The Gray Fog Diary: An Unfinished Chapter Shrouded in Ash

Have you ever had the same nightmare over and over? Lin Wei’s nightmare is always locked at 16°C. The fingertips of a “gray-fog figure” brush her wrist, a glass medicine bottle in Room 307 presses against her palm, and even the wind in the underground passage carries the same chill. Then she discovers a faint gray ligature mark on her wrist, identical to those on Nurse Xiao Zhou and the missing Li Juan. A star-shaped mark within it grows hot along with her star-shaped hair clip, and she realizes with a shock that the clonazepam she takes every night is no sleeping aid. A concentration of 1:5 is the trigger for the former director’s “Black Ash Project,” and she has long been a “consciousness vessel” waiting to be activated. The fingerprints in the pharmacy, camphor shavings, and three purple marks on the neck of Su Wan’s semi-transparent consciousness form all expose the truth: the former director used “black ash” to strip away consciousness and turn bodies into vessels. Su Wan was the first. Lin Xiao’s consciousness is sealed in a glass jar, while people like Xiao Zhou are trapped in illusions, slowly turning “transparent.” Chen Mo’s flashlight reveals alpha waves on the lab equipment: the vessels’ final pulses of consciousness. Aunt Zhang’s knitting needles are tangled with black-ash yarn from the “Shadow” faction, and beyond the door marked with the character for “Shadow” in the new ward, more vessels let out faint groans. They use three hair clips to hold back the black ash, but they know this is only the beginning: the former director’s students have a vast supply of activation agents, and the cracks in the ward walls conceal countless dormant fragments of consciousness. Cradling Lin Xiao’s consciousness jar, Lin Wei hears Su Wan’s voice drift through the illusion: “Saving them means saving yourself. There’s still the mark of half a vessel hidden inside your body.”