag on her seventh birthday; the silvery trails Xiaotao drew in the fish tank; the empty fish tank on a rainy morning, leaving only a few wisps of fading fluorescence...
And in the last mission, the huge creature that stretched out its tentacles towards her in the deep sea and took her away. Although the size difference was a hundred times, the three black spots arranged in a triangle on the tentacles were clearly the grown-up Xiao Tao.
"Take it with you..."
Atasha's voice seeped from the inside of her skull like a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, carrying with it a strange aroma mixed with sulfur and sandalwood.
Nansong gritted his teeth and dug his nails deep into his palms until mother-of-pearl blood oozed out from between his fingers. The moment this blood came into contact with the air, it condensed into tiny jellyfish eggs, which rolled to the ground with a crisp sound like wind chimes.
She couldn't be sure whether what she saw was a dream or a trap.
The strange white light of the library still lingered on the retina. Song Wudang's disguised cyclamen was still swaying in the field of vision in the last second, and the next second he fell into this space that violated the laws of physics.
Her memory was like muddied ink; she couldn't even recall how she got here—perhaps she had never left that strange cave filled with black swirls?
The little jellyfish's tentacles suddenly extended and gently tapped her ankles, the cold touch so real it was heartbreaking.
Nan Song looked down at his trembling hands. His nails had grown into translucent thorns without him noticing, and a lavender mist lingered at his fingertips.
What's even more terrifying is that she actually thought this was reasonable, as if a dormant switch in her body was quietly turned on by Atasha's voice.
The black hem of the woman's skirt spread out like a living thing, its edges now covered with pale peach-colored patterns.
Those lines are growing and spreading at a speed visible to the naked eye, forming strange patterns similar to coral branches.
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