The bus stops and opens its doors, letting passengers exit and new ones enter.

  Unfortunately, they aren’t the only things to get on.

  Tentacles crawl up from the fractured street—an amalgamation of wet sinew, translucent cartilage, and mucus glistening in impossible colours, forming a shape somewhere between Cthulhu and that mouth-tentacle thing from Final Fantasy named after a brand of cigarettes. It stumbles onto the bus and immediately begins oozing over seats, over people, searching for purchase on every open surface it can find. Aster watches the golden fields flare as the tentacles hit their bioelectric resistance, burning the intruder in halos of protective energy.

  The tentacles giggle at the attempt, a wet, obscene sound, excreting sticky orange-yellow foam where they brush against the passengers’ biofields, clinging to them.

  Only some of the spheres absorb it; others resist, but where the foam takes hold, it seeps into the field, and a strange reaction follows.

  The affected bubbles begin bleeding a sickly, acidic haze that tastes of anxiety, swirling like distorted clouds around them, twisting in stutters, jerks, and micro-panic loops. As the mist blooms, different tendrils on the creature open like flowers, fan-like mouths hungrily filtering the released mist from the air.

  Oh, fuck this now!

  As the writhing mass draws closer, the bus thankfully lurches to its next stop before it can reach Aster. He pushes himself upright. “Yeah, that’s enough public transport for one lifetime.”

  He’d rather ride this out somewhere that didn’t feel like being trapped in an enclosed space with them.

  As the doors hiss open, he pauses, taking it all in.

  The world outside is no longer just indifferent—it’s alive, hostile, and unnecessarily slimy for some reason.

  The same storm of coloured insanity covers the sky again, and the city seems to have turned into a swamp of nightmares and pure lunacy.

  The first step onto the pavement feels like walking across the tongue of some stone-skinned leviathan. The ground ripples—faintly, but enough. Enough to make Aster wonder whether the street had always been half-alive, or if he’s finally too far gone to tell the difference.

  He doesn’t jump back; he doesn’t yelp. His brain quietly folds the moment into a growing file labelled Nope and tapes it shut with what’s left of his self-respect.

  The bubble of golden field still clings to him, shimmering faintly like static caught in a force field, and that—more than anything—keeps the panic from cracking him open from the sternum outward.

  He doesn’t care if that belief is just his mind’s attempt at a safety blanket. Having it there gives some part of him a form of reassurance that doesn’t immediately send him screaming down the street. Monkey brain says gold field means safe, and he sure as hell isn’t arguing.

  He rubs at his chest as it continues to ache. The hook tugs again—deep, mechanical, hungry. In the back of his mind, he wonders if he can really file this searing dread under the usual panic that sometimes haunts his subconscious. It feels colder. More primal.

  It feels like something wants him—and it’s tugging the line, trying to find him.

  He thinks of that creature made of meat and steel again, shivering as he wonders why this hook and that creature feel so inexplicably connected.

  “Yeah, it could always get worse,” he mutters. “Better to think of this as MK Ultra: South Africa Edition and just wait for it to end.”

  He focuses again on his surroundings.

  Around him, the city has peeled itself like an orange, revealing its raw, primordial guts. The city is still visible beneath but feels wrong—swollen, pulsing under layers of spectral fungus and astral moss that throb in a colour palette that makes his brain itch. Buildings sway and shimmer under the weight of entire forests taking root in their concrete skeletons, luminous roots feeding directly from the structures they pierce.

  Something like tentacles writhes from a storm gutter and vanishes when he blinks.

  He passes a window sprouting coral fans glowing in impossible gradients of lavender, chartreuse, and molten orange, each pane trembling like jelly. The glass reflects his face—and something behind it that isn’t his reflection. He looks away before it can wave.

  He tries not to look too long at anything. Staring means acknowledging. Acknowledging means thinking. Thinking is a luxury Aster can’t afford right now.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The street itself is familiar—brick, grime, the occasional flicker of neon—but overlaid with another layer entirely: a living, breathing mess of flora and fauna, dripping and writhing in colours that shouldn’t exist outside fever dreams. Vines crawl up lampposts like serpents in an orgy, their flowers flaring in neon purples and corrosive greens, petals jagged like glass shards that reflect the streetlights into a kaleidoscope of emotion.

  The air tastes of ozone and damp moss, mixed with something metallic and sharp, like the tang of blood from ten different species. Every breath feels like inhaling the thoughts of the city itself—thick and slow, weighing on him in coils of pressure.

  He walks carefully, heels pressing into the living pavement. The chaos doesn’t assault him so much as whisper in curious murmurs. He gives a wide berth to a shimmering puddle that seems to whisper of regrets and tiny betrayals.

  A patch of street blooms into a garden of grotesque delights. Flowers with petals like bat wings hang beside bulbous, gaping blooms dripping fluorescent nectar. Snails the size of pigeons’ crawl along vine-branches, leaving trails that glitter and hum. One large, eyeless moth the size of a cat swoops low, brushing past his shoulder, its wings trailing threads of spectral static that leave a faint taste of complacency.

  He stops at a crossing, waiting for the red-light pulsing frustration to turn green, the air thick with cigarette smoke drifting among the mist. A few people loiter outside a pub—weekend philosophers in office shirtsleeves.

  Aster pauses. Something about the group’s centre feels wrong.

  A strange mist hovers around them, thick enough to taste. He can feel it—cloying, perfumed, hard to describe—but it’s the psychic equivalent of someone explaining crypto to a waitress.

  They stand in a loose half-circle, a man at the centre laughing too hard at his own joke. Head tilted back like a solar panel absorbing worship, the kind of laugh that makes everyone pretend to agree just so they can leave sooner.

  Aster is about to turn away—just another loudmouth in a shirt one button too open—when the strange mist suddenly disappears, sucked toward the man mid-laugh.

  Aster squints confused.

  Then he sees it.

  A pale, glistening mass, impossibly slick, clings to the man’s back. The man keeps laughing too loudly at his own jokes. No one else speaks. No one even tries.

  Aster’s eyes track the leech-like thing—pale, viscous, pulsing like a slow, deliberate heartbeat. It expands as if inhaling some invisible source of self-satisfaction from the man’s field. Then it exhales, a sickly mist pouring from the pores dotting its back, surging outward in a thick, sticky wave.

  The mist is dark, oily, a shade of green-blue that sticks to the biofields of everyone it touches. It engulfs the group of smokers, even brushing against Aster’s own field. The mist doesn’t seem to affect him—but having it this close, he still can’t say what it is. It’s not smoke. Nor Mist as he knows it. It just feels smug. You can taste the superiority in it, like second-hand cologne and cheap wine.

  The rest aren’t so lucky. The dark mist seems to leech a bright copper vapour from those it touches—a flicker of energy drained out and sucked back into the leech with each pulse.

  Aster frowns, watching the smug mist interact with their fields. It’s drawing the copper mist directly from them, dissolving it out like acid.

  He reaches out before his brain can veto the motion, fingertips brushing the drifting edge of the gold vapour. Warm. Electric. Real. Thin ribbons of what he can only describe as pure joy siphon from those in range.

  It dissolves into the smug mist, sucked in and filtered, feeding the leech-like creature. A perfect, hideous ecosystem—one man’s self-satisfaction weaponized into an extraction field for everyone else’s happiness.

  He can almost follow the logic. The leech takes excess smugness from the man, catalyses it into some form of caustic joy dissolver, filters it back through the mist, and feeds on the returns.

  A neat little circuit of emotional parasitism.

  It makes perfect sense.

  Too much sense.

  He blinks, hard.

  He’s standing in the street, staring at an imaginary leech that he now imagines runs on weaponized arrogance and psychic osmosis.

  The group has noticed him—waving his hands through empty air, slack-jawed, staring at something they can’t see. They do their best impression of ignoring him.

  The guy with the leech doesn’t bother with tact. He glares straight at Aster, irritation plain.

  “Oh shit—uh, the stock market,” Aster mutters, spinning around and walking as fast as he can without breaking into an outright sprint, hoping he doesn’t look too crazy, but certain that he does.

  Why the fuck is he trying to make sense of his own insanity? Is he stupid? He’s in the throes of a schizophrenic break—or some spore-induced fungal infection actively producing LSD directly on his neurons. He’s not sure yet, but he can’t afford to be labelled crazy on top of being cursed unlucky. He needs to wait for this hallucination to stop, and being out in public is starting to feel like a terrible idea.

  He thinks of the hooded man and the house he just left. Did he really break into it? The key was where the man said it would be. Could he afford to go back if the place belonged to someone?

  Maybe he could just wait there until this episode quiets down. It’s either being sent to an asylum because people notice his breakdown in the street—or waiting a day or two in an empty building and hoping no one comes back in that time.

  The answer seems simple. He needs to go back.

  Aster checks his surroundings, looking for landmarks or road signs not covered in writhing vines, tentacles, or psychedelic moss.

  Bree Street. Shit—he’s almost twenty blocks from 7 Heart Lane, and he’s already given the last coins he had to the bus that dropped him here. He’ll have to walk. It isn’t that far.

  Well—

  Not on a normal day, anyway.