With her self-proclaimed banner of "rather miss it than let it slip," Jing Shu, over the frantic course of the afternoon, really did end up saving a few people, though some of them had merely been trapped underwater for mundane, non-leech-related reasons, like a jammed door or a snagged air hose.
Along the way, she also incidentally finished an 800 virtual coin bounty that had been languishing on the board. The client, a restaurant owner trying to rebuild, needed a full set of commercial kitchen equipment, a massive stainless steel stove, a walk-in freezer unit, exhaust hoods, hauled up from a flooded basement restaurant.
Because of the building's collapsed layout and narrow service entrance, the salvage boat's crane could not reach inside, and the gear was far too heavy and bulky to move by hand, even underwater. Even with scuba tanks and plenty of time, you would need a team of seven or eight professional divers to coordinate dragging it through all those dark, twisting corridors. In that lightless, disorienting water, it was a logistical and safety nightmare.
This was precisely where the amphibious shark submarine shone. Its compact size and agility were perfect for weaving in and out of skeletal structures, and its 280 horsepower electric drive could tug serious weight on a tow line. To keep things simple and avoid any prying eyes, she made triple sure there were no other divers or salvage cameras in the vicinity, then simply extended her will.
The entire, dripping stainless steel assemblage vanished from the concrete floor and appeared in a cleared corner of her Rubik's Cube Space. She then piloted the sub back to the designated collection point, surfaced near the barge, and "unloaded" the gear with a theatrical splash, as if she had just managed a miraculous tow. The Rubik's Cube Space was a full-on, unapologetic cheat, saving her immense time, effort, and diesel.
Time slipped by unnoticed. The external temperature, visible on the sub's dashboard, had plunged from the day's high of 37°C down to just a few degrees as evening approached. The dim, perpetual twilight was about to sink into pitch black, a sign that this salvage day was nearly over, yet she hadn't found even a single promising nest of leeches. If she could at least locate one viable cluster, she could discreetly transfer it home to begin her breeding and cultivation experiment.
"Did I use the wrong method again?" she muttered to herself in the sub's quiet cabin, the glow of the instruments reflecting in her eyes. "Should I just go solo tomorrow and start a systematic, grid-by-grid carpet search of the leech hotspots?" She was beginning to doubt her crowd-sourcing strategy and was mentally ready to call it a day, her enthusiasm dampened.
"Wrap it up, wrap it up!" Liu Xing's amplified voice crackled over the water from the command boat.
"Everyone who has surfaced, stay up! Line up by team and report headcount! Each group leader, report today's search area and primary results, mark the salvaged zones on the master map, then we hold a quick debrief before dispersal!" Liu Xing wiped sweat from his brow despite the chill. Another day done, another day of navigating danger without a major, headline-making disaster. He allowed himself a moment of weary relief.
At the final, authoritative blast of the air horn, everyone still in the water began hauling themselves up onto boats or swimming for the docks. The frenetic activity ceased. Jing Shu, about to turn her submarine toward home, was pivoting when a sharp, panicked shout from the command boat caught her ear.
"Team A10! Where is Team A10? All three members are missing! Does anyone have eyes on them? When was the last sighting?"
"Not sure, Supervisor Liu! Haven't seen them for a while now!"
Jing Shu's eyes, which had been dull with disappointment, lit up like struck flint. Her body went taut. "Which direction were they assigned?" she called out, her voice cutting through the gathering gloom.
"Six o'clock bearing! They were checking the perimeter of that former large underground supermarket, the 'Mega-Mart' on the old maps!"
She didn't wait for confirmation. The submarine's throttle slammed forward, and she shot off in a streaking wake of bubbles toward the six o'clock bearing.
Large underground supermarkets like Mega-Mart were usually among the first places looted and then officially salvaged. They were treasure troves. Today's official salvage plan, which she had scanned, did not include that location at all, it was marked as "cleared."
Which meant only one thing. Team A10's dive there was off the books, unofficial. Maybe they had heard a rumor, seen a glint, decided to chase a private score.
"Something's fishy," Jing Shu murmured, her hands steady on the controls as the dark, boxy outline of the submerged supermarket entrance loomed in her lights.
She guided the submarine through the blown-out main entrance, sweeping the vast, cavernous interior. The place had been stripped so clean by earlier raids that even the metal shelving units were gone, leaving a forest of bare concrete pillars. Whenever she bumped into floating debris or a half-collapsed display island, she simply rammed through, the sub's reinforced nose shrugging off the impact.
The submarine, she reasoned, was only really useful this year, while the city was still a lake. Later, when the waters receded or froze, she'd barely need it. Besides, she had acquired it through a barter of a few units of honeysuckle, it was cheap enough that she didn't feel particularly bad about knocking it around.
Her powerful floodlights cut twin cones through the murky green water as she watched closely. No sign of divers, no bubbles, no emergency lights. She passed the ghostly zones that once held snacks, then housewares, vegetables, preserved foods, and was just about to reach the area that had been the fresh market and seafood section when her lights illuminated something that made her breath catch.
Not bodies. Not yet. But dense, sprawling, pulsing clumps of something organic.
It was a mass of rotted, swollen scraps of meat, possibly from drowned livestock, maybe from humans, maybe from the supermarket's own ruined inventory. The scraps teemed with wriggling carrion scavengers, pale worms, waterlice. This had probably been the fish-processing station and live fish tanks before the apocalypse. The concentrated stink and residual heat in the enclosed space would have drawn flies and maggots initially, then, after the flood, all kinds of opportunistic underwater bugs and parasites.
Thinking of unknown creatures reminded her of a specific, horrifying invasive species that would appear in the later years. They were drawn to blood and rotting meat, drank blood, ate flesh, and their bodies were perpetually covered with necrotic, festering sores that hosted countless carrion scavengers. After prolonged soaking, they looked like grotesque, ambulatory masses of white, waterlogged rotten meat.
Their biggest traits were living in aggressive packs, spreading virulent pathogens, and obsessively picking the scavengers off each other's bodies for food. When they encountered humans, they attacked in a blind, frenzied swarm. During the great northern migration in her previous life, her group had been ambushed by a swarm of such creatures. The memory still made her skin crawl.
"It shouldn't be this early," she muttered, pushing the thought away. That particular horror shouldn't appear for several more years, only migrating south later with the climate shifts and the mass human exodus from the frozen north.
Besides the carrion, her lights now revealed something else, a seething, crimson cloud. Even more red nematodes, drawn by the potent scent of decay. They never turned down free energy. They ate vegetation, they ate algae, and they absolutely devoured rotting meat.
And where there was a massive concentration of red nematodes and rotting protein, the leeches that exploded in number whenever food was plentiful had swarmed in. The water near the former seafood counters was thick with them, a undulating, blackish-brown carpet clinging to every surface and swirling in the current.
"This time it's a giant nest," she whispered, a thrill of grim triumph mixed with horror. "No wonder those three never made it back. If even one of them had managed to break away and go up for help, the other two might not have died here." She understood the fatal calculus. One slow day, one lucky find that could set you up for three years, it made people reckless.
The scene that came fully into view was grimly familiar, yet still shocking. Three divers in black wetsuits were tangled together in a last, desperate embrace near the checkout lanes, their air hoses knotted. Leeches, hundreds of them, carpeted their bodies, crawling over every inch of exposed skin and wetsuit. And in the gloved, dead hand of one diver, clutched in a rigor-mortis grip, was a single, perfect, crimson blood mushroom.
So they had found blood mushrooms. The ultimate prize. Unfortunately, their biology lesson came too late. When there are thousands upon thousands of hungry leeches in the water, they don't politely stay put just because you try to keep your distance. As soon as the first leech found a bare wrist or neck seal, it would have latched on. The scent of blood in the water, however minute, would have triggered a feeding frenzy. In water like this, teeming with parasites, she would never, ever stick her head or a limb outside the submarine's hull. There was a very good reason she conducted all her "salvage" from inside a sealed metal tube.
In the middle of the leech swarm, growing from the very debris they fed on, stood clusters of blood mushrooms. They were plump, vibrantly red, and there were no fewer than a dozen of them. Her heart leapt with a fierce, possessive joy. Found you.
This time, she did not touch anything directly with tools or hands. She focused her mind on the entire, grotesque ecosystem, the leech swarm, the mushroom clusters, the surrounding water thick with nematodes and rot. With a thought, she shifted the whole mass, a sphere roughly six meters across, wholesale into a newly isolated section of her Cube Space. She wanted to see if the blood mushrooms could reproduce in captivity within this complete micro-habitat. She even carefully transferred a large volume of the surrounding nutrient-rich, foul water into the space to maintain the environment.
The three divers were beyond saving, their faces pale and bloated. With her chest tightened, she sent their bodies into the space as well, along with their gear and the leeches still clinging to them. She was meticulous. She scooped every last visible leech from the surrounding pillars and floor, not letting a single one slip by. Altogether, the leech swarm, the nematode cloud, and the associated biomass occupied nearly 6 cubic meters within her extradimensional storage.
Then, for the sake of the outside world's procedures, she separated the three dead divers from the mass in her space and mentally tethered them to the towing hitch at the tail of her submarine. In a flash of motion, she reversed thrusters and rushed back out of the supermarket cavern. Right, a rule she had confirmed, living people with active consciousness couldn't enter the space, but the recently deceased, their minds extinguished, could be placed inside temporarily, like any other organic matter.
Eager to get home and begin inspecting her gruesome haul, she fishtailed the submarine alongside the command barge and, with careful mental effort, deposited the three waterlogged bodies back onto the deck with a series of heavy, sodden thumps.
Liu Xing's face, which had been tight with anxiety, crumpled. His eyes filled with tears of sheer relief. He nearly knelt to her in gratitude, then, seeing the blueish tint of the faces and the absolute lack of movement, the relief shifted into resigned grief. He sobbed once, a harsh, choked sound, then barked at his stunned crew, "Quick! Settle them with respect! See they are properly identified and buried with the honors due!" He had lost men, but not to a mystery that would haunt his operations. There was a body, there was a reason. In this world, that was a form of closure.
Jing Shu was shaking too, but with the adrenaline of success and frantic curiosity. She gave Liu Xing a curt nod and piloted the sub away before he could ask any difficult questions.
Back at the villa, she ignored the calls from the kitchen about dinner. She went straight to the second floor, locked her bedroom door, and sat cross-legged on the floor. Closing her eyes, she plunged her consciousness into the Cube Space, beginning a careful, fascinated observation of this captured, morbid food chain.
The leeches, disturbed, had formed a packed, swirling ball around the central blood mushroom clusters, which were now rooted in a slurry of rotten matter in the space. The red nematodes swirled at the periphery, held at bay by the aggressive movements of the leeches. She watched, her mind's eye focusing with unnatural clarity.
And at last, she understood the missing piece of the puzzle, the reason this ecosystem thrived in the oxygen-poor, foul water. The leeches' mouthparts had evolved, or perhaps this specific strain had always been this way. They weren't just sucking blood from large hosts. They were actively herding, capturing, and devouring the red nematodes that swarmed around them. The blood mushrooms, it seemed, were not the leeches' food source, but a symbiotic organism that thrived on the specific waste products and biochemical environment created by the leeches' predatory activity on the nematodes.