An Apocalypse Triggered by One Man

"First Mom and Dad came back every night, until I had a whole house full of parents. Then someone started calling me her husband out of nowhere. All I did was pass through a tunnel during the Ghost Festival. How did I suddenly collect an entire family?"

Watching Xuan Wen walk away, Gao Ming looked pale. He was now certain that, like the parents who had brought him a cake, Xuan Wen was something "unknown" that had taken their form.

"Xuan Wen not only knew what happened in the tunnel, she even guessed I'd come to Nightlight to delete my games."

Only after Xuan Wen disappeared down the corridor did Gao Ming's complexion return to normal. The fat cat also came back to life, curling up behind him.

"The heavy rain has blocked the roads. If I want answers right now, asking Xuan Wen seems to be my only option." Gao Ming regained his composure. "But her condition is very different from Mom and Dad's. She seems completely unrestricted, able to move freely around the city in broad daylight..."

"Fortune! What are you doing out here?" Wei Dayou scooped the fat cat up with one hand, nuzzling him as he joked with Gao Ming. "Why don't you stay, Gao Ming? Look, even Fortune can't bear to see you go."

"He's not attached to me. He's attached to staying alive." This was Gao Ming's first time seeing a cat play dead. No matter what happened around him, he had stubbornly refused to move. "Dayou, I know you're a good person, so I'll warn you one last time. Don't go out after dark, and keep away from that new colleague. There's something seriously wrong with her."

"I've seen the news too. I know Hanhai hasn't been peaceful lately. Don't worry. Take care of yourself, and call me if you need anything. We've been working together for so many years, after all." Ignoring the little fellow's fierce resistance, Wei Dayou carried Fortune back into the office.

The fat cat clawed at the glass door with both paws, yowling at Gao Ming outside. He looked utterly miserable.

"If you came with me, you'd see what real hell looks like." Gao Ming gave a wry smile. "This cat has some brains, but not many."

After leaving Nightlight Studio, Gao Ming did not go home. He went to a bus stop and studied the city map marked with its various routes.

Hanhai was a very unusual city, divided into nineteen districts. The most prosperous, the East District, was home to wealthy people from all over the world. Modern and dreamlike, it offered experiences beyond the limits of an ordinary person's imagination. The Old City District where Gao Ming lived, however, seemed like another world entirely. Apartment buildings crowded together in dense clusters, oppressive and cramped. Merely walking among them made it hard to breathe.

A hundred years earlier, Hanhai had risen amid the chaos of war as a refuge for politicians, merchants, and refugees. Welcoming people from every walk of life, it had used its unique advantages to become one of the world's three great free ports. But under the impact of the intelligence revolution and the biological revolution, this dazzling city had reached a crossroads in history.

None of that had anything to do with Gao Ming, however. His gaze swept over the densely packed bus stops as brutal, terrifying murder cases and eerie, chilling urban legends flashed through his mind.

"The Butcher Case, the Cat Doll Dismemberment Case, the Sex Fiend Case, the Dissolved Corpse Case, the Red Pavilion Corpse-Cooking Case, the Dog Pit Case, the Sunken Corpse Case..." His eyelids twitched. The murder cases in his head covered almost the entire city. Worse still, compared with those cases, he had read far more urban legends and watched far more horror films.

"Borrowed Yin Lifespan, the Flesh-and-Blood Immortal, the Hanged Man, Night of Return, the Skin-Swapping House, the Headless Doctor, the Man-Eating Elevator... There are too many. I can't even count them all!"

From places as large as hospitals, schools, and shopping malls to spaces as small as corridors, elevators, drawers, and the area beneath a bed, everything found in a city had a corresponding scene in Gao Ming's mind.

"According to Xuan Wen, every nightmare in my mind has become real. That wouldn't just mean my games. Anything involving mystery or the supernatural could appear in this city."

Much as he hated to admit it, Gao Ming felt he had single-handedly ushered in the apocalypse.

"Whatever comes from that unknown world seems able to use the memories in my head to create all kinds of horrors and merge them with this city."

Dark clouds filled the sky, pressing lower and lower. The city seemed like a prisoner with a hand clamped around its throat, about to die struggling beneath the weight of its sins.

Standing at the bus stop and watching the rain-lashed streets, Gao Ming looked grim. "If my head were full of nothing but filthy thoughts, I wouldn't have all this crap to deal with."

There was clearly something wrong with Xuan Wen, but she seemed capable of giving Gao Ming clues, and those were what he needed most right now.

At five thirty that afternoon, Xuan Wen walked out of the office building beneath a red umbrella. As though she had known Gao Ming would still be there, she approached the bus stop with a smile. "Have you been waiting for me this whole time?"

"I just haven't decided which bus to take home."

"Then shall we go together?" Xuan Wen held the umbrella between them and tilted her head to look at Gao Ming. Her gaze held affection, but there was something twisted about it, like a collector looking at a precious work of art, or someone with a peculiar fetish finding a strange kind of satisfaction.

When the bus arrived, Gao Ming waited until Xuan Wen had boarded and taken a seat before going to stand alone at the back.

An hour later, they arrived back in the Old City District.

Looking at the buildings before him, Gao Ming wanted even more to get away from the woman beside him.

Lijing Apartments consisted of four buildings arranged in the shape of the Chinese character for "well." Xuan Wen lived in the building directly opposite Gao Ming's. If he ventured a bolder guess, she might already have been secretly watching him for days.

"Don't get the wrong idea. The murders around Lijing Apartments over the past few days have nothing to do with me." Xuan Wen's voice was somewhat muffled by the downpour. "Actually, I've been on edge every day too. I've been living in fear."

"So you eliminated all the threats to stop being afraid?" Gao Ming had not initially been thinking about the murders, but Xuan Wen's reminder brought Li Lin's warning back to mind.

During the three days he had been trapped in his room, many "things" had already "spread."

Crossing the apartment complex's open courtyard, Gao Ming and Xuan Wen entered Building Two.

They had just reached the third floor when they saw an Old Lady burning joss paper in the corridor. The brazier was full of ashes left by the burning spirit money. She kept muttering something as she kowtowed to a memorial portrait beside it.

The elderly woman had a head of silver hair, yet the man in the portrait looked only in his forties. An older person kowtowing to a younger one made for a strange sight.

"Her adopted son killed himself three days ago." Xuan Wen stopped. "According to the neighbors, he was a good person when he was alive. Honest and kind, he worked hard without complaint. Even though he wasn't related to the Old Lady by blood, he cared for her whole family as if they were his own."

"Often, we only see what's on the surface. People who aren't good with words may have more going on inside." Gao Ming had seen the Old Lady's adopted son in the courtyard. His surname was Zhao, and he was friendly to everyone. He often carried his phone with him while cleaning the bathrooms in the apartment buildings.

Brother Zhao always smiled, but Gao Ming had always felt that his smiles were forced.

As someone who worked in psychological counseling, Gao Ming sometimes chatted with Brother Zhao downstairs. But since the previous month, he had not seen him in the courtyard at all.

After bowing to the memorial portrait, Gao Ming followed Xuan Wen to the fifth floor.

Clotheslines had been strung haphazardly through the corridor, close to exposed electrical wires, with all kinds of clothing draped over them. Perhaps it was the effect of their surroundings, but the clothes looked dingy gray and deathly white. Even without any wind, they swayed slightly.

Old-fashioned iron doors lined both sides of the passage, their surfaces mottled with rust. The yellowish-brown doorframes formed an eerie contrast with the bright red Spring Festival couplets. Even the characters for "fortune" pasted in the middle looked deeply unsettling.

"We're here."

Xuan Wen took out her keys and opened the door to apartment 2507, but Gao Ming was somewhat afraid to go inside.

Apartment 2507 had been the home of the Old Lady's adopted son. Three days earlier, Brother Zhao had jumped from this apartment's balcony.

"You rented the dead man's apartment? It hasn't even been seven days since he died."

For some reason, Gao Ming recalled a scene from a game he had designed: an ordinarily dressed male protagonist secretly watching footage of his own death between rounds of a spirit-summoning game with his deceased wife in a haunted apartment.

(End of chapter)