One person: Starting with the Snow Drinking Blade

Chapter 451 The Origin of Red Eyes

"What happened to those two afterwards?" Lu Linglong asked.

"They were locked up." Liu San's voice deepened. "The town mayor locked them in a small room in the town clinic, saying there was an outbreak and they needed to be quarantined for observation. They died the next morning."

"Dead? Turned into a zombie?"

"We don't know." Liu San shook his head, rubbing his face and pressing his fingertips to his eye sockets for a long while. "The news has been suppressed. The town mayor said it was a common infection, and the limited medical resources prevented a cure. But everyone can smell it—the smell wafting from under the door of that small room in the health center—it's different from the smell of a normal dead body."

He paused, as if waiting for something, and continued when no one responded: "Three or four days later, other people in town started experiencing the same thing. It wasn't because they were bitten; some people were walking along the road when they suddenly collapsed, and when they stood up again, their skin had changed color."

"No external injuries?" Wang Ye's voice tightened.

"No external injuries." Liu San repeated confidently, "Some people I spoke to on the street the day before yesterday, and the next morning I heard they collapsed at home, and by the time they were found, they had become like that. That's when the panic in town started."

"What about the wedding?" Nie Lingfeng asked.

Liu San's lips twitched, but the expression wasn't a smile; it was more like a muscle contracting instinctively. "That was a catalyst," he said. "The town mayor's son, Zhao Xiaolong, was getting married to a girl from the next village. The date had been set a month in advance. At that time, things were already getting unsettled in the town, but the mayor said the marriage couldn't be changed; a joyous occasion would ward off bad luck and suppress the evil spirits. He sent people to fetch the bride, choosing a small path that went through the foot of the mountain, supposedly to avoid the forest. But the wedding procession still encountered that thing halfway there—just one, walking by the roadside, seen by a young man in the procession."

"who?"

"One of the young men in the wedding procession, named Zhao Xiaohu, is Zhao Xiaolong's cousin," Liu San's voice grew even drier. "That kid is young, bold, and very curious. He saw that thing by the roadside and insisted on going to see what it looked like. Others in the procession tried to stop him, but he wouldn't listen and went over anyway. The thing turned around and grabbed him—just a quick swipe, and he scratched his forearm. He said it was nothing, just a scrape, and covered it with his sleeve, not telling anyone."

"Then he came back."

"He's back. That night was the wedding banquet. Dozens of tables were set up in the town square, and everyone in town, young and old, was there. Zhao Xiaohu was fine at first, sitting at the table drinking and playing drinking games with people; nobody noticed anything unusual." Liu San's hands unconsciously clenched the fabric of his trousers at his knees. "Halfway through the meal, he suddenly stopped talking. The people next to him thought he was drunk and patted him on the shoulder to try and calm him down. When he turned around—" Liu San's eyes reddened, "his eyes had changed color. He just glanced at the people next to him, and then opened his mouth. And inside…and how wide his mouth was open…"

Zhang Chulan didn't press for further details. Liu San's description was enough for him to imagine the scene of the wedding banquet collapsing: a strange event suddenly erupted in the middle of a banquet of hundreds of people, and those nearby were caught in the first round of biting before they could even react, followed by a second and a third round. When it spread through the crowd at that speed, panic dismantled all order even faster than the infection itself.

"You just said that the other people in town also changed on their own even without being directly bitten," Nie Lingfeng's voice pulled Liu San back from that scene. "This change started before the wedding. But you and several of your colleagues haven't changed yet. What do you think is the reason?"

Liu San was stunned. He glanced at Lin Mei, Zhang Qiang, and Wang Daniu, then looked down at the back of his hand, as if checking if his skin color was normal.

"...I don't know," he said slowly. "I think about it sometimes. Many people in the factory are hiding in the workshop just like us, but some people who were talking together the night before are completely different the next morning. I don't know why some of us... are still here."

"Do you guys have anything in common?" Wang also asked, "For example, the nature of your work, the things you've been exposed to, the places you frequent?"

Liu San and Zhang Qiang exchanged a glance. Lin Mei suddenly spoke, her voice clearer than Liu San's, perhaps because she had recovered faster after replenishing her fluids: "...the bottom of the furnace."

"What?" Wang Ye turned to her.

"The bottom of the foundry furnace," Lin Mei repeated, her gaze fixed on the base of the massive cupola furnace deep within the factory. "The four of us... used to be responsible for cleaning the furnace bottom. Every two months, we'd go into the inner cavity of the furnace bottom to remove the remaining slag. Each time, we'd spend an entire afternoon there."

"What's under the furnace?" Nie Lingfeng asked.

Liu San picked up the thread: "The location of that sky furnace was determined when the factory was built. When they were laying the foundation, they unearthed a very thick layer of bluestone slabs, which was much more regular than normal underground rock strata and didn't look like it was formed naturally. The construction workers at the time said it might be some kind of old altar, but they didn't take it seriously. After smashing the slabs, they built the furnace foundation on top of it."

"When you were working at the bottom of the furnace, did you come into contact with any residue from the stone slabs?"

"There's a layer of dark green rust on the bottom wall of the furnace," Liu San said. "That rust is different from normal iron rust—it's not soft or brittle, and when you scrape it with a shovel, it feels slippery and resistant. Every time we finish cleaning the bottom of the furnace, we feel incredibly refreshed, like we've had a good night's sleep."

Wang Ye and Nie Lingfeng quickly exchanged a glance.

"That stone slab is located directly below the furnace," Nie Lingfeng said. "If something below is continuously releasing a certain kind of Qi—a Qi that is not of the same origin as the evil Qi in the town, and may even be mutually repelling—then you have been in its aftereffects for a long time, and your bodies have developed a tolerance to this other kind of Qi."

"You mean we have antibodies?" Lin Mei asked.

"It might not be called an antibody, but it's similar." Nie Lingfeng glanced at the four people. "So you've held on until now."

A moment of silence fell over the factory. Zhang Chulan's flashlight beam swept across the side of the furnace, casting a slanted shadow that reflected a dim arc of light onto the cast iron surface. The furnace was much larger than it appeared from the entrance, its top extending towards the higher skylight, its bottom sinking nearly two meters into an inner cavity below the ground. The cavity opening was covered by a thick cast iron grate, through which one could see even deeper into the darkness.

Wang Ye squatted down and touched the ground near the base of the furnace with his finger. When his fingertip pressed down, there were a few extremely fine, dark green veins under the grayish-brown soil surface. The color was so light that it was almost invisible, but they would slowly gather and disperse in the direction of his finger's rubbing, like a very slow liquid flow.

"Still alive," Wang Ye said softly.

"Who's still alive?" Zhang Chulan leaned closer.

"What's underneath," Wang Ye stood up, brushing the loose soil off his hands. "It's not completely covered by the evil qi. It's still releasing its own things at a very slow rate. That dark green texture—it's locked in a tug-of-war with the intruder, and although it's at a disadvantage, it hasn't been completely swallowed up yet."

Nie Lingfeng walked to the front of the furnace and looked up at the outline of the top of the Sky-Piercing Furnace. Sunlight streamed in through the narrow cracks in the skylight, casting tiny bright spots on the rusted iron walls. His gaze finally settled on a section of the wall where the furnace base met the ground—the dark green rust there was thicker than in other places, gleaming with a subtle, non-glaring sheen in the dim light.

"We'll hold this factory tonight," Nie Lingfeng said. "Tomorrow at dawn, we'll open the furnace bottom grate and see what's underneath."

Liu Si paused for a moment, then spoke in a tight voice, "Captain Nie, what...could be down there?"

Nie Lingfeng didn't turn around to look at him. His gaze remained fixed on the dark green rust, his voice low but carrying clearly in the empty factory: "It could be an old seal. It could be a broken monument. It could be something else—it's using its last bit of strength to hold on, preventing that eastern part beneath the town from swallowing up the entire area."

Zhang Chulan stood half a step behind Wang Ye, following his gaze to look at the furnace wall. He couldn't discern what the dark green patterns represented, but he saw Nie Lingfeng's index finger tap lightly twice on the Snow Drinking Blade sheath—a gesture indicating that he was repeatedly disassembling and reassembling something in his mind, as if testing some plan that had not yet been implemented.

The sky outside the factory was slowly darkening. The beams of light streaming through the skylight gradually shifted from slanting to vertical, then narrowed and faded, until only a single, thin beam remained suspended among the dust particles floating in mid-air. The dark green rust on the furnace walls became even clearer under the twilight, like something slowly burning beneath the darkness, its color deep but never extinguished.