Dead Memories

Where is this?

The thought had barely crossed Wang Xincheng’s mind when all that remained before his eyes was a swaying expanse of white.

He remembered the last thing he had seen: a wave of blood surging up from the elevator shaft, the stench of blood forcing its way into his nostrils. After that, every sound had been swallowed, and the figures around him had faded into darkness one after another.

When he opened his eyes again, rows of fluorescent tubes stretched across the ceiling.

They swept past his field of vision, glaringly white.

Wang Xincheng tried to turn his head, but his neck did not respond.

That was when he realized he was strapped to a gurney. His hands, feet, and chest were all pinned down by leather restraints.

There was even a strap across the base of his neck, positioned with meticulous precision. It prevented him from moving around, but did not immediately cut off his air.

As if he were some kind of patient.

Wang Xincheng had spent half his life practicing feng shui in Heung Kong. He had seen plenty of sinister things—mass graves, haunted dwellings, murderous formations, and the like.

But this place had none of the smell of incense ash, none of the roiling sensation of yin energy. There was only disinfectant, metal instruments, and a medicinal odor sharp enough to make his teeth ache.

He tried to speak.

His mouth did not move.

Not a single sound could be forced from his throat.

Something was wrong.

This wasn’t my body.

Wang Xincheng tried moving his fingers, but they would not budge. He tried blinking, but even that was impossible. It was as if he had been stuffed into someone else’s head, able only to look out through these eyes, with no control whatsoever.

The gurney was pushed down a corridor.

The paint on the walls had yellowed, and the fluorescent tubes flickered on and off.

There were doors at intervals on either side, numbers pasted above them. Some even had wooden plaques hanging from them.

The plaques bore crooked writing. From the corner of his eye, Wang Xincheng could make out only two characters:

Specimen.

The gurney stopped.

The door was pushed open. The wheels rolled over the threshold with a brief, grating thump.

A surgical light shone in the room, aimed directly at his face.

Beneath it sat a ring of instruments—knives, forceps, syringes, glass bottles—arranged so neatly that they looked less like tools for saving lives and more like a butcher’s equipment laid out before work began.

Two people in full-body protective suits approached from either side.

They were completely covered, with only their eyes visible behind their goggles. There was no trace of humanity in those eyes—only calculation and record-keeping.

One of them slapped the wrist of the body Wang Xincheng occupied and pressed down on the vein.

The other raised a syringe.

A pale red sediment swirled in the transparent liquid. The needle pierced the skin, and the drug was pushed into the vein.

There was no pain.

Instead, Wang Xincheng felt half a breath of relief.

But before that breath had fully left him, another syringe stabbed in.

Both injections were administered at the same time, with terrifying familiarity.

What kind of place was this?

Yangcheng?

Japan?

A hospital?

The instant his thoughts reached that point, his vision began to shake violently.

It wasn’t the lights shaking. His head was slamming against something.

This body had begun to move.

Its neck was held down by the strap, yet its head thrashed backward with all its strength. Once. Twice. The gurney board trembled beneath the impacts.

The strap across its chest pulled taut, while the restraints around its wrists shrieked against the metal.

Wang Xincheng could hear “himself” screaming.

It was not a normal human cry. It sounded as if the throat had been scraped raw with sandpaper, then the voice dragged forcibly from the lungs. When pain reached its absolute limit, the sound no longer resembled a human being at all.

The two people in protective suits took half a step back.

One lowered his head and began writing. The other picked up a new injection. He did not hurry to use it. Instead, he studied the veins bulging from the wrist.

The veins had risen beneath the skin.

Wang Xincheng saw them clearly.

This body was fairly robust, with broad shoulders and a solidly muscled frame—the body of a healthy adult man.

Yet now, the veins protruded one by one, swelling, shrinking, then swelling again.

The muscles spasmed. Something seemed to be scurrying beneath the skin.

Snap!

The strap around his neck broke.

With its head freed, the body slammed itself against the gurney even more violently.

Before the man in the protective suit could say anything, two more people entered through the door. One seized the shoulders, the other pinned down the legs.

Even with all four of them working together, the body continued to struggle.

The gurney was shoved sideways. Its metal wheels screeched across the floor, the sound sharp enough to pierce the ears.

Watching all this, Wang Xincheng felt a chill settle in his heart.

He understood.

This was not a nightmare.

This was someone’s memory of dying.

He had been strapped down here, injected, observed, and recorded—treated like a nameless piece of meat.

The screams gradually weakened.

But the spasms did not stop.

Fine red spots began appearing across the body. At first, there were only a few around the wrists. Before long, they had spread across the chest and every inch of skin.

Wang Xincheng had seen this before.

Subcutaneous bleeding.

This was not an ordinary reaction to poison. The capillaries throughout the body were collapsing.

If no one intervened, the man would be dead.

But no one in the room came to save him.

The men in protective suits merely continued taking notes.

The edges of Wang Xincheng’s vision began to darken.

The owner of this body was at the end of his strength. Only broken gasps remained in his throat.

Wang Xincheng wanted to open his eyes wider, wanted to get a clear look at the men’s faces, but their goggles concealed them completely.

Just as his consciousness began to sink, one of the people in protective suits suddenly cursed.

“These logs wither away far too quickly!”

It was Japanese!

These people were Japanese!

Wang Xincheng’s mind exploded with the realization. The next second, everything went black.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself back in the elevator.

He was still standing where he had been, one hand braced against the elevator wall, his palm slick with sweat. His throat felt stuffed with cotton, and for a long while he could not get a word out.

The people around him were still there, except all of them had their heads lowered, as though trapped in some kind of hallucination.

“Oh? You’re awake? Mr. Wang, you’ve got a solid constitution.”

Lin Mo sounded completely relaxed, as if he were the only person unaffected.

Wang Xincheng looked up at him, his throat painfully dry.

“They… What did we run into?”

He had meant to say dream, but swallowed the word before it left his mouth.

Dreams did not contain details like that.

The angle at which the needle pierced the skin. The reaction behind the goggles as the liquid was injected. The sound of pages turning on the record sheet.

Those things had been too real.

Real enough to make him uncomfortable.

Lin Mo glanced at the others, then said seriously, “Memories.”

Wang Xincheng swallowed.

“The memories of the people who died here?”

“Mm.”

Lin Mo said, “Their resentment couldn’t disperse, so it gathered into this thing. Whoever runs into it gets shown a scene. If you’re unlucky, you can see several in a row. And they’re all free, too—more considerate than the movies.”

Wang Xincheng did not respond to the joke.

His face had gone gray, but there was a suppressed fire in his eyes.

“I saw Japanese people. Two of them—no, there were more than two in that room. They were wearing protective suits and experimenting on living people. But this is Yangcheng. How could there be Japanese people here?”

The carelessness faded from Lin Mo’s expression, and his voice turned cold.

“Has Mr. Wang forgotten the Japanese invasion of China? Yangcheng was occupied for seven whole years back then.”

Wang Xincheng opened his mouth, but could not answer.

It wasn’t that he had forgotten.

It was just that so many things had been buried beneath the high-rises, shopping malls, and subway lines that came later.

Every day, people walked over the ground above them, buying coffee, rushing to work, complaining about housing prices. No one stopped to think about what had once been buried beneath their feet.

“Has Mr. Wang never wondered why the dragon vein was contaminated? Who was it that planted eight coffins at the Dragon’s Fang?”