The Gate to a Distant Land (I)

Another hallucination.

Lufthansa had a passenger lounge at the airport, a relatively quiet, comfortable place where he could relax and enjoy the facilities. He could close his eyes and rest for a while; the string of supernatural incidents had left him mentally exhausted.

But as soon as he closed his eyes, his mind automatically replayed that scene of the blazing sun and the gates of heaven opening.

Old Tang's face had twisted slightly in pain.

Sheets of crimson-patterned golden coffins melted into rivers.

A violent wind swept fallen leaves across the road. Dead, withered branches and vines all around grew wildly, dancing like hundreds upon hundreds of Titan pythons. No matter how vast the space was, they covered it completely.

It was wrong. None of it made sense. Nature's iron laws had been trampled underfoot.

A brilliant light, as intense as a rising sun, spilled from a bronze door that had appeared out of nowhere.

They were dozens of meters underground, yet the light pierced through the earth overhead. Something seemed about to fall from the sky, and the light high above grew ever fiercer, like countless thrown spears.

Even the apocalyptic scenes described in the Bible myths could not have been much more terrifying.

The sound of hoofbeats landed softly.

The bronze door beneath the pale light slowly opened. Lightning serpents, like the minions of released sunlight, were everywhere—thunder, heat, and flames.

The God on the eight-legged steed studied him, neither joyful nor sorrowful.

It spoke, each word deliberate.

"You have finally come."

Old Tang shuddered violently.

His shirt was soaked through. He sprang from the lounge's massage chair, and amid his panic, he seemed to hear that soft, low call again.

It was familiar, yet distant.

Who was it?

"Brother."

"Are you going to awaken... I can feel it... I'm going to find..."

No, no, no, no. Don't come looking for me.

Old Tang felt as if someone had fiercely gripped his throat. He looked around wildly. Anything he said at this moment felt so powerless.

It was as if— as if he had made some irreversible mistake.

It was as if some fate had locked onto him.

"No, no..."

"I need to lie low. I need to forget this ghost-and-god nonsense. One more big job, then I'll wash my hands of it."

"I'll find somewhere with beautiful mountains and clear waters to live. I'll stay beside a creek, chat with friends, and play StarCraft. I have friends. I have dreams."

"That's right. My life has only just begun."

Still shaken, Old Tang muttered to himself as he headed toward the boarding gate, his steps growing increasingly hurried. He understood that he had probably encountered the supernatural incidents other hunters talked about.

If he had not donated most of what he earned over the past few years to orphanages and now lacked enough money to retire, he really would have wanted to quit the hunter world immediately.

Passersby kept looking back at him, unable to understand why there was a man fleeing in such a panic, like a stray dog driven from home, as if something vicious was chasing him from behind.

There was still half an hour before boarding, but he had to walk around. Whenever he was at a loss, he needed to keep moving. It was a habit he had developed as a hunter.

"Brother."

That damned voice had returned.

Damned... no, that was not how he should describe it.

How could he use a word filled with such distaste? A faint ache pulsed in his heart.

Clearly, he had been looking forward to hearing it once more too, hadn't he?

Old Tang stopped and turned around hesitantly.

A sea of fire. This was no longer Berlin Airport.

He saw it again. At last, he saw it clearly.

A burning city. Everything in it was dying.

At the center of the ancient city stood a twisted, towering pole. A delicate-looking child hung from its peak, eyes closed and covered in wounds. The flames of the entire city mercilessly scorched him.

Light blazed across the heavens above, but what it brought now was not warmth. It burned like spears and iron.

Damn it, his heart hurt so badly. It truly felt as though a sharp blade were cutting through it. Someone important had been lost because he had made a mistake he never should have made.

Rows of palaces collapsed.

Amid the licking flames, the boy looked at him with tender attachment.

"Brother... when you raise the battle standard and devour the world, will you eat me too?"

"Brother, when the cocoon breaks... I'll come find..."

"No, no..."

"No, no, no, no..."

"That voice isn't me... the one answering you isn't..."

"Don't come... don't come!"

"Constantine."

"Odin, king of the Nordic gods, suspected to be a dragon. It might spawn on rainy-night overpasses. Zero Overpass is suspected to be the Tenth Elevated Bridge. Its servants are humanoid Deadpools. It may be restricted somehow and unable to interfere with reality. Hiss, it's even a special-scenario Pokémon."

"Doesn't seem particularly brave? Or maybe it isn't very aggressive?"

Holding a fountain pen, the contemplative Lu Mingfei wanted to write down his deepened understanding of reality in his journal.

The faintest ink was better than the strongest memory. He knew exactly how unreliable he was.

After being unreliable for more than a decade, how could he suddenly pull himself together?

You had to eat one bite at a time. You had to become reliable one step at a time too.

Yet in the end, he did not write down what he was thinking. Who knew whether Cassell College had some means of getting hold of his journal? He needed to find a chance to destroy the thing. It even contained his self-congratulatory reflections on punishing evil under his alt account, "Scar of Sunset."

So he used crude, simple sketches to draw a rough layout of the city... A city layout sounded like it should be extremely complicated, but with computer satellite maps as reference, it was not difficult.

He only needed to mark out a few key locations with rough lines, label the possible exits and entrances of Zero Overpass, and use the intersections between the Tenth Elevated Bridge and the other overpasses to estimate the likely location and scale of this stretch.

In truth, it was probably not very accurate. He had far too little information. Lu Mingfei was merely acting on a whim and finding something to do.

People were like that. When their imaginations ran wild, sometimes only they could recognize their own work. To anyone else, that sloppy style would probably look like a childish scribble copied from a cat.

Before he had drawn much, Lu Mingfei looked it over twice to memorize the general idea, then tossed the journal aside. He searched online for obscure subway stations in Beijing, especially ones associated with supernatural tales and legends.

A gloomy atmosphere seemed more fitting for places where dragons and Deadpools appeared.

He was already getting sleepy. He would soon be entering the "Beijing Subway Station" dungeon in his dreams, so it was always better to learn more. Farming monsters with a map and farming them without one were completely different things.

He had long wanted to contact Senior Brother Chu, but due to the time difference, Chicago was more than thirteen hours behind his city.

He was nearly unable to resist sleep here, while it was still noon over there.

With the schedule of someone as regular as a machine, Chu Zihang had probably finished lunch an hour and a half ago. Even if he took a nap, he should be about to wake up.

How should he add him? Lu Mingfei opened Chu Zihang's profile picture from the school advancement group and nervously opened a friend request.

He had never exchanged a single word with Senior Brother Chu in real life. The other man could not possibly know someone like him.

He had heard from dejected female classmates that Chu Zihang's QQ friend slots were famously difficult to obtain, priceless and unavailable. Rumor had it that after Chu Zihang went abroad, even former high school classmates who had known him had received no response when they tried to add him.

Plan A: Find a topic to start with.

"Senior Brother Chu, I want to find someplace near my hometown where I can take odd jobs. Do you have any places to recommend? Sorry if I'm bothering you."

Plan B: Get straight to the point.

"Senior Brother, I'm your future sworn brother. Right now, I have no one around me I can trust. I'm alone in the world and desperately need help. Once I make something of myself, I'll appoint you Grand Marshal and King Side by Side."

In the end, Lu Mingfei only typed nine dry words.

"I'm Lu Mingfei, a Shilan alumnus."

After thinking about it and failing to come up with anything else, he decided to borrow someone else's prestige and add, "Liu Miaomiao's classmate."

"Chu Zihang has added you as a friend. You may now begin chatting."

He had approved it almost instantly!

Lu Mingfei stared at the mouse in astonishment.

It was not that hard to add him after all.

Liu Miaomiao's influence was actually that great. It seemed that "Senior Brother and I aren't really familiar" had just been her modest excuse.