The alley after rain looked like a swollen gray intestine, writhing slowly as it digested the city's residual warmth.
When Shen Yan pushed open the wooden door of "Cangyu Studio," the hinges groaned like an old man's joints. Damp mildew mixed with aged sandalwood incense, condensing into an indescribable atmosphere—like the last handful of earth scattered into a grave before sealing.
The shop floor was barely twenty square meters. Antique shelves crowded with the remains of time: a celadon bowl with a missing chip, a bronze incense burner covered in patina, thread-bound books with illegible handwriting, a moon guitar with snapped strings... Each object occupied its proper place, arranged with the precision of numbered beds in a morgue.
Only Shen Yan knew that some things shifted slightly after midnight.
He walked around the counter, his fingertips brushing the surface, picking up a thin layer of dust. Last month's final visitor had been an old woman asking about a pair of Republic-era glass paperweights. She hadn't bought them—just touched them briefly and left in a hurry. Shen Yan had seen the shadow clinging to her shoulder as she departed: a palm-sized thing shaped like a water stain.
He couldn't be bothered to care.
If not for his grandfather's withered hand clamping down on his wrist on that deathbed, pressing both the shop key and a single sentence—"The Shen bloodline must not end"—into his flesh like a brand, he would be somewhere now, staying up late revising designs for some design firm, instead of waiting here for things that weren't human to come knocking.
The old wall clock struck seven.
Shen Yan opened a drawer and pulled out a ledger bound in blue. The cover bore no words. He flipped it open; the latest page was written in neat regular script:
"Fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, Gui Mao year. Received one folding wooden hairpin. Host: Lin Xiuyun, Republican-era female student. Lingering attachment: An unfulfilled appointment. Resolution: Burn a letter beneath the sycamore tree at the old school site. Remaining lifespan: Reduced by seven days."
Flipping backward through the ledger, every transaction recorded a price. His life was like sand in an hourglass, grains stolen one by one by the attachments of these dead things.
Shen Yan closed the ledger, pulled out a half-bottle of liquor from under the counter, and took a sip against the bottle's mouth. Just as the burn pierced his throat, he heard an extremely faint scratching sound from above—like cat claws, but more fragmented, more rhythmic, coming from the direction of the attic.
He glanced up at the ceiling. Total darkness up there.
"Not yet time," he said to the air.
The scratching stopped.
Shen Yan lit the kerosene lamp on the counter. The flame danced, casting his shadow across the wall of old objects behind him. Those shadows writhed, twisted, and for a moment seemed to break free from the constraints of light, taking on shapes of their own.
Beyond the door, darkness in the alley began to settle.
The first night was about to begin.