The Era of the Wolf's Howl

Chapter 2

Zhong Xiaoman struggled even more fiercely than I had anticipated.

As I clamped down on her wrists, the fluorescent powder lodged beneath her fingernails came sifting down, coalescing on the asphalt into tiny crescent shapes—identical to the traces found at the crime scene.

"Let go!" She arched her back like a wildcat with its hackles raised. "I'm just a courier!"

The music box slipped from her grasp and sprang open with a sharp *snap*. The whirring of its winding mechanism was as grating as fingernails scraping across a blackboard; then—

I heard my mother's voice.

"Don't be afraid. It will all be over soon..."

I froze. It was a memory from when I was five years old, burning up with a fever—yet in the background, I could hear the rhythmic *beep-beep* of an ECG monitor. But back then, my family had been so poor we couldn't even afford a thermometer.

Zhong Xiaoman seized the opportunity to break free. She retreated three meters away, a strange smile playing on her lips. "Did you hear that? You people stuffed things inside us—and then completely forgot about them yourselves."

The iron gate of the abandoned observatory was rusted a deep, rusty red. When I kicked through the chains, flakes of rust drifted down like dandruff. Moonlight seeped through the cracks in the dome, piecing together twelve distorted circles on the floor below.

No—not circles. They were moons, running in reverse.

Lu Lin suddenly let out a muffled groan. He clutched his right eye, a pale blue fluid seeping through the gaps between his fingers. A web of fractured glass patterns spread wildly across his retina; projected onto the wall was a three-dimensional blueprint—the ventilation ducts of Sector E-7, forming a colossal question mark.

"Architectural schematics for the Bureau of Calibration," his voice trembled. "But there's an extra corridor—one that doesn't exist..."

The barrel of the telescope felt cold as ice. As I leaned in toward the eyepiece, the lens suddenly snapped into focus. The scene from thirty years ago appeared with terrifying clarity: a figure in a white lab coat—*me*—was plunging a syringe into a little girl's arm.

The little girl looked up.

It was Zhong Xiaoman's face.

Acid rose in my throat. On the ID badge worn by the "me" in the image, the title "Chief Researcher" was inscribed; meanwhile, the label on the syringe bore the imprint: "Memory Carrier No. 23."

Suddenly, the shadows came to life.

The blood-red moons painted on the wall began to writhe, as if being smeared away by an invisible hand. They flowed down to the floor, coalescing into an arrow that pointed directly toward the Great Clock Tower in the city center. Zhong Xiaoman's music box snapped shut of its own accord, and with a sharp *c***k*, its winding key broke clean in two.

"Twelve o'clock," Lu Lin said, wiping a streak of blue blood from the corner of his eye. "The Great Clock Tower's machinery room... is where the thirteenth moon is hidden."

Chapter 4

The gears of the Great Clock Tower snagged my shadow. I counted the glowing footprints leading up the stairs; suddenly, the seventh step collapsed, caving in to form a crescent-shaped hollow. Inside my pocket, the components of Zhong Xiaoman's music box clinked against one another—each tiny screw still warm with body heat.

A pale blue mist seeped through the c***k beneath the door to the top-floor attic. The instant my hand closed around the doorknob, a pattern of fine, intricate teeth marks suddenly materialized across the metal surface—a perfect match for the bite marks I had seen on the neck of the vampire noblewoman.

"Don't touch it!" Lu Lin's retinal patterns glowed faintly in the darkness. "That is frozen moonlight."

Bai Yan stood in the exact center of the room. On his left hand, he wore that familiar black glove; in his right, he cradled a model of the moon that was slowly melting away. Silvery-white liquid dripped into a specially designed receptacle below—and with every falling drop came the faint, audible *clinking* of miniature gears meshing together.

I crouched inside the ventilation shaft, aiming my phone's camera lens at the receptacle. Suddenly, the viewfinder zoomed in automatically; etched into the surfaces of those gears were the exact same spiral patterns found on the winding key of the music box.

"The seventh batch of 'Moon Tears' lacks sufficient purity," Bai Yan's voice drifted out, sounding as if it were coming from beneath the water. "We require more Memory Carriers."

Zhong Xiaoman suddenly pinched my thigh. Her lips moved, murmuring strange, unintelligible syllables, and the handwriting in my notebook began to twist and distort. The entry I had originally written—"Mechanical Gears"—shifted before my eyes, transforming into "Memory Fragments," while thin threads of blood began to seep through the ink.

Suddenly, my fountain pen sprang to life of its own accord. It began to scribble furiously across the paper; then, with a sharp thrust, its nib pierced through the page and plunged deep into the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger. "Memory Anchor Reset Protocol Initiated"—this line was written in my own blood.

As I flung aside my fountain pen, a drop of ink splashed onto the lunar model. Its rate of dissolution suddenly accelerated, and from within the silvery-white liquid, the outline of half a human face emerged. It was the "Chief Researcher" I had glimpsed through the telescope.

Bai Yan whipped his head around. In the exposed palm of his left hand—now stripped of its glove—the inverted-moon tattoo was bleeding. As droplets of blood fell into the containment vessel, every gear in the mechanism ground to a sudden halt.

"Run!" Lu Lin kicked open the cover of a ventilation shaft. His right eye had completely transformed into a mosaic of shattered glass; the light refracting through it projected a map of our escape route onto the wall.

Every clock in the stairwell had ceased to tick. Their minute and hour hands formed countless inverted-moon symbols, while the grinding of their jammed gears sounded like the ragged gasps of the dying. Zhong Xiaoman suddenly pressed the shattered remains of a music box against the face of the largest clock; the winding hole aligned perfectly with the pointed tip of the moon symbol.

*Click.*

Simultaneously, every clock throughout the entire building began to spin in reverse. A sudden, searing pain flared across my retinas as a three-dimensional schematic of the seventh subterranean level materialized within my field of vision. At the very end of that anomalous, extra corridor, a label read: "Memory Archive No. 023."

Lu Lin suddenly clutched his eyes and crumpled to the floor. A viscous, blue fluorescent fluid oozed through the gaps between his fingers, tracing a pattern of twelve concentric circles onto the ground—identical to the layout of the observatory above. No, thirteen circles—within the final, innermost circle, my own reflection hovered.

The sound of Bai Yan's footsteps echoed up from the floors below. Zhong Xiaoman hauled me to my feet, dragging me toward the rooftop; the sticky fluorescent powder coating her palm left a perfect handprint upon the steel access door. On the roof, the wind howled furiously, and the moon loomed so massive in the sky that it seemed poised to come crashing down upon us.

I glanced back at our pursuer and froze. Bai Yan's left hand was now fully exposed to the moonlight—and it was not the hand of a human being, but a mechanical construct composed of countless miniature clocks.

Every single clock face pointed to 11:59.