Chapter 4: Dial-up Hell: Don't Look at Its Face

A mass grave.

This place had long since become an abandoned construction site.

Old Chen and I stood side by side in the middle of the mud.

The rain was pouring down heavily.

But this rain was not transparent.

It was tinged with an eerie, sickly green, trickling down the exposed steel bars.

The puddles on the ground kept bubbling.

In the air, besides the fishy smell of rain, there was the pungent odor of machine oil.

And... the smell of burnt circuit boards.

Old Chen looked up, scanning the surroundings warily.

"Don't step in the black water."

I was just about to ask why.

In the distance, a harsh metallic scraping sound came.

Creak—

An abandoned excavator with a broken track moved.

The cab was empty.

But the track was slowly rolling forward through the mud.

The headlights turned on.

Not ordinary lights, but piercing red lights.

Two of them.

Like two blood-red eyes opening in the dark night.

"Back!"

Before Old Chen's words faded, the excavator's bucket slammed down with tremendous force.

Boom!

Mud and water mixed with gravel exploded.

The green rain splashed all over my face.

I rolled away awkwardly.

The bucket smashed into the spot where we had just been standing, cracking the ground open.

Under the crack, there was no soil.

It was all cables.

Black fiber optic cables.

Dense and intertwined, like black blood vessels growing under the earth.

Then.

The sound came.

Hiss—

Squeak—

Buzz...

It sounded exactly like the noise of an old 90s modem dialing up.

Sharp, piercing, intermittent, but enough to make your scalp tingle.

The mud began to bulge violently upward.

The first "thing" crawled out.

A translucent humanoid figure.

Its body looked like a video frame stuttering on a poor network, with edges flickering and tearing constantly.

It slowly raised its head.

Its face had no features, only a patch of wildly flickering black-and-white static.

Then came the second.

The third.

The fourth.

They crawled out of the mud one after another, accompanied by that nauseating dial-up sound.

Old Chen drew his sword.

The bronze sword came out of its sheath with a crisp ring.

"Yunfeng!"

"Don't let them touch the cables!"

Before I could react to what that meant, the first humanoid entity lunged at me.

Old Chen moved swiftly, placing himself in front of me with his sword.

He swung the sword down hard.

Clang!

No blood splattered, no sound of flesh and blood.

The moment the blade touched its body, a blinding blue electric spark exploded.

Zzzt!

The thing was split in two.

But it didn't "die"; only half of its body was still writhing and crawling forward on the ground.

Old Chen, expressionless, stepped on it and drove the bronze sword tip down hard.

Smack!

The entire translucent body, like a monitor suddenly unplugged, instantly went black and dissolved into a puff of mist.

But the second one had already silently pounced onto Old Chen's back.

Without thinking, I grabbed a rusty rebar from the ground and swung it.

Bang!

The rebar pierced through the thing's body precisely.

But it had no effect.

It grabbed the rebar with its hand.

My wrist went numb.

A strong electric current surged through the rebar and into my arm.

I screamed and immediately let go.

Old Chen heard the commotion and turned around quickly.

The bronze sword slashed upward from below.

Blue light exploded again.

The thing dissipated instantly in the rain.

The rain fell harder.

The green curtain of rain almost obscured the view.

The abandoned excavator moved again.

The track rolled over the ground, still without the roar of an engine.

Only the dial-up sound grew louder and more frequent.

Hiss—

Buzz—

Creak!

I dared not use physical weapons anymore. I quickly pulled out the hard drive and connected it to the portable computer I carried.

The screen lit up, casting a faint blue glow on my face.

I was about to rerun the script to set up a data firewall.

My fingers had just touched the keyboard, ready to type the first command.

From a pile of scrap metal nearby, a mournful crying sound suddenly arose.

Woo...

Woo woo...

My fingers froze.

The sound came from an abandoned, broken walkie-talkie.

Black casing, antenna snapped off, screen shattered like a spider web.

But it was glowing faintly.

The crying grew louder.

It sounded like a child crying, or a woman wailing.

Old Chen whipped around, his eyes blazing.

"Don't listen!"

Too late.

From the walkie-talkie burst an extremely piercing scream.

Hiss—!!

The air in front of me seemed to be torn apart by some force.

A thing, or rather a "person," stood up.

Less than two meters away from me.

It had no face.

To be precise, its face was a mass of wildly flickering garbled code.

Green, white, black.

Blocks of mosaic jumping and reassembling, like a completely corrupted video file.

Before I could step back, or even breathe,

It had already flashed right in front of me.

An ice-cold hand reached out and clamped tightly around my neck.

First, extreme cold.

Then burning heat, like a branding iron on skin.

Five fingers kept tightening.

I was lifted off the ground by this inhuman force.

My feet dangled in the air.

The portable computer fell into the mud.

The screen flickered a few times and went completely dark.

"Yunfeng!"

Old Chen's anxious shout seemed to come from far away, growing faint.

I desperately grabbed at the hand choking me.

No use.

The thing had no physical body; my hand passed right through.

But the force choking my neck was real.

Air was cut off.

My chest felt like it was about to explode.

The pungent smell of machine oil.

The nauseating smell of burning.

And...

Another smell, mixed in, growing clearer.

Suddenly I remembered.

It was the smell of copper coins soaked in fresh blood.

The scene before my eyes began to darken, the edges dissolving.

My consciousness kept sinking.

Like falling into a bottomless dry well.

Then.

In the endless darkness, I saw a computer.

Fifteen years ago.

It was New Year's Eve.

I was ten years old.

Outside, there were deafening firecrackers.

Crackling.

The window paper trembled.

I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night.

The room was empty.

Grandpa wasn't lying in bed as usual.

I vaguely heard sounds from the basement.

Intermittent crying.

Very faint, but clear in the silent night.

Barefoot, I stepped on the cold floor and walked down the stairs.

The basement door was ajar.

Inside, no lights were on, only a faint green glow flickering.

It was an old CRT monitor, a bulky "big butt" model, sitting on a shabby wooden table.

The screen flickered erratically.

Grandpa was sitting in front of the monitor.

He had his back to me.

Although it was cold outside, his old cotton jacket was completely soaked with sweat.

On the table was a coarse porcelain bowl.

In the bowl was dark red blood.

Beside it lay a string of copper coins.

The coins were strung with a red thread, which seemed to have been soaked in blood for a long time.

What happened next was deeply etched in my memory.

Grandpa grabbed the blood-dripping red thread with the coins.

Without hesitation, he plugged it directly into the motherboard slot of the computer.

I stood at the door, frozen stiff, unable to move.

On the screen, there was no familiar Windows interface.

Instead, rows of green patterns appeared.

They weren't code.

They were hexagrams.

Qian. Kun. Zhen. Xun. Kan. Li. Gen. Dui.

The sixty-four hexagrams changed and evolved at a dizzying speed on the screen.

And that faint crying sound was coming from the computer's old speakers.

Exactly the same as the sound from the abandoned walkie-talkie at the mass grave just now.

Finally, I couldn't help but softly called out.

"Grandpa?"

Grandpa whipped his head around.

His eyes were bloodshot.

Not from bleeding, but as if he hadn't slept for countless days and nights, filled with terrifying red veins.

Seeing me, instead of being loving as usual, he rushed over like a madman.

He grabbed my shoulders.

His strength was terrifying, almost crushing my bones.

"Who told you to come down!" he growled, his voice full of despair.

I was scared to tears.

"I... I heard someone crying."

Grandpa's face twisted instantly.

He stared at me with a fear I couldn't understand.

"Remember," he said through gritted teeth, each word squeezed out.

"Never try to rewrite karma with code!"

I was ten and didn't understand what that meant.

Grandpa tightened his grip.

"In the future, if you see something without eyes..."

"Never look at its face!"

"Just unplug the power."

"Remember, disconnect the physical connection!"

As soon as he finished speaking.

The old CRT monitor in the basement suddenly let out a piercing shriek.

Pop!

The screen instantly turned to static.

Grandpa glanced back, his face turning pale as death.

Without hesitation, he shoved me hard toward the stairs.

"Run!"

I didn't run.

I turned around and looked at him.

"Grandpa, where is the Xiang family's thing hidden?"

Grandpa fell silent.

It was a deathly silence.

Only a second, but it felt like an eternity.

He slowly turned his head and looked again at the computer with the static.

He said:

"It's in the net."

"The Xiang family's secret."

"It's in the 'net.'"

The screen suddenly burst with a blinding white light.

My vision went black.

I snapped my eyes open.

Cold, fishy rain slammed into my face.

The sensation of reality instantly returned.

The face made of garbled code was still right in front of me.

Its cold hand was still clamped around my neck.

I couldn't breathe at all; my lungs burned like fire.

Intense sounds of fighting came from my ears.

I turned my head with difficulty and saw Old Chen entangled by two translucent humanoid entities.

He kept swinging his bronze sword, blue electric sparks flashing and exploding wildly in the dark night, but he couldn't break free.

I turned my gaze back with effort, looking at that nauseating garbled face.

Grandpa's warning from fifteen years ago suddenly exploded in my mind.

Unplug the power.

Disconnect the physical connection!

I gave up trying to pick up the computer that had fallen in the mud.

I stopped thinking about how to crack the monster with code.

My right hand struggled to reach behind my waist.

There was a tactical knife for self-defense.

I drew the knife.

The thing had no physical body.

But at its illusory neck,

There was a tiny red dot.

Flickering faintly.

Like the signal indicator light on a router or network cable port.

I mustered my last bit of strength and raised my right hand.

The blade cut a cold arc through the green rainy night.

One stab.

I drove it deep.

Thud!

The tip of the knife precisely pierced the flickering red dot.

At that moment, the whole world seemed to fall silent.

All the sounds of rain, fighting, and the excavator's roar disappeared.

Only a second of dead silence.

Then.

Beeeeeep—

An extremely piercing, prolonged tone.

Like the alarm sound of a computer blue screen of death.

The monster choking me suddenly froze.

The garbled code on its face began to flicker, twist, and stretch wildly.

Green. Red. White.

The colors intertwined and finally turned into a lifeless gray.

All the light went out instantly.

The cold force around my neck disappeared.

I crashed heavily into the mud, greedily gasping for air that smelled of machine oil.

The monster didn't fall like a corpse.

It began to crack and peel from the head, inch by inch.

What fell to the ground wasn't rotting flesh.

But a pile of rusty scrap metal.

Broken dark green circuit boards.

Burnt, pungent black chips.

And...

Several pale, unrecognizable bone fragments.

I lay in the mud, coughing violently.

Old Chen had also finished his fight.

He slashed open the last humanoid entity clinging to him.

The blinding blue light disappeared completely into the rain.

Silence returned all around.

The crazy excavator also stopped, its track no longer turning, and the two blood-red headlights dimmed and went out.

The rain continued to fall.

Still that unsettling green.

I endured the sharp pain in my throat, supported myself on the muddy ground with both hands, and staggered to my feet.

My neck was burning, and I guessed a ring of purple bruises had already formed.

Old Chen leaned on his bronze sword, his chest heaving heavily, gasping for breath.

He walked over to me and looked at the pile of discarded electronic components and bones on the ground.

"What did you just... do?" he asked.

I looked down at the knife still in my hand; there was no blood on the tip.

"Unplugged the power," I said hoarsely.

Old Chen was stunned.

"What?"

"My grandpa taught me," I said, looking up and wiping the mud from my face.

I didn't explain further.

Because my gaze passed over Old Chen's shoulder and looked ahead.

Just ahead.

At the deepest part of the mass grave.

The mud churned, and the ground slowly split apart.

A door.

Rose from underground.

It was an extremely eerie door.

It had no wooden or metal frame.

The frame was made of white bones.

On those bones, black fiber optic cables were densely wrapped.

The cables, like living venomous snakes, were tightly coiled around the pale bones, even piercing through the gaps.

In the middle of the frame, there was no passage.

But a thick, impenetrable darkness.

So black that not a single ray of light could pass through, like a bottomless pit that could devour everything.

At that moment.

The portable computer that had fallen in the mud and gone dark suddenly lit up on its own.

No one touched the keyboard.

In the terminal window, a line of glaring green code automatically appeared.

CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

Old Chen stared at the door, his face grim.

"Yin Gate," he muttered, a rare note of fear in his voice.

I stared at that darkness that seemed to devour souls.

"What's inside?" I asked, my voice trembling.

Old Chen didn't answer.

I looked down.

The book "Eye of Hell" that I had been clutching tightly in my arms, sealed in a waterproof bag, had somehow opened by itself.

It had turned to the first page.

On the originally blank paper, a line of bright red blood characters appeared, as if the blood was still wet.

Xiang Yunfeng.

Then.

A second line of blood characters, below the first, slowly, bit by bit, emerged.

As if someone were carving words with an invisible knife.

Welcome home.

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Participant of Chapter 4: Dial-up Hell: Don't Look at Its Face