A Classic Start for a New Infinite-Flow Player!

Cold. Shaking.

A foul stench, tinged with rust and salty fishiness, lingered in his nostrils. It was an intensely irritating smell that refused to disperse, making every breath feel as though it were choking his throat.

It was unbearable.

When he opened his eyes, his mind was still a bleak blank. He Qiu almost instinctively began coughing, as if his body had bypassed thought entirely and was trying on its own to reject that horrifying smell—

"Cough, what the hell stinks so badly? This is... this..."

His scattered consciousness rapidly returned, and his vision cleared. He abruptly turned his head, his words catching in his throat.

The sight before him was not the seat of the van where he should have been.

Rather, He Qiu was currently leaning against a half-open iron door that swayed faintly. While unconscious, one cheek and most of the side of his face had been pressed directly against its dark brown surface, mottled with rust, and his clothes were covered in dust as well.

No wonder.

He had barely managed to straighten up when the thick stench, enough to test the limits of human endurance, stirred a violent urge to vomit. His stomach already seemed to be churning.

Without time to think, He Qiu covered his mouth and nose. He turned his head and rubbed the rust dust from his face against his shoulder. Having only just awakened, his facial muscles still ached from the pressure...

But where was this?

He stiffly turned his neck and looked over the abandoned interior. Everything before him was an unfamiliar, outdated arrangement. The decor was clearly European in style. Half of a built-in cabinet had evidently suffered a heavy impact, leaving it cracked and caved in. Spiderwebs stretched intermittently from the dusty floor to the ceiling among several empty cans and liquor bottles...

Waking up in an unfamiliar environment filled him with profound unease.

He shook his head hard. Before he had even fully sat up, as though worried he had not woken up yet, the young cameraman who worked at a local television station in his hometown vigorously rubbed his eyes.

But when he blinked, the scene remained unchanged. The iron-sheet door, its paint peeling away in large patches to reveal its dark brown original color, swayed faintly with his movement, proving that there was nothing wrong with his vision.

Refusing to believe it, he pinched his thigh twice with all his strength. The pain made him grimace, but nothing in front of him changed. He Qiu finally became completely certain that he was not still asleep and dreaming...

But this clearly was not the van.

How had a grown man of over a hundred pounds been dumped in a place like this?

I remember... I should have been riding back to the television station in the van?... Oh, right. A strange ad screen suddenly popped up on my phone while I was typing... and then I fell asleep?

In his panic, He Qiu quickly sorted through what had happened in his mind. But upon closer thought, apart from that ad whose contents he had not even had time to examine before his finger pressed it out of habit, he could not find any useful clues.

He checked his pockets and found no phone. His familiar camera equipment and miscellaneous bag were nowhere nearby either. Aside from the clothes he wore, which had probably absorbed the smell along with him, it seemed nothing else had been left for He Qiu.

Had he been... robbed?

His head was still foggy. When he finally stood up from the floor, the blatant commotion startled a black mass of flies in the distance into buzzing flight!

Only then, after taking in the whole room, did He Qiu realize that something was very wrong.

What lay before him was far more than a dilapidated house carrying a hint of deathly stillness.

Pale shattered glass was scattered throughout the spacious living room. Torn magazines, newspapers, and trash were tangled together. Twisted, ruined furnishings and decorations lay everywhere, while beneath an overturned tray on the table was an unrecognizable clump of mold.

Flies circled among toppled furniture and light fixtures. Alongside certain chaotic remnants resembling bone, discolored stains stretched across the floorboards toward the stairway leading down in the distance...

It was a complete mess.

Within a few glances, intense unease rose in him, and the string in He Qiu's heart instinctively tightened to the limit.

He had not noticed it while sitting, but now, as his shoes scraped against the marble floor—which no longer looked particularly wet—there was an unpleasantly slick sensation beneath his feet, like somewhere a slug had crawled.

Even the walls bore conspicuous traces of certain liquids that had once splattered outward in radial sprays before dripping down. They had oxidized and faded after weathering.

...A deep blackish brown, with barely any of the red it had originally possessed remaining.

The fishy stench in his nose suddenly seemed far more distinct, making his scalp tingle and his limbs turn cold.

His stomach churned violently as well.

The silent house seemed shrouded from beginning to end in a strange shadow that made it impossible to relax. His teeth nearly began chattering on their own.

He noticed the chaotic handprints smeared everywhere from the sofa to the door. Some had soaked through the wall paint, dark or light in color. On a few, the traces of five fingers struggling could still be made out; others had blurred into mere stains. Yet all of them ultimately shared the same ominous, dark brown hue.

Without saying anything, He Qiu merely shuddered.

Amid the dried bloodstains, disorderly overlapping footprints covered the floor, dragging out long, blackened streaks.

What was more, scattered small holes could be seen throughout the walls and furniture. Their edges were rough and irregularly torn. When He Qiu reached out and touched one, he confirmed that the tear within was large enough to fit his thumb inside.

These hole-like "wounds" curled slightly outward, and they were so deep that the pale inner layers of the building materials had been exposed—

There was no need to think too hard about it. Even if he had never eaten pork, who had not seen a pig run?

Clearly, these were genuine bullet marks.

Beneath a wooden cabinet lying on the floor, beside a drawer that had fallen apart, a thick-backed longsword nearly two arm-spans long lay limply amid what should have been a large spread of dried black stains. Its metal surface had practically fused with whatever had dried onto it, leaving no visible reflection from the blade.

There were no bodies.

But the familiar five-fingered handprints around him, the bloodstained overturned tables and chairs, certain scattered fragments he did not want to think too deeply about, and even more details... all silently indicated what kind of creature those old bloodstains had come from.

How much blood had been lost before it dried?

The cameraman naturally did not know the answer.

He stared in horror at the scene before him, which looked like the aftermath of a major murder case. He only knew one thing—he was in deep trouble.

Of course, he was not the only one. Those figures lying behind the sofa probably had not escaped it either.

Keeping in mind the importance of preserving the scene, He Qiu carefully avoided the various "things" on the floor as he approached them cautiously.

Sure enough, there were four people lying on the floor behind the sofa. Like He Qiu, aside from stains they had only recently picked up, they were "clean" enough to seem utterly out of place in this house. Three men and one woman, old and young, all dressed in ordinary clothing. Judging from the faint movement of their noses and mouths, they seemed to still be unconscious.

After thinking for a moment, He Qiu gritted his teeth. He could not worry about leaving fingerprints at a crime scene like this anymore. He picked up a small Western dining knife from the floor beside him and hid it in his sleeve for protection. Then he reached out and shoved the others. Seeing that only one of them reacted slightly and none showed signs of properly waking up, he simply gave each of them two solid kicks!

Good! That got a reaction!

It seemed they had not been drugged unconscious. Or at least, the dosage had been light.

He breathed a small sigh of relief. As the people on the ground gradually opened their eyes, He Qiu quickly pulled back a little. Resisting the nausea, he bent his knees and sat on an old carpet stained with some questionable traces. To be safe, he even put on the same dazed expression, as though he too had only just sat up from unconsciousness.

Judging from their clothes and skin color, I can probably communicate with these people. But among a group of strangers with unknown origins and unknown intentions, I should not casually show anything too unusual.

That was a bit of worldly experience He Qiu had gained as an adult in society.

At this point, he was not naïve enough to think this was some common foreign prank show involving random passersby. Not to mention that this sort of thing was not popular in the East at all, and who would dare arrange such an overly stimulating "welcome" without the other person's consent...

Not to mention the smell in the air, the odor released by decaying biological remains that instinctively made every nerve in one's body tense!

...Very soon, the awakened people, He Qiu included, almost simultaneously covered their mouths and noses and stared wide-eyed at one another.

The only woman among them saw several unfamiliar men around her and nearly screamed instinctively. But the moment she opened her mouth, she covered her face tightly instead, clearly so overwhelmed by the stench that tears were about to fall.

After all, for overly "delicate" modern people, even though most of the window glass had already been shattered and the house remained ventilated at all times, the lingering smell was still far too intense.

Forced to cover half their faces, the awakened people exchanged looks and could only speak in low voices, trying to reduce their exchange of air with the outside.

But very soon, before they had even exchanged more than a few words, they no longer had any reason to complain about the unbearable stench. Or rather, perhaps they should have been grateful for it.

Because a growingly icy shiver crawled up every person's spine like legless scales.

Vaguely, before these uninvited guests who had awakened in an unfamiliar house could even try to leave, they faintly heard movement from somewhere far downstairs.

It was a blurred sound carried from afar on the wind.

—Hoarse, rising and falling low roars that did not sound like anything a creature of flesh and blood could make...