There was a saying: the moon was fullest on the sixteenth, not the fifteenth.
And as luck would have it, tonight was the sixteenth day of the lunar month.
So the moon was exceptionally round tonight!
But it would have been even more beautiful if it hadn't been such a bizarre shade of red.
Unfortunately, some things just didn't go as you'd hope...
In any case!
The blood moon hung overhead. Its round, scarlet disk loomed high in the sky, its halo like a thin red veil shrouding the heavens.
All of N City was bathed in its crimson glow, and the foglike aura of the uncanny was naturally far more active than usual.
It was only around half past nine at night, but there wasn't a single pedestrian outside the old Qinghuai neighborhood on Wangxiang Road.
That wasn't strange at all!
People valued their lives, and at night—especially on a night with a blood moon overhead—even children knew it was dangerous to be out and about. That went double with a terrifying funeral home nearby.
And yet...
On a night like this, in this old, cramped neighborhood of dilapidated homes, the air carried the faint smell of oil and smoke from barbecue skewers.
Following the smell, it wasn't hard to find the source: a few young men were drinking, eating barbecue, and loudly playing a drinking game in a courtyard built from corrugated steel sheets and translucent panels, with the whole yard completely enclosed.
Under normal circumstances, drinking and barbecuing outside at night was incredibly dangerous. No one would be foolish enough to risk it!
But if you were inside a fully enclosed courtyard, with the gate shut, then as long as you didn't go out before dawn, you should be fine.
That was what most people in the