Outside the old town.
The man who had just deployed the Forbidden Ruins sat beside the signboard. He glanced back at the half of the old town frozen still as a painted canvas, shook his head helplessly, pulled out his phone, and started playing a match-three game.
"Brother, why are you sitting here playing on your phone in the middle of the night? Aren't you worried your ass will catch cold?"
Before long, a pedestrian crossed over from the opposite side of the road and burst out laughing at the sight.
The man glanced up at him, then went back to his screen. "Nothing better to do. Bored stiff."
The pedestrian chuckled, fished a cigarette from his pocket, and offered it over.
The man waved it away and said, deadpan, "No smoking on the clock."
"Ha! Squatting on the roadside playing phone games counts as being on the clock?" The pedestrian grinned.
"Mm."
"Fine, then." The pedestrian shrugged and started toward the street behind the man.
"Where are you going?" the man said suddenly.
"Home."
"You can't go back. Not right now, anyway."
The pedestrian's brow arched. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"This road's closed. When it opens again, then you can go home." The man jerked a thumb at the signboard behind him.
The pedestrian followed his gesture and saw the signboard planted inexplicably in the middle of the road. He was about to say something when a faint light flickered across the four large characters of ROAD CLOSED AHEAD.
The pedestrian's gaze went glassy.
A few seconds later, he turned stiffly around and walked back, step by step, the way he had come, eyes swimming with confusion...
The man looked entirely unsurprised. He was about to get back to his match-three game when another man's voice burst through his earpiece.
"Zhao Kongcheng!!"
The instant that voice sounded, the man shot up off the ground. Every trace of idleness and drowsiness vanished from his face, replaced by absolute severity!
"Here! Captain, what happened?"
"We have a problem. One of the Ghost-Faced Men in this batch has ascended into a Ghost-Faced King. While we were rounding up the others, it lashed out, wounded Hongying badly, and escaped the Forbidden Ruins' range through the storm drains."
"A Ghost-Faced King?" Zhao Kongcheng's face changed. "Which way did it run? I'll cut it off!"
"No, Kongcheng. Combat isn't your strong suit—you can't beat a Ghost-Faced King. I'll hunt it down myself."
Zhao Kongcheng faltered. "Then what do I—"
"After the Ghost-Faced King broke out, two more Ghost-Faced Men slipped into the storm drains in the chaos. Everyone else is tied up purging the rest."
"Which direction?"
"Southeast."
"Got it."
Light flared in Zhao Kongcheng's eyes. He sprinted to the far end of the street, ducked into a black van, and stamped the accelerator, roaring off in a howl of engine noise.
On the passenger seat, folded neat and square, lay a black-and-red cloak.
And a straight blade, sheathed!
...
"Alright, I turn off here. I'm heading home."
Wang Shao stopped and turned back to the other four.
Just then, Li Yifei seemed to remember something. "Wang Shao, if I'm not wrong, isn't your home right next to the old town?"
"Yeah, why?"
"...It's nothing. Just be careful on your way back."
The corner of Wang Shao's mouth twitched, and he rolled his eyes. "If you've got something to say, say it. Don't stop halfway and leave a man hanging—it feels awful."
Li Yifei hesitated a moment. "I heard the old town hasn't been safe lately. There's a psycho killer on the loose!"
"A psycho killer? For real?" Jiang Qian didn't quite believe it.
"Of course it's real!" Li Yifei glanced around and dropped his voice. "You probably haven't heard, but over the past few days, a dozen people have died in the old town, one after another."
"A dozen people? No way. If it were that big, it'd have been all over the news," Wang Shao said, shaking his head.
"Ha, 'no way'? I'm telling you, there's something off about the whole thing. Someone up top forced a lid onto it. If my dad didn't work at the police station, I wouldn't know either."
"Off? Off how?"
"Word is..." Li Yifei paused, lowering his voice further still.
"Word is, the victims all had their faces peeled clean off. Nothing left but a bloody mess of mangled flesh and bulging eyeballs. The killer's methods were absolutely savage!"
A cool night breeze drifted past. At those words, all of them felt a chill shoot from the soles of their feet to the crowns of their heads!
"Li Yifei! What is wrong with you, telling stories like that in the middle of the night!" Jiang Qian's face had gone white. She glanced around the silent street despite herself, furious.
They were near the old town here, in one of Cangnan City's remote districts. Evening self-study let out close to ten, and there wasn't a single pedestrian on the road. With Li Yifei's story on top of it, the air had turned genuinely creepy.
And it wasn't just her—even Wang Shao and Liu Yuan, two grown boys, looked spooked. Wang Shao glanced at the narrow lane he was about to take and suddenly felt a little hollow inside...
If Li Yifei's words had merely frightened them, what Lin Qiye said next made their scalps crawl outright.
Lin Qiye thought for a moment, then spoke, his voice low and distant: "Are you sure... it was a person that did those things?"
"Qiye, you..." Jiang Qian shuddered!
Wang Shao's and Liu Yuan's mouths twitched, and the looks they gave Lin Qiye turned strange.
Well, well, Lin Qiye, with that honest face of yours. Who'd have guessed the one hiding the deepest was you?
Li Yifei stared at Lin Qiye in astonishment. "You think so too?"
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Jiang Qian couldn't take any more. She reached out and gave Li Yifei's arm a vicious twist, and he yelped in pain on the spot.
"No ghost stories in the middle of the night!! I still have to walk home after this!"
Li Yifei clutched his arm, grimacing, and retreated to one side, muttering under his breath, "It's not a ghost story, though..."
Wang Shao shrugged. "I'm not standing around talking nonsense with you people. I don't believe in any of that occult garbage. I'm off."
Wang Shao's figure faded into the narrow lane.
Jiang Qian shot Li Yifei one more glare and walked on a few steps—then stopped dead.
She sniffed hard, her brow creasing.
Doubt crept into her eyes.
She turned her head. "Do you guys smell something foul?"
"Foul?"
"Like the stench of something... rotting."
"I don't smell anything. Liu Yuan, you?"
"Me neither—URGH!!"
Liu Yuan and Li Yifei never finished. Their faces changed, and they clamped their hands over their noses, looking around in horror.
Lin Qiye was about to speak when a stench of unspeakable foulness flooded into his nostrils. It was as if a hunk of meat left to rot for two weeks had been dumped into a septic tank and whisked together with a dozen rotten eggs. One whiff set his stomach churning violently.
It was the foulest thing Lin Qiye had smelled in his entire life.
As for Jiang Qian, whose nose was the keenest of them all, she simply crouched down and vomited.
"Fuck, what the hell stinks that bad?!" Li Yifei shouted, hand clamped over his nose.
"I don't know." Lin Qiye's brow furrowed. After a moment, he raised his hand and pointed down the narrow lane Wang Shao had taken.
"But judging by the direction it's drifting from... it seems to be coming from there."
The next instant, a blood-curdling scream tore out from somewhere not far away, echoing through the still night sky.