The little room smelled of mildew and rot. The door was locked from the inside by the red-clad specter, Wang Yingxiu.
The Feng brothers were tearing one another apart.
Under the wavering light, Wang Yingxiu stood with blood on her hands, her fingers digging into Feng Zhuzhi’s eyes. Feng Zhenzhen, her head split and bleeding, was clamped around their uncle Feng Shuanzi’s neck like a spider on its prey.
“You blind old bastard! You blind me!” Feng Zhuzhi screamed. Disoriented from the ghost’s assault, he thought his brother had landed the blow. He picked up a shovel and swung it wildly.
Feng Shuanzi, struck across the brow, bled everywhere but flew into a blind rage. He punched Feng Zhuzhi down, straddled him and rained a brutal series of blows onto his face.
While the two men thrashed one another like animals, I hauled myself off the filthy bed, snatched my backpack with one hand and grabbed the trembling girl curled at the footboard with the other, and bolted for the door.
“Don’t you dare run!”
Feng Shuanzi still sat astride his brother, in total control. When he saw me moving, he lunged up and seized my T-shirt. There was a tearing sound; fabric split from collar to spine in a long rip.
Feng Zhenzhen wasn’t a revenant like Wang Yingxiu—she lacked that terrible malice—and she couldn’t fully control her uncle. The force of his pull sent me stumbling backward. His rough, oily hand was about to close on my chest when the locked door exploded inward with a thunderous crash.
Sunset bled into the room. A tall figure filled the doorway and in one fluid movement scooped me to his waist, then drove a boot into Feng Shuanzi’s chest. The old man flew back, collided with the shovel still clutched by his brother on the floor, and the blade cut into his groin. He howled, doubled over, clutching himself as blood soaked through his shorts.
A sneer broke from Wang Yingxiu’s lips as she finally released Feng Zhuzhi’s eyes. After a moment of swelling, the pain gave way and Feng Zhuzhi could see the room for what it was.
Feng Shuanzi lay curled on the floo r, shrieking, blood forming a dark pool beneath him. The man in the doorway watched with a cool, disdainful frown. He was unlike anyone I’d ever seen—tall, in a deep-gray shirt and pale blue jeans that made him seem carved out of moonlight. The two Feng brothers looked like toads in the mud beside him.
“You bastard, how dare you lay a hand on my brother!” Feng Zhuzhi scrambled up, a lunatic glare in his bloodshot eyes. Years of cruelty had twisted him—he had beaten the most beautiful women he got his hands on, even the wife his mother bought for him with the family’s burial savings; she’d been beaten to death along with three children born into those bruises. Feng Zhenzhen had escaped once she grew older; little Feng Qianqian had never been allowed out.
Now, seeing the man in the doorway like a god, Feng Zhuzhi lunged for destruction. He swung the shovel at the stranger’s neck.
“Xiu!” I cried, twisting to look for Wang Yingxiu, but the man stepped back a fraction, holding me effortlessly. The shovel’s arc sliced past us.
“Is he hurt?” the man asked.
He wore that same half-smile he always did, but something in it—cold and hungry—made me shiver. It was the smile of an unearthly predator, not the placid expression I’d seen before. For a moment his face seemed carved from hell itself, animated with a cruel relish that made my breath stop.
He noticed my fear. His thumb brushed my lip, and then, without warning, he pressed my head against his chest.
I couldn’t see what he did next, but the movement and the sounds were enough: it was a massacre, swift and one-sided. When he released me, the floor had become a lake of red. The two brothers were there—lifeless, drained of spirit—and their souls were gone, as if swept away. Only the two female ghosts, Wang Yingxiu and Feng Zhenzhen, cowered in a corner, shaking.
For a long second he stared at me. His pupils flashed with a red light, like embers, then settled back into a bottomless black.
“I’m hungry,” he said at my ear, then nipped the tip of my ear. “This place is filthy—ruins my appetite.”
“No—this isn’t why we came!” I snapped. I had not come to feed him. We had a mission: to settle the grudge between Wei Yuan and the ghost Feng Zhenzhen. Wei Yuan was still being held somewhere. If we didn’t act fast, he’d be dead.
“Wei Yuan—he’s been taken. He’ll die!” I pressed. I could still see, in my mind, Wei Yuan knocked senseless after Feng Zhuzhi’s punch. I’d been dragged into this squalid room and had no idea where they’d hauled him.
“I… I know.” The little girl I’d yanked up from the floor—Feng Qianqian—scrunched to the ground at our feet. She had watched the slaughter; her face was smudged with dirt, but she lifted it and offered a timid, eager expression.
“Kind sister, I’ll lead you,” she said, as if gratitude could smooth everything over.
Si Jiangchen gave a soft, disapproving chuckle at my insistence on rescuing others first. Feng Qianqian had never been spoken to with such gentleness; she trembled and nodded, then stumbled toward the broken door.
I looked back at the two ghosts huddled by the wall and nodded to them, then followed the girl out. The house was the Feng family’s narrow upstairs, with no proper staircase—just two wooden planks leading down.
“This… my sister paid for this floor with her savings,” Feng Qianqian said as we climbed. “She said it was for my brother’s wedding—so he could have a wife… Grandma wanted to buy him a place in the city, but he refused. He insisted on building here. We ran out of money. Grandma said cremating my sister would cost money, so she told us to bury her behind the house instead to save for my brother’s future.”
The words landed like stones. So that was why Feng Zhenzhen had been unable to move on: not some random curse, but the cruelty of her family—treating the dead like trash to spare a few coins. No wonder she refused to be soothed.
By the time we reached the courtyard, Bai Wei sat stiffly on a low stool. The four legs of the stool boxed her in; beneath them, the vicious old woman lay face-down, pinned and gagged, unable to move.
When she saw us, Bai Wei’s eyes flooded red. She didn’t rise—she only stared at Si Jiangchen and sobbed, “Jiangchen, I thought something had happened to you. I was so worried…”