"Get out!" The bookshop owner's face went red, shock and fury tangled together — and not just because Ma En's pressure had wounded his pride. There was something else beneath the anger. A dread he couldn't name. He didn't find the young man himself frightening. But he felt, with a certainty that bypassed reason, that this person would bring something frightening with him.

A walking disaster. That was the phrase that came to him. He'd heard people talk about this kind of thing over the years — people you could tell at a single glance were harbingers of calamity, carriers of bad luck. He'd never believed it. Who had eyes that good? But now he was living it. Feeling it in his bones. That crawling, hair-raising wrongness radiating from the young man's presence.

This was his own territory. He knew every corner of it. Yet with this young man standing in it, the familiar had turned alien. The shadows. The sound of rain. The rot seeping from wood and brick. The dark stains and wet moss creeping across the floor. All of it had sharpened, become vivid, become wrong — different from every other day he'd spent here. And the strangeness he felt came from within all of it, as though the shop itself had turned against him.

"Don't be scared... I won't hurt you." The rain was loud, but somehow it only made the young man's voice stand out more clearly. That voice tightened something in the bookshop owner's chest. I'm losing it, he thought. I must be. Why else would I feel this way — today of all days, with this one person?

He didn't know. And it was precisely because he didn't know that the fear had teeth. In an instant, his mind raced through more thoughts than it had produced in weeks. A deep, grinding pressure bored into the bottom of his heart like a drill bit.

He looked at the young man again. That ordinary face didn't look ordinary anymore. Details he'd overlooked before now stood out with an unsettling clarity — the suit, the hair, every line immaculate. Why so neat? Neat to the point of wrong. Not something a normal person would do. Not the work of a sound mind. He remembered, suddenly, something from detective novels: certain twisted maniacs dressed exactly like this.

Rainy day. Large black umbrella. Rigid posture. Meticulous grooming. A psychological defect — yes. The young man was dangerous. Something was broken inside him. He was mentally ill.

The bookshop owner realized, with a jolt, that in these few short exchanges he'd thought more than he had in the past month. So much that his skull felt swollen.

"Get out..." His voice came out hoarse. He felt as though he'd thrown every ounce of strength behind the words and still couldn't force the other man to leave. "I'm not a criminal! You're not police! You have no right to interrogate me!"

Even as he said it, he knew it didn't feel like a movie interrogation scene — not really — even though the setting and the other man's bearing were close enough.

Ma En found the reaction strange. He dealt with strangers regularly, for work and in daily life, and he'd never seen anyone respond like this. He couldn't understand why such deep terror showed in the bookshop owner's eyes. The man's pupils had gone slightly unfocused — he was looking in Ma En's direction, but Ma En didn't feel looked at. The owner seemed to be staring at something behind him. Or deep inside him. Or at some monster standing in his exact position that didn't exist.

Is this man on drugs? He couldn't help wondering.

He'd also considered that the owner and the perpetrator might share some criminal connection — that mentioning the killer had triggered a guilty reaction. But that didn't track either.

He still couldn't make sense of this bookshop owner's behavior.

The owner's state kept worsening. He looked like he couldn't breathe. His throat produced a thin, ragged heh... heh... sound, as if he might pass out at any moment. Ma En put his ID away, stepped around the counter, unscrewed the water canteen beside the owner, and poured it into his mouth.

The bookshop owner thrashed like a man being assaulted, but the struggle didn't last. He went slack — a puppet with cut strings — and slumped in his chair. Still breathing, at least. But no matter how Ma En called to him, the man showed no sign of hearing.

Someone else might have panicked. Ma En just adjusted the owner into a more comfortable position and left it at that. No particular emotion. If the man wouldn't talk and was this agitated, there was no point pressing him. And now that the owner couldn't chase him out, it was convenient enough to search the shop.

The shop was small but packed. Books were stacked in piles rather than shelved, with no labels, no system — novels, manga, reference books, classics, dictionaries, all jumbled together. No point strategizing about where to look. Start with whatever was closest and work outward. With bad luck, you could turn the whole place inside out and still come up empty.

Searching a mess like this for a book whose name he didn't even know — genuinely difficult.

And yet, against every expectation, Ma En glanced around and his gaze snagged immediately on a book in the pile to his right. Something about it — just a feeling — told him it was what he was looking for. He pulled it out. The cover was a faded, aged blue, like a handwritten copy from the turn of the century. The pages were on the verge of falling apart, held together with string and staples.

He wasn't certain this was the book the perpetrator had mentioned. But among all these volumes, the moment he spotted this one, a powerful sensation had seized him: This is it. And the sensation was different from what people called intuition. He'd had intuitions before — he knew what they felt like, and this wasn't that. This was something new. Something abnormal. Something that edged into the uncanny. A pull. A summons. A resonance. In all his years of searching for the bizarre, this was the first time he'd ever felt anything like it.

He decided instantly: he was buying this book.

He ran his fingers across the cover, and more sensations bloomed from the contact. The surface didn't feel like paper. It felt like skin — cool, smooth, faintly repulsive, the way it would feel to make someone who hated snakes press their hand against a snake's body. But when he looked down, it was paper. Clearly paper. And as he studied it, the skin-like sensation vanished. Gone without a trace, as if the feeling had been nothing more than an illusion — a fantasy manufactured by a mind primed to find the bizarre, in a setting that encouraged it. Even that earlier surge of recognition, that powerful pull, might have been his own invention.

Nothing abnormal at all. That was what Ma En told himself. But for someone who had spent years chasing the bizarre, it was hard to dismiss what he'd felt — however much it resembled illusion, hallucination, wishful thinking. He was still buying the book.

The cover bore no title and no author's name. Just a blank face. He opened it, meaning to check for a table of contents, a foreword, any summary of the book's subject — and the moment he looked, something slipped.

He felt as though he hadn't read the words inside, yet a fullness had settled over him, the way it would after finishing an entire book. The specifics were impossibly tangled, his brain unable to process what it had just received. What did I see?

His head began to swell. Dizziness and nausea rolled through him. Something that felt like an involuntary act of self-preservation — operating before conscious thought could catch up — made his hands close the book.

Then, abruptly, a name surfaced in his mind. The book's title — or a title he had invented for it. Strange. Fabricated-sounding. Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records.

And then his mind began, unbidden, to construct a history for the book: A cultivator during the Wei-Jin period stumbles upon fragments of an ancient immortal's compiled secret manual — The Seven Secrets Scripture of the Mysterious Lord. From these fragments, he creates his own method of immortal cultivation. Three hundred years of practice. Ascension. The cultivator's name is lost to history. The method he created is the text now resting in Ma En's hands.

Ma En came back to himself and almost laughed at the absurdity. He'd never considered himself the fanciful type. He'd handled plenty of obscure, nameless books over the years, and not once had he hallucinated an entire mythology the moment he touched one. But because he'd always believed books carried dangerous power, he treated any loss of composure around them with extreme vigilance.

He knew, with perfect clarity, that this was the first time in his life he'd ever lost composure this way.

In a daze, Ma En wondered if he'd actually touched something genuinely bizarre. He knew he'd looked at the book — briefly, somehow — but he couldn't remember a single word of its contents. He checked his watch. Half an hour had passed since he'd entered the shop. Beside him, the bookshop owner still lay slumped in his chair, breathing in weak, shallow gasps, like a fish dragged onto shore.

Ma En felt he really must be losing it — he could have sworn the bookshop owner had a fish head.

Regardless, he was buying the book. But the owner didn't look capable of conducting any kind of transaction. Ma En took out his wallet, pulled out a hundred-yuan bill, and laid it on the counter. Then he picked up the large black umbrella from beside the door and walked out into the downpour. His figure vanished almost immediately behind the curtain of rain.

Only then did the bookshop owner surface from that near-suffocating state. He didn't think. He glanced at the rain — no sign of anyone out there — and slammed the shop door shut. He didn't bother with rain gear. He ran home like a man possessed. He never wanted to see that young man again. He was done with customers for today. This nightmare of an encounter was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and he prayed — desperately — that it would be the only time.