Prologue 2 Urban Legend

Ma En graduated from a provincial key university at 20 and landed a civil servant position. He still hadn't given up on his ideas, his fixation. He kept searching — online and in person — for strange, non-human phenomena, investigating leads on his days off. He still hadn't found what he was looking for. Nearly everything he could verify turned out to be fabricated. The things he couldn't verify stayed maddeningly ambiguous — impossible to confirm, impossible to rule out. His search kept slamming into contradictions, and sometimes it left him discouraged. Defeated, even. But he'd sleep on it, and by morning he'd be right back at it, as stubborn as ever.

He told people he liked to travel. He couldn't explain the real reason to anyone. He had friends, but they were all normal people — he couldn't tell them either. He'd visited psychiatric hospitals, tried to pry something extraordinary out of patients diagnosed with mental illness. Nothing came of it.

He read voraciously: philosophy, theology, mysticism, psychology, mathematics, physics, history, local chronicles. But buried in all those stacks of new and old books, he couldn't find a single thread that connected the thoughts in his head — thoughts that bordered on delusion.

Today, again, he'd come up empty after burying himself in books. He'd spent an entire month, every evening, chasing down a rumor that had suddenly begun circulating in the city where he worked. It sounded dangerous, though it wasn't much different from most urban legends. He'd made every preparation he could. When he pursued these things, he always assumed the worst scenario he could imagine — just in case, he was even prepared to encounter something beyond his ability to fight, something that might kill him. But usually, reality was far more mundane and boring than he'd anticipated. He gained nothing.

Most urban rumors were just human behavior, exaggerated. At worst, they involved killers and executioners. Looking for anything "non-human" in these incidents was pure fantasy.

This latest rumor, theoretically, was no different. He'd braced himself for that. But watching the perpetrator get hauled away by the police still left him bitterly disappointed. He was the one who'd called the police. He watched from a distance as the human criminal broke down, thrashing and hysterical, before finally going limp. The whole scene smelled of nothing but humanity.

Still — even with a confirmed human crime, he needed to verify every exaggeration in the rumor, every detail that seemed to have been conjured from nothing. Only when it was all concrete, every piece accounted for, and nothing pointed to non-human involvement — only then would he stop tracking it.

What had caught his eye about this particular rumor was the ritualistic quality of the perpetrator's actions. Whether the man was faking it, mentally broken, or genuinely trying to perform some kind of rite, parts of the ritual had already been carried out. This was a vicious serial killer. Six boys. Six virgins. Six infants. From any angle, those numbers had a flavor to them — something deliberate, something that went beyond coincidence. The day he was arrested was the day he'd tried to kill the last one. He'd admitted it himself, screaming.

The ritualistic behavior of most serial killers was just self-compensation — filling some void in their own fractured humanity. A process of patching over what was missing. Nearly every ritual meant something only to the killer. That was Ma En's view, though he wasn't about to dismiss the present just because the past had always played out the same way.

Maybe — just maybe — this case would be different. He kept going with that thought. He reviewed every photo he'd secretly taken, broke down every version of the rumor word by word, cross-referenced them against the perpetrator's confirmed identity, psychological profile, physical and mental state, then ran it all through his own framework of theory, experience, and instinct, eliminating everything that didn't hold up.

What was left: a single symbol. A pattern, a marking — strange, but in a way that looked more like graffiti than any established religious or ritual iconography. A mark made of dots, curves, and crescent-shaped blocks. It didn't resemble the distorted outline of anything recognizable. What stood out was the complete absence of straight lines — and none of the curved structures matched any known ancient script. He'd gone through extensive written sources to confirm it.

From a rational standpoint, this was most likely just graffiti — something the perpetrator's crumbling psyche had projected outward, a shape that symbolized whatever was happening inside his mind. Nothing non-human about it. But Ma En searched anyway, looking for anything with a similar structure among existing symbolic systems.

He wanted proof: that while the perpetrator's actions were overwhelmingly human in origin, the trigger had come from something that wasn't.

He found nothing, of course.

Afterward, he used items he'd taken from the crime scene to pose as someone connected to the perpetrator, then visited the killer in prison. By that point, the man was hollowed out — physically and mentally spent, drifting in a kind of daze that Ma En could tell wasn't an act. After the arrest, the man's spirit had simply drained away, like some kind of karmic payback. The smallest noise made him flinch. Not that it mattered, in human terms. No amount of suffering could wash away what he'd done.

Ma En felt nothing for him. He just wanted to wring every last drop of information out of the man. The process was unremarkable — steadying the man's nerves took some effort, steering him took more — and then Ma En got one small detail: before committing the crimes, the killer had gone to a bookshop. He'd seen something in a book there, and that had cemented his resolve to do what he did. The police had already uncovered this, but they didn't care. They probably wouldn't even include it in the report. For the perpetrator, maybe it was a clear enough spark — but from a broader view, premeditated criminals always accumulated their reasons over time. Pinning it on a book's contents was obviously wrong. And someone capable of crimes this terrible, someone whose actions had ritualistic elements, was certainly not acting on pure impulse.

People who killed on impulse typically killed one or two victims. If they killed many, they did it all at once, quickly. This perpetrator might have started with an impulse, but he'd gone on to kill 18 people over the course of a month — lucidly, rationally, intelligently, methodically. In the process, he'd become an urban legend himself.

He wasn't impulsive. He hadn't committed these crimes simply because of something he'd read in a book. That was the most scientific conclusion. But Ma En found himself interested in this lead the police had dismissed. He got the bookshop's location and a rough description of the book. The title — the perpetrator couldn't remember it anymore. He wasn't even sure he'd actually seen such a book, or whether his memory had simply malfunctioned.

On another day off — raining, the sky a flat, heavy gray — Ma En carried a somewhat worn black umbrella and a black briefcase, took the bus to the street nearest the bookshop's address.

This wasn't downtown. Not anywhere close to prosperous. A 50-year-old urban village sat nearby, and the buildings all around it had their red brick exposed. Parts of the concrete road had broken open, showing gravel underneath. Potholes everywhere, the kind that caught you off guard — you'd step into what looked shallow and feel the water swallow your shoe. Ma En's leather shoes and trousers were already spotted with dirty water, dark brown stains climbing the fabric. The roads here were terrible. But Ma En didn't mind. He'd been to far worse places in pursuit of non-human rumors.

He tightened his dark suit jacket and moved toward his target. The streets were empty — the downpour had erased every trace of people. Water hammered down from the eaves. Everything drowned in the sound of rain.

He didn't know the area, so he took wrong turns. Wandered down side roads that shouldn't have existed. Dead ends — he didn't even realize they were dead ends until he was standing in them, and then he had to double back, find another way.

Low buildings everywhere, paths tangling and forking in a maze. Old streetlights with their covers long gone. Some without bulbs. Severed electrical wires dangling, unrepaired. A miserable place to live.

Water in his shoes. Cold crawling up his socks, his ankles, his calves. The feeling was beyond description.

But what could he do? The address the perpetrator had given was vague to the point of uselessness. You had to actually come here to understand how remote it was. Without a very specific reason, Ma En couldn't imagine why anyone would trek through a place like this just for a bookshop. Then again — that made him curious about what the shop actually looked like. The result might well disappoint him.

By the time he spotted the bookshop's sign, he'd been wandering the area for half an hour. The number of people he'd passed along the way could be counted on one hand. And his appearance — the suit, the briefcase, the umbrella — stood out conspicuously among them. He could tell from the way they looked him over, openly or not. To the people who lived here, he was an outsider through and through. He made them uneasy, suspicious, instinctively guarded.