Chapter 1: The Fungus

  When the emergency call came in, Lin Xiaotang was staring blankly at the mold stains on the wall of the duty room. The dark green streaks resembled the creeping ivy in the corridors of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, always reminding her of the urban legends she had heard during her training.

  "Hello? Is this 911? I need to report something!"

  The man's voice exploded through the headphones, carrying the distinct lazy drawl of a Beijing native. In the background, there was the faint sound of metal scraping. Lin Xiaotang glanced at the surveillance screen, where the red light of the storm warning cast blood-like streaks on the glass.

  "There's a foreigner lying on the road faking an injury, probably high on something," the caller whispered. "Yeah, yeah, his skin's as black as coal, and he's holding a controlled knife..." Suddenly, there was the sound of fabric tearing, followed by a dull thud of something heavy hitting the ground. "I bet fifty cents he's an illegal border crosser!"

  Lin Xiaotang's goji berry tea rippled in her thermos. From the monitoring room, Old Zhang let out a snort. "That damned 13th Ye Xie Alley again? Last Wednesday, Team Three went to check it out. The whole street is just bubble tea shops."

  "Thank you for your contribution to public safety," she said, biting her lower lip to keep from laughing, her nails leaving crescent marks on the duty roster. "Can you tell me the exact location?"

  "This place is freaky..." The sound of glass crunching under shoes came through the phone, and the man's breathing suddenly quickened. "13th Ye Xie Alley, that's what the navigation says."

  The lid of her thermos clattered onto the keyboard. Lin Xiaotang remembered the case file photos she had seen on her first day: the scene of a 1998 serial murder case. The victim's skull was caved in like a walnut gnawed by a beast, and even the tabby cat at the alley entrance was frozen in a bristling, arched-back posture. The most horrifying part was that on the night before the case was closed, the reclusive old man with a limp had smashed his own skull with a polished cane—and the cane tip contained the DNA of all the victims.

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  "Officer? Are you still there?" The line was now filled with static. When the call-back prompt indicated the phone was off, she suddenly noticed the surveillance footage flickering: in the live feed of the food street, the character "邪" (evil) on a bubble tea shop's sign was bleeding like ink.

  ...

  Ji Tian took a half-step back, his nose catching a strange mix of rust and decaying organic matter. The black man curled up on the ground was foaming at the mouth, his right hand still gripping a knife—if the twisted lump of metal could still be called a knife.

  "Money! Give me..."

  "Bro, your broken English with that ancestral skin is such a stereotype, you know?" Ji Tian nudged the man's twitching wrist with the tip of his shoe. "No money, but if you want a life..." He suddenly froze. On the man's hand was a tattoo of a counterclockwise mandala.

  Three years ago, on a rainy night, he had seen the same pattern on the wrist of a corpse floating by the moat.

  His phone suddenly vibrated in his pocket, and the sweet voice of the navigation system chimed in: "Turn right ahead, I've been waiting for you~" Ji Tian felt a chill run down his spine—he had thrown that SIM card into the moat long ago. Even more bizarre was the sound of a cane tapping against the brick pavement behind him, the rhythm precise, like some kind of Morse code.

  "Young man, do you know how to get to 13th Ye Xie Alley?" A hoarse voice crept into his ear, carrying the scent of formaldehyde from a funeral home.

  Ji Tian turned slowly, his pupils contracting sharply. The bald old man's head was covered in rapidly growing "misfortune mushrooms," their black fungal threads piercing through the rain and embedding themselves into the brick walls on either side. From the moss-covered cracks in the walls, countless pairs of blood-red eyes suddenly opened.

  "Your way of asking for directions is quite unique," he said, reaching for the baton at his waist, his fingers brushing against the sticky secretion of the fungal threads. The old man grinned, revealing tiny mushroom caps wriggling between his gums. "Twenty-three years... Finally, someone who can see the mushrooms..."

  In the distance, police sirens wailed. Ji Tian suddenly noticed that from the missing tip of the old man's left pinky finger, a crystal-clear death cap mushroom was blooming.