Chapter Text
Zhou Mingru was completely drained. Not just tired, as though something essential had been scrapped out of him and only a hollow shell remained. His body ached, shoulders soar from being hunched for too many hours sitting at a desk, eyes dry and burning from endless screens, and a stomach soured by days of nothing but instant noodles and vending machine coffee. He was the broken shell of a corporate drone.
He let out a long, ragged sigh and dropped himself onto the bed without ceremony, the mattress groaning beneath his weight. He grabbed a pillow and pressed it over his face. Not for comfort, but to shut out the world and muffle the scream of frustration rising in his chest. His life had come to be a patchwork of thousand tiny losses.
They piled up each day, week, and month. Bad luck. Missed deadlines. Half-hearted apologies from managers who cared more about numbers than the toll it took on employees. Each day he dragged himself out of his littly apartment with the faint hope that maybe tomorrow would be different.
But it never was. And now, to top it all off, he had actually convinced himself that a ritual taken from a sketchy man he met on the street might somehow turn it all around. That some muttered words and scattered food offerings could rewrite the cruel script his life had been following. He groaned into the pillow.
“I must’ve burned out all my brain cells to think that would work,” he thought bitterly. “Some grains of rice in the corners of a room and a chant I couldn’t even pronounce properly? What the hell was I expecting? Divine intervention?” He rolled over onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused.
“I’ve been reading too many web novels,” he admitted to himself with a dry, humorless laugh. “If I really believed some fantasy nonsense could fix my mess of a life… then maybe I deserve this spiral.”
The silence of the room answered him. Not warm, not comforting, just still. But somewhere, in that stillness, something shifted. Nothing loud or obvious. Just a breath, a flicker in the room around him. Like the world had paused for the briefest second and then began to skip and buffer.
As he held his eyes closed waiting for a pleasant dream or a well-deserved break from his stresses the small flicker became a storm. A feeling like a trapdoor opening beneath him, the sensation of plummeting into darkness. Too far, too deep to be natural. The familiar comfort of unconscious rest was absent, replaced instead by a stifling, suffocating silence that pressed against his ears like water at the bottom of a deep well.
At first, there was nothing but a tight feeling like being wrapped in netting pulling him under waves in the ocean .Screaming as he fell he could not hear his voice. He struggled to find anything to grab hold of and stop the feeling of sinking down.
Thick viscous threads seemed to surround him. While he could touch them and try to grab hold they slipped though his fingers. His arms were flailing as the threads clung to his shoulders, neck, and face like a living shroud. The web of them draped over him like a suffocating cloak, cold and strangely heavy. He clawed at the strands, fingers scrabbling to peel them away. They stretched and snapped with sickening elasticity, sticking to his skin no matter how violently he pulled. Every movement only seemed to tangle him more, winding around his wrists, crawling up his arms like ghostly vines.
"Get it off!" He cried though the sound was only in his mind. His struggles left him breathless and panicked but no matter how vigorous his attempt, nothing seemed to changed. He spun in place the dark void, tearing at the silk with desperate, trembling hands, ripping the curtain in ragged strips and flinging them off and away into the darkness. But still it clung. Still it resisted, as if the webs of unknown threads themselves didn’t want to let him go. Alive like tentacles that all had a will of their own.
With his heart pounding and energy spent Zhou missed when the whispers started. It was a soft voice, a kind whisper as if a parent to a child. The voice of a father to a son, promising love and safety, rescue from this terror. The whispers in his ears were speaking in a language he couldn't understand. He ceased his struggles as he focused and failed to understand the words. He could not even figure out what language he was hearing but it left him feeling shaken to his core.
"Help me!" Zhou cried. This time he could hear his voice as he shouted. As though he had finally fallen through a barrier to another world. "Where am I, where are you!" His skin crawled. His breath came in gasps, and all around him the voice fell quiet. He felt as if something was watching, just beyond where he could see.
Soon shapes moved at the edge of his vision spreading over the darkness surrounding him. But they were too fast to be seen clearly. Perhaps stars that shot past him, cities at night, he couldn't be sure.
‘This must be a dream,’ he rationalized. ‘A nightmare like I've never had before’. It was the only explanation that made any kind of sense. He tried to wake, to claw his way back to the safety of consciousness. But something held him down, not with chains or ropes, but with presence, a pressure that made movement feel futile.
Zhou’s temples began to throb. He cried out, and clutched the sides of his head, but it did no good. He could feel something pressing into him like fingers. Invisible yet intimate. Probing. Testing. Like it was trying to peel back his mind layer by layer.
‘This must be a brain aneurysm. I'm dying in my sleep and these are my last moments. Any second now my brain will pop and that will be it.’ he thought not sure if death would not be preferable to the pain he was in now. Through the pain he still tried to watch the shapes spinning around him.
The world before him was no longer moving, instead it finally was starting to take shape. Bit by bit, like fog rolling back from a stage. The shapes were wrong at first, warped and bleeding at the edges, but slowly they began to settle crude outlines becoming objects, depth returning to space.
He was in a room lit red. The light cast from an unknown source. While the world began to take a blurry shape the pain in his head did not let up. He could feel something under him, a chair that supported his exhausted frame. He shifted slightly, grimacing at the weight in his limbs, and reached out toward the only shape he could focus on a broad, dark silhouette just in front of him. His hand trembled as he stretched it forward.
It was a desk. Old and scratched but made of solid wood. Unlike the deck in his apartment made of cheap compressed wood. This was not his room.
Worse yet the desk was covered in something thick and wet. His fingers were coated in it. Zhou pulled his hand back back, looking at the dark fluid smear across his skin. It was thick. Almost black in the red light. Still warm.
The air was thick with a strange, unsettling medley of scents—each one distinct, yet somehow entwined in a way that felt both familiar and wrong. The first to hit was a sharp metallic smell. It carried the iron tang of something primal, raw and warm, like a coin held too long in the mouth or the scent that lingers after a deep cut. It clung to the air with a sickly sweetness, turning the stomach even as it drew a morbid curiosity.
It was blood.
Blood soaked the desk in front of him. Blood had soaked onto his fingers when they were gripping the desk.
He tried to steady the dizzy world around him. Zhou closed his eyes trying to push down another surge of panic as he battled against the pain in his head. He tried to calm his breathing and focus on the other smells. Beneath the blood there was the scent of old books. Old books that had rested on dusty forgotten shelves bound by leather and faded ink. That dry musty smell was almost comforting.
But beneath both, came the acrid, smoky bite of fireworks. The unforgettable smell of gunpowder and scorched chemicals. It was a scent that stung the nostrils and woke memories: festivals, explosions in the night sky, and the brief, violent bloom of light and fire. But here, stripped of joy, it smelled more like something burned that shouldn’t have been, of scorched flesh.
Together, the three formed a haunting perfume of violence, memory, and ritual. Something had happened here. Something horrible.
‘Pain, pain and blood! What happened to me!’ Zhou winced as he opened his eyes and tried to blink his room, his apartment back. It didn't work.
He was still sitting at the desk covered with blood and chunks of something scattered upon it. Shakely he tried to look around him for clues. In the middle od the desk laid an opened notebook with coarse yellow pages. As hard as he squinted at the writing Zhou couldn't make sense of the strange lettering scribbled on its pages. Moving over the rest of the desk he saw an ink bottle and to the right of the notebook sat a dark colored pen with a fully circular body. Its tip shimmered with a faint glint while its cap rested right besides a brass revolver.
‘Not fireworks for sure then,’ he thought.
This was the first time he had ever been in a room with a gun. A gun that he figured might have something to do with the blood spilled all over the desk. While he had seen many in movies and video games this one looked like nothing he had seen before. It seemed more like a revolver from historical movies than the modern guns that existed. Despite his horror at its location and the implications it made he was impressed by the craftsmanship of the weapon.
It was clearly a well made weapon, equal parts weapon and work of art. The polished brass of the gun had etched filigree patterns, soaked in some places with splattered blood. The thick barrel was angular, squared off at the end and reinforced with copper bands, each engraved with tiny numerals and symbols. Like the words in the book they symbols were the same illegible script.
Turning away from the mess in front of him, Zhou tried to stand and instead fell to the floor. His weak legs were unable to support him, his knees buckled the moment he rose, and he collapsed to the floor with a dull, graceless thud. His palms slapped against the cold wood, breaking his fall just enough to keep him from hitting his face.
His legs once steady, once dependable were now little more than useless sticks beneath him, trembling with every attempt to move. His body felt off like his legs no longer belonged to him. There was more blood on the floor, and something squished under his palm. That something clung to his skin, warm and gelatinous. It looked like a bit of brain matter.
The stink of blood curling into his nose and the horror of what he was crushing settled in the back of his throat. He coughed, gagged, and for a moment, thought he might vomit. But nothing came, just a dry heave and a wave of nausea that made the spinning room feel even more unstable. While his world narrowed to the rhythmic pulse pounding in his ears and the bitter burn rising in his throat he missed the sound of the door opening.
It was here as his body tried to rid itself with the horror of this room that a young woman found him. On his hands and knees with his stomach heaving in a pool of blood.
“Klien, are you sick?” Her voice is low and hesitant, but warm and caring. It landed in his ears like a drop of cold water on fire, cutting through the haze just enough for him to raise his head. “Brother what’s wrong?” Zhou stared at the young woman, he couldn't understand her.
She stood in the doorway, frozen mid-step. The red light cast her face in strange ghastly shadows, but the worry in her eyes was clear. She didn’t move right away. Didn’t breathe. Her gaze darted from Zhou to the blood-smeared floor, then to the grotesque trail of gore leading up the legs of the desk. Then she screamed.
Zhou tried to speak, but his voice came out broken, just a rasp a broken plea for help.