After Qin Xiaoxia shook Doudou until he could breathe again, the two finally managed to catch their breath amidst the tension.

Aside from Doudou, who remained tense due to his fear of water, Qin Xiaoxia was starting to come to his senses.

This Wish hadn’t gone wrong; it was likely taking them directly to the source of the river’s problem.

But speculation was one thing, and reality was another.

Qin Xiaoxia suspected they might not have physically arrived in the river, but he couldn’t be sure.

’What if there really is a monster? What if we run right into it?’

’Wouldn’t the two of us just be lambs to the slaughter on this sofa?’

Unfortunately, no amount of frantic thinking could change their current situation.

The river, which should have been murky, was now unusually clear. The visibility stretched for dozens of meters.

He didn’t know if it was an effect of the Wish or if his own vision had somehow changed.

Now, a patch of black filth up ahead was particularly conspicuous.

"Doudou, Doudou! Quick, look! What is that?"

But soon, to their horror, Qin Xiaoxia and Doudou discovered the sofa showed no signs of stopping and was still hurtling straight forward.

"Stop, stop, stop, stop..."

SWISH—

Going from extreme motion to extreme stillness, the sofa stopped dead just a few meters in front of the patch of black filth.

Qin Xiaoxia only had time to curse, "Son of a bitch!"

The inertia instantly converted the feeling of being pressed into his seat into a violent, weightless lurch forward.

Just as Qin Xiaoxia and Doudou felt themselves pitching forward into the filth, they bizarrely found they couldn’t leave the sofa.

The sensation of inertia was undeniable, but their butts remained "glued" to the sofa.

A few seconds later, the two of them, along with the sofa, finally came to a complete standstill.

Qin Xiaoxia lay slumped like a dead dog. He glanced at Doudou, who was in no better shape, and managed a weak joke.

"S-so thrilling."

Doudou tugged on Qin Xiaoxia’s shirt and pointed forward.

The pitch-black shadow looked like a mass of rotting matter, a mixture of all sorts of filth.

It writhed on a spot on the riverbed.

Murky currents radiated from it, continuously contaminating the surrounding water and making it even filthier.

Suddenly, Qin Xiaoxia saw corpses.

There were cats, dogs, and even... people!

The bodies were in an advanced state of decay, occasionally tumbling into view from within the black murk for a fleeting moment.

"Blech—"

The sight of a human corpse with a half-rotted face amidst the thick, viscous filth made even someone with a stomach as strong as Qin Xiaoxia’s dry heave.

’It must be the environmental protection agent who went missing a couple of days ago.’

This stuff was clearly the source of the Winding Loach River’s bizarre transformation. It felt alive, yet it was hard to be certain.

"C-Cousin... This thing... it’s a Nightmare Swamp..."

Doudou’s voice was laced with a scalp-numbing terror.

Just as Doudou finished speaking, and just as questions flooded Qin Xiaoxia’s mind,

BOOM—

A yanking force, dozens of times stronger than before, came from behind.

In less than half a second, Qin Xiaoxia and Doudou felt themselves being flung away.

About ten seconds later.

Limbs gone limp, Qin Xiaoxia opened his eyes to find himself and Doudou sitting on the sofa in the living room.

Doudou’s eyes were still closed.

The sofa felt damp to the touch, but he quickly realized it wasn’t water—it was his own sweat.

"Doudou, wake up."

Qin Xiaoxia shook him a few times. Doudou’s eyes snapped open, and he glanced around frantically for a moment.

"Phew... We’re okay, we’re okay..."

Qin Xiaoxia was speechless.

"Never mind ’okay.’ That ’Nightmare Swamp’ you mentioned—what the hell is it? Is it a monster?"

"Y-you could say that, I guess."

Doudou, looking worried, shared what he knew about the Nightmare Swamp.

A Nightmare Swamp can’t be classified as a living creature in the conventional sense.

It’s more like a natural phenomenon.

They typically form deep within treacherous marshes, born from the accumulated resentment of countless creatures that have died there over the years. This resentment coalesces into a form of "dirty" Magic Power.

A Nightmare Swamp lacks the basic concepts of living things, like birth, death, and reproduction, but it is exceptionally jealous of the living.

Any marsh where a Nightmare Swamp appears becomes an extremely dangerous place. It’s incredibly difficult to even find it, let alone destroy it.

In fact, there are other similar phenomena besides the Nightmare Swamp. Places like the Corpse Gathering Land and Calamity City are also formed from concentrated resentment and are all extremely perilous.

Doudou had only ever heard of them; this was his first time seeing one for real.

Hearing this explanation, Qin Xiaoxia was completely baffled.

"So what are we supposed to do? There’s no way the two of us can handle this, right?"

But the usually timid Doudou suddenly thought of something.

"But the hardest part about a Nightmare Swamp is finding its source. Usually, it hides within a massive marsh, or even merges with the marsh itself. But the Winding Loach River..."

Qin Xiaoxia caught on and immediately finished the thought.

"Is definitely not a marsh!"

Not only was it not a marsh, the Winding Loach River was a flowing river—living water.

Although it was gradually worsening under the Nightmare Swamp’s influence, it was still a long way from becoming a marsh.

Besides, the river was small, only about thirty meters across at its widest point. Compared to the vast marshes Doudou described as the birthplace of Nightmare Swamps, this was a very confined space.

"Plus, even though that mass looked big, it’s actually tiny compared to the ones in the stories. It must be a newly formed Nightmare Swamp."

Doudou added.

The two of them were excited for a moment, but their spirits quickly fell again.

"What’s there to be excited about? Even if it’s a newly formed and relatively weak Nightmare Swamp, the two of us still can’t handle it!"

He never wanted to be a hero, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of powerlessness that came from knowing the enemy’s weakness and being utterly unable to act on it.

Just then, they noticed the living room TV was still on, the news report continuing in the background.

"...Next, we have an update on the Qingzhen channel restoration project. We’ve just received word that the Kehua District Environmental Protection Department, in cooperation with the Ninghua Kuncheng Cleaning Company, has decided to initiate a comprehensive project to pump and dredge sections of the Qingzhen channel. We understand that work to dam the river sections has already begun ahead of schedule..."

Hearing this, Qin Xiaoxia’s eyes lit up.

’A pumping and dredging project?’ he thought. ’If they can confine the Nightmare Swamp to one section, could we do something once the water’s been pumped out?’

Though his legs still felt a bit wobbly, Qin Xiaoxia was eager to go check on the situation.

By the time he dragged Doudou to a spot a short distance from the riverbank, they could already see workboats setting up temporary cofferdams.

Tomorrow, this section of the river would be completely dammed at both ends, and pumps would drain all the wastewater in between.

Qin Xiaoxia and Doudou only dared to watch from a distance, not wanting to get any closer to the riverbank. Qin Xiaoxia, for his part, was still a little worried about the workers.

But he resisted the urge to go over and warn them.

For one, pumping the river was their only hope of dealing with the Nightmare Swamp. For another, the workers wouldn’t stop just for his say-so. If he went up and told them there was a monster in the water, they’d just think he was crazy.

"Huh?!"

Enduring the foul stench, Qin Xiaoxia was startled by a sudden sensation.

He could seemingly feel the location of the Nightmare Swamp.

’Could it be because of the Wish Technique?’

But Doudou had no such feeling; he just kept staring at the river, his face full of fear.

Perhaps due to the rumbling machinery of the workboats upstream and downstream, the Nightmare Swamp remained in the center of the dammed-off section, not moving toward either side.