"Alright, Ming-zai. I get you. When I first started punching the clock for the 9th Department, my stomach was performing those same fantastic rubber acrobatics." Officer Zhao Feng said, letting out a long, heavy sigh. He tilted his head back, staring up at the ceiling—a cold slab of institutional white. "But look—indulge an old friend and listen to a couple of folk tales. A few dark legends. Hear me out to the end, then we'll jaw about it. Do it for the sake of the old days, okay?" Zhao offered a jagged little grin and clapped Li's shoulder with a hand that felt as heavy as stone., Li Guoming realized he was boxed in; he simply nodded.
Zhao didn't wait for an answer. He nudged Li toward the rear exit, a steel-and-cinderblock portal that led to the smoke-break area. He struck a light for Li, then one for himself. They stood in the quiet for a stretch, watching the blue smoke rise in little bunched balls that hung in the stagnant air. Finally, Zhao's voice broke the silence, sounding dry and raspy.
"I've got a yarn for you. A story the Taoist priests used to whisper, way back at the jagged end of the Han Dynasty..."
"Near a dead lake at the foot of Mount Lu-wu (鹿吳之山), there was a thing—a Gu Diao. It was a feathered engine of nightmare that crawled out of the water but looked like a monster eagle with a single ivory horn. It let out a shriek that sounded like a newborn baby—a high, thin wail that froze the marrow in your bones. People reckoned it used that sound to bait men in luring them into the tall grass before it started processing the meat.
But the Gu Diao was a picky eater. It had a nose for human rot. It craved the particular stink of a black soul. Back then, when the law was a dead letter and the strong handled the weak like cattle, there was a rich bastid named Tian (田). He was a small-hearted, cruel piece of human wreckage. He ran his loans like a scam, sending his grunts to collect with their knuckles and charging interest that felt like a high-voltage shock. No money? He took the crops. No crops? He took the people for slaves. If a man's wife or daughter was pretty enough, he'd pluck her like a ripe fruit for his own bed. If anyone bucked the machine, he killed them cold., That kind of cruelty made a black misery simmer through the whole village. They say that distilled human evil acted like a sweet incense—a dark perfume that called the Gu Diao out of the deep to feed.
One night, the Gu Diao rose from the surface of the swallowing blackness. The moment its feet touched the dirt, the feathered engine of nightmare shifted. It transformed into a pale walking skeleton of an old man, his nose a sharp, hooked beak and his eyes as empty as twin abyssal pits. He stood there by the road, wrapped in a rotted straw mat that looked like a discarded shroud.
Master Tian, a small-hearted and cruel piece of human wreckage, came riding out of the city with his pack of grunts. When they drew near, the old man unhinged his jaw and let out a shriek that sounded like a baby being processed in a slaughterhouse—'Waaa... Waaa... Haccch!'—a high-voltage sound of pure agony that froze the marrow in their bones.
Tian ordered his men to beat the old bastard, to drive him from the path, but the old man didn't flinch. He didn't even seem to feel the blows. Instead, his jaundice-yellow eyes fixed on the rich man's chest. He sniffed the air as if catching the scent of a gourmet meal.
'The stink of your black soul acts like sweet incense.' The devil rasped. 'I crave your insides, soaked in the bitter oil of your cruelty and greed.'
Before Tian could choke out a word, the old man began to stretch and writhe. His eyes flared with amber fire and his mouth elongated into a heavy, gray scavenger-bird beak. With a strength that was fundamentally wrong with the world, he pinned Tian to the ground. He didn't kill the bastard quick; he used that razored beak to unmake him. He plucked out the quivering organs, eating the meat bite by bite while his victim was still drawing rasping breaths and screaming in a way that defied every manual of logic. Tian's servants tried to run like rats in a drainpipe, but by dawn, they were all just more meat for the machine.
When the butchering was done, the Gu Diao shifted back into its horned-eagle form and slid into the dead lake as if nothing had happened. It left behind only a twisted, gutted ruin of a corpse—a bloody testament to the black-hearted men of the earth."
"That's the yarn," Officer Zhao Feng said, his voice as dry and raspy as a winter wind. "The Tale of the Demon of Mount Lu-wu." He didn't wait for a reaction. He simply flipped to the final, blood-greasy page of the statement and began to read aloud, his voice dropping into a low, rhythmic cadence that made the air in the room feel stagnant.
"Big Brother Zhang was converged upon by three of those feathered engines of nightmare." Zhao read. "They didn't just kill him; they processed him. They jacked him up against the wall by his throat and used those razored beaks to hollow out his middle while he was still wide enough awake to shriek like a child in a fire. In a heartbeat, his torso was a void—nothing left but a jagged, splintered spine dangling from a pelvic ruin. Then one of them went to work on his face, plucking out his eyes, his tongue, and his brain like they were choosing delicacies from a box of chocolates. Ge Feng, the head cook, was pinned to the floorboards. They unmade his belly and ate his innards fresh, yet the poor bastard died with a foolish, slack-jawed grin pasted to his face. Then one of those monstrosities approached Darin, unhinged her, and handed her liver to the programmer like it was a party favor..."
"The gospel of a lunatic!" Li Guoming barked, the sound like a dry branch snapping. "The kid's mind performed its final rubber acrobatics and snapped. He saw a gang war—a real charnel house massacre—and his brain just opted out. He made up monsters to make the blood mean something. It defies every instructional manual of logic!"
"Ming-zai..." Zhao Feng said, his expression becoming severe, a hard scrawl of dread. "I know this tastes like spoiled meat. But look at the map of this abyss. This legend isn't some penny-dreadful everyone knows. It dates back to the jagged end of the Han Dynasty. How does a slow-motion programmer from the mainland describe a demon that matches ancient bones word-for-word if he didn't see it? It's a confluence, Ming-zai. A dark one."
Zhao leaned in, his eyes becoming twin abyssal pits. "And it's not the first time this machine has ground its teeth in this corner of hell. My division dug up records from seven centuries back. You know the name Zhou Daguan? The traveler who penned The Customs of Cambodia (真臘風土記 : Zhenlafengtu Ji)? He was looking at these same shadows seven hundred years before we ever rolled into this particular nightmare."
"Ah... I've heard the name." Li Guoming replied, his voice sounding thin in the stagnant air. "A mainland bureaucrat who trekked into the Cambodian wilds back in the Yuan Dynasty."
Officer Zhao gave a short, grim nod. He huffed out one last plume of smoke—a great, frustrated cloud—before crushing his cigarette in the tray with a final, violent twist. He spoke with a slow, heavy cadence, the kind of voice that made Li's pulse start to red-line.
"That's the man. But in Ambassador Zhou's traveling party, buried among the scholars and the merchants, was a priest from the Longmen branch of the Quanzhen Sect: Changchun Zhenren—Yun Yangzi (长春真人 · 云阳子). Now, any pissant history book will tell you the Quanzhen followed the Mongols since the end of the Song, gaining mass and power during the Yuan. But here's the kicker, Ming-zai—the part they don't teach in the academy: the Quanzhen, and specifically that Longmen school, was the original engine of "Department 9." They hammered out this secret division at the jagged end of the Song Dynasty, a machine built to handle things that are fundamentally wrong with the world."
Zhao raised a hand, cutting Li off before he could throw a question into the gears. He looked like a man reading from a dead-letter file.
"Changchun Zhenren left a record of that voyage across the sea. He claimed the real mission wasn't diplomacy—it was the processing of the Gu Diao. He and two of his brothers worked together to box the beast up in Cambodian soil. They used a compass to hunt for the "Yin Eye" (阴眼 : Yīn Yǎn)—the land's own negative pulse—and built a stone trap there. They laid out a sequence of decoys, luring the Gu Diao into the cage before binding it with sorcerous chains forged from Lightning Mastery (雷法 : Léifǎ). Finally, they scattered the ritual sands to draw the Taiji Suppression Array (太极镇魔图 : Tàijí Zhèn Mó Tú) and conscripted the locals to pile a seven-story stone stupa over the top, capping it like a tombstone. It's all there, etched into the archives of the Longmen Quanzhen since the third year of Yuanzhen—around 1297."
"Utterly uncanny..." Inspector Li Guoming muttered, his face performing those fantastic rubber acrobatics of pure, unadulterated shock. He felt his pulse start to red-line as the weight of the story settled in his gut. "Are you telling me these things—these demons—are real? Actually breathing air in this world? It defies every instructional manual of logic".
"The machinery of truth doesn't lie, Ming-zai. There are records—cold, etched evidence in the ancient bones of the archives." Zhao Feng replied, his expression becoming a hard scrawl of dread. "Ten days before I rolled in here, a flash-notice hit my desk: that seven-story stone stupa—the one boxing up the Gu Diao—finally gave up the ghost and collapsed. But verifying the damage is a suicide run; that corner of hell on the Thai-Cambodian border is a furnace right now. Both nations are hammering each other with heavy war-gear, and I reckon that ruined casino is just another heap of cinderblocks by now. That makes Lu Wen—that poor piece of human wreckage in Room 407—the only key we've got left in the lock".
"I get the priority on the programmer." Li said, a jolt of curiosity hitting him like a high-voltage shock. "But why the late party? The machine moved him out of Cambodia three months ago. Did the 9th Department just get the memo, or has the clock been running slow at the capital?".
Zhao Feng leaned in, his eyes becoming twin abyssal pits. "The Bureau's known for three months, Ming-zai. But I was blindsided by a charnel house in Northern Thailand. Another nightmare pulled straight from the Shanhaijing—a holy day of slaughter at a hot pot joint called Sheng Ri Huo Guo (圣日火锅). Ten souls were unmade there. The scene was a void violently painted with massive, terrifying quantities of blood, but—just like that Eternal Luck hellhole—there wasn't a single body left to rot'.
Zhao's voice dropped into a dry, shivering rattle. 'I had to investigate. Our top bloodhound, Senior Detective Lin Feitian ( 林飛天 ), vanished into the static at the scene, along with a whole squad of grunts. We reckon the Sixteen Night Walkers (十六巡夜) processed them all. Made them just more meat for the machine."
Officer Zhao's voice dropped into a low, rhythmic cadence, heavy as a stone. "These abominations pulled straight from the ancient bones of the Shanhaijing... they aren't just appearing, Ming-zai. They're converging in this short, jagged window of time. It's not a coincidence; it's an omen. Something big is getting ready to break the world."
"Gu Diao... the Sixteen Night Walkers..." Li Guoming muttered, his mind performing fantastic rubber acrobatics as he tried to swallow the news whole. "If those demons are real, then the reality we know is a dead-letter file. Tell me what the machine needs from me, Zhao. I'm in."
"The machinery of this investigation has two main gears." Zhao said, his eyes becoming twin abyssal pits. "First: why was that piece of human wreckage, Lu Wen, the only soul not processed into fresh meat? And second: the ghost in the machine connecting both charnel houses. The owner of that ruined casino in Cambodia and the hot pot joint in Thailand is the same grey-market magnate. A man named Deng Liangcai (鄧良才)."
"Bao Zheng Deng!" Li's eyes rolled like trapped rabbits in their sockets, wide with a sudden, jabbing shock. "I've heard that name. He's a monolith in the dark places of the world."
Zhao Feng's expression became a hard scrawl of dread. "There's a third link, Ming-zai... and it's the reason I've come to pull you into this particular corner of hell. It's a child-snatching case—a kidnapping ring back in our own dirt, back home in Eryuan County (洱源县 : Ěryuán Xiàn)."
When Zhao finished, they shared a long, heavy look—two old friends realizing they were standing on a trapdoor that was finally about to give way."
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