His death was not a dramatic experience filled with light at the end of a tunnel. For Zhao Huang, death was merely a switch being turned off. The last sensation he felt was the cold of the marble floor of his luxurious Macau suite seeping through the fabric of his expensive suit, followed by the hiss of the final breath leaving his lungs, ravaged by cancer. Then, there was nothing. A silent, empty, timeless darkness. Like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Yet, that nothingness did not last forever.
His consciousness returned not with a bang, but with a slow hiss, like an old radio gradually picking up a signal. The first thing to appear was sound. Not any familiar sound. Not sirens, not whispers, not even crying. It was the sound of a soft, mournful wind whistling, sweeping through the empty space with a constant, melancholic tone. Then, came sensation. Not the pain from his cancer, nor the cold of the marble floor. It was a feeling of... emptiness. Lightness. As if he were merely an empty shell.
Zhao Huang tried to open his eyes. But there was no response. No eyelids blinking, no muscles tensing. He tried to move his fingers, to feel the luxurious carpet or the arm of a chair. All he got was a feeling of stiffness and dryness, like old, rotten wood. His mind, honed over decades of vigilance and strategy, immediately went on full alert. This is not Macau. This is not any place I know.
He commanded his arm to move, to feel his surroundings. There was a dry, crunchy scraping sound, like two dry pieces of stone rubbing together. Slowly, with tremendous mental effort, he managed to raise one of his arms. He tried to bring it before him, to "see". But what he "felt" wasn't flesh and blood. What he felt was a long, segmented form, with a rough texture full of small holes. Its end wasn't five fingers, but five pointed, stiff bony protrusions.
This... is not my hand, he thought, his inner voice flat, trying to deny the impossible reality.
He forced his strangely unfamiliar arm to touch the part where his face should be. Again, what he encountered wasn't a nose, lips, or skin. What he found was a smooth, round structure at the top, with two large, empty hollows beneath it, followed by a smaller cavity and a row of hard, sharp protrusions.
Panic, his old enemy which he had always managed to control, for the first time in decades, tried to pounce on him. My face! Where is my face?!
He tried to scream. He commanded his vocal cords to vibrate, to let out a shriek that could blast this panic away. But all that came out was... silence. No air passed through his throat because there was no longer a throat. No lungs to pump air. There was only an empty chest cavity and a cage of ribs bounding nothingness.
I CAN'T SPEAK! he screamed in his mind, and this time, his flat tone broke into raw desperation. Where am I? What happened? Is this after death? Hell?
His mind spun wildly, remembering his sins, the bloodshed he had caused, the harsh life he had led. Was this his punishment? Locked forever in a body that wasn't a body, in an unknown place, without a voice, without a way to communicate?
But Zhao Huang was not a man who gave up easily. He was the man who built an empire from nothing, who faced death countless times, and who even challenged cancer until the end. Panic was a luxury he could not afford. With a will hardening like steel, he forced himself to calm down.
Breathe, he commanded himself, a reflex from his former life. Of course, no breath came in. But the ritual, the act of focusing, worked. Calm. Think. Analyze.
He stopped trying to scream. He stopped fighting the strange sensations of his new "body". Instead, he began to accept them. He focused on what he could "feel". That wind. It was real. It flowed through the hollows in his ribs, sweeping through the empty eye sockets. He could feel the texture of the surface he was lying on—rocky, dusty, and uneven. The cold pierced his bones, literally.
He raised his "hand" again, bringing it right in front of... in front of what? He had no eyes. He realized that now. The two large hollows in his current face were empty eye sockets. But, strangely, he could "see" his hand. Not with normal vision, but with a kind of perception originating from within his empty skull. A vague mental image, monochromatic in shades of gray and pale yellow. He saw the long, dry bony fingers, the seemingly fragile joints, and the dull ivory color.
This... is a skull. His mind worked, trying to comprehend the illogical logic. I am a skull. A skeleton. But... how can I see? It was a question that baffled him. No optic nerves, no eyeballs, no brain to process images. Yet, he had consciousness, and he had a kind of sight that allowed him to see his own physical form and his immediate surroundings. It was the first mystery of the thousands he would face.
He moved his "gaze" from his horrifying hand to his surroundings. He was in a room—or more accurately, a cave? The walls appeared to be made of rough stone, dark and damp. The space was narrow. But what caught his attention wasn't the surrounding darkness, but a small point of light in the distance. It wasn't a bright or warm light. Its glow was weak, silvery, and flickered slowly, like a dying firefly or a very distant star. Yet, in the gloom of this place, that light became the only marker, the only point of reference.
Must head there, he thought. Remaining here would yield nothing but madness. He had to move. He had to seek answers.
He tried to stand. It was the strangest and most unnatural experience of his life—or his death. He commanded his legs to push his body upwards. There was a terrible creaking sound, like a pile of dry twigs about to snap. For a moment, he wobbled, almost falling and shattering into pieces. But his old survival instinct took over. He stretched out his arms (producing more creaking sounds) for balance.
His first step was unsteady and uncertain. His bony feet landed on the uneven ground with a worrying sway. Each step produced a loud, resonant "click-clack" in the cave's silence. He moved slowly, very slowly, like a baby learning to walk, but with a fragile body of death. Each step was a calculation, an effort not to crush himself into dust. He focused his entire consciousness on coordinating his hips, knees, and ankles, which were mere bones. That small light became his only compass, slowly drawing him forward.
After a journey that felt like hours, with the sound of his own creaking as the only accompanying music, he finally approached the source of the light. It turned out, it wasn't the cave's exit, but a large crack in the cave wall. The crack opened to the outside. The wind he had heard since the beginning grew stronger, sweeping through the crack and swaying his lightweight body.
He moved close to the crack and tilted his eyeless head upward. The view that stretched out nearly shattered his already fragile consciousness.
He was not in an ordinary cave. This cave was located on the side of a giant cliff, towering high. Below him, thousands of meters down, sprawled a dense, dark forest, with giant trees that looked like grass from this height. In the distance, a range of jagged mountains split the horizon, their peaks shrouded in rolling mist. The sky was not a sky he knew. Its color was purplish-red, adorned by two moons—one large and silver, the other smaller and bluish—and stars that twinkled in unfamiliar patterns.
This... is not Earth, he thought, and this time, even his inner voice sounded empty and hollow. All his achievements, his empire, his struggles, his death—all of it was meaningless. He had been thrown into a completely alien world.
He watched as the sun—or something that functioned like a sun in this world—slowly set behind the distant mountain peaks. Its sun was a deep orange, larger than he remembered, and its light cast waves of purple and gold that flooded the already strange sky. The view was truly breathtaking, so majestic and full of mystery, yet perceived by one who was dead, by a consciousness trapped in a skull.
With a final creak, Zhao Huang—or the entity that was once Zhao Huang—sat down on the edge of the cliff, right at the mouth of the cave. His bony legs dangled over the deep abyss. He tilted his head towards the sky, his empty eye sockets staring straight at the two moons beginning to shine brighter.
There was no more fear. No more panic. There was only a deep and silent acknowledgment.
I am dead. But I still exist. I am a skull on a cliff in a world not my own. My old kingdom is gone. My cancer is gone. All that remains is... me. And this mystery.
He sat there, unmoving, a statue of death carved upon a cliff of alien life. The wind blew through the hollows of his bones, producing a low, melancholic whistle, the only sound his "body" could produce. In the silence of his mind, a new resolve began to grow, rough yet hard as steel. A resolve similar to that of the eighteen-year-old youth who decided to survive on the streets of Shenzhen.
Very well. If this is my second life, or a continuation of death, then I will face it. I will seek answers. I will unravel the mystery behind all this. I am Zhao Huang. I once mastered an ocean of crime. Now, I will try to understand this ocean of strangeness.
And under the light of two alien moons, a skeleton sat alone on a high cliff, the root of a new, dark, and puzzling life, ready to explore the darkness that awaited him.