The deeper I walked into the husk of the countryside, the quieter everything became.
No birds. No bugs. Just the sound of wind dragging broken signs across cracked pavement. Somewhere behind me, a sheet of corrugated metal banged in the breeze like a temple bell, summoning ghosts that had long since stopped pretending to be dead.
I found a half-loaded pistol duct-taped to the inside of a corpse's thigh. Smart. Would've been smarter if the bastard had lived long enough to use it.
The bullets jingled like coins in my hand.
I took a coat from another body—black leather, burned at the sleeve. It reeked of blood and cheap cigarettes. Fit better than I expected. Inside one of the pockets, a dog tag: YAO CHENG.
"Sorry, Yao Cheng," I muttered, sliding it over my neck. "Borrowing your skin for a while."
He didn't protest.
⸻
By midday, the sky darkened—not from clouds, but from something heavier. Red mist swirled low against the ground, thick enough to sting my throat. I wrapped a tattered scarf around my face and pushed on, following the broken road.
I passed husks of old transport vehicles, their metal frames curled inward like flower petals after frost. One still had corpses inside—mummified by sun, their mouths stretched into O's of horror. Flies had abandoned them. Even maggots had standards now.
But it was the figure propped against the mile-marker at the crossroads that stopped me cold.
I didn't see him at first. The red fog had thickened near his body—like it wanted to hide him.
When I got closer, I realized the thing wasn't rotting like the others. It had been… preserved.
Sewn shut from the throat down to the groin. Black surgical thread. Not military. Not medical. Something cruder. Hungrier.
Its head lolled forward, chin to chest. Long black lashes. Pale face, soft even in death. And underneath the dried blood—
Li Qiyan's face.
No.
I dropped to a crouch.
It wasn't him. Not exactly. The features were off. Softer jaw. Older nose. The body was wrong too—bulkier. But the eyes…
I forced myself to tilt the chin upward.
The thing's mouth twitched.
Its lips peeled apart, threads snapping one by one.
A voice hissed from its throat—not loud. Barely a whisper. Not spoken by breath, but by something inside the chest cavity.
"Shanshen…"
I staggered back.
The thing's jaw dropped further. Inside its throat, I saw stitching—not just thread, but fingers. Fingers that didn't belong to this corpse.
I put the pistol to its temple and fired twice.
It didn't scream. It just stopped moving.
⸻
I didn't move for a while after that.
I sat in the dust beside it, gun across my knees, and watched the red mist slither around its boots like a cat rubbing up against a master.
Whoever—or whatever—had made that thing hadn't done it for war. That was personal. That was someone stitching together their memory of a man they couldn't let go.
Or maybe it was a warning.
Or maybe it was me.
⸻
I stood and turned west.
Sector C17 was less than a hundred kilometers out.
If he was there, breathing, untouched by all this—
No. No if. He was there. I knew it.
The road ahead twisted like a scar across the earth.
I adjusted the pistol grip. Checked the knife again. Felt the heartbeat steady in my throat.
And then I walked.