The guests, two distinct companies of them, began to file slowly through the restaurant's doors.
The first group, exactly sixteen souls, men and women in the middle of their lives, shared an unnerving uniformity: their faces were perfectly blank, emotionless—indeed, they seemed utterly vacant, lost in some private, faraway static.
Their linked hands broke apart only as they crossed the threshold. The strangest thing was their complete indifference to the staff. They didn't spare a glance—not one—for Liu Gang or the waiters who were bowing and chirping welcome at the entrance. The disrespect hung heavy in the air, stirring a deep, uncomfortable awkwardness in Guo Xiu and Hu Tingting.
The second group, exactly ten men, all aged perhaps sixty or older, were a different breed. Liu Gang noted their wealthy, well-fed demeanor, suggesting men of significant means or high office. They carried themselves with an established air of grave importance. Most of these men offered a quick nod or a raised hand in acknowledgement of the greetings. A few even gave a curt inclination of the head. But none of them smiled. Several carried an expression that suggested a heavy, private burden, or perhaps a profound worry.
Liu Gang instinctively judged the first company to be common folk—the workers, the rank and file. The second, conversely, carried the shadow of the powerful: wealthy officials or grim magnates ushering their lessers on some peculiar, late-night errand.
Regardless of their strange nature, Liu Gang and the staff maintained their forced, professional deference, ushering all the "special guests" deeper into the warm, too-bright space of the restaurant. They settled themselves at the two waiting tables, and then nothing happened. The silence was the real enemy. Not a single word was exchanged among the diners. A heavy, deeply unsettling atmosphere settled over the room, chilling the staff to a quiet, rising panic.
The midnight meal carried the faint, musty odor of old ghost stories that everyone had heard: the ancient tradition where hosts laid out a feast for the hungry spirits and wandering dead. These tales lingered—from mouth-to-mouth legends to the flickering digital whispers of the internet.
But the genial old man had bought their service outright. He had begged, paid a vast surplus, and tucked so many bills into their hands that the staff's obedience was total, suppressing the scream of dread under the pressure of cold, hard cash.
The customers offered not a single word, yet the staff performed their duties perfectly, moving through the strange, heavy quiet to deliver every dish and reserved drink without error.
The hot pots sat steaming on the tables, the food piled high and untouched. In that crushing silence, a man at the ten-person round table, positioned directly opposite the entrance, finally moved. He raised his chopsticks, deftly dipped a piece of bean curd skin into the plunging, boiling broth, and conveyed it to his mouth, taking the first taste.
As the vegetarian mouthful passed his lips, a slow, terrible smile cracked across the man's face. He offered a single nod of cold satisfaction. That was the only signal needed. Across both tables, the silence was broken as every other guest picked up their own chopsticks, ready at last to feed.
"A ritual of the deepest kind," Wang Dong, the head chef, rasped from behind Liu Gang, emerging from the greasy shadows of the kitchen.
"A ritual, Lao Wang? What manner of ceremony do you mean?" Liu Gang asked. Although he might have carried the manager's title, when it came to ancient custom and rules of decorum, he knew the older cook was the better scholar. Wang Dong had spent his life steeped in the industry, absorbing tradition like a sponge.
"Look at them," Wang Dong directed, nodding toward the round table. "The one who ate first sits in the Shangzuo (上座 ) the high seat, opposite the entrance. From there, he commands the serving and oversees all the guests. This is the old, rigid manner, called Fanzhuo, (饭桌) emphasizing the sanctity of the table arrangements. You, being the manager of this establishment, should perhaps endeavor to educate your miserable self on these matters."
Liu Gang felt a cold spike of irritation prick his gut, stung by the sheer, unearned condescension. Yet the cook was right; status demanded knowledge of such details. He forced his face into a mask of acceptance, nodding slowly. He spoke the necessary words: "Thank you, Lao Wang. I will endeavor to learn."
The cook was caught flat-footed. He had expected a sneer, a bitter rebuttal to his cutting slight. Instead, Wang Dong's earnest thanks shocked him into silence. Wang Dong merely offered a short, bewildered nod before retreating back into the hot gloom of the kitchen.
The entirety of the party had now settled. The ten men at the round table ate and drank with grim, contented pleasure, nodding silently to one another like men who have achieved a shared, difficult goal. The one in the high seat—the Chairman—even leaned back, his satisfied smile stretching as he gazed across the room toward the silent, waiting sixteen at the long table.
But the sixteen at the long table did not look back. They consumed their food and drink with a horrifying, rapid consumption, as if driven by some deep, ancient hunger. They were ravenous, gluttonous, yet unnervingly silent, and no scrap of food—not a single slick vegetable shred—ever missed their mouths or fell onto the cloth. It was a chilling, unnatural discipline all its own.
The entirety of the twenty-six guests proved to be feasters of astonishing, terrible capacity. After the first hour of their silent consumption, the ten men at the round table finally began to slow, like wolves finishing the first course. But the sixteen at the long table showed no sign of moderation whatsoever.
This relentless pace triggered a cold panic among the staff, especially the cooks, because the great cauldrons were nearly empty of broth. In their exhausted rush to clean up past the midnight hour, they had casually, stupidly dumped a significant portion down the drain.
Liu Gang, catching the sharp, cold scent of the emerging crisis, felt a cutting worry that they would run out of the necessary vegetarian broth entirely for the unstoppable long table. He bolted straight into the kitchen to consult the head cook, searching for some impossible, last-minute fix.
"Can we brew more, Lao Wang?" Liu Gang demanded. The head cook shook his head—a gesture of final, heavy defeat. He explained that broth of that precise, necessary flavor required hours of patient simmering; it simply could not be conjured instantly.
A younger cook timidly suggested cutting the remaining broth with plain water, just enough to bulk up the volume, arguing that surely the diners must be stuffed close to bursting by now. But both the Head Chef and Liu Gang rejected the idea with a contemptuous speed. Diluting the stock would kill the specific, subtle flavor—and given the old man's dire, cold commands, risking the flavor was risking everything.
"So what in God's name do we do, Wang Dong? You're the Head of this whole operation! Find a way, and find it NOW!" Liu Gang snarled, pushing his frantic desperation onto the chef.
"The solution exists," Wang Dong stated, running a rough, calloused hand over his chin. "The flavor is secure, guaranteed—but it will violate the specific terms of the old man's reservation."
"The flavor is the only thing that matters!" Liu Gang snapped, lunging forward. "Sheng Ri Huo Gua demands flavor! That has always been the damned, unbreakable rule of this shop!" He felt the words crackle, then a cold, sickening lurch in his gut. Mistake. A profound, sinking mistake. He had spoken too fast. He hadn't stopped to hear what the cook meant by that phrase: 'will violate the specific terms of the customer's order.'
"Agreed," Wang Dong grunted, accepting Liu Gang's surrender. He grabbed the remaining pot of vegetarian broth and threw it onto the high heat. He scooped a cup of the pale, pure stuff and set it aside as a control. Then, in a motion heavy with dark intent, he pulled the lid off the simmering clear stock—and plunged his long-handled ladle deep into the rich, oily chicken-and-pork bone broth, dumping a generous pour directly into the vegetarian pot!
"Lao Wang!" Liu Gang gasped, recoiling as if struck. He knew the magnitude of his error.
"Don't seize up on me," Wang Dong instructed, his voice low and patient, as if explaining a grim inevitability. "I built this batch of vegetarian broth on the flavor profile of our basic clear stock. The smell and taste are identical. The clear broth was strained through cheesecloth and chilled to completely remove animal fat. It's impossible to tell the two flavors apart."
He continued his long explanation: "Besides, I only cut it with a small amount—a fraction of the total volume. It will enter the throat without a single trace of deviation. The flavor profile is secure. Try the difference yourself." Wang Dong offered the ladle of the newly mixed broth and held out the pure vegetarian control.
Liu Gang dipped the ladle, sniffed, and tasted. He repeated the sickening ritual three times. His face was a mask of defeat and deep, cold knowledge. "The flavor is the same, truly the same," he finally admitted.
"Let's do it, Lao Wang." Liu Gang nodded, the relief washing over him with the force of a cheap, gut-warming shot of whiskey.
Yet, underneath that quick, nervous ease, a cold, clammy sliver of guilt burrowed deep. He had broken faith with the gentle old man, but he lied to himself that satisfying the guests' overwhelming hunger with delicious food was the only thing that mattered in this midnight feast.
"They need more broth!" Zhou Xingyi BURST into the kitchen, her voice sharp as splintered glass.
The sudden intrusion rattled everyone like loose teeth, especially the Manager and the Head Cook. A sick wave of paranoia washed over them: Had the girl overheard the secret, the ugly little deceit they had just committed?
"Give us a minute," Lao Wang rasped back, masking his anxiety. "Needs to get up to temp." He shot Liu Gang a quick, dark conspiratorial glance.
Moments later, the newly corrupted broth was ready. The assistants carefully filled two large serving urns. Before they dared send the liquid out, however, Wang Dong and Liu Gang performed the final, desperate test, sipping the soup. They were absolutely, terrifyingly certain—the flavor and aroma were indistinguishable from the original pure vegetarian stock.
Yet, neither man spoke the cold, mounting apprehension that was now burrowing in their guts. Something fundamentally wrong was settling over the room, an unshakeable sense of impending damnation.
Zhou Xingyi and Guo Xiu hauled the heavy urns of the tainted broth out to the waiting tables.
Liu Gang followed the broth urns out, standing sentinel in the shadows. His stomach was a fist of worry. He kept telling himself the smell and taste were exactly the same—a culinary confidence trick—but the knowledge of the betrayal, the dark substitution, made his skin crawl.
Suddenly, a quick, bony hand shot out from the round table, snatching Guo Xiu by the forearm. The customer—the chairman in the Shangzuo position—dragged her close, whispered a furious, stinging torrent of words into her ear, and then released her, letting the startled server stumble away.
"Is it over already!?" Liu Gang's heart hammered a frenzied rhythm in his chest. He didn't know (and mercifully never found out) that the confrontation had nothing to do with the compromised broth. The chairman had merely caught the young waiter attempting to hustle cheap drugs to the guests at his table and was issuing a dire, whisper-deep threat: never let that filth near the Silent Sixteen.
When Liu Gang saw Guo Xiu released unharmed, only looking pale and shaken, he waved the moment away, clinging to the hope that the soup had been fine.
But then, the silence CRACKED like a dropped plate of porcelain. As soon as the newly delivered broth hit the boil, and a few more mouthfuls passed down the guests' throats, the reaction struck both tables like a physical bolt!
The ten men at the round table turned ash-white, lips trembling violently. They sprang to their feet with a soundless, furious energy. Their faces were twisted into masks of black contempt and rage, yet not a single word broke the air. They simply started walking, a furious, silent exit.
Only the regal figure in the chairman's seat paused. He swept his furious, blazing gaze across the stunned staff, stamped his foot once in a silent paroxysm of blinding frustration, puffed his cheeks, and let his eyes bulge like cracked porcelain doorknobs—a silent, dreadful condemnation
. He didn't speak a single word, only shook his head in heavy, sorrowful disgust. He gave one last, melancholy look at the table of sixteen, then turned and strode out the door, swallowed by the blackness, ignoring Liu Gang's terrified, stammering pleas for explanation!!
At the long table, the sixteen silent patrons had frozen mid-motion, chopsticks suspended above the pots. They remained bent over and unmoving, perfectly still, until the last hostile figure from the round table had disappeared. Then, the moment the doors closed, they broke out into high, brittle LAUGHTER.
At first, it was just soft, low chuckles rumbling deep in their throats. Then the sound grew, louder and sharper, until it became a flaming, sustained shriek that forced the staff to press both hands tightly over their ears.
Wang Dong and the cooks, jolted by the noise, crowded the doorway of the kitchen. They saw that the entire contingent of sixteen at the long table had risen as a single, terrifying mass. Mixed in with the agonizing screams were deep, rasping, guttural utterances—sounds that might have been the language of fever—but the staff caught one clear phrase ringing above the madness:
"The Great Feast!"
The guests, eight on each side of the long table, stretched their arms out, grasping hands across the distance. They began to sway them up and down in unison, mimicking a grotesque, boneless dance. Their limbs moved with an appalling, sickening fluidity, as if the bones had been replaced by thick, stretchable rubber.
As they swung their arms, their bodies began to writhe and transform in impossible ways. They shot skyward, then instantly slumped low. Their mouths split open in wide, hideous rictus-grins, revealing rows of long, pearl-white, needle-sharp teeth. The true horror was the stretching: their lower jaws elongated, drooping sickeningly down almost to their chests, while their upper jaws stretched toward the high ceiling. Hair began to sprout and grow long in black, oily mats. Their eyes bulged wide, the pupils dissolving into bottomless pools of blackness, like twin abyssal pits. They laughed and screamed, the noise a ghastly, echoing howl.
The staff could only stand frozen, paralyzed by the sudden, physical intrusion of the monstrous. Liu Gang felt a sudden, humiliating warmth bloom across his groin and down his legs. He had pissed himself without conscious thought, the body's ultimate, liquified surrender to dread.
The bodies of the guests twisted and stretched, completing their hideous metamorphosis into loathsome, ugly fiends, forming a snaking line of grasping, interlocking hands. One of them shrieked a sound that sliced through the air:
"THE NINE DIVINE LORDS CAN NO LONGER PROTECT MANKIND!"
The chain broke apart, and they lunged out, hurtling across the room toward the terrified restaurant staff with murderous intent.
Liu Gang froze, his arms rigid, his legs locked, unable to flee or even twitch. Then, framed in the kitchen doorway, he saw Wang Dong's massive, fleshy face—smiling widely, saliva slicking his chin, his eyes bulging in a fixed, dreadful stare. No.It was not Lao Wang. It was only the head cook's severed, greasy head, held fast between the sharp, yellowed teeth of a demon!
The creature's rough, enormous right hand, its fingers long and tipped with needle-sharp talons, clutched Wang Dong's headless, plump carcass, dragging the corpse forth. Its left hand, meanwhile, plunged deep into the chef's belly, ripping out coils of steaming intestine. Blood and slick organs spilled forth, spattering the floor in a crimson, chaotic mess!!
The other employees fared no better. Some were torn limb from agonizing limb, ripped cleanly in half. Others had their chests cracked open, their still-beating hearts clawed out to be licked and devoured by the frenzied jaws. Others still had their skulls crushed and peeled open by colossal mouths that sucked out the warm, wet brain-matter. Some were simply seized, bitten clean in two at the waist, and chewed alive!
Tears scalded Liu Gang's face. His eyes bulged, white and staring in pure terror. His limbs refused the primal screaming command to flee. His mind grew hazy, dissolving at the edges of consciousness. He no longer knew that he had lost all control of his bowels, voiding foul, warm waste into his trousers.
The final vision he witnessed was the entire restaurant transformed into a killing floor, a slaughterhouse—filled only with the wails of the tormented, the shrieks of sheer, unholy dread.Blood, ripped flesh, and human organs lay strewn everywhere, the coppery, iron stink rising in a choking cloud. And through the gore-slicked air, a grinning face with eyes of sheer, absolute blackness moved, coming steadily closer!!!