He spent all of Saturday on housework. No research that evening. Ma En was exhausted — two nights of bad sleep, the kind where he couldn't remember dreaming but hadn't slept deeply either. His consciousness seemed to stay active the entire time, running on its own, and when he woke his mind was scraped clean. Blank. He suspected the book was responsible, but it might have been nothing more than overthinking — some psychological feedback loop draining his reserves. Either way, his routine stayed intact. He did what he did every Saturday: cleaned every room, washed the pile of dirty laundry, bought groceries and stocked the fridge.

While he worked, he didn't deliberately think about the book. But he began to notice, gradually, that his gaze kept drifting toward where it sat — more and more often, as though some addiction so faint he could barely detect it were releasing itself through his body.

The day held nothing special. All of it went to chores. That evening, after dinner and cleaning the kitchen, he took the trash downstairs. He figured he'd walk around the neighborhood once the bag was in the bin. He had nowhere to go in particular, but Ma En sometimes liked this feeling — walking without purpose, thinking about nothing, the hollow emptiness of it.

This city's evenings always carried a particular quality for him, though he had to admit there was nothing unique about them. Its nightscape didn't rank among the best of the cities he'd visited. The place had its own rhythm, different from the fast-developing cities, but no matter how slowly it grew, the air wasn't any clearer, the night sky no brighter.

In every season, the sky over this city looked the same: a murky dark red, like a permanent stain. Even on days when the sky was clear and cloudless by afternoon, the stars vanished at night. Even the moon, set against that hazy crimson, never seemed especially large or bright. People blamed pollution. Ma En preferred a different theory — that the heavy, oppressive sky was a sign of something unusual. He'd had this fantasy since he was a child, and it had followed him into adulthood. He knew, scientifically, that it was nonsense. But the fantasy had never been about science. It was pure feeling. He'd never bothered to justify it.

Tonight, the sky wore its usual murky dark red. Few stars. The moon showed through the clouds in a thin crescent, incomplete. Ma En had the sudden thought that it looked like something enormous peering down with one eye — and immediately laughed at himself for thinking it.

Pedestrians passed steadily. He watched them and noticed something: tonight there seemed to be an unusual number of couples, paired off, bodies close. But they all walked quickly, hurrying, as though late for something. He wondered if today was some occasion he'd forgotten, or if there was an event somewhere in the city. He couldn't think of a reason. The sheer number of couples moving briskly through the streets was striking — and the usual evening strollers had thinned out noticeably, leaving the neighborhood oddly quiet.

Something felt off. He couldn't say what. The feeling was hazy, indistinct, the kind of thing that might have been nothing at all — a passing whim, a trick of the mind. But no matter how hard Ma En tried to focus, he couldn't shake it. He felt himself sliding toward a half-awake state as he walked, and the wrongness nagged at him like an itch he couldn't reach.

The night wind picked up. Tree branches swayed, their leaves making a soft rustling. He listened. The rustling was changing — shifting from something gentle into something harder, heavier, a rolling sound, like solid objects tumbling across a surface. What chilled him more was the direction: at first the sound came from the treetops, but then it seemed to come from behind him, as though something back there were following him. He glanced at the ground. Only his own shadow.

No. Not just his shadow.

Ma En blinked hard. A second shadow — long, stretched, distorted — was creeping past his own, reaching further and further ahead. It wasn't moving. It wasn't fixed. It was growing. Was that normal? His rational mind answered instantly: no. Not remotely.

Something was going wrong. The signs were multiplying.

Sound first. Then smell. Then visible details — the kind of things you'd normally overlook without a second thought. Now, when he noticed them, each one seemed to be undergoing a quiet, irrational distortion. And all of it — everything his attention kept snagging on — seemed to be telling him the same thing: something was behind him. Following.

Ma En walked faster. It didn't help. The details wouldn't let go. The crawling, spine-deep wrongness wouldn't let go. Around him, pedestrians still passed — mostly couples, men and women — but they too seemed wrong in this atmosphere, as though their being here at all were somehow unnatural.

The more he focused on what was behind him, the sharper the presence became — indescribable but unmistakable, drawing closer, pressing him to turn around. When he finally whipped his head back, he saw nothing. Nothing specific. Nothing unusual. As if the whole thing were his imagination.

But even after confirming the empty street behind him, the feeling didn't fade.

It was getting stronger. Closer. And it was always behind him.

Ma En exhaled and saw his own breath — white, hanging in the air, as though it were the dead of winter.

All of it — the strangeness, the distortions, the incomprehensible wrongness — was pushing him toward one conclusion: something had found him. Something was closing in. He couldn't see it. He could feel it. He wasn't carrying weapons. He hadn't brought any of the tools he'd designed for exactly this kind of hypothetical encounter. And yet here he was, standing inside the scenario he'd spent years imagining and never quite believing would arrive.

That realization chilled him too — a different fear from the fear of dying. Something else was rising from deep inside him, bubbling, on the verge of boiling over.

Before it could, he was already moving faster. Walking became jogging. Jogging became running — flat-out, headlong — as though something terrible were chasing him home.

This was the paradox: because he'd spent years pursuing the bizarre, because he'd spent years imagining how terrible the bizarre might be, the reality of it — vague, creeping, barely there — hit him harder than any of his worst-case scenarios. The real thing was worse than imagination. It always was.

He couldn't just stand here and wait to die. Something that had never happened before was happening now, and the cause was obvious — the nameless book. It had to be. He'd finally encountered the thing that would change his life forever, and it had arrived too fast, too suddenly, leaving him without a single lead. If there was an answer, it was probably in the book itself.

Chasing the bizarre was his obsession. Waiting to die was not. The killer. The bookshop owner. And probably others before them — people who'd met ugly ends in the wake of whatever this book carried. He was next in line.

It was terrifying. It was exactly what he'd expected. Mental preparation didn't make the fear smaller. It just meant he'd known the fear was coming.

Ma En sprinted past the couples on the street. He heard someone curse — he'd nearly crashed into them. But the thing behind him wasn't going to wait while he apologized. All of this was his own doing. All of it was the reward he'd spent years earning.

He couldn't say how afraid he was. But somewhere inside that overwhelming fear, other emotions were mixed in — things he couldn't identify, couldn't untangle from the terror.

He made it to his building. The thing — obscure, deep, relentless — was still behind him, still closing the gap, yet somehow never quite close enough to touch. He judged this by feeling alone. He didn't hesitate. He ran for the stairs. And at that moment, the entire building seemed to have lost power. Every unit dark. Every resident gone. Not a single light, not a trace of human warmth. Absolute silence. Absolute blackness. The wrongness of it nearly made him believe he'd run to the wrong building — that this wasn't his home at all.

Then a flash of light cut across his vision. A figure flickered inside it. He registered both too late to stop. His momentum carried him straight into the collision.

He hit a soft body. A woman screamed. Before they could fall, his hand found the stair railing. His other arm caught her waist. The light source dropped, and in the shifting shadows he couldn't make out her face. But the feel of her, the vague outline — definitely a woman. Young, by the sound of her voice. He had no time to apologize. All he knew was that the thing pursuing him — that invisible, relentless pressure — had vanished. Instantly. The deep, lurking sense of crisis went blank. His racing mind went blank with it.

He stood there, gasping. He could hear her gasping too — the woman he was still holding. She was as shaken as he was. He recovered first and let go. She seemed to lose all strength, sliding down to sit on the stairs.

"Are you alright?" he asked, groping around until he found the light source — a small flashlight, palm-sized. That tracked. The whole building had lost power. Going downstairs in the dark wasn't safe.

He stood the flashlight upright and aimed it at the ceiling, using the diffused glow to look at her.

What he saw was not a woman.

The upper body was bare — the exposed curves of a female form — but sitting on the neck was a cat's head. Not a mask. Not the stylized, almost-human cat face from a painting. A real, living cat's head — fur-covered, wild-eyed, its pupils catching the light with an animal's gleam.