There were no more words, only the sound of his and my footsteps walking on the snow.
Before we knew it, we had reached the door of the clinic. There was a light on in the gap between the wooden doors, and there was obviously a nurse on duty inside, but it was quiet, without the barking of dogs that I had heard when I arrived.
I knocked on the door, and it opened.
The person who appeared through the crack in the door was not the female nurse on duty last night, but a strange man in his forties wearing a white coat, who looked like a doctor in the clinic.
“Excuse me, has the clinic’s phone been repaired?”
“It’s fixed, it’s fixed. You want to make a phone call, right? Come in.” He opened the door and let me and Tunshe Nalin in. But as soon as I stepped into the clinic, something cold and hard was pressed against my temple. I was startled. The doctor actually had a gun in his hand. I looked behind him and saw that there were more than ten people standing in the infusion room in the corridor, all wearing black jackets and windproof hoods. Mo Wei was kneeling on the ground, with a gun pointed at his head and his mouth sealed with tape. When he saw me, he widened his eyes and kept making umm, umm sounds.
“Don’t move.” Said a rough voice.
“Tunshe Nalin, run!” I shouted, and then I heard a gunshot. A flash of fire passed by my ear, and the muffled sound of a human body hitting the ground came from behind!
“No!!” I roared and turned my head, only to see Tunshe Nalin standing there. There was a bullet hole in his chest, but not a drop of blood was flowing out. However, on the exposed skin of his neck and cheek, countless blood-red lines that looked like veins appeared.
I opened my eyes wide and was stunned.
“F*ck, who the hell is this person!”
“Damn it, this isn’t a human being. We can’t deal with him. Let’s go to that haunted house and call Ah Feng and the others over and report to the boss!”
There was a loud shout from inside, and I was strangled by the neck and dragged to the other end of the corridor. Then there were several more bangs, flashes of fire, and shells flying. All the bullets hit Tunshe Nalin. His long hair was flying, and his clothes were torn, but he seemed to feel no pain. He walked straight towards me, step by step. The gangster who held me hostage was obviously shocked by this scene, and the gun against my temple was shaking, but I was as horrified as him, so I couldn’t even struggle and looked at Tunshe Nalin stiffly.
—Not a human being?
“Let go of… him.”
Amidst the hail of bullets, he spoke in a low voice, but his voice had changed. It did not sound like something a human could make. It seemed to come from the abyss of hell, carrying the wails of thousands of ghosts, or like the howling of the north wind in the netherworld, rushing into the eardrums and reverberating and crashing between the skulls.
“Don’t come over here! Damn it! What the hell is that…” The muzzle of the gun moved away from my temple and was about to shoot at Tunshe Nalin when suddenly, there was a scream of ‘Ah’ behind me and the sound of glass shattering. I turned my head and saw that the gangster disguised as a doctor was pounced out of the window by a figure on all fours. Blood splattered three feet high and also on my face. A bloody mass was thrown against the wall and slowly slid down.
Those are intestines. Human intestines.
I retched, and my legs went limp, and I fell to the ground. I looked at Tunshe Nalin, who was walking towards me amid the hail of bullets, and then I retreated to the end of the corridor. Suddenly, a pair of pale hands stretched out from a door next to me, grabbed my feet, and dragged me inside.
When I saw a bloody face without skin, I almost fainted on the spot. I kicked and stabbed wildly; however, that ‘corpse slave’ holding my feet did not bite me but just knelt in front of me. I was so scared that I clung to the doorframe and crawled out: “Tunshe Nalin!”
I just took a look outside and was stunned.
In just a moment, the floor of the corridor was covered with winding and intertwined gray-white vines, which spread wildly towards the walls and ceiling and bloomed with blood-bright camellia flowers.
The gunfire shooting at him had stopped. From the infusion room inside the clinic next door came screams of pain. I couldn’t see the situation over there, but I could see the vines twisting and wriggling, like snakes devouring the flesh and blood of their prey.
And Tunshe Nalin stood in the center of the vines, like the trunk of a big tree, with his hands open and connected to the vines. These vines were formed by his ten fingers and torso.
His figure was twice as tall as before, and his head almost touched the ceiling.
I looked up—
Finally, I saw his eyes, which had always been covered with a black cloth, and I was not allowed to see them.
Between the mottled shadows of the tree vines and the ink-like, swirling black hair, there appeared a pair of blood-red eyes. That shockingly extraordinary face now had a grin that stretched to the ears, revealing sharp fangs, and across the exposed pale skin were countless blood-red veins and runes, just like the evil god statue I had seen standing tall on the lycoris radiata platform.
I suddenly realized something—
He is not a shaman, nor a human being… he is the legendary Corpse God.
And I had a ghost marriage with him.
This thought was like a thunderbolt, which blew my soul away. I couldn’t control myself and screamed loudly. I kicked the hands of the corpse slave holding my ankles and scrambled to escape from the window. However, my legs were suddenly tied by something thin and flexible. I was dragged into the air without warning. The next moment, a pair of cold hands grabbed the back of my neck, and my eyes met the narrow red eyes, that’s like a bloodthirsty beast’s at close range: “Where are you escaping to?”
“Ahhhh—” I was scared to death, and I instinctively struggled hard, pushing and hitting, but my hands were tied by the vines in an instant and tied behind my back.
He held me tightly with inhuman strength, his lips pressed against my ear, gently stroking my temples, and said hoarsely, “Don’t be afraid, don’t run away, Ranran… you said… you wouldn’t abandon me.”
I caught a glimpse of a bright red in the clinic next to me and turned to look—the ground was covered with blood and flesh, the vines were twisted and winding, countless cracks appeared on the vines, and long tongues full of sharp teeth protruded from their mouths, devouring the remains of those people. They had all been torn to pieces, and the ground was covered with broken limbs, hearts, livers, intestines, and bits of human skin and bones.
“Ugh—”
I shivered and retched, but he sealed my lips tightly.
He pushed me against the wall, covered my eyes, and kissed me among the corpses and flesh.
“Mmm!” I twisted my body, but the more I struggled, the deeper and more forcefully he kissed me. Finally, a string in my brain suddenly snapped.
Everything went dark before my eyes, and I lost consciousness.
In a daze, not knowing whether I was awake or dreaming, a loud explosion was heard nearby, the earth shook, and the surroundings were scorching hot, and it was getting hotter and hotter, as if surrounded by flames.
“Put out the fire, quick, put out the fire!”
“Why can’t this fire be put out? And it’s blue as well?”
“Atana, Zanbadasadewa—”
……
“Teacher Qin Ran? Teacher Qin Ran!”
I woke up with a scream.
As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw a face covered in charcoal dust, with messy golden hair, eyes wide open, and his black pupils reflecting my miserable appearance.
“Mo Wei?”
I looked around fearfully. The room was bright and transparent, with several beds. The facilities looked very new. It didn’t look like the small clinic in the town before.
“Where is this? Where is he, he?”
The fear in my heart could not stop rising, I hugged my knees and curled up.
“You mean the one who was with you…” Mo Wei was obviously still in shock as well and swallowed his saliva. “He killed many people. My camera was broken, and I didn’t have time to record it. No one will believe us. It’s also useless to call the police… What the hell is that thing? Teacher Qin Ran, how did you meet that kind of monster? And those men in black, you don’t know this, but they’ve been lurking around that town for days now. I have no idea what they’re up to… but could they be looking for you? What’s the entanglement between you and them?”
I shook my head, unable to answer his question, the wreckage of the broken bodies I had seen with my own eyes came back to me, and I couldn’t help but vomit on the side of the bed with a “wa” sound.
“Teacher Qin Ran!” He patted my back. “Nurse! Come quickly, he vomited!”
After drinking a cup of hot water and taking two stomach pills, I slightly recovered but still lay by the bed, too weak to move, trembling all over, the room spinning around me.
“Are you okay? Teacher Qin Ran, you… you are shaking so badly.”
I shook my head, overwhelmed by the immense fear pressing on my throat, and unable to speak.
I regarded a terrifying existence, whose true nature I didn’t even know, as my muse. I performed a marriage ceremony with him, fell in love with him, and even planned to bring him home to live together.
“Then, then what happened afterward? How did I end up here?”
Mo Wei scratched his head. “After I escaped in the chaos, I called the townspeople to come out and tried to go back to rescue you. But then, the clinic suddenly exploded, and I was knocked unconscious. I was told that the officers from the Kashag Police Station brought me here, and I didn’t expect to find you here as well.”
“Where is this?”
“Mutu. It’s the largest town in the Suwajia Mountain area, a tourist destination.”
An explosion occurred? Are those vines afraid of fire? Could it be that Tunshe Nalin…
My heart was filled with complicated emotions. I suddenly thought of something and slowly pulled up my trouser legs—the pair of anklets made of vines were still there on my ankles.
My heart skipped a beat.
If this was part of the vines on his body, he should be fine.
“Go, help-help me find a pair of scissors.”
“Ah, okay.” Mo Wei immediately handed over a Swiss Army knife.
I grabbed it, but to my surprise, as soon as I ran the blade back and forth, it became dull and bent.
I was stunned, but Mo Wei didn’t buy it. He switched to a serrated blade instead. Before it even made contact, there was a sharp “snap” as the blade shattered on the spot, the fragments nearly grazing his eyes.
We looked at each other, our faces as pale as death, and neither of us dared to move.
“Is this… is this what he gave you? He wouldn’t be able to track us down with this, would he?”
