He waited for the night, but it didn’t come.
The blue expanse of endless space was now a web of spiders. The sky’s colour faded, like someone had poured ink to mess up the painting.
The field of red flowers dried up, their colour dissolved, and became black like a lunar eclipse.
The ribbon burnt with the same sensation, and heat bloomed on his wrist where the character 壹 (1) glowed silver. The silk tightened around his wrist.
It felt less like a tracker and more like cruel shackles that bound a slave with no dreams or freedom.
Everything collapsed, and then Mo Fei woke up with a loud scream.
The air was thick, filled with a fetid smell. A sibilant noise, a little further from his location, reached his ears. It wasn’t a human shrill. Then another dissonant howling voice echoed.
"Where am I now?" He was at the edge of a forest, now.
His hand found the ribbon, but it was not burning; the moonlit silver light had moved away, the character 1 壹 was gray. The second - 贰 - (2) now shimmering with that same faint moonlit silver light.
"This ribbon... It’s not any tracker; it actually shows which world I am in." He understood. "This means if I somehow reach World 11, then I might come back home."
Then, with a flash, a new chilling thought arose: What triggered the ascension? Time? Or something else? Or perhaps it was just sleeping. In this world there was no one that could answer it, for now.
Six paces away, a drop of a viscous substance fell onto a petrified spine. Mo Fei’s breath hitched when it echoed.
"Every single thing is made to scare me."
Even if he reached World 11, he was uncertain that it would help him to go back home, his mind wary because if that was the case, then at least one person could have come back to World 0.
The suffocating night reminded him that it wasn’t safe.
He somehow reached out of the forest into the outskirts of a town. The alley opened onto a vast street. A grotesque sight. The ground was ghastly, rotting, and blood-soaked. Trees should give oxygen, but these trees... gnarled and twisted in most ominous shapes. Leaves were butchered, tattered like meat.
Roots were coming out of the surface of the forsaken land as petrified wood. And the whole region had bones scattered everywhere. There was a garden full of thorny flowers glistening with ephemeral moisture, as if the owners had dissolved minutes ago.
And there lay a bone, the flesh was still there like a leftover of something, and the ground was sticky like the fresh blood had moistened the flowers.
"Bones... they feel like... they died a few hours ago," his eyes looked into the sight of the bones and scattered flesh covering the bone that was just beginning to rot.
Slowly, something shifted behind him where the mangled bones piled twenty feet away. His breath caught in his throat. "A mistake?"
Behind him, a scatter of ribs and a shattered skull twitched with a clattering noise. The surrounding roots coiled like awakened snakes. With the crunching noise of formation. The very next second, the bones snapped together, forming a multi-limbed being.
A cluster of vertebrae formed a rattling tail. Finger bones articulated into legs. It had no face. Just a clattering jaw, from which spilled a whispered chorus: "... lost, I’m lost..." and "Why can’t I see..."
Its broken hand bone reached towards Mo Fei, making a writhing sound. He flinched by the sudden jarring movement. "Give me... give me your eyes... I want to see. I want to see this terrifying world." The bone monster whispered. The ’Yan Gu’ turned its body of assembled grief toward him. The symbols on its bones flared.
The ground was tangled with roots that seemed to cover a vast area of blood-soaked ground, one wrong step could make him trip over the ground, but it wasn’t a real concern; it was the clattering noise that he could hear behind him.
Mo Fei’s brain imagined the scene happening behind him. A wave of dry clicks moving far too fast. A cadaverous entity was screaming and crawled after him, wanting to take his eyes.
"LOOK BACK LOOK BACK LOOK–"
"-the sky is falling in-"
In the response, a trembling, heavy voice came out of his exhausted lungs.
"--bié guòlái! DON’T COME CLOS–"
He didn’t look back. His instinct told him not to look behind. But then he saw a slope leading downward, toward a cluster of structures that weren’t glass, but dull, weathered stone. A town? Shelter.
"I’m safe, I-I’m saved."
He veered toward it, his lungs burning with the metallic air. A root lashed out from the ground, tripping him. He fell hard; the wind knocked out of him. The skittering was right behind.
He rolled over. The Yan Gu loomed, a scaffold of nightmares. A long, spine-like limb stabbed down at his arm. It pinned Mo Fei’s sleeve to the ground. Its jaw-cluster leaned in, whispers becoming a focused hiss. A sharp, root-wrapped finger-bone extended toward his forehead to begin its inscription.
His body thrashed recklessly; his legs slammed into a spot that connected with a clattering knot of its ribs. It made a loud guttural reaction; the whispers turned into a wild, animalistic sound. With a strong pull, Mo Fei yanked his arm free, fabric tearing, and he scrambled up.
No thoughts came to his mind; the survival instinct was giving everything it had. His clicking of boots echoed in silence as he closed up the final distance down the slope.
The stone walls of the town rose before him, silent, and ominously still. No lights. No movement. But it had a gate. An old, iron-wrought thing, slightly far.
"It definitely doesn’t look like a good place to stay, but at least it’s less terrifying than a monster made of bones." His eyes scanned the town, before they fell on a house. "Ugh, see the terrifying world with my eyes?" A relief washed over his face, the peace after the exhaustion.
He threw himself through the gap, then turned and shoved the creaking gate shut with his full weight. A moment later, a heavy THUD shook the metal. Then another. Then... silence.
"It’s over, damn." He stumbled, walking toward the house. "Geez, I was really close to seeing heaven." He breathed heavily.
Mo Fei went inside and closed the door. His back slumped against it, gasping through the heavy silence and the scent of rotting bone. The Yan Gu stood motionless just outside, its ribs making a sound of clattering bones. It didn’t break in again; it simply... waited.
The whispers softened to a resentful murmur. Slowly, Mo Fei pushed himself away from the door; he turned without caring about his surroundings.
His thoughts raced with observation. "The bones and flesh weren’t old... Does that mean someone died who came with me? There were six more humans. If I remember correctly, one is already dead... but what happens if we die? Will it end?"
From the corner of his eyes, the town came into the line of sight through an odd window made of iron; the edges were sharper than obsidian. The town was a maze of rocky streets and houses made of only stones. The windows of those homes were dark. No smoke rose from the chimneys-a sign of no inhabitation.
It was less a sanctuary and more a void of life, a negative imprint of a community. And the bones were there too. They weren’t scattered... arranged. Though they were not new, they must have been here from the last year. He saw a skull placed on a windowsill. Almost like an ornament. It was a collection of whoever lived here.
"A skull," he stared at the bone in horror. "It’s arranged. Did I come into a worse danger?"
And on his wrist, the ribbon pulsed-贰-(2), a cold reminder. His time here was already bleeding away. The real terror wasn’t just the monster outside the gate.
It was what, or who, had gathered all these bones inside.