Shapeshifters

Upon reaching the third floor, I found many rooms in disarray, but the scene of cockroaches covering everything I had imagined did not materialize. A cockroach crawled past my feet, looking no different from an ordinary one, and I felt relieved, even amused. At Su Ying’s room, she greeted me as if I were her savior, quickly hiding behind me, with her roommates following suit. I saw three or five cockroaches wandering around on the floor and couldn’t help but laugh, saying, “What’s there to be afraid of?” I stepped down to squash one. The girls inexplicably screamed. But when I stepped on it, it felt odd, not with the expected crunch but more like stepping on a piece of rubber, still squirming underfoot. I lifted my foot, and to my shock, the cockroach was still crawling as if nothing had happened. Surprised, I stomped on it several times more, but the cockroach, instead of dying, seemed to speed up with each stomp, looking even more lively. This reminded me of the boneless cat; the cat that couldn’t be run over by a truck, and now, the cockroach that couldn’t be squashed. Had the cockroaches, like the cat, turned into some kind of indestructible soft-bodied creature? The thought made me nauseous. At that moment, a cockroach crawled into an open drawer, and one of Su Ying’s roommates screamed, rushing forward to protect her drawer. Seeing the cockroach crawl towards some envelopes, the girl grabbed a fruit knife, screamed, and sliced down, cutting the cockroach in half. But this action had an unexpected effect. After being cut in two, both halves of the cockroach continued to crawl at full speed, the head with some legs crawling out of the drawer, the body still moving inside, then quickly emerging from the other side, not looking like it was struggling in death but full of vigor. It was as if there were now two cockroaches instead of one. They split up, crawling around my feet, and I instinctively stomped on them again to no effect, but I had to protect the girls behind me, so I kicked them away. Seeing their vigorous activity, I felt a chill, and Su Ying and her roommates covered their mouths in shock. Now, I was certain these were definitely not the cockroaches we knew; they might be some kind of mutated species. Not only were they like that cat, becoming unkillable soft-bodied creatures, but they could also survive being split in half, with a terrifying level of vitality. Generally, insects might twitch after being dismembered, but only twitch.