The night was as dark as ink, so thick it seemed like congealed old blood that could not be dissolved.
Jiang Han stood in the center of the deserted street. The dim yellow halo of the streetlamp cast a distorted shadow on the ground. The cold wind rolled up a few withered leaves, making a rustling friction sound that was particularly piercing in this dead silence of the night.
He raised his hand, looking at the black silhouette swaying in his palm with his movements, a look of incredulous confusion in his eyes.
Just a few minutes ago, he was still on the familiar Earth, but now, the air was filled with a nauseating stench of decay—the scent of something ancient and evil.
"Where is this..."
Jiang Han whispered to himself, his voice echoing on the empty street without provoking any response.
Suddenly, a gloomy, cold chill shot from his spine to the top of his head without warning. It was not an ordinary cold, but a trembling sensation as if his bone marrow had been frozen. He instinctively wanted to turn back, but found his body as stiff as rusted machinery.
Directly behind him, a fuzzy black shadow was slowly peeling itself away from the corner of the wall.
The thing had no fixed shape; it was like a lump of crumpled rotten mud, or like a piece of human skin twisted in pain. It had no facial features, only a bottomless fissure, emitting a sharp hiss similar to a baby's cry.
A vengeful spirit.
This absurd word popped into Jiang Han's mind instantly, but the scene before him forced him to believe it. In this crumbling world, reason seemed to be the most useless thing.
The mass of shadow squirmed and approached Jiang Han. As it moved, the surrounding light seemed to be swallowed up entirely. The streetlamp sizzled, and the glass bulb shattered instantly.
Darkness descended.
Jiang Han's heart beat violently. The fear of death drowned him like a tide. However, just as the vengeful spirit was about to touch the back of his neck, a sudden mutation occurred.
The shadow beneath his feet suddenly came alive.
That black silhouette, originally formed merely by the projection of light, now looked like a greedy giant mouth. It suddenly rolled upward, extending toward the mass of the vengeful spirit in defiance of common sense.
There was no violent collision, nor was there an earth-shattering sound.
That terrifying vengeful spirit, the moment it touched Jiang Han's shadow, melted away silently like snow encountering boiling water. The shrill crying stopped abruptly, replaced by a satisfied whisper, as if from the abyss.
Gulp.
Jiang Han clearly felt a stream of air, cold yet full of power, rush straight from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull. The sensation was not painful; instead, it carried a strange pleasure, as if a missing part of his body had been instantly filled.
The streetlamp lit up again, although it remained dim.
The street returned to its dead silence, as if everything just now had been a hallucination.
Jiang Han gasped heavily for breath, cold sweat soaking his clothes. He looked at his feet in horror—that shadow seemed deeper and heavier than before, like a bottomless dark pool.
And in the depths of the shadow, a painful human face could be vaguely seen struggling, before sinking completely.
"It... was eaten?"
Jiang Han tremblingly reached out his hand, wanting to touch the ground, but stopped in mid-air.
He realized that this world was far crazier than he had imagined. And he himself seemed to no longer be that ordinary human being.
In this otherworld where ten thousand spirits roam at night and rules crumble, something inside him was awakening.