"Three-Eyed Eagle" Du Chong opened his eyes.
His head was still buzzing. His thoughts remained stuck on the moment he had crept up behind several young people to ambush them.
Then... then his thoughts had abruptly cut off. By the time they resumed, he had been bound hand and foot, gagged with a wad of cloth, and dumped somewhere he had never seen before.
It was a large, tidy room with grayish-yellow flooring, a pale green ceiling, and pure white walls. Pictures he could not understand hung all around him: maps, charts, pie charts divided into colors, vertical bars of different heights... Neither the maps nor the writing looked familiar to him.
He could not match the terrain on the maps to anywhere he knew. The strange writing looked vaguely familiar at first glance, but on closer inspection, every character was almost—but not quite—recognizable. He could not understand a word.
The room held many other peculiar things. Some he did not recognize at all; even the ones he did recognize had bizarre shapes.
That long table was strange.
Those chairs with unusually thick backs were strange.
That enormous chair that looked as though it could serve as a bed was strange.
He recognized the flowerpot, but why was a cactus growing in it?
Then there were the bookcases, with crystal for doors and nothing but boxes inside. He had no idea what that was about.
As for some of the odd decorations, they might as well have said, "We know you, but you don't know us."
Fortunately, there were things here he recognized perfectly well.
Not far away, a fat man lay inside a white circle. He was the infamous "Blood Butcher" of Yi Province's Greenwood. The fellow was an outstanding cook, best known for slicing up living people. Fish,