Fear erupted like hot oil hitting water.
Two days.
Two full days and nights passed. Not a single living thing dared set foot on the village paths.
Every door was bolted tight, heavy and final. The hearth fires had long since died, leaving only cold ash.
Occasionally, an infant's cry would pierce the deep night, instantly smothered deep in swaddling clothes by terrified parents.
Not even a dog dared to whimper.
Silence. A dead silence like a coffin lid lay heavy and suffocating over the mountain-encircled village.
On the third day, the sun fought its way barely to the zenith before being devoured whole by vast banks of grey-black miasma. The sky turned as gloomy as twilight, pressing down until it stole the breath from every chest.
In that suffocating moment of unbearable tension, the village's rusted speaker pole, topped with its crooked sheet-metal horn, erupted in a burst of ear-splitting static.
Then, the village chief's voice – already shredded by terror and hours of screaming, sounding like it was scraped from the bottom of a dry well – crackled through, fragmented yet bursting with a desperate, dying strength:
"...Cough... cough! Everyone, cough... listen!"
The speaker crackled and spat, mangling his words with interference.
"...Wait to die? Wait for that... that thing... to go house to house... like butchering chickens... thwack! To eat us all?"
"...Grab tools! Hoes, sickles, axes, clubs, anything you can hold, stab, or swing... grab it!"
"Bring the old... the young! Food! To! To the central granary!!"
"Cram together! Hold together! If it dares come... we... we fight it to the death------!!"
The voice tore itself apart with hoarse fury, the despair and rage within it like the final spark igniting a barrel of oil.
It instantly set fire to the villagers' already frayed nerves.
A dead silence hung for a heartbeat, then exploded like buried dynamite. Piercing wails, men's coarse curses, children's shrieks of terror, the crash of belongings – all erupted simultaneously from the dark gaps of doors and windows!
The village became a stirred hornet's nest, erupting into a frantic, chaotic surge of last-ditch survival.
Doors banged open.
Faces, pale as paper and twisted with panic, emerged into the sickly light.
Men clenched hoes and sickles, knuckles white and veins bulging like gnarled roots.
Women carried children on their backs, infants swaddled in rags clutched to their chests, sacks of rough rice or charred corn cakes tucked under their arms.
Trembling elders stumbled along on walking sticks. They jostled and shoved, like sheep driven by an invisible lash, surging towards the stone-built granary at the village center.
Li Erwa was swept along in the tide.
A heavy sack of grain bowed his already stooped back, but his eyes were fixed on the southern slope, now almost swallowed by thick, miasmic clouds. His face held no color, only a grey, deathly pallor.
"Should've burned him! Should've listened to that damned Wang the Limper! Look at us now! The whole village is gonna be fed to that thing!"
A shrill, tearful voice pierced the chaos, a needle popping the last bubble of false hope.
"Shut up! Scream again and I'll split you first!" another voice, thick with fear and violence, roared back. The wailing choked off into desperate sobs.
The path to the granary, usually the smoothest in the village, was churned into a swamp by panicked, muddy feet.
The leaden clouds pressed lower, heavier, a suffocating blanket overhead.
Though it should have been the height of noon, the light dimmed to twilight gloom!
The thick, stagnant air felt like a physical weight pressing down on the valley. Every breath tasted of cold, corrupt earth. The scene was a vast shroud, smothering the frantic escape.
The granary's heavy timber-and-stone doors slammed shut with a final thud, barred from within.
Logs thicker than rice bowls were wedged solidly against them. Windows were blocked with millstones, mortar grinders, even massive stone rollers hauled from the threshing ground!
Gaps were frantically stuffed with torn quilts and rotten bedding.
A fire was lit in the granary's deep, cavernous space.
Its feeble, flickering light barely illuminated a small circle, revealing layers of terrified faces pressed together.
Countless frightened eyes glittered in the shifting shadows.
Men were roughly divided into groups, clutching their makeshift "weapons," facing different directions behind the barricaded doors and windows, muscles coiled tight, ears straining. Women huddled with the elderly and trembling children in the dim firelight, weeping silently.
Time had never crawled so slowly.
The sun vanished, dissolved utterly by the filthy ink-black clouds smothering the sky. The line between day and night melted away.
Was it... night? No one could tell. Lamps burned low, were refilled, and dimmed again. Water boiled in the pot over the fire.
No wind.
No insects.
Silence.
A thick, suffocating silence, like cold blood coagulating in the ear canal.
This silence itself was an invisible torture, a slow flaying of nerves worse than the imagined horror outside. Fear fermented silently, swelling and turning toxic, a gas corrosive to the mind.
A young man stationed at the granary's highest ventilation point, peering through the one tiny, unblocked slit in the stone window, suddenly went rigid!
It was as if an invisible ice-cold needle had pierced the base of his skull.
His eyes bulged, fixed unblinkingly on the pitch-black night outside.
"Wh-what?" his companion beside him hissed, voice barely a whisper, afraid to disturb the air.
"...Light..." the young man choked out, fear clogging his throat like phlegm. "West end... the ox pen... lit up by itself..."
A silence fell over the granary so profound they could hear the frantic drumming of every heart.
The young man's teeth chattered, sweat tracing lines down his contorted temples. "...The flame... it's... it's green..."
A wave of bone-deep cold seeped through the tiny slit, snaking into the pores of everyone straining to listen. Legend said... that was... corpse-candle flame!
The green fire flickered in the ink-black darkness beyond the window – like a phantom's eye – then vanished without a trace, as if it had never been.
The silence that followed this sudden, incomprehensible omen was thicker, colder than before!
Only a quarter of an incense stick's time later.
"Wuuu... wuuu..."
An infinitesimal, yet soul-piercing sound began. Like the whimper of an abandoned infant, despairing in the biting cold.
It was ethereal, now drifting near the granary's eastern corner, now pressed flat against the thick stone of the western wall... It wormed through the cracks in the stone, plucking at the taut nerves in every mind – it was a human sound!
A woman weeping! Desperate... helpless... heartrendingly sorrowful!