The cold didn’t bite. It crushed.
It fell upon the ferry town like an avalanche of frozen iron. It dropped the surrounding heat by forty degrees in twenty heartbeats. Moisture in the air condensed into falling needles of black ice that clattered against the roof tiles like handfuls of gravel. The breath tore out of Lin Ke’s throat in thick, jagged clouds of grey fog that froze solid against his collar.
Down on the river, the water exploded.
It wasn’t an explosion of fire or steam. A two-hundred-foot fissure ripped across the muddy riverbed with a sound like tearing leather, and from the deep trench beneath, the rotting heap erupted.
Tens of thousands of pale, glowing filaments geysered into the night sky, twisting into screaming spirals before cascading downward across the wooden docks. They weren’t whole spirits. They were soul leftovers. Amputated memories, unresolved death cries, uncollected spiritual pointers piled up across hundreds of years of transit disasters and unmaintained channels.
A scared ferry guard ran screaming past the warehouse porch, his wooden spear raised high in trembling hands.
Before he took five paces, three pale filaments whipped out of the mist, piercing his chest like sewing needles. The man didn’t bleed. His skin turned the color of lard, his eyes rolled into his skull. His body locked into a rigid, trembling burst as his living spiritual breath flow was drained down to the marrow in three seconds.
