Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I went down to the first floor and knocked on Dashun’s door.

After knocking for ages, it was Shao Xing who opened it, his eyes still heavy with sleep.

“Where’s Dashun?” I asked.

Shao Xing rubbed his eyes. “I wasn’t feeling too well tonight, so Dashun went to keep an eye on the truck for me.”

The moment I heard that, I hurried outside.

It should have been the latter half of the night. A deathly pale moon hung in the sky, washing everything around me in a ghostly white glow.

Nights in the Great Northwest were terrifyingly quiet. The land was vast and sparsely populated; aside from the wind moaning across the wilderness, there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

I passed through several stone houses and walked to the open lot where we’d parked the trucks.

Since we were afraid someone might steal the coal, we’d left someone in almost every truck.

But whether it was because it was too late and everyone had fallen asleep, or for some other reason, I couldn’t say.

As I walked over, I didn’t even see the glow of a single phone screen.

When I got close to Dashun’s truck, I suddenly heard a faint voice.

It was very soft and thin, as if it were saying, “Hungry… so hungry… hungry.”

I strode quickly to the front of Dashun’s truck and saw a pale white shadow plastered against the window on the driver’s side.

It stood upright on two legs, its body long and thin, its face pressed tightly to the glass.

I didn’t get a clear look at what it was. I just swung the Soul-Whip at it!

There was a sharp crack in the air.

The thing seemed startled by me and whipped its head around.

My heart jolted.

Because for one split second, I thought I was looking at Dashun.

The features on that face really did look a lot like Dashun’s.

But the thing’s skin was clearly wrong. It had no pores, no texture, and was as smooth as an inflated balloon.

Worried that it had hurt Dashun, I lashed out with the whip again.

But in an instant, the thing dropped to all fours. With its head tilted back against its spine, it scuttled under the truck like a spider, moving unbelievably fast.

I chased it in a circle around the truck, but somehow, it vanished without a trace.

I quickly went back to the front of the truck and opened the door. Dashun was leaning back in the seat, his face deathly pale. He looked as if he were suffocating, and even his lips had turned purple.

I called his name twice, but he didn’t wake up. Then I tried pressing the philtrum below his nose.

Only then did Dashun suddenly suck in a sharp breath and open his eyes.

I waited for Dashun to catch his breath, then asked him what had just happened.

Still badly shaken, Dashun said, “Brother Long, I don’t know if it was a dream or real. I was planning to close my eyes for a bit, but as soon as I did, I heard someone outside knocking on the truck door. He said he was hungry and asked if I had anything to eat.”

“I said I did, and I was just about to get something for him when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a deathly pale face rise up from below the window.”

“I jerked my head around to look, and it scared the hell out of me.”

“That thing didn’t look like a human face at all. It was more like a flat sheet of dough! All its features were sunken in, but its mouth could still move, and it was still talking.”

“Right after that, my head went fuzzy, and I didn’t know anything anymore…”

I comforted Dashun for a while, then took him back to the stone house to rest.

After that, I returned to the parking area.

I circled Dashun’s truck and checked it over, but I didn’t see anything strange again.

However, beside the rear wheel, I found a dark mark that seemed a little odd.

I bent down slightly and immediately caught a sharp, foul, fishy stench.

Had Dashun run over something while driving? Or had it gotten on the tire somewhere else?

I was puzzled, because the smell was very much like some kind of rotting fish.

In the dry Great Northwest, that was a smell you almost never encountered.