Northeast Thailand... Three months before, Officer Zhao Feng and Li Guoming would be caught in the gears of the machine in Eryuan.
Tian Shu (田枢) sat hunkered in the sallow shadows of a fourth-floor storage room. At twenty-seven years on the clock, he had a face so clean and fine that people often mistook him for a girl, but there was no sissy-boy softness in him. He was a human hawk, a man who had already survived a world of pain. His frame might have looked fragile at a distance, but up close, it was all lean, corded muscle and zero fat, like a machine stripped down to its essential parts.
Even with the sun bleeding out of the sky, the summer heat in the Northeast was a heavy blanket, a solid thing. The mercury was red-lining past 30 degrees Celsius, sending sweat tracking down Tian Shu's chin to drip onto the dusty floor like a slow leak. He stayed as still as a stone effigy, not even venting a sigh to shed the heat. He kept his head low, just a sliver above the window ledge to stay out of the glass eyes of the world, his gaze fixed on the rooftop of the abandoned building next door., It sat one story lower than his current sarcophagus, and he watched a small-fry gang of seven or eight pigeons pecking at the rice-grain bait he'd scattered there earlier.
This neighborhood was an artifact, an old Chinese quarter that had once been the beating heart of the city's trade. Now, the gears of progress had moved elsewhere, leaving the area to rot into a pissant slum. Most of the buildings were over forty years old—spent shells that the world had simply given up on. Only a few still held the shivering rattle of life.
The building Tian Shu was currently haunting belonged to a senior friend, a man who was the family's designated failure. This friend was a washout—a lazy bastid who couldn't handle the grind of school or the machinery of a real job. Every venture he touched stripped its gears because he didn't have the patience to see it through. Eventually, he'd crawled into this tombstone of a family building with his wife, living for free because the family had stopped caring about the property altogether.
This fourth floor was a dark gallery of neglect, a place where no one ever bothered to climb. The air was thick with the musty odor of old paper and a swampy reek of stagnant time. Thick roadmaps of dust covered the floor and the riot of junk piled in the corners. There were even bird carcasses and mummified rats drying in the shadows, not to mention the big-ass geckos that lurked behind the rotting cabinets like prehistoric watchers.
But Tian Shu didn't give a damn about the stink or the vermin. He just sat there on his hunkers, a focused, urgent engine of patience, his eyes never leaving the neighboring rooftop.
The last light of the day was bleeding slowly toward dusk, and the gloom began to settle over the neighborhood like a heavy blanket. Suddenly, Tian Shu saw a dark, hunched shape creeping toward the pigeons. In the fading sallow light, he could make out the figure of a woman with an Inverted Bob haircut, wearing a sleeveless dress with navy and white stripes. She was creeping on her belly with an agonizing, focused slowness until she was within range. Then, she performed a sideward predatory lunge, her hands snatching a pigeon with the speed of a snapping trap.
"Aiya! She's for real!!" Tian Shu groaned, a dry, shivering rattle escaping his throat. He watched, frozen, as the woman unhinged her jaw and used her mouth like a dark, empty hole to bite into the bird, processing the creature alive—feathers, bone, and all. Tian Shu shook his head, his mind a void of logic, and began to back away in a blind, rat-like scramble toward the exit.
Just as he reached the stairwell door, Tian Shu paused to cast one last glance at the neighboring roof. The woman was standing now, staring straight at him with eyes like twin abyssal pits of absolute blackness., She was using one hand to wipe a Rorschach of blood and wet feathers from her mouth and cheeks.
"Aiya! She saw me!" Tian Shu gasped. He tried to hold his ground, forcing a fixed, radiant smile onto his face—the kind of nursery-rhyme sweetness intended to hide a world of pain. He tried to act as if he'd seen nothing out of the ordinary, but the woman let out a high-voltage shriek—Aao!—and simply vanished into the static.
Panic flared in Tian Shu's chest. He rushed to the window just in time to see her perform fantastic rubber acrobatics, leaping the gap between the buildings and clinging to his wall like a dark insect. In a matter of seconds, she was scuttling up the masonry with the boneless grace of a lizard. Before he could even draw a breath, she tumbled through the window and stood before him in the sallow, murky light of the storage room.
"Why did you come here?" the woman asked. Her face was as flat and clinical as a washed blackboard, but her eyes burned with a predatory intensity.
Before Tian Shu could find a lie to save his skin, she leaned forward and hissed a chemical curse of a question: "You know now, don't you? You know I'm a Phi Pop!"
(The Phi Pop is a primordial horror of Thai folklore—a malevolent spirit that possesses the human machinery, turning the host into a flesh-eating engine of nightmare. It craves the swampy reek of raw meat and live prey, but its real sport is the slow slaughterhouse operation of the host's own body, plucking out the quivering organs and eating them from the inside until the spent shell finally gives up the ghost.)
"Easy now, Ah-Jie... Simmer down," Tian Shu said, his voice a calculated nursery-rhyme sweetness, though his legs were already performing a blind, rat-like scramble toward the exit. "You're no Phi Pop. The real deal? It doesn't look a damn bit like this."
Suddenly, he barked at the shadows behind the woman's inverted bob: "Hey, Big Brother! What the hell are you doing up here on the roof!?"
The woman jolted, her gears stripping as she whirled to look. Tian Shu seized the heartbeat of a chance, lunging through the door and taking the stairs three at a time—a centrifuge of desperate movement. The woman realized she'd been played; she let out a high-voltage shriek and tore after him, her dress snapping like a liquid whipcrack in the sallow stairwell.
Tian hit the second-floor landing and skidded to a halt beside a man waiting in the gloom. The woman burst through the door, a feathered engine of nightmare, but the moment she saw the newcomer, she simply gave up the ghost. Her predatory snarl dissolved into a mask of shivering nerves. She went from a hunter to a spent shell of a housewife in a single, final snap.
"Honey... when did you get back?" she stammered, her voice a dry, shivering rattle. "Don't listen to this pissant kid. He's just spitting out fever-dream static!"
The man—her husband and Tian's senior friend—looked at her, his face a roadmap of trauma. "I've known for a long time what you were doing in the dark," he rasped, his voice sounding heavy as stone. "I called Tian to help me process the math. Stop the raid, honey. The whole neighborhood is starting to pick up the scent."
"Honey... I... I didn't want the machine to work this way!" The woman began to leak big, storybook tears, but her eyes—those twin abyssal pits of absolute blackness—never left Tian Shu. "You... you little bastid! I'm going to strip your gears for this! We were doing fine in our own private static until you came along to tear us apart!"
She let out a shivering rattle of a growl, her hands hooking into skeletal talons as she lunged to clamp them around Tian's throat.
"Ah-Jie's no Pop!" Tian Shu shouted, standing his ground as the pulse in his neck began to red-line. "I'm telling you, the real thing? This ain't it!"
The husband, a short, thinning piece of human wreckage, gawped at them. "What are you talking about?" he bleated, his mind a void of logic. "You just told me she was on the roof processing that bird alive! Catching the pigeon and eating it like spoiled meat!"
"Ah-Jie's been tampered with by a chemical curse, Big Brother," Tian Shu said, a grin performing fantastic rubber acrobatics on his face. "It's not a Phi Pop operation; it's just the Gu Worm (蛊)—a nasty little black-market hex that's stripped the gears of her mind and made her run on a ghost-program."
In a single, final snap, Tian lunged forward with focused, urgent haste. He jammed his left thumb into the notch between her eyebrows—a strike like a hammer on a nail—then flicked his index finger against the skin above her upper lip. His right hand fished a small ceramic bottle from a dark gallery of his pocket. He popped the cork—a sound like a liquid whipcrack—and funneled a pungent, red liquid down her throat. It smelled like burnt aviation fuel and old secrets. He hammered his thumb into the crown of her head, then caught her before she could collapse into a spent shell, jacking her jaw up to force the chemical curse all the way down.
"Get the bucket, Big Brother! Fast!" Tian barked. The husband—a shorter, thinning piece of human wreckage—scrambled to grab the plastic-lined spittoon. A heartbeat later, the woman began to perform a shivering rattle of a heave, her eyes rolling back into white astonishment. Tian clamped his hand on her jaw, forcing the mouth of the machine open. Out came a viscid, pustulant jelly of dark green bile, a swampy reek of old blood, meat scraps, and bird feathers.
Tian stroked her back with a slow, clinical rhythm as the centrifuge of her stomach emptied. She gasped for air like a fish out of water, looking ready to give up the ghost. Floating in the stinking, necrotic sludge were three or four flat, pale-yellow worms, each one the size of a thumb. They were a writhing nest of bad luck.
"There's your Gu Worm," Tian said, his face a mask of cold knowledge. "Somebody local put the dirty on her. Probably a bad actor or a scavenger from the Guangxi tribes who knows how to brew this primordial poison. They slipped it into her slop, and it started processing her from the inside out."
"She's on the right side of the mirror now, but she's not home and dry," Tian warned, his voice dropping into a low, rhythmic cadence. "Boil these herbs I've prepped. She needs them for two weeks to scrub the chemical curse from her gears. Then a month of bed rest—she's a spent shell and needs time to find her strength. In the meantime, if she's got enemies in this rat-warren of a town, you go and make expiation. Buy them off, beg for mercy—whatever it takes. This hex is a walk in the park to break, but the machinery of protection is a whole different ballgame."
"But don't get your bowels in an uproar thinking this is an everyday raid." Tian Shu said, his voice dropping into a low, rhythmic cadence. "Processing a Gu Worm (蛊) is no walk in the park; the master has to pour his own life-force into the machine to make it turn. Looking at the spent shell of this particular hex, the bad actor behind it is a rank amateur. Once they pick up the scent that we've stripped their gears, they'll crawl back into their hole. They're terrified of the blowback."
"Thank you, truly, A-Tian..." the husband said, his voice a dry, shivering rattle as he leaked big, storybook tears. He helped the young man guide his wife—now a soupy, semi-conscious heap—onto a nearby sofa, a piece of furniture that sat there like a cracked and dirty patchwork of old memories.
Before they could swap another word, the phone in Tian's pocket began its high-voltage jangle. He checked the number, his face becoming a mask of cold knowledge, and he stepped into the hall with focused, urgent haste.
"Tian Shu here." he said, his Mandarin as sharp and clinical as a washed blackboard. Then, his posture collapsed—a pouting balloon of a man suddenly deflated by a needle. "Master Lin Feitian... an accident? Jesus! I don't believe it... the gears of the world have truly unhinged." He paused, listening to the private, faraway static on the line. "Understood. I'll bird-dog the Department 9 boys as fast as I can. When does their flight hit the tarmac in Thailand?"
He returned to the kitchen, his expression a hard scrawl of focused intensity. "Big Brother, listen close. I'm writing down a chemical cocktail for her. You can scavenge the ingredients at any Chinese pharmacy in the market. Use them to supplement the herbs I already prepped—it'll help scrub the residual poison from her gears. I've got an urgent situation—the kind that might keep me in China for months, caught in the machinery of the state. While I'm gone, I need a favor: go to my place and feed the small-fry—the parrots and the goldfish. Don't let them give up the ghost."
"Sure, A-Tian! Anything! You name it!" the husband babbled, looking at the young man with a vacant, grateful stare. "My wife... we owe you a king's ransom for this."
Tian Shu offered a jagged scrawl of a grin and shook his head. He clapped the older man's shoulder—a final thud of certainty—then turned and vanished into the night in a focused, urgent scramble, already moving toward the next world of pain.
...........