Panic spread like plague among the villagers, twisting faces and widening eyes with silent, contagious terror.
Yesterday's weasel theory crumbled to dust. All eyes, drawn by an uncontrollable dread, turned silently, as one, towards the southern slope.
"Run—! Are we waiting to die?" Zhao's wife shrieked, her voice cracking.
"Run where?!" Li the Third roared, his own face deathly pale. "Nothing but mountains! Die of hunger or exhaustion trying to climb out? Or feed whatever's in them?"
He scanned the faces of his neighbors, people bound to the land for generations. "Wait! Maybe... maybe some unknown beast has come down from the deep mountains!"
Hope. Like cheap morphine, it briefly numbed their fraying nerves.
Before dusk, every household barred their doors and windows, hanging heavy cloths over the openings. Children and elders who usually slept separately now crammed onto the main room's wooden platform, wide-eyed and sleepless in the dim glow of oil lamps.
The air hung thick and stagnant, heavy with sweat, stale urine, and leftover food. Only ragged, rapid breaths pierced the suffocating silence.
Every rustle of wind through grass or bamboo sounded like the scraping claws of the horror drawing nearer.
They dared not sleep deeply, dared not close their eyes.
When exhaustion forced a momentary nod, a sudden gasp – their own or a neighbor's – would jolt them awake, drenched in cold sweat that soaked their stiff, worn tunics.
This fragile illusion of safety, woven from thin window paper and desperate lies, was utterly shattered and trampled into the mud in the darkest hour before dawn on the seventh day.
A colossal sound – like splintering wood and a bellowing beast combined – erupted violently from the eastern end of the deathly silent village! Short, brutal, it slammed like an invisible hammer onto the taut nerves of every frozen body!
As the sky lightened to a corpse-like grey, the horror was finally unveiled.
The thick wooden door of Carpenter Zhang the Fourth's isolated house on the east side now resembled shredded paper.
One door, frame and all, had been ripped bodily from the wall and lay discarded in the mud. The other was shattered into jagged fragments, jammed grotesquely into the brickwork beneath the doorway.
A stench hit them like a tidal wave – the thick, metallic reek of blood mixed with the putrid sweetness of ruptured innards.
The first villager brave enough to creep near immediately collapsed onto the muddy path, retching violently, heaving as if to turn his stomach inside out.
Gathering their last shreds of courage, the horrified crowd pressed forward.
When the scene beyond the threshold seared itself into their vision, every breath stopped dead. Souls felt ripped from bodies by a giant, icy hand!
The main room, the inner chambers...
everywhere the eye could see, space was painted in a horrific, abstract tapestry of hell. Layers of dried rust-brown and fresh crimson gore splattered the grimy mud-plastered walls!
The floor was invisible beneath a thick, congealed carpet of blackened blood, studded with unidentifiable chunks of flesh and bone!
High on the walls, sprayed arcs of scarlet and purple-black blood stained the white paper, clinging strands of torn hair stuck within it.
Carpenter Zhang's burly frame, honed by years of woodwork, lay sprawled in the center of the carnage.
His chest was a collapsed, gaping cavity, revealing splintered white ribs amidst shredded muscle.
His wife's body was half-draped over an overturned bed, her head gone. The remains of their two half-grown children resembled broken dolls savagely torn apart, scattered in opposite corners...
No screams. No wails. The crowd at the doorway became statues – faces the color of grave dirt, eyes vacant and glassy. Ice shot up from their feet, freezing hearts, guts, and limbs solid.
A dark yellow stain spread across someone's trousers, quickly absorbed by the cold mud beneath their feet.
A crushing silence pressed down, threatening to burst chests. Into this suffocating void, a small, frantic rustling came from the back of the crowd.
It was Li the Third's fifteen-year-old boy. Shaking like a leaf caught in a gale, trapped in a nightmare, his fingers dug deep into a woman's arm beside him.
His eyes bulged, slowly, dreadfully turning towards the equally pale, almost unrecognizable face of Li Erwa in the throng.
"...the grave... south slope grave..." The boy's voice was a strangled rasp, like a file scraping rusted tin. "Go look... Uncle Li's father's grave... is it..."
A jolt of pure terror surged through them all! Even despairing grief froze solid under this sudden, icier thought.
The crowd exploded like hornets poked with a hot iron!
A few of the usually bold young men, fueled by a surge of adrenaline born of utter terror, scrambled, crawled, practically ran on all fours towards the southern slope!
When the grave mound – watered by summer rains and should have been greening over – slammed into their petrified vision, they didn't need to get closer. The soul-shattering sight rooted them to the spot.
The grave? The grave was gone!
Li Erwa's father's carefully mounded earth tomb looked as if packed with dynamite. An immense, savage force had erupted from within, blasting it outward from the center!
Dark, wet earth was flung, torn, and scattered in a vast circle of devastation yards wide! Shattered stones and torn turf lay embedded in the splattered mud like battlefield debris.
The most hideous focal point was the heavy, expensive cypress coffin – the sturdy vessel meant to shelter the dead.
Now, it lay like refuse spat out by a giant after being chewed and splintered! Thick, broken planks were strewn everywhere.
The longest fragment of the lid was even embedded deep in the trunk of a nearby pine.
Others lay twisted and mangled in the blast crater, some flung into distant ditches and ponds, smeared with sludge and dark green moss.
And at the epicenter of this ruin gaped a hole – almost vertical, pitch-black, and unfathomably deep! Like the earth itself had opened a demon's maw! The edges of the hole were grotesquely torn and clawed, as if something had ripped its way out.
Strands of eerie, ghostly white hair, like tangled spider silk, clung to the edges of the damp, shattered wood and the wet mud walls of the pit. They glowed faintly in the weak, pale morning light.
From the depths of that hole welled a denser, far more ancient stench – the icy, cloying reek of millennia of rot! It rose silently, relentlessly, coating the nostrils and throats of the living, seeping into their very pores.
Li Erwa collapsed with a heavy thud onto the churned mud at the edge of his father's desecrated grave.
He lay like a rotten log, eyes wide open. No tears came, only the suffocating sensation of a drowning soul strangling his throat.
Heiniu, who had reached the front, trembled violently, teeth chattering uncontrollably. A warm, wet stain spread down his trouser leg, blooming on the cold mud.
They tumbled and scrambled back down the slope, their terrified whimpers and involuntary retches tearing through the cold dawn air.
Stumbling steps carried them through puddles and thorny brush, bearing the appalling news back to the blood-soaked village.
Deep within the hole, absolute darkness and silence reigned. Yet, in the nearly stagnant air, an impossibly faint sound seemed to penetrate the thick earth – a low, pervasive resonance in the dark.
Like countless tiny insects gnawing on rotten wood. Or the slow, deliberate scraping of a blade on stone. Cold. Viscous. Dripping with malice.