A bright moon, sparse stars.
The bell rang for the end of evening self-study. Students trickled out of the classrooms in twos and threes, laughing and chatting into the night. After a day's grind, this was perhaps their most relaxed hour.
No homework, no teachers, a couple of good friends at your side—and once you got home and showered, you could crawl comfortably into bed. What could be better?
And amid these scattered clusters of students, one massive formation more than a dozen strong came cutting through, marching toward the school gates in neat, steady order.
At its center, a boy with black satin over his eyes was wrapped up tight, like the filling of a dumpling.
A procession that size instantly drew every nearby student's attention.
"Really... I can walk home by myself. Honestly." The corner of Lin Qiye's mouth twitched as he spoke, helpless. "I can see. It's just that my eyes can't take light yet..."
"Say no more, Lin Qiye!" Jiang Qian cut him off, righteous and stern. "We promised your aunt we'd take good care of you, and we're going to deliver!"
"Yeah, Qiye. Our homes are in the same direction anyway. It's all on the way."
"Mine's on the way too."
Lin Qiye: ...
Truth be told, right now he'd rather have been the one getting ostracized. Having lived so long in darkness, he wasn't used to being cared about by this many people. It made his skin itch.
Auntie and Yang Jin didn't count, of course. They were family.
Still, they all meant well, and he could hardly say anything against it. All he could do was follow the crowd forward, resigned.
"I turn right at the intersection ahead—but I can walk with you a bit farther."
"This is my turn. I'm off—see you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow."
"..."
The farther they got from the school, the more classmates peeled away with their goodbyes. A few minutes later, only five people remained around Lin Qiye.
The rowdy mood gradually quieted, and there was suddenly room to breathe. Lin Qiye let out a long sigh of relief.
"Do you think... the Mist will really wake up again someday and swallow Great Xia?" Li Yifei asked, backpack slung over his shoulder, turning his head with some curiosity.
"Didn't you hear the experts? The odds of the Mist reviving are tiny. It probably won't change for the next hundred years—and as for what happens after that... we won't be around by then anyway, so why worry about it?" Jiang Qian rolled her eyes.
"Please. You know as well as I do that whatever those so-called experts say is the least reliable thing there is. What if we finally claw our way into university, haven't even had a taste of the good life, and then the Mist just swallows all of Great Xia? Wouldn't we have lost out huge?"
"So that's why you spend every day loafing around instead of studying?" Jiang Qian stepped in front of Li Yifei, her face serious. "Let me remind you—Mr. Wang already said that if you take last place one more time on this exam, you're moving your desk up next to the podium."
"I know, I know." Li Yifei gave an awkward laugh.
"Actually, I don't believe the Mist can revive either." Wang Shao, walking at the front, suddenly spoke. "At the end of the day, the Mist is just a natural phenomenon. Once it hits a certain critical point, it'll gradually recede. Same as an ice age—glaciers bury the land, and then as temperatures climb back up, the ice slowly retreats, and what follows is a brand-new era."
"I've heard of that one—the natural-disaster theory, right? It's pretty well accepted these days." Jiang Qian nodded.
"And what if... the Mist isn't a natural phenomenon at all?" Lin Qiye, silent until now, suddenly spoke.
Wang Shao blinked, then laughed. "Qiye, don't tell me you actually buy what those theologians are peddling—that the Mist has something to do with supernatural forces?"
"It's the twenty-first century. We believe in science. The world isn't crawling with ghosts and spirits," a classmate named Liu Yuan chimed in.
Lin Qiye didn't answer. Whether or not this world held things beyond science—no one knew better than he did. But that wasn't something worth telling outsiders.
Li Yifei muttered under his breath, "Personally, I think the world would be a lot more interesting if that stuff did exist."
"Why are we even wasting breath on this? None of it is ours to worry about. Instead of agonizing over whether the Mist will revive, you'd do better to plan how you'll sleep in through the three-day Survivor Day holiday. Now that's practical," Jiang Qian said with a laugh.
"True. Holidays are the only real thing in life!"
...
At that same moment, in Cangnan City's old town district.
A man was strolling unhurried down a desolate, dim street with a signboard over his shoulder. Aged streetlamps cast their dull light, stretching his shadow long behind him...
He glanced at his phone, walked to the mouth of a narrow street, and stopped.
"This is the spot..."
He muttered to himself, set down the signboard from his shoulder, and stood it upright.
Under the flickering streetlamp, the sign's shadow guttered in and out—and against its black backing, several large characters in vivid scarlet blazed to the eye!
—ROAD CLOSED AHEAD!
The man leaned against the lamppost, lit himself a cigarette, dragged deep on it, and switched on his earpiece.
"Captain, the third signboard is in position."
"Copy. Begin."
"Mm."
Cigarette clamped between his lips, the man stepped up to the signboard and set his thumb against the point of a tooth. He bit down hard!
A bead of blood welled from the wound. The man crouched and, with that blood-stained thumb, drew one long horizontal stroke across the four large characters of ROAD CLOSED AHEAD!
His eyes sharpened, and an inexplicable aura erupted outward with him at its center!
He tilted his head back to the black night sky and whispered in a voice only he could hear...
"Forbidden Ruins—【Unrestricted Airspace】."
The next moment, the scarlet streak of blood on the signboard bleached away at speed, as if it were being absorbed. Then the four great characters ROAD CLOSED AHEAD flashed with a burst of red light!
And slowly returned to normal.
The man dropped onto his backside on the ground, let out a long breath, and complained aloud.
"Fuck. Drained dry again..."
At that moment, if anyone had looked down on Cangnan City from the sky, they would have seen three points of light flare up around the old town—then, with those three lights as its vertices, a dark-red equilateral triangle sketched itself out at blinding speed!
The instant the triangle took shape, the half of the old town it covered began to fade away, as though someone had erased it from the map...
Yet seen from the ground, the old town was still the same old town.
At the same time, in the center of that triangle, six black-and-red cloaks streaked across the sky like lightning!
The man at their head gazed up at the dark-red vault, reached back to grip the hilt of the blade behind him, and narrowed his eyes.
"Ghost-Faced Men purge operation—begin."