“Am I... not dead yet?”

Luo Feng swallowed the spike in his skull, then clawed himself upright like a man surfacing from black water.

“This is a battlefield.”

A soft woman’s voice brushed his ear like silk, and he snapped awake as if ice hit the spine.

Blankness filled his eyes, sheet after sheet of white—an empty world, no breath, no green, no hope, a desert of snow without a sound.

Yet the blurred figure before him struck his mind like a spark on steel, and memory tore back the veil of white.

Fire blossomed in an explosion; an engine roared like thunder; and then... that vast black shape that covered the sky like nightfall at noon.

Luo Feng retraced the path that threw him into this strange place, thread by thread, breath by breath.

What the hell was that thing?

It had been an ordinary day—clock in, clock out, then grab a bag of sweets girls loved, and drive with a friend to check on his friend’s little sister.

They rolled into a familiar tunnel mouth, and in a blink the world flipped like a table in a storm.

The car was ripped from the road and pitched down again like scrap tossed by a wave; jokes vanished; death opened like a whirlpool.

Just before he died, one thing burned into him—the black shadow that roofed the sky, a night that swallowed noon.

Mysterious, terrifying, irresistible—the brand seared into his brain like hot iron, and pain flooded him whenever he reached for it.

Does a power like that exist in the world?

Maybe only gods hold that kind of weight, like mountains pressing the sea.

“Not a god. The opposite of a god.”

The soft voice turned rigid, a mechanical woman’s tone, like a program executing orders, cold as polished glass; irritation crawled over his skin.

“Am I... dead?”

That was the only question that mattered, the line of fire between shadow and light.

“You died.”

Two voices braided together, hard and soft, like blade and silk woven into one grip.

“Is this a miracle?”

Luo Feng trembled; when the car flattened, he had felt death clean, like a small boat swallowed by storm and night, senses snuffed to ash.

We grant you life.

You will fight for us.

“Wait—fight? Fight what?”

He learned to bear both voices in his skull like twin currents, then pushed a question back against the tide.

Not yours.

To consider.

The voices warped like tape stretched too thin, and the white world twisted like heat over a road; time and space lost their names.

“Hey, wake up...”

A familiar voice lapped at his ear; he opened his eyes to a face smeared with blood, then a hand clamped his mouth, and he bucked like a hooked fish.

“Don’t move. It’s me!”

Luo Feng cooled a little, and the face resolved through shadow.

“Cheng Fu? What happened to you?!”

The tunnel was dim, the voice low and grave, and Luo Feng matched him, dropping his tone to a whisper like footsteps on glass.

By the thin light, he saw bite marks all over Cheng Fu’s arms, jagged moons big and small, some so deep the bone grinned white—yet no blood seeped.

No way a car wreck made those; even a fool wouldn’t buy that, not with marrow peeking like frost.

“Keep it down, man. Look at the big rig over there.”

Cheng Fu hauled Luo Feng up and pointed at a sixteen-wheeler flipped in the tunnel’s gut, its cargo box twisted like a crushed can.

Under the sickly light dripping from above, a warped figure stood on the bent container, human-tall but with a giant left arm, thick as three men’s thighs, grotesque in the yellow haze.

Light from above? Why was there a jaundiced glow in a tunnel? The lamps should only rim both ends like rings.

The thought stabbed, and Luo Feng jerked his head up.

A headless body hung pinned to the ceiling by a bone spike that speared the chest, nailed in like a cruel flag; the light leaked from its open belly like a lantern in a corpse.

“Damn it, Cheng Fu—what the hell is that?!”

“That one just got killed by that freak. I woke a bit earlier. Both monsters crawled out of that damn container.”

Luo Feng’s heart thrashed like a drum, breath grew heavy like bellows. Fear should rule here—yet a bright fever rose in him instead, a wild edge of excitement.

“A bunch crawled out. The one on top hasn’t looked our way once. It ate every last one of the things I took down.”

Terror was carved all over Cheng Fu’s face like cuts in bark. He was braver than most, sure, but who could watch a man-shaped thing swallow others whole and stay stone-calm?

“What now? Slip out the back, quiet?”

Luo Feng fixed the twisted monster with a hunter’s stare. The thing didn’t twitch; it posed like a statue on rusted metal, still as stone.

“Hard... very hard. The guy above us tried to run for the back. Got nailed there in one shot.”

Cheng Fu spread his hands wide to sketch the scene, and Luo Feng could picture the moment like a freeze-frame of doom.

“Now announcing mission.”

The cold, mechanical woman’s voice cut in, and Luo Feng’s eyes snapped to Cheng Fu; Cheng Fu was already looking at him, pupils tight.

“You too?”

“Shh... listen.”

As if it had waited for their whispers, the voice rolled out again, clipped and chill.

Mission Target: Kill the Variant Vampire Test Subject.

Mission Description: Big body. Brains, not so much.

Mission Reward: 5,000 Evolution Points. Communication access unlocked.

Mission Failure: Death.

One minute until the subject resumes movement.

Resumes movement? So the warped thing had been frozen until now, a chained storm about to break?

It also explained why the ceiling corpse died first and they were spared like fish slipping a net. But what were Evolution Points? What was communication access?

What... was this?

Was he inside a game’s skin?

Luo Feng shook his head, clearing fog like rain off a window. Questions could wait; the minute could not. He dug through the “scrap pile” for a weapon with a scavenger’s urgency.

One minute. Only a minute of rope, then the cliff.

“Luo Feng, the voice gave us a hint—vampire test subject. So it might share the old vampire weaknesses, right?”

Cheng Fu’s whisper brushed the wreck like a breeze. Even with a minute of grace, sound might draw teeth. A sliver of an edge was still an edge.

“Stay cautious. It’s an experiment. It may not inherit every vampire flaw.”

Luo Feng pried open the trunk, shoulders tight, and exhaled when luck smiled.

“Good. High-lumen flashlight and a survival axe are intact. One extinguisher left. You’ll have to make that work.”

He shoved the extinguisher into Cheng Fu’s hands, then ripped his shredded shirt into strips and lashed the axe and flashlight to his palm, knotted tight as a sailor’s rope.

Against the unknown, a dropped weapon equals a grave. Better paranoid than dead; neither of them wanted to leave their names in this tunnel.

“Cheng Fu, set it up like I said...”

“Are you sure about this?”

Cheng Fu’s face was a storm about to break, lines cut deep.

“Go! Time’s almost up!”

Luo Feng shoved him away and ghosted toward the truck like a shadow hugging steel.

“Time’s up!”

The monster on the container loosed a roar that rattled bolts, and the word “mission” slammed from abstract to real like a door in the wind.

A life-and-death moment—yet Luo Feng felt a clean calm spread, a winter lake smoothing to glass; even his heart fell back to a steady drum.

“Monster! Over here!”

He snapped the flashlight on and blasted the beam into its eyes. The creature bellowed and charged, giant arm windmilling like a falling tree.

The rush backfired. Twisted metal bit into its meat like a bed of thorns, and the thing howled, voice scraping stone.

Luo Feng raised the axe and chopped for the neck, clean and decisive, no hesitation to muddy the swing.

No matter the monster, take the head and it shouldn’t dance.

He ripped the axe free for a second strike—then needle-hot pain stitched through him in a flash, cold raced his spine, and he dove outward on instinct.