When it woke up, it saw the man.
Head tilted back, mouth open. Eyeballs bulging halfway out, like two half-peeled boiled eggs. The man was slumped in a gaming chair, the computer screen's glow washing over his face. The screensaver's candlestick chart was still cycling, red and green zigzags reflected in dead pupils, still pulsing.
Dead.
"No!" It tore itself out of the ceiling shadows and dropped in front of the man. The room was still dark, but it could see better in darkness than broad daylight.
It could see the pale white smoke seeping from the man's seven orifices. Soul essence. The soul was escaping the body before it had even cooled, like steam drifting from a kettle just off the flame, wisp by wisp, unhurried.
It reached out to gather it back. Its fingers passed through the smoke. The smoke passed through its fingers. The soul kept drifting toward the ceiling.
It tried again.
Still couldn't hold it.
Then it panicked.
Real, genuine panic. As a nightmare demon that had lived for centuries, the last time it felt this was right after it was born, chased by the underworld's patrol enforcers, nearly beaten into oblivion. But back then it was fleeing for its life. Now it had just screwed up.
It went over what had happened. It had woven dreams inside the brain of this programmer, Zhao Yuanhang, for three nights.
First night: made his stocks hit twenty consecutive limit-ups. Second night: made him sell his company options and go all in, his net worth jumping from three million to two hundred million. Third night: vertical limit-down, thirty in a row. The wind on the rooftop. The leap.
The original plan was: the moment he jumped off the building in the dream, Zhao Yuanhang would wake up.
Jolted awake by his alarm. Woken by a full bladder. Startled by the garbage truck downstairs. Anything. Just wake up.
But this time he didn't.
The moment Zhao Yuanhang's consciousness detached from his body in the dream, the despair energy flooding out was thick as liquefied darkness. It drank too fast. Too deep. Too greedy. By the time it sensed something was wrong, Zhao Yuanhang's heart had already stopped.
Dead in the dream. Dead in reality too.
Done.
Those two words slammed into its consciousness. Like a hammer hitting a stone slab.
Done done done.
It took a step back, its back hitting the wall. The rented room reeked of death.
It snapped its head toward the window.
Night was still deep. Three-seventeen in the morning. The city was asleep. But some things were waking up.
Faint sounds drifted in. The clank of iron chains dragging across bluestone. The hiss of yin fire burning residual moisture out of the air. The scratch of a cinnabar brush crossing yellow paper in the judgment hall.
It recognized this aura. Underworld patrol enforcers, tasked with capturing demons and monsters that disrupted the mortal order. Theoretically, the east district wasn't a major crime zone. The Night Warden shouldn't have arrived this fast. Unless someone had altered Zhao Yuanhang's lifespan.
No. Not altered. Shortened. By it. According to the underworld's Book of Life and Death, this man still had forty-three years left. A premature death forty-three years ahead of schedule was like dropping a bomb into the underworld's management system.
It shrank back from the window, hiding in the ceiling shadows.
The sound of soul-binding chains drew closer. Not from the hallway. From underground. The elevator shaft. The Night Warden didn't use doors. He walked the yin roads. Elevator shafts, sewer pipes, ventilation ducts—all of them turned into underworld passageways beneath the Night Warden's feet.
Run. Now.
It dissolved into smoke and seeped through the door crack.
The hallway's motion-sensor light clicked on.
Standing at the end of the corridor was a figure draped entirely in black robes. A head taller than most men. Its shoulders were too square, like it wore armor. But beneath the armor there was no flesh. Only deeper darkness.
The Night Warden.
Its gaze met the Night Warden's. The hallway temperature plunged over a dozen degrees. A layer of white frost bloomed across the fire extinguisher cabinet in the corner.
The soul-binding chains moved.
The chains didn't come from his hands. They grew out of his sleeves, like iron serpents. The chain tips were forked, each prong bearing a wisp of ghost fire. The blue-green phosphorescence carved six arcs through the dark corridor.
It dodged.
The chain whipped past the back of its head. Didn't touch. But the wind off the chain was wrong. A searing pain flared at its nape, like someone had scraped a red-hot iron chopstick down its spine.
It didn't look back. It phased straight through the fire door and plunged down the stairwell.
Behind it came the crash. The fire door was ripped clean off its hinges. The steel panel embedded itself in the opposite wall.
"Seal the third floor." The Night Warden's voice didn't come from his throat. It vibrated out of his bones.
The yin soldiers had arrived.
At the stairwell landing, a row of iron-gray figures was seeping out of the walls. Like water stains spreading from beneath wallpaper. First a blurred silhouette, then the silhouette solidified into soldiers wrapped in broken armor.
Twelve of them. Arrayed like an iron wall.
It didn't charge through.
It detonated two demon meridians, releasing a dense black fog. The fog was fragments of dreams. Every shard showed something Zhao Yuanhang had seen right before he died: the limit-down candlestick chart, the peeling ceiling gap, the dead potted spider plant on the windowsill.
The yin soldiers crashed into the fog. Their movements slowed. Dream fragments clung to their bodies, boring into their consciousness.
Yin soldiers had no consciousness. But they had residual memories. Incense-offering memories left in long-forgotten temples. The dream fragments tangled with these memories, and in an instant, a crack split open in the formation.
It seized that single moment and slipped through the gap between two yin soldiers.
Another hit on the back. This time a short halberd from a yin soldier. The blade sliced through its demonic aura, leaving a gash that exposed the churning black mist inside.
It dropped from the third-floor stairwell straight to the ground-floor lobby. When it hit the floor, it felt more than one demon meridian shatter inside. Three. Four.
As it burst through the building door, there seemed to be human footsteps in the wind outside.
The street outside was deep in the small hours before dawn. Sycamore leaves hung motionless under the streetlights. The air was thick as a pot lid clamped down. A water sprinkler truck was passing in the distance, its roof flasher painting the whole street blue.
It moved along the wall. The halberd wound on its side was leaking black mist. Every wisp of mist was demonic aura, and demonic aura left traces in the mortal world. The Night Warden could follow those traces.
It found a manhole cover and dissolved into smoke, slipping down through it.
No Night Warden aura in the sewers. Yin soldiers wouldn't crawl through drainage pipes.
It stopped where the pipes intersected. The air here was a cocktail of industrial wastewater, rat droppings, and some unidentifiable chemical stench. But to a demon that fed on dreams, none of that mattered.
It curled up in the darkness and assessed its injuries.
The burn on its shoulder was from the soul-binding chain. It was eating inward toward the bone. Wounds from yin fire didn't heal on their own. Yin fire latched onto whatever it touched and burned until every last trace of demonic aura was incinerated.
The halberd wound on its side could heal, but it needed time. Three days? Five? With its current demonic aura reserves, it couldn't even last three.
It had just gorged on Zhao Yuanhang's despair. That emotional energy was still churning inside. But energy was fuel, not medicine. It could power techniques, weave dreams, melt into shadows—but it couldn't directly patch wounds.
The problem was, it needed a hiding place. At least three days' worth.
It stayed in the sewers for four hours.
Near dawn, it poked its head out of a pipe. It was a back alley in an urban village. Power lines crisscrossed overhead. A breakfast stall's steamer was pumping out white vapor. The smell of scallion pancakes mixed into the morning breeze.
It was hungry.
Nightmare demons ate dreams. The chase and fight had burned through most of its demonic aura overnight. Zhao Yuanhang's despair energy could fuel combat, but it couldn't sustain the demon itself.
It needed another meal.
But it couldn't kill anyone else. One death could be brushed off as a "sudden heart attack." Two deaths, and the Night Warden wouldn't just patrol anymore. He'd escalate straight to the Yama Hall for an arrest warrant.
It didn't feed on the people at the breakfast stall. Their minds held nothing but the sweet-versus-savory soy milk debate. No great joy or deep sorrow.
It needed someone with violent emotional turbulence.
A stock trader.
It found the second target outside a securities brokerage.
A man in his fifties, wearing a shirt washed so pale it was nearly translucent. His pant legs were an inch too short, exposing the dark gray edges of his socks. He was crouched on the steps outside the brokerage, gnawing on a steamed bun, eyes locked on his phone screen.
The screen was a sea of green.
Not the fresh green of spring. The deep, murky green of stagnant water. The green of limit-down.
It passed close to the man. Close enough that its shoulder brushed his back. That single touch was all it took to get inside.
A nightmare demon's feeding method didn't require entering the target's brain. Just a touch. Skin contact, a brush of clothing, even proximity through the air—if the distance was close enough, it could hook a thread of consciousness.
It had already linked into the man's waking dream. A daydream. The same scene looping in his head: last month, the day that stock hit limit-up. His wife had cooked a full spread. His son called from school to say he'd ranked first in his grade.
Then the scene cut to today. Sixty percent of the account wiped out. His son's next semester tuition gone. Last night, his wife counting her blood pressure pills in the kitchen.
Not a nightmare.
Just reality.
This kind of energy was no good. Half-cooked real-world anxiety tasted like chewed sugarcane pulp. But better than nothing. It took a few sips and quietly withdrew.
The man didn't notice a thing. He just rubbed his temples and thought the sun seemed harsher than usual today.
It kept moving deeper into the city.
Daytime was rough on nightmare demons. Sunlight didn't burn it, but it thinned out its demonic aura. It needed to find a place to hide before nightfall.
Zhao Yuanhang's rented room was out. The police had sealed it by now, and the Night Warden definitely had yin soldiers staking it out.
It needed somewhere no one would go.
The edge of the urban village butted up against an old residential area slated for demolition. A bomb shelter built in the 1960s was hidden behind the residential zone. The entrance was locked behind an iron grate. The rust was so thick you could chip off whole chunks.
It dissolved into smoke through the gaps in the grate and descended the mold-caked steps.
The shelter wasn't long. Twenty-some meters to the dead end. The floor was scattered with broken bricks. Half-person-tall mushrooms grew in the corner, an unhealthy grayish-white.
There were signs someone had lived here once, but no one had been back in years. A camp bed leaned against the wall, the sheets rotted into a web-like texture.
A poster was pasted to the bed board. A Hong Kong starlet from the nineties. Most of her face had been eaten away by mold. Only one eye still gleamed in the dark.
This place wouldn't get searched.
It buried itself in the shadows. It dispersed its demonic aura into the gaps between broken bricks, the cracks in the walls, the condensation beads on the ceiling.
Once the entire bomb shelter was saturated with its presence, no demon could pinpoint its exact location. This patch of shadow was it. That patch was it too. A direct hit anywhere wouldn't strike anything vital.
The nightmare demon's last resort. Shadow Dispersion.
It sank deep into the darkness. Its remaining demonic aura wrapped around its consciousness like a thin membrane, sustaining the bare minimum of survival.
The scene looping in its mind wasn't the escape. It was the moment Zhao Yuanhang's eyeballs bulged out of their sockets. It had seen countless dead faces. But none of them belonged to someone it had killed.
No. That wasn't true.
It had killed before.
In the Republican era, it killed a warlord's concubine. The woman was severely depressed. All it wanted was to step into her dream, give her a better script.
The dream wasn't woven properly. The woman killed herself in the dream. And in reality. The next day the warlord flew into a rage and hauled out a whole row of people to be shot. It counted. Thirteen people. One concubine's life, thirteen lives chained to it.
The Yama Hall sent people that time too.
But they didn't catch it.
It hid at the bottom of a dry well. Shadow Dispersion pulled it through. The Yama Hall searched for seven days and came up empty. On the eighth day, the warlord himself was assassinated by political rivals. The Yama Hall's attention was pulled away by bigger events.
This time was different.
This time the victim was just a programmer. No family, no connections. His social circle was sparse as winter branches. No one would stand up for him. No one would buy him a headline. But the Night Warden came faster than before.
Because now there were computers.
The realization hit it suddenly. In 1930, the Yama Hall relied on handwritten entries in the Book of Life and Death. It took half a day for a judge's brushstroke to reach a patrol enforcer.
Now, the instant Zhao Yuanhang's heart stopped, the hospital's emergency system automatically sent a signal to the emergency center.
The emergency center's records synced simultaneously to the health bureau, the public security bureau, and certain agencies registered under the state security apparatus—the ones with file numbers ordinary people couldn't look up.
The Bureau of Anomalous Affairs.
It had heard of this agency.
Three years ago, a fox spirit in Nanjing had tricked an entire residential complex into buying laced health supplements. Addictive supplements. Keep buying until you're bankrupt, then jump into the Qinhuai River. The fox spirit drained the despair of over a hundred people before it was discovered. Not by the underworld. By the mortal world's agency.
A group of people in black tactical jackets dragged it out of its den.
The one in charge had a gray left eye.
Rumor was, that fox spirit was now locked in some underground laboratory. Blood drawn daily. Tissue sliced for samples. Researchers trying to figure out how demonic power integrated with the human body. Live experimentation. Three years now.
Falling into the Night Warden's hands just meant being thrown into hell.
Falling into the Bureau of Anomalous Affairs meant becoming a living specimen.
It pushed its consciousness deeper into the shadows. Survive first. Think about the future later.
At nightfall, it emerged from the bomb shelter.
The wounds were still there. The yin-fire burn hadn't spread, but it hadn't shrunk either. Just kept that half-necrotic state. The halberd wound on its side had formed a thin black membrane along the edges. Its body's own repair fluid.
It needed to feed.
Not sugarcane-pulp daydreams. A full dream. Climax, twists, the works.
It found a target in a suburban logistics park.
Six or seven truck drivers were hanging around the logistics park parking lot. Almost ten-thirty at night, killing time while waiting for cargo. A few of them were circled around a truck hood playing cards.
One wasn't playing. He was curled up in his driver's cab staring at his phone. The cab light was off. The phone screen painted his face blue-white.
It paused outside the window for a moment.
The driver's name was Old Feng. Forty-two. He'd mortgaged his house before the New Year. Got eight hundred thousand from the bank, added his two hundred thousand in savings. Threw the whole million into the stock market.
All in on a metaverse concept stock called Kyushu Paradise. Old Feng didn't even know what metaverse was. He'd followed the crowd. Made six hundred thousand three months ago. Didn't sell. Last month it fell back to his cost basis. This month it dropped four hundred thousand below.
Right now he was reading an analysis from a fellow investor in the WeChat group: "Kyushu Paradise has bottomed out. Rock-bottom volume means rock-bottom price. The big players are accumulating. Tomorrow it'll definitely go up."
He believed it. But he didn't dare fully believe it. This half-doubtful, half-anxious state was premium dream material.
It reached out and touched the cab window.
And went in.
In the dream, Old Feng was still staring at his phone. The candlestick chart grew out of the screen, lengthening into tangled vines. The vines wrapped around his wrists and climbed up his arms. A voice whispered behind his ear: "Limit-up tomorrow. Limit-down tomorrow. Pick one."
In the dream, Old Feng picked limit-up.
The candlestick shot a straight line up, punching through the phone screen and into the sky. Old Feng's account balance went wild, from minus four hundred thousand to five million, ten million, thirty million.
He opened the driver's-side door. Outside wasn't the logistics park parking lot. It was a beach in Sanya. His ex-wife was walking out of the ocean in a wedding dress, holding a glass of champagne.
"I knew you'd make it," his ex-wife said. She hadn't said that when they divorced.
Old Feng took the champagne. The beach started collapsing. Sand draining into the ground like a broken hourglass. The candlestick flipped from the sky. One massive bearish candle smashed into the ocean. The water turned black. His ex-wife's face began to melt. The champagne in the glass became blood.
It fed in the shadows. The fragrance of despair. The bitter tang of regret. The greasy aftertaste of greed.
Old Feng screamed in the dream.
Then it heard someone knocking on the car window.
Not a sound from the dream. From reality.
It shot out of the dream. Three black Iveco vans had appeared in the parking lot. Their headlights were all on, blasting the lot bright as daylight.
The doors opened. A dozen or so people climbed out. Black tactical jackets, body armor. Combat boots hitting the concrete in synchronized rhythm, like a metronome.
Bureau of Anomalous Affairs.
The man in charge was early thirties. Buzz cut. Lean build. His footsteps were light as he approached, but every step landed exactly where it was looking. Not coincidence. This man was tracking its gaze.
The man's left eye glowed gray-white in the darkness. Some kind of mutation.
"Spread out. Surround all shadow zones in the southwest quadrant." He spoke. Not loud, but every word hammered into the air like a nail.
The dozen or so operatives simultaneously pulled out some kind of device. Hexagonal metal plates, their surfaces engraved with dense patterns. The grooves were packed with dark red powder. Cinnabar.
Sealing arrays.
The mortal world's enforcers had built a whole kit specifically for demons.
It pulled back from the cab shadows. Old Feng woke up, looking around blankly, still not registering what was happening.
The Iveco vans, the black tactical jackets—none of it registered in Old Feng's perception. Bureau of Anomalous Affairs operations came with a built-in layer of cognitive shielding. Ordinary people couldn't see them and couldn't remember them.
But it could see.
And it saw that the gray-eyed man was walking straight toward where it was hiding.
It slipped into a tire's shadow, passing under the vehicles, moving toward the parking lot's edge.
The cinnabar sealing arrays weren't thrown directly at it yet. He was waiting for it to expose its position first.
It stopped under the last Iveco. There was no continuous shadow path ahead. The parking lot's edge opened onto a stretch of bare concrete, fully lit by the streetlamps.
"It's under the third vehicle."
When the gray-eyed man made that call, it almost thought its Shadow Dispersion had failed. Then it realized: this man wasn't relying on sight. He was calculating.
The parking lot had a limited number of shadow zones. Each vehicle's shadow angle and area could be derived from the streetlamp positions. Eliminate the zones too small to hide in, and only the undercarriages remained. And the Iveco had the highest chassis, the largest shadow footprint.
It waited under the vehicle for one second.
There was no way out anymore.
Then it did something it had never done.
It emerged from under the vehicle. Not toward the open ground. Straight at the gray-eyed man's face.
The gray-eyed man didn't flinch.
He got a direct look at it. Full. Unmasked. The nightmare demon's true face. A mass of roiling black fog. Two faint green embers at its center.
Then he smiled.
"Nightmare demon? Thought you were a yaksha. Wasted my nerves."
Wasted my nerves.
Before those three words had fully landed, cinnabar powder like chalk dust spilled from his uniform sleeve. It mixed into the night breeze.
It collided with the powder.
Demon-sealing wasn't some advanced sorcery. It was direct, brutal, primal attribute suppression. Cinnabar powder to lesser demons was basically activated sulfuric acid. The moment the powder touched its demonic aura, the aura began boiling violently, peeling off, evaporating.
It screamed.
It had no vocal cords, but the instinct to scream was engraved in every conscious being. Its demonic aura sloughed off in sheets within the cinnabar cloud, exposing the deeper layers. The parts getting close to core.
It scrambled backward with everything it had.
The gray-eyed man didn't pursue. He pulled a metal canister from behind his back and aimed the nozzle its way. Inside the canister was a silver-white powder. Silver dust. For warding off evil. More expensive than cinnabar and stronger. Effective against high-level demons too.
He didn't spray.
He was waiting for it to make the first move.
"Allow me to introduce myself. State Security Bureau 19, Bureau of Anomalous Affairs. Name's Lu Ming."
It didn't answer.
"You killed a man in a rented room in the old district. I don't fully understand what you did to Zhao Yuanhang. But the autopsy report had one interesting line: the victim's eyes were protruding, facial muscles were contorted, and his brain's dopamine and adrenocortical hormone concentration both reached lethal levels. He wasn't scared to death. It was a mixed state of extreme euphoria plus deep despair."
Lu Ming paused.
"That's how nightmare demons eat. You fed him in his dreams. Licked the plate clean. Forgot to bus the table."
Its demonic aura was recoagulating around its torso. The parts burned by the cinnabar were temporarily useless. What remained was just enough to hold its form.
"Here's the deal. You come into the Bureau, you get a room in the observation wing. We study you, we don't kill you. You can trust our research ethics. We treat our test subjects well."
It stared at Lu Ming's face. That gray left eye reflected a machine-like calm under the streetlights.
"If you fall into the Night Warden's hands—" Lu Ming pointed toward the eastern sky. "That one's hunting too."
It followed Lu Ming's finger.
On the eastern skyline, a patch of clouds was moving unnaturally. Against the wind.
Beneath the cloud mass pressed thirteen slender silhouettes.
Yin soldiers.
The Night Warden was here too.
Lu Ming muttered something into his radio. The moment the words ended, the Iveco roofs opened simultaneously. Four silver net-like devices shot up from inside the vehicles.
Sky Canopy Net.
Designed specifically to block underworld surveillance. Once the net unfurled, a semi-transparent silver glow covered the entire sky above the parking lot.
"Buying you a moment," Lu Ming said. "Don't thank me. I need you alive."
"Your terms?"
It was the first words it had spoken all night. The voice scraped out from deep within the black fog. Hoarse. Like two sheets of sandpaper rubbing together.
"You crossed paths with the Night Warden. Tell me how many yin soldiers he brought, what formation, the state of his soul-binding chains. Which chains have drawn blood. Which haven't."
It looked at Lu Ming.
The relationship between the mortal enforcer and the underworld patrol enforcer didn't seem much better than it had imagined.
"Twelve yin soldiers. Single-line snake formation." It said. "Six-pronged soul-binding chain. All prongs have drawn blood. Ghost fire on the chain tips. Should be judge-blessed soul-refining flame."
Lu Ming nodded. He tapped a few keys on his wristband.
"Alright. Run."
"You're not taking me in?"
"Your capture priority ranks after your fight with the Night Warden. If I take you now, I'd have to fight him for you first. Then I'd have to treat your wounds on top of that. Too much work." Lu Ming finished and turned toward the Iveco.
"Head west. There's an abandoned chemical plant west of here. Three floors above ground, two below. Behind the reaction vessels on the second basement level, there's an old waste discharge pipe. One-point-two meters wide. Big enough for you."
"Why tell me this?"
"Because you're easier to chase than the Night Warden."
Lu Ming climbed into the vehicle. All three Ivecos killed their headlights at the same time, like three sugar cubes melting into the night.
The parking lot returned to darkness.
It crawled out from the pile of discarded tires and looked west. Lu Ming was right. There was a lightless zone in that direction. It could just make out the outlines of a few smokestacks.
It ran west.
Less than five hundred meters out, a blast of yin wind slammed down from the sky behind it.
The Sky Canopy Net tore apart like a sheet of plastic wrap. The silver light detonated in midair, raining down like scattered beads. Every spot where a silver droplet hit the ground, the concrete seared into a thumb-sized scorch mark.
The Night Warden stood on the Sky Canopy Net's wreckage.
Black robes billowing. Soul-binding chains coiled around his body, all six prongs spread in six directions. The ghost fire on each prong had grown larger than back in the corridor. The Night Warden's rage was directly converting into fuel for the flame.
He wasn't an impatient enforcer. But he had one bottom line: he would not be tricked twice in the same case. The Sky Canopy Net had cost him half a minute. Half a minute. Enough for a heavily wounded nightmare demon to cover three kilometers.
By the time he caught up with his yin soldiers, the nightmare demon had already slipped into the chemical plant's second basement.
The plant had been abandoned for over a decade. Chemical residue had seeped from the pipes into the groundwater. The nearby residential area had been emptied out long ago.
The whole plant was fenced off by a ring of rusted iron railings. Signs reading "DANGER—KEEP OUT" hung from them, most of the lettering devoured by rust.
The second basement entrance was hidden behind the reaction vessel workshop. A half-length iron ladder led down. Rust flakes from the handrail fell into the darkness. You had to wait a long time to hear them hit bottom. Deep.
It poured every last drop of demonic aura into movement speed and practically teleported down to the second basement.
Then it stopped.
It couldn't run anymore.
The halberd wound on its side had torn open again during the sprint. Black demonic aura was jetting out of the wound, jetting, pausing, jetting again. Like a leaking tire.
The yin-fire burn on its shoulder had spread from bone to core. It could feel its consciousness starting to blur at the edges.
It pressed itself against the rusted iron wall of a reaction vessel and curled up.
The second basement was the plant's concentration workshop. Over a dozen reaction vessels stood in two rows. Each one was thick as two men with their arms stretched around.
Pipes sprawled across the ceiling in every direction. Some had snapped. Their broken ends held chemical crystals that had been solidifying for over a decade. Two smells saturated the air. The iron-rust tang of ferrous sulfate and the sweetish stench of lingering volatile organic compounds.
Footsteps outside. Yin soldiers' iron boots on concrete. A faint clink of armor with every step.
And more than one squad.
It closed its eyes and sank all remaining demonic aura into its core. One meridian intact. Two. Three... Only five could still be mobilized. Two of those were already half-shattered.
A stick of incense at most before the aura ran dry. By then, forget fighting. It wouldn't even have the strength to hold its form.
The sounds outside drew closer. The lead was the Night Warden. A column of yin wind had carried him straight from ground level to the second basement entrance.
Then he stopped.
The Night Warden wasn't rushing in. He was deploying his formation at the entrance. The twelve yin soldiers split into four squads. One holding the exit. Two sweeping the second basement. One on mobile reserve. An encirclement-hunting formation.
Encirclement-hunting formations were specifically designed for targets hiding in complex terrain. Fine meshwork. Full coverage. No blind spots.
The Night Warden's combat experience was far older than Lu Ming's. Lu Ming relied on logic. The Night Warden relied on instinct. A demon's habitual escape paths. Typical hiding terrain. Desperate last-stand patterns. He'd seen them all.
Centuries of enforcement. Very little a demon could pull still surprised him.
It had no plan this time.
It listened. The iron boots were getting closer. The second basement turned out to be bigger than it had guessed. The yin soldiers were still sweeping the east side.
It needed time.
Where would time come from?
In the darkness, it opened wide those two green embers and immediately dredged up Zhao Yuanhang's residual memories from inside its body.
Residual memories from Zhao Yuanhang. When a nightmare demon ate dreams, it didn't just consume emotional energy. It also swallowed dream fragments.
Most fragments dissolved into useless memory dregs after digestion, but Zhao Yuanhang's dying despair had been too thick. The fragments hadn't been fully processed.
Zhao Yuanhang's olfactory memory: the harsh chemical smell of industrial solvents. This smell was identical to what he'd smelled during his internship at a chemical plant years ago.
The summer he was interning...
It unfurled Zhao Yuanhang's fragments.
That internship summer. Zhao Yuanhang faced the massive reaction vessels. The first thing his master taught him: "There's pressure inside the vessel. Until the pressure's fully released, don't touch a single bolt."
One day he didn't listen.
A bolt on the vessel had come loose. He reached out to tighten it. His master shoved him away from behind.
The bolt shot out and punched through the ceiling ventilation duct.
His master looked at him and said: "You almost died in front of that vessel."
That scene was carved deep.
It pulled the scene out of the fragments. It kneaded the scene into its own black fog and scattered it into the chemical residue in the air.
When the yin soldiers reached the reaction vessels, Zhao Yuanhang's fear fragment would seep into their consciousness.
A chemical operator's primal fear when facing a pressurized reactor.
Yin soldiers weren't afraid of that. But they would pause. They would need to distinguish: was this a real environmental hazard, or a decoy released by the target?
A pause was enough.
Once the search rhythm broke, the formation would have gaps.
It waited in the darkness.
Outside the reaction vessel, the yin soldiers' iron boots paused for a beat. A moment later, someone said something. The Night Warden's voice came from the second basement entrance, low as a subterranean drum.
"Ignore that. Search the left side."
Two more reaction vessels on the left.
Inside the vessel's shadows, it calculated how much time it had left.
Demonic aura reserves: twenty percent.
Yin soldiers: less than ten meters away.
Probability of escape: essentially zero.
That was when a commotion erupted from ground level.
The crunch of tank treads on gravel. The mechanical whine of hydraulics deploying and retracting. Someone had driven heavy equipment into the chemical plant.
Lu Ming.
The noise from above disrupted the Night Warden's search deployment. The yin soldiers' iron boots changed direction. One squad was pulled back to the surface.
The Night Warden had no patience left for Lu Ming. The Sky Canopy Net in the parking lot had already burned through every last shred of respect he had for the Bureau.
"Bureau 19! Underground is ours. You hold the surface." The Night Warden's voice traveled down the stairwell.
"Negative. Your target is suspected of unlawful operation resulting in death. Under the Interim Measures for Anomalous Lifeform Management, priority jurisdiction over supernatural entities within national borders belongs to the Bureau."
Lu Ming's voice came through speakers temporarily set up on the surface. His bureaucratic tone was three notches thicker than last time.
"Jurisdiction? You couldn't even identify what it was."
"We've updated. Nightmare demon. Fifty Demons Index, No. 371. Feeds on dreams. Semi-spiritual, semi-material form. Weaknesses: cinnabar, silver, light." Lu Ming paused. "Want me to keep reading from the Demon Classification Atlas?"
The Night Warden said nothing. The yin fire flared thirty percent larger.
Listening to this argument from the second basement, it realized something: Lu Ming was stalling for it.
Not out of kindness. Because Lu Ming wanted a live specimen. The Night Warden wanted a dead body to close the case. Whether it lived or died meant nothing to the underworld. But to the Bureau, a living, communicating nightmare demon was worth a hundred times more than a dead one.
It shifted its body in the darkness. The yin-fire burn had gnawed to the edge of its core. Another half-stick of incense, and the burn would breach the core's protective layer, boring straight into its consciousness proper.
At that point, not even a god could save it.
It closed its eyes. If those were eyes.
That was when the second voice came.
Not from outside. From inside. From the deepest part of its consciousness.
"You're hungry."
The voice was low. Deep. Ancient. So ancient it sounded like it came from hundreds of meters underground.
Every thread of its demonic aura went rigid.
"I'm hungry too."
The voice was closer now. Close enough that it seemed to be speaking directly against its consciousness.
It tried to move. Couldn't. Its body wouldn't obey. Its demonic flow rate plummeted, nearly stopping. This was direct suppression. Pressing down from the level of consciousness itself. Whoever this was, they hadn't even shown their face and had already locked it down completely.
"You're going to die." The voice's tone was flat, like stating today's temperature. "There are two forces outside contesting custody over you. Six squads of yin soldiers on the second basement level. A Bureau 19 special operations team on the surface. Your demonic aura is under twenty percent."
A pause.
"I can save you."
The darkness around it began to warp. The reaction vessels, the pipes, the floor. Everything started sinking deeper.
It was being pulled into a new darkness entirely.
The air carried a rust-iron scent that didn't exist anywhere in the mortal world. The smell of sealing chains that hadn't been changed in millennia.
Its consciousness plunged downward.
And saw a city.
A city built from consciousness itself. In the city's deepest depth was a massive black silhouette. Its outline was too dark to make out. Too far. But you could see the countless chains wrapped around it—tens of thousands—extending from every direction of the darkness, stabbed deep into that black silhouette's interior.
The silhouette was vibrating. With every pulse, the chains shuddered. The shudder ran up the chains, through the eighteen layers of hell, to the plaque above the Yama Hall, making the characters on it tremble.
The shudder traveled further up. Past the feet of the Bodhisattva statue. The Bodhisattva didn't move.
"You see it?"
The dark silhouette's pulse hit again. This time the tremor didn't travel upward. It came straight toward it.
It was nearly blasted apart by the shockwave.
"I've been trapped a long time. I need energy. You need to live. We can help each other."
Its consciousness barely held together through the tremor.
"Your terms?"
"You establish an outpost in the mortal world. Use humans as anchor points. Build a trading floor. The trading floor will produce what I need. You handle operations. I provide support."
"What are you?"
The black silhouette was silent for a moment. Not thinking. Swallowing. It spoke after swallowing.
"Someone who's been hungry a very long time."
The entire underground space began to contract. Not the silhouette's power. The seal was reacting. Some other force had sensed this conversation.
"Time is short. Yes or no?"
"How do I trust you won't turn on me?"
"You don't have a choice."
It stared at the black silhouette.
The chains. The Yama Hall. The Bodhisattva statue. Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva's dharma body was positioned directly above the seal. What kind of entity required Ksitigarbha himself to personally suppress it?
It didn't dare think further.
"How long?"
"Forever."
"Forever?"
"Until I've paid back what I owe you."
The air contracted tighter. A point of golden light flared at the Bodhisattva statue's brow.
"Decide."
"...Fine."
The last syllable of "fine" hadn't even faded when a violent pain detonated from its chest.
Its core. The black crystalline node the size of a walnut that caged its consciousness. Something tore it open from the inside.
Something inside it was being pulled out.
Not demonic aura. Something deeper than demonic aura. Its heart-nucleus.
The heart-nucleus passed through the darkness. Through the chains. Through a cluster of karma fire without temperature. The heart-nucleus's edges were scorched black by the karma fire but didn't shatter. Past the karma fire was the crack in the seal.
The crack was impossibly narrow. A strand of hair couldn't slip through. But the heart-nucleus was finer. Finer than thought. Finer than light. Finer than time.
Then the heart-nucleus vanished into the depths of the black silhouette.
It heard a swallowing sound.
Then a colossal force poured down through the top of its head.
Its body. That mangled, ragged mass of black fog. It was yanked out of the second basement. Straight through soil, concrete, groundwater layers, abandoned pipes. Hauled upward, nonstop.
During the ascent, it saw the residential building where it had hidden before.
Higher. The morgue of the Third People's Hospital.
Zhao Yuanhang's body was there.
The force shoved it into the corpse.
This wasn't ordinary possession. It was being crammed into something deeper. Fate essence. Zhao Yuanhang's fate essence had already scattered. He'd been dead over a day. His soul had long since been taken to the underworld.
But the force reached toward the underworld and dragged Zhao Yuanhang's soul back.
Not the whole soul.
Ground up. Ground into a thin, semi-transparent membrane.
That membrane was draped over it.
Wrapped tight. Like plastic wrap sealing raw meat. Not a single gap.
The membrane was mimicking a heartbeat. Squeeze, release. Squeeze, release. Zhao Yuanhang's body had a heartbeat again. Breathing followed. The membrane pushed the lungs into mechanical expansion and contraction.
Blood was forced through the vessels. Warmth crept back into limbs cold as an ice cellar.
It opened Zhao Yuanhang's eyes.
Not two green embers on a black fog anymore. Human eyes. Brown irises. A few uneven dark striations. Bloodshot whites. But the eyes moved. Blinked. Saw.
The morgue.
Six body beds in a row. Only its bed had a body on it. The rest were laid with medical isolation sheets. The sheets were new. No dead-person smell on them yet.
It sat up. Zhao Yuanhang's body was stiffer than it expected. The spine cracked a few times, like a pivot that hadn't been oiled in a long time. It put its feet on the floor. The floor was freezing. Disinfectant crystals were lodged in the tile grout.
A blast of wind shoved the door open.
The Night Warden stood in the morgue doorway.
The soul-binding chain spun three loops in his hand. The ghost fire at the chain tips lit half the room. The Night Warden's face, split by his own fire into half-blue and half-black. His expression was unreadable.
He didn't move.
He didn't speak.
He was looking.
The man standing before him looked exactly like Zhao Yuanhang. Thirty-five. About one-seven-two. Slightly overweight. The hair situation on top was not optimistic. Dressed in the standard white morgue shroud. The toe tag was still on his ankle: "Zhao Yuanhang. Male. 35. Cause of death pending."
But the soul-binding chain didn't react.
The chain reacted to demons. No matter how deep the concealment, how flawless the possession, the yin fire on the chain would sense demonic aura. But right now the yin fire was still as dead water.
The Night Warden spun the chain another half turn.
Still nothing.
He retracted the chain. No further words. He turned around. His black robes caught a brief reflection under the morgue's UV lamp. Then his whole body began sinking into the floor.
Before vanishing, he turned his face back halfway.
That single eye looked at it. As if to say: I know you're acting. I just haven't found the evidence yet.
The next one to arrive was Lu Ming.
Lu Ming didn't use the door. He climbed in through the morgue's back window. Not graceful at all. He banged his knee on the window frame and swore.
He dusted off his knees and walked to the body bed.
That gray-white left eye swept top to bottom.
It stopped at the chest.
"There's something inside your body that doesn't belong to you." Lu Ming said. His tone wasn't accusatory. More like he was talking to himself. "Not demonic aura. It's..."
He searched for the right word.
"Scar-like. Grayish-white. Coiled inside the chest cavity. Around the heart."
He didn't wait for an answer. He sat down at the edge of the body bed and propped his feet up on the neighboring empty bed.
"What's your name?"
It was silent for a long time. It was deciding what to call itself from this moment on.
"Mo Yan."
Lu Ming looked at it.
"What do you do?"
"Stock trading."
Those were Mo Yan's first words spoken in the human world. And also the most important ones.