Cold. Shaking.
A foul stench, almost rusty and salty, lingered in his nostrils. It was an extremely pungent smell that refused to disperse, making every breath feel as though his throat were clogged.
It was unbearable.
When he opened his eyes, his mind was still a bleak blank. He Qiu began coughing almost without thinking, as if his body had bypassed the process of thought and instinctively tried to reject that terrifying smell—
"Cough, what the hell smells so bad? This is... this..."
His scattered consciousness quickly began to return, and his vision cleared. He abruptly turned his head, and his words caught 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 half of a faintly swaying iron door. While unconscious, his cheek and most of the side of his face had been pressed directly against the blackish-brown surface, mottled with rust. Even his clothes were covered in dust and grime.
No wonder.
He barely managed to straighten up. Beneath that overpowering stench, which seemed designed to test the limits of human nerves, a violent urge to vomit surged up from within him. His stomach already seemed to be churning like a stormy sea.
Before he could think further, He Qiu instinctively covered his nose and mouth, then turned his head and rubbed the rust dust from his face against his shoulder. Having just awakened, the flesh on his face still throbbed from being pressed down for so long...
But where was this?
He stiffly twisted his neck and looked around the abandoned interior. Everything he saw was an unfamiliar, outdated arrangement. The decorations were distinctly European in style. Half of a built-in cabinet had clearly taken a heavy blow, leaving it cracked and caved in. Among several empty cans and liquor bottles scattered across the floor, broken strands of spiderweb stretched from the dust-covered ground to the ceiling...
Waking up in an unfamiliar environment left him with a profound sense of unease.
He shook his head hard. Before he had even fully sat up, as if worried that he had not actually woken up yet, the young cameraman employed by his hometown television station rubbed his eyes vigorously.
But when he blinked, the scene before him remained unchanged. The iron door, its paint peeling away in large patches to reveal its blackish-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 bare his teeth, yet nothing before 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 he, a grown man weighing over a hundred pounds, ended up dumped in a place like this?
I remember... I should have been riding back to the station in the van, right?... Oh, right. A strange ad interface suddenly popped up on my phone while I was typing... and then I fell asleep?
In his panic, He Qiu quickly sorted through the sequence of events in his head. But after thinking carefully, apart from that ad whose contents he had not even had time to look at before his finger had automatically tapped it, he could not find any useful clues.
He checked his pockets and found no phone. His familiar camera equipment and gear bag were nowhere nearby either. Aside from the clothes he wore, which had probably absorbed the same stench as their owner, it seemed nothing else had been left for him.
Had he been... robbed?
His head was still foggy. When he finally stood up from the floor, his blatant movement startled a black mass of flies in the distance, sending them buzzing into the air!
Only then, after taking in the full view of the room, did He Qiu realize that something was seriously wrong.
What lay before him was far more than a run-down house with a hint of deathly silence.
Broken pale glass was scattered throughout the spacious living room. Torn magazines, newspapers, and garbage were tangled together. Twisted, ruined ornaments lay everywhere, while beneath an overturned tray on the table sat a moldy, unrecognizable lump.
Flies circled among overturned furniture and light fixtures. Along with some chaotic remnants that resembled bones, discolored stains stretched from the floorboards all the way to the stairwell leading down in the distance...
It was a complete mess.
After only a few glances, a fierce unease rose within him, and the string in He Qiu's heart instinctively tightened.
He had not noticed while lying down, but now, as his shoes scraped against the marble floor—which no longer seemed particularly wet—he felt an unpleasant slickness underfoot, as though slugs had crawled across it.
There were even conspicuous marks on the walls, left behind after some liquid had once splattered outward in a radial pattern before dripping and flowing down, then oxidizing and fading over time.
...A deep blackish-brown, with barely any trace left of the "red" it had once possessed.
The bloody stench in his nose suddenly seemed much more distinct. It made his scalp tingle and his hands and feet turn cold.
Even his stomach began to churn violently.
The quiet room seemed shrouded from beginning to end in a strange shadow that made it impossible to relax, causing his teeth to nearly start chattering on their own.
He noticed the messy handprints smeared everywhere from the sofa to the door, some light and some dark, soaking even into the peeling wall paint. Some still retained the traces of five fingers struggling desperately, while others had blurred into stains. Yet all of them had ultimately taken on the same ominous, dull brownish color.
Without making a sound, He Qiu merely shuddered.
Amid the dried bloodstains, chaotic footprints covered the floor, dragging out long, blackened streaks.
What was more, small scattered holes could be seen everywhere in the walls and furniture. Their edges were rough and irregularly torn. After touching one, He Qiu confirmed that the cavity within was large enough to fit his thumb.
The wound-like holes curled slightly outward, and their depth was enough to expose the pale inner layers of the building materials—
There was no need to think too hard about it. Even if he had never eaten pork, he had still seen pigs run.
Clearly, these were genuine bullet marks.
Beneath a fallen wooden cabinet, beside drawers that had already fallen apart, lay a thick-backed longsword nearly two arm-lengths long amid what should have been a broad pool of dried black traces. Its metal surface had almost fused with whatever had been left behind and dried completely, leaving no visible gleam from the blade.
There were no bodies.
But the familiar five-fingered handprints around him, the bloodstained overturned tables and chairs, the scattered fragments of things he did not wish to think about too deeply, and countless other details... had already silently revealed what kind of creature had produced those old bloodstains.
How much blood would it have taken before it dried like this?
The cameraman naturally had no answer.
His eyes widened in horror as he looked at the scene before him, like the aftermath of a major murder case. He knew only 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.
Taking into account the importance of preserving the scene, He Qiu carefully avoided the various "things" on the floor as he cautiously approached.
Sure enough, there were four people on the floor behind the sofa, just like He Qiu. Aside from a few stains they had only recently picked up, they were so "clean" that they did not fit this room at all. Three men and one woman, young and old, all dressed in ordinary clothes. Judging from the faint movement of their noses and mouths, they still seemed to be unconscious.
After thinking for a moment, he gritted his teeth. He could not afford to worry about leaving fingerprints at a scene like this. 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 pushed the group. Seeing that only one of them gave a slightly groggy response and none seemed ready to wake up properly, 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 dose had been light.
He breathed a small sigh of relief. As the people on the floor gradually opened their eyes, He Qiu quickly pulled back a little. Enduring the nausea, he bent his knees and sat down on an old carpet stained with who knew what suspicious traces. To be safe, he even put on the same confused expression, as if he had just sat up after waking from unconsciousness.
Judging from their clothes and skin color, I can probably communicate with these people. But among a group of strangers with unknown backgrounds and unknown intentions, it's best not to show too much that's "special."
That was a bit of experience He Qiu had gained as a working adult.
By now, he was not naive enough to think this was some common foreign prank show involving random passersby. Never mind that this sort of thing was not popular in Dongda, who would dare to set up such an excessively disturbing scene to "welcome" someone without their consent...
Especially with the smell in the air, the sort that instinctively put every living creature on edge—the smell released by decaying biological remains!
...Very soon, the people who had awakened, He Qiu included, almost unanimously covered their noses and mouths and stared at one another.
The only woman among them saw the unfamiliar men around her and nearly screamed instinctively. But the moment she opened her mouth, she instinctively covered her face with force instead. The smell in the room had clearly brought tears to her eyes.
After all, for modern people who were a little too "delicate," even though most of the windowpanes were actually shattered and the room remained ventilated, the lingering smell was still far too intense.
The awakened people, forced to cover half their faces, looked at one another and could only speak quietly to reduce their exchange of air with the outside as much as possible.
But very soon, before they had even exchanged more than a few words, they no longer had any reason to blame the unbearable stench. Or perhaps they should have been grateful for it.
Because a growingly cold shiver crawled up every person's spine like limbless scales.
Faintly, before these uninvited guests who had awakened in an unfamiliar house could even attempt to leave, they heard movement somewhere in the distance downstairs.
It was a vague sound carried from afar on the wind.
—A hoarse, rising and falling low roar... something no creature of flesh and blood should have been able to make...
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