At midnight on April 29, beneath a dark purple sky devoid of stars and moon, dense moisture blanketed the entirety of Qi Family Village, carrying the stench of rot and a bone-piercing damp chill.
Fei Zhenqi kicked open the wooden door of a house and entered with a flashlight. He lit the candle by the bed, dragged the reeking corpse off the mattress, and helped Ning Xu sit down at the bedside.
The two had been trapped in Qi Family Village for two days and two nights. Ghosts and monsters emerged without end, corpses of men, women, old people, and children lay piled along the field ridges, and a thick fog sealed off both the way in and the way out. Once one entered, there was no leaving—this place had become a land of death.
Nearly all the living had died. There were so many paper effigies that they seemed impossible to kill, eerie wells appeared every few steps, and the dead would occasionally leap up as zombies, impossible to guard against.
Ning Xu's already injured body had gained several new wounds. Her left leg dangled limply beneath her waist; the previous afternoon, while she had been resting in an open space, a dry well had suddenly appeared beneath her, and a Ghost Hand had reached out from its mouth, its nails severing her tendons.
The right half of her shoulder was also a bloody mess. Beneath her tattered clothes were deep, bloody holes gouged out by zombie claws, their edges blue-black as blood continued to stream down.
The water and electricity had been cut off in most of the houses in Qi Family Village. The few single-story homes that still had both were full of ghosts the moment one entered—obvious bait meant to lure people in. There was nowhere