Ankang Hospital (安康医院). Kunming, China.
Inspector Li Guoming (李国明), a grunt from the Kunming National Security Detachment (昆明市公安局国安支队), stomped out of the main building, his stride frantic. He'd just been blindsided by a sudden flash-notice: a big wheel from the central office was rolling in, and he was already late to the party.
As he reached the curb, a big black Hongqi (红旗) sedan drifted into the lot, looking as heavy as a house and twice as important. A man in a charcoal-dark suit stepped out, moving with a focused, urgent haste. He wore sunglasses that looked like polished obsidian. Li felt his pulse start to red-line. Being a local badge-carrier, he didn't deal with the high-flyers from the capital often. He felt like a green grunt again, his stomach starting to perform those fantastic rubber acrobatics that come with the fear of looking like a country palooka.
But as Li approached, the big-shot's face cracked into a wide, jagged grin. He snatched off his shades and threw his arms out wide, waiting to envelope Li in a manhug.
"Ming-zai ((明仔)! It's been a coon's age, and look at you—all high and mighty!" the man bellowed, his laughter a startlingly full-bodied sound that drifted off into the afternoon air. He slammed into Li, a hug so tight it felt like being caught in the gears of a machine.
"Xiao Feng (小峰)! Is it really you? You scared the living shit out of me!" Li shouted, his voice thick with a relief that tasted like sweet water after a long drought.
"In the flesh, buddy. How's it going? Look at us—thirty-eight years on the clock and you're still sporting that twenty-something face. Though you've turned into a bit of a porker, haven't you, old friend?" Zhao Feng said, his smile beaming as he clapped Li's belly with a hand that felt solid and real
"Not bad," Li Guoming said, trying to match his friend's easy tone. "Pays the freight and keeps the home fires burning. But what about you? Last I heard, you were riding a desk for the Beijing Economic Development Commission. What wind blew you into this particular corner of hell?" Li felt a jolt of curiosity, a quick lightning-stroke up from his gut that made his pulse start to red-line.
"The machine's grinding, that's what," Zhao Feng replied, his smile as bright and fixed as a new coin. "Let's get out of this sun. I've got a dozen questions for you, but the lead-in is simple: take me to the survivor. The one they pulled out of that charnel house in Cambodia."
They had shared the same dirt since they were knee-high, growing up in a pissant village in Yunnan. They'd walked to school together until the road forked in high school. Li had beelined for the capital and the Police University (PPSUC : People's Public Security University of China), leaving the childhood snapshots behind. But in the secret heart of a man, some connections are like a physical weight you don't just put down.
Meeting at Ankang Hospital was no social call; it was a monolith under the Ministry of Public Security (MPS)—a madhouse for people whose histories were too dangerous for the world to read. The wing they were entering was a steel-and-cinderblock tombstone where the watchers kept the machinery of security running tight. The patient Zhao wanted to see was a dead-letter file brought back to life, the weirdest case on the books.
This particular piece of human wreckage was the only soul left breathing in a ruined casino that had become a rat warren for global scammers. Chinese undercover agents—playing the role of ghouls looking to buy 'fresh human hearts' for the black-market butchers—had found him during a raid on that Cambodian hellhole near the Thai border. He was the only one left standing when the machine finally stopped grinding.
The Scene was a void violently painted with massive, terrifying quantities of blood. Not a single body was left to rot, but the evidence of a charnel house was everywhere—blood and human fluids geysered across the floorboards, the walls, and even the God-damned ceiling in slow, oily gouts. This was a four-story tombstone of a building, with three levels rising into the humid air and one sinking deep into the dark of a basement.
It was a rat warren for global scammers, no doubt about that. The investigators found a pissant graveyard of computers, hundreds of cell phones, nearly a thousand SIM cards, and a high-speed nerve system of internet cables and massive data servers. There was enough gray cash and heavy war-gear to outfit a small army. They reckoned dozens of souls had been caught in the gears here, but now they were all missing, leaving nothing behind but the copper-iron stink of slaughter.
The only piece of human wreckage left breathing was a thirty-five-year-old named Lu Wen. He was a Handan boy, a slow-motion programmer who'd been meat for the machine back on the mainland before swallowing the hook for a fake job offer. His past was a flat pancake of career failures, and he had no criminal spark—just a spent shell with no financial ties to the gang.
The investigators couldn't get a straight story out of him; his mind was performing fantastic rubber acrobatics of terror. He was a shivering wreck, babbling in a dry, shivering rattle about feathered engines of nightmare and demons that swallow their meat fresh. But the real kicker—the thing that froze the marrow in the search party's bones—was what Lu Wen was cradling in his hands: a raw, dripping hunk of a human liver.
Through his incoherent screams, he claimed bird-things with jaundice-yellow eyes had torn through the metal bars like they were wet cardboard. It sounded like the raving of a lunatic, but the physical evidence didn't exactly scream 'lie.' The security doors weren't just opened; they were a ruin of shredded steel, looking as if some giant, prehistoric machine had simply decided to rip them apart. Broken glass and mangled burglar bars were everywhere—a final testament to a reality that had gone fundamentally wrong with the world.
"Six or seven demons had been processing the inhabitants of the casino with a horrifying, rapid consumption. Lu Wen would frequently fall into shivering rattles, his mouth propped wide in a blabbering shriek: 'They eat them alive! They eat them alive!'. As for the raw, dripping hunk of human liver the programmer had been found cradling—he claimed it was all that remained of Darin, the Thai woman. He told the authorities that one of those feathered monstrosities had simply handed it to him like a party favor after it had finished unmaking her heart and lungs!
It was a story that defied every instructional manual of logic, a lunatic narrative that the rational mind simply could not swallow whole. Yet the physical evidence didn't exactly scream 'lie'; the casino was a void violently painted with blood, saliva, urine, and human waste. The staining gore geysered across the floorboards, the walls, and even the god-damned ceiling. Initially, the officials clung to the mundane, favoring a theory of a targeted assault by rival 'Grey Chinese' factions—leaving Lu Wen alive as a spent shell, a bloody testament to their malice.
The young programmer had been hauled back from the Cambodian border and tucked away in a steel-and-cinderblock tombstone—a high-security psychiatric ward under the Ministry of Public Security—with Inspector Li Guoming as his designated watcher. The two old friends stood behind the one-way glass, watching the human wreckage. Lu Wen was lost in some private, faraway static, pacing the room in a blind, rat-like scramble while babbling in a dry, shivering rattle. Zhao Feng scanned the reports, his face a hard scrawl of dread, before finally closing the last dead-letter file.
"Ming-zai," Zhao said, his voice sounding heavy as stone. "We've run into a big thing here".
Li Guoming's pulse started to red-line; he knew this man didn't deal in fairy stories.
"What I'm about to relate to you will seem uncanny and grotesque," Zhao continued, his expression already severe. "But it's the result of years of painstaking analysis by our division. I need you to understand, Ming-zai: I'm working for the 9th Department now. I'm the machinery of the investigation"
"The 9th Department... you mean 'BICP' the Bureau for Investigation of Critical Phenomena?" Li Guoming's eyes rolled like trapped rabbits in their sockets, wide with a sudden, jabbing shock. A secret like that was a monolith, a high-level ghost in the machinery of the State that a local badge-carrier like Li only knew through the dry whispers of the grapevine.
Zhao Feng gave a short, grim nod. He patted his old friend's shoulder with a hand that felt as heavy and solid as stone. "The thing that turned that scammer nest into a charnel house? I estimate it was the Gu Diao (蠱雕) —a feathered engine of nightmare recorded in the ancient bones of the Shan Hai Jing," he rasped.
Before Li could choke out a question, Zhao squeezed his shoulder tighter, a grip like the gears of a machine closing in. "Listen to the tale," he urged, his voice falling into a dry, shivering rattle. "The ancient scrolls say: 'Five hundred li to the east sits Mount Lu-wu... where the Ze-geng river spills south into the Pang. In that water lives a beast called the Gu Diao. It looks like an eagle but sports an ivory horn. Its voice is the wail of a human infant. It eats men.' "
Zhao pulled out his phone, the screen casting a sickly, sallow glow over the ancient Chinese characters:
又东五百里,曰鹿吴之山... 泽更之水出焉,而南流注于滂水.水有兽焉,名曰蛊雕,其状如雕而有角,其音如婴儿之音,是食人.
"The babbling from that survivor? That piece of human wreckage we're watching?" Zhao's voice was now a sliver of ice cutting straight into the meat of the soul. "His story is a perfect map to this abyss. It wasn't a gang war that unmade those scammers, Ming-zai. It was this ancient devil."
"But it's the babbling of a lunatic, Xiao Feng—no, Officer Zhao!" Li Guoming barked, his dissent as sharp as a dry branch snapping. "This Lu Wen is a complete wreck. His mind's gone south into a private, faraway static, and every word coming out of his mouth is just garbage!"
"Did you see the tail end of his statement? The part before the world simply gave up the ghost for him?" Li continued, his voice a hard scrawl of frustration. "It defies every instructional manual of logic. I was the one who logged that fever-dream myself, Zhao. He was talking in circles, his words a dry, shivering rattle. It took me an age to stitch that mess into a report, and I'm telling you now, it's the gospel of a madman, pure and simple!"
Li finished his tirade and glanced at the sign bolted to the door of Room 407—a cold slab of institutional plastic marking a cage in this steel-and-cinderblock tombstone:
MENTAL HEALTH CENTER (精神卫生中心)
Room Number: 407 (病房编号:407)
Treatment Level: High-Security Surveillance (诊疗级别:特级监护)
PRECAUTIONS: (注意事项)
NO VISITORS. (禁止探视) DAILY PSYCH EVALUATION REQUIRED. (每日心理评估) REPORT ANY ABNORMAL PERCEPTIONS IMMEDIATELY. (如发现异常感知,立即报告)
Any way you sliced it, in Li's mind, this was the narrative of a lunatic—a mind that had performed its final rubber acrobatics and snapped. It wasn't exactly a shocker; after all, Ankang was a Psychiatric Hospital, and the air here was thick with the musty odor of broken souls.
The man from the 9th Department turned to his old friend. He let out a sigh that sounded as heavy as stone, a low whistle of air through his teeth. He didn't speak yet, but Li felt a cold lead of certainty in his gut—Zhao Feng had a dozen things he wanted to say, things that would likely freeze the marrow in Li's bones."
.........….