Her Tentacles 3

Chapter 3: The Restaurant

Although it was only the third day of their relationship, coming to Century City was actually something Shu Yao and Lin Ran had planned yesterday.

But after work yesterday, Shu Yao had been held up by a last-minute faculty meeting and had then stayed to help a colleague who was also a head teacher. She didn’t leave until after nine. Lin Ran had waited for her outside the school for over three hours, ultimately just to drive her home.

The thought of it filled Shu Yao with guilt.

Trying to make up for the failed date, she followed Lin Ran from the parking garage into the shopping center’s silver elevator. Her fingertips, hidden in the pockets of her black, wide-legged trousers, quietly clutched a tissue to wipe away her sweat. She tried to naturally strike up a conversation and, while she was at it, hold her girlfriend’s hand.

“The restaurant I picked…”

“Level B1, arriving now.”

The elevator’s automated mechanical voice cut her off.

The doors opened, and the heavy air of another poorly ventilated parking level rushed in, along with a crowd of people. When Shu Yao realized the new arrivals were all strikingly familiar, her pupils contracted in shock.

“Well, well, Teacher Shu, what a coincidence! To think your ‘plans’ were to come to Century City!” A loud male voice exploded throughout the elevator.

The hand Shu Yao had been about to pull out of her pocket immediately froze. She had no idea how he and several of her female colleagues had ended up here.

She became intensely nervous, and her expression, to others, instantly turned cold. Her light-colored pupils, in particular, became like emotionless bronze mirrors, reflecting the discolored temple of the man’s glasses as he leaned closer, and the few matted strands of his unkempt, greasy bangs.

He grinned at her, completely unfazed, while his eyes sized up the other beautiful figure standing beside her, a look of awe appearing in them. “If we’d known you were coming to Century City, we could have all come together, right? Hey, Teacher Fan, Teacher Chen, looks like tonight’s storm warning was fate, bringing us colleagues together for dinner. It’s a good thing we couldn’t go to that riverside place after all!”

“Is this Teacher Shu’s friend? Why don’t you join us?”

Over the background noise of Wu Li’s presumptuous invitation, Shu Yao could clearly see Teachers Fan and Chen discreetly rolling their eyes.

But no one spoke up to break the uncomfortable atmosphere.

Under Wu Li’s increasingly intense stare, her red lips trembled, but before she could utter a single word, an elegant voice sounded unhurriedly beside her ear.

“I’m afraid that won’t be convenient.”

Wu Li was taken aback by the rejection.

He pushed up his glasses, habitually tilting his chin to assess the person who had refused him. This was a woman who should have been subjected to his evaluation, yet those rare, pure black eyes merely skimmed over the top of his head like a dragonfly on water, never once meeting his.

She wore a flawless smile, but Wu Li—who was under 170cm but often claimed to be 175cm, rounding up to 180cm—couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been utterly humiliated by her from head to toe.

…

“First floor, arriving now.”

The elevator doors opened again. Lin Ran naturally turned to the person beside her. “Let’s go.”

Shu Yao nodded blankly. As she passed Teacher Fan, she inadvertently saw her give a discreet thumbs-up.

“?”

Her expression was one of bewilderment.

It wasn’t until she followed Lin Ran into the elegantly decorated restaurant, wreathed in clouds of dry ice fog, that it dawned on Shu Yao. Her eyes lit up as she looked at the person walking beside her. “That… that was amazing.”

Lin Ran, who was glancing around the restaurant, casually turned her head. “Hm?”

“Your rejection, it was so natural! So commanding!” Shu Yao clapped her hands together like a little seal, her fingertips pressed together in a silent applause, her gaze fixed on her girlfriend with pure adoration.

Even Lin Ran, who prided herself on her understanding of human nature, was a little puzzled by the praise.

The next second, her nose twitched slightly.

—She smelled it. The scent of young, tender prey.

Instantly, her dark eyes shifted toward a booth in the deeper part of the restaurant. Lin Ran’s face was a smiling mask. “Weren’t you just telling me about this restaurant? Shall we go in?”

Shu Yao nodded quickly. As they walked, she rattled off the restaurant’s merits: the menu changed with the seasons, the classic dishes were consistently delicious, the new items were often pleasant surprises, and the decor and ambiance were nice, too.

Under Lin Ran’s subtle guidance, they sat down in the quietest booth in the restaurant.

A single lamp illuminated the table from above.

Lin Ran’s gaze, however, went over Shu Yao’s shoulder to the ventilation fan on the ceiling behind her.

…Is it up there?

She pulled her gaze back and looked at the menu Shu Yao had pushed toward her. Although she had no interest in the exquisite pictures and no appetite whatsoever, it didn’t stop her from keeping up the charade.

[This one, this one! She wants the crispy one!]
[Here, she’s been looking at this for a while!]
[This one looks good, I want to eat it too!]

Aided by the cheating whispers of the childish voices, Lin Ran precisely checked off every dish that had caught Shu Yao’s eye.

At the end of a branching path in the winding ventilation duct.

Near the warehouse door of the Joyful Supermarket.

“Fuck, my whole day has been full of morons.”

Wu Li, who had been rejected by Lin Ran and was supposed to be having dinner with his female colleagues, had an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He picked up his old phone, its screen protector covered in countless cracks, and held down the button to send a voice message.

“They’re all nepotism hires. That Shu Yao acts all high and mighty and cold all day, and the people she knows are just as arrogant. If it weren’t for her local residency, her apartment downtown, and the little bit of money her mom left her, who would bother putting up with that bitch’s attitude…”

A string of ugly, humiliating words poured out.

He sent several more voice messages. He remembered that he had promised to run an errand for Fan Xin to buy a replacement pot for her home, but the supermarket cashiers were changing shifts and there was no one to help him. He had been told to either find it on the shelves himself or ask someone in the warehouse, which only soured his mood further.

He swore again, feeling as if he had run into every oblivious idiot today, from Shu Yao, who never reciprocated his advances, to Fan Xin, who had a child but still dressed provocatively and ordered him around the office, to the supermarket staff.

He was going to file a complaint and get this moron fired!

Wu Li banged on the warehouse’s metal door—“thump, thump, thump”—but saw no one. Noticing there were no cameras here either, he lifted his foot and kicked the door open, taking two steps inside. “Anyone here?”

The warehouse was silent, except for a pungent, unpleasant smell that made him instinctively recoil.

“Shit, what a dump.”

He stepped inside, his gaze sweeping over the rows of ownerless goods on the shelves. Thinking of the sparsely populated supermarket he had just come from, he inexplicably fell silent and ventured deeper.

Bzz. Bzz.

Insects buzzed overhead, tirelessly bumping against the lights.

Wu Li craned his neck, leaning closer to the packaging of a small electronic device on a shelf. He took out his phone to search for the price, but when he looked down, he found his glasses were blurry. He took them off, wiped them on the corner of his shirt, and put them back on, only to find the light from his phone seemed brighter and more glaring.

Wait a second…

It’s not that the phone screen is too bright, but that it’s too dark around me.

He frowned and looked up, about to curse, but the words caught in his throat.

There was someone above his head!

No, that wasn’t right. What the hell is that monster!

His glasses, reflecting the light from his phone, revealed the culprit blocking the light.

Long, slender, crooked, snow-white limbs extended from under its armpits and between its legs, bursting through the husk of a human skin. The monster residing within controlled the watermelon-sized head, tilting it as it studied the human who had walked right into its lair with pupils that had no whites.

Wu Li’s face turned pale. Torn between vomiting and screaming for help, he chose to scream:

“AHHHHHHHHHH—”

In the reflection of his glasses, a snow-white limb, as thin as a finger, bent and shot out.

…

Sizzle.

Downstairs.

Fingers with perfect lines manipulated a silver knife, piercing a piece of short rib sizzling in a clay pot. The outer layer, coated in black sauce, was sliced open to reveal a pale pink within, a testament to the beef’s tenderness and the chef’s excellent cooking skills.

“Very fresh.” Lin Ran’s eyes reflected the pink in the meat’s texture, but her nose caught the scent of fresh blood slowly wafting through the air, growing richer. The smile on her lips widened.

She placed the piece of meat into the bowl across from her. “Try it.”

Shu Yao didn’t have time to be touched. She looked toward the other tables. “Did you hear something?”

“Hm?” Lin Ran tilted her head, her satin-black hair seeming to reflect the light from the lamp above the table. “Did you?”

The other tables had resumed their conversations. Shu Yao had no choice but to dismiss what she’d heard as a hallucination. It was probably because Wu Li was so annoying, always hovering around her, that his voice would pop into her head even during such a wonderful moment on a date.

She immediately shook her head. “I must have misheard.”

Seeing that Lin Ran was only serving her food while her own bowl remained empty, she felt a little embarrassed. “Aren’t you… eating? Is the food here not to your liking?”

Lin Ran pondered for a moment before delivering her critique in a slow, deliberate manner. “It’s not cooked enough.”

“Then… should we wait a little longer?”

But just then, she heard Lin Ran speak again. “Do you know what cordyceps is?”

…

Shu Yao was momentarily stunned by her friend’s leap in logic, assuming she was trying to make conversation while waiting for the meat to cook. She looked up again, only to see Lin Ran still holding the knife, her eyes half-lidded, as she sliced the spare ribs in the pot, one cut after another, the movement as elegant as conducting a symphony.

Bone and meat were being separated.

Her superhuman hearing captured the sounds from the other end of the ventilation duct. The sound of the small knife cutting the food perfectly overlapped with the rhythm of limbs slicing through flesh and blood.

“The Ophiocordyceps fungus and the ghost moth larva. Both are insignificant, ant-like existences…”

The speaker murmured with half-lowered lids, the smile on her face having vanished at some point.

Her long black hair flowed like ink, draping past her ears and jawline and hanging over her shoulder, becoming like icicles on a branch on a winter night.

Her pure black eyelashes cast a shadow, concealing her face from the nose up.

The minute sounds of human skin being pierced, of the arthropod monster burrowing inch by inch into flesh and blood, continued to stream into her ears.

“When the ghost moth larva is parasitized by fungal spores, its body is continuously absorbed and eroded as it grows…”

The monster, wearing its new skin, propped itself up from the ground. The rustle of clothing against shelves was accompanied by the sound of gnawing and chewing from within the body, as organs disappeared one by one.

“Ultimately, the insect and the fungus become one.”

The glasses that had fallen to the floor were picked up again. Bloody fingers clumsily wiped the shattered lenses, the movement changing from clumsy to fluid through repetition.

Finally, even the sound of bumping against the shelves ceased, leaving only the sound of practiced human footsteps.

The storyteller gave a belated smile, slowly inhaling as she closed her beautiful eyes.

Beneath her closed lids, in the center of her pure black eyes, her disguised human pupils, excited, slowly transformed into squares.

“And when it dies—”

“A nourishing delicacy is born.”

…

The atmosphere at the table became extremely quiet.

Shu Yao’s expression grew increasingly puzzled.

She tried to recall if there were any dishes made with cordyceps on the menu while, in the strange silence that followed the end of the story, she blinked and tentatively asked in a small voice, “Be-besides cordyceps, is there anything else you really want to eat here?”

The scent of the maturing prey had already drifted away.

Only then did Lin Ran slowly open her eyes. A smile touched her lips as she looked at the person across from her, whose expression betrayed an unconscious confusion. A moment later, the small knife in her right hand moved accurately toward another dish: stir-fried seasonal mushrooms with cured meat.

The thin slice of cured meat was pierced by the knife.

“There is.”

The silver knife speared a slice of meat, dark at the edges and light in the center.

Lin Ran lifted the knife, bringing the food to her lips. The taste of human food flooded her senses. She looked down at it for a moment, a hint of restraint on her face, before finally placing this slice of meat into Shu Yao’s bowl as well.

“What a pity.”

A hint of regret flickered in her eyes as she spoke again. “It needs to be cured for at least seven days to be flavorful enough. Eating it now would be inappropriate.”

—I still have to endure for another seven days.