The dead had terrible manners.
Lin Yu had his back pressed against an overturned reading desk, listening. Something was scratching at the history department's double doors. Not frantic, not desperate. Rhythmic. Like it was testing the wood, figuring out where the weak points were.
He'd been stuck in the NTU library for three days now. Three days since the sky cracked open like someone had dropped a porcelain bowl across the whole atmosphere, golden fractures running horizon to horizon. Three days since his phone buzzed with a notification he'd never signed up for.
[Karma Ledger initialized. Welcome to the Divine Convergence.]
He'd laughed. Not a good laugh. The kind of laugh you make when you're alone in a dark building and a floating golden interface just appeared in your peripheral vision, showing five bars all sitting at zero. Below them, one line:
[Seal Assignment: Pending...]
Everyone else got theirs within hours. He'd watched from the library windows as people on the street stopped mid-step, golden light flaring out of their chests. One woman started freezing puddles solid just by walking near them. Some guy sprouted wings, actual feathered wings, white like something off a Tang dynasty temple mural.
Lin Yu got nothing. Pending. For three days.
The scratching stopped.
He held his breath.
Six translucent fingers punched through the door like it was wet cardboard.
"Shit."
He rolled left as the whole door blew inward. Three figures came through the wreckage. Humanoid, sort of. Made of grey mist and something that felt like hunger given shape. Hungry ghosts. Egui. He'd studied them in Professor Chen's folklore seminar last semester. Bloated stomachs, throats thin as needles, mouths that could never be filled. The textbook called them "metaphors for desire."
The textbook was wrong.
Lin Yu grabbed the fire extinguisher he'd stashed behind the reference shelf. Only thing he'd found that worked on them. The pressurized spray broke their forms apart for a few seconds. He'd figured that out on Day 1 when one drifted through the men's restroom wall while he was filling water bottles. Not a great moment.
He sprayed the lead ghost in the face. It scattered into wisps and started pulling itself back together.
Three seconds. He'd timed it.
He ran.
Through the central aisle, past overturned shelves. The mythology section, where he'd basically lived for three years, was a barricade now. He'd built it on Day 2 out of textbooks. He vaulted the wall of books and landed hard in the study alcove behind it.
Two seconds left. The ghosts would follow his scent or his heat or whatever it was they tracked. Hunger doesn't need eyes.
His hand closed around something on the floor.
He hadn't meant to touch it. His hand just moved. The small green stone had appeared in the alcove sometime during Day 2. Rough jade, warm, humming at a frequency he felt more in his teeth than his ears.
Don't touch unknown objects in the apocalypse. That's rule number one. Everybody knows that.
His hand didn't care.
The golden interface went haywire the moment his skin made contact. Numbers spun. Bars flickered. Where [Seal Assignment: Pending...] had been, new text burned in:
[Seal #0: ??? -- Status: ERROR]
[Resonance: Forced -- Depth: 1]
[WARNING: Unregistered seal detected. Correction protocol queued.]
Pain shot up through his palm. The jade dissolved into his skin like sugar in hot water, leaving a faint green glow under the surface. The scar on his left hand, thin white line from when he fell off a wall as a kid, lit up for a second and went dark again.
The hungry ghosts crashed through his barricade.
Lin Yu's feet hit the floor. And he felt them.
Not the ghosts. The floor.
Every crack in the tile. Every beam underneath. The building's foundation going down into the earth like roots. All of it, mapped in his head as vibration and density and weight. He could feel the ghosts too, or rather the absence of them. Three cold voids in the vibration pattern. One straight ahead. Two coming around the sides.
Tremor sense. The word popped up from some RPG he played in high school. But this wasn't anything like a game. It was like having a second nervous system wired into the ground.
The lead ghost lunged at him.
He sidestepped without looking. The vibration data got to his body before his eyes caught up. A void shifting two meters left, accelerating. He ducked the second ghost, felt its non-mass as a cold gap in his awareness.
The third one came from above. Floating. No floor contact. No signature.
It grabbed his shoulder. Cold punched through his arm, and with it came a flash of something alien. Hunger-emptiness-never-enough-always-starving. The ghost's entire existence, transmitted through contact like an electric shock made of nothing. Lin Yu yelled. Not pain exactly, more the sheer wrongness of that void.
He slammed his hand into the ghost's face. Didn't think about it. The fragment's energy surged through his fist on instinct, a shockwave of vibration that ripped through the thing's form. Not like the fire extinguisher's three-second disruption. This one shattered it. Grey mist blew outward and dissolved.
The other two ghosts froze. Then they ran. Back through the ruined door, gone.
Lin Yu stood there in the wrecked library. Breathing hard. Left arm numb. Right hand buzzing with leftover energy. The green glow under his scar pulsed twice and settled to a faint warmth.
His Karma Ledger hadn't moved. Five bars still dead center at zero. Grey. But where a seal name should have been:
[Seal #0: ??? -- Status: ERROR]
[Fragment absorbed: Earth God (Tudi Gong) -- Shard]
[Correction Tribulation scheduled: 72:00:00]
Seventy-two hours. That's what the system was giving him before it sent something worse to fix its mistake.
He laughed again. Same hollow sound as before.
"I'm a bug," he said to the empty room. "Everyone else got superpowers and I got a bug."
He flexed his tremor sense, pushing it outward. The building sang back at him. Five floors of concrete and steel, structural weak points, exit routes he'd already memorized, weight distributions shifting as the wind pushed through broken windows three stories up. Beyond the walls he could feel the city. Taipei, but wrong. Hundreds of footsteps scattered across the surrounding blocks, each one a tiny drum beat against his awareness. Some were heavy with the weight of new power, vibrations dense and hot. Others were just stumbling. Normal people trying to find somewhere to hide.
The campus was mostly empty. A few clusters of survivors in the engineering building across the quad. Some kind of makeshift barricade at the main gate, two people standing watch. He could feel their heartbeats from here, fast and scared. They wouldn't last long if anything bigger than hungry ghosts showed up.
He looked up through the broken window at the golden sky. The cracks ran from one horizon to the other. He'd assumed they were random. But from this angle, head tilted, the lines almost looked like they connected into something. Like strokes.
Like writing.
He blinked and it was gone.
Seventy-two hours.
He grabbed his backpack. Three days of scavenged food, phone at 34%, and a beat-up copy of Fengshen Yanyi he'd grabbed without really thinking about why. Headed for the stairs.
If the system wanted to delete him, it could get in line. Right now he needed somewhere that wasn't a university library full of holes to not die in.
His tremor sense picked up something to the south. Past the mess of Zhongzheng district. A single point, steady and warm. Strong.
Longshan Temple.
He started walking.