My name is Chen Shu. I have just become an ordinary detective with the Jiangning Criminal Investigation Unit.
I began investigating a series of disappearances. The bodies of dozens of victims all showed the same strange condition: some of their muscle tissue was missing, but their bones were intact.
In the notes section of the report, the forensic examiner had written a line in tiny letters, then crossed it out: "Consider the possibility of non-biological factors."
In an abandoned apartment building, I found a strange person who was still alive, curled up on a plank bed, so thin he looked like a dried corpse. He kept repeating the same words:
"Don't blame her. She's only feeding her child."
Then I saw her: a woman hanging upside down from the ceiling, her fingers embedded in the walls. The floor of the entire level was turning into living organs.
Someone saved me. His name was Luo Cheng. He said he was from an organization called "Anchor Point," which dealt with things on the dark side of this world that ordinary people were never meant to know about.
He handed me a Tang sword.
"It's called 'Zero.' It chose you."
A line was carved into its scabbard in very faint writing, as if someone had scratched it out little by little with a fingernail. I studied it for a long time, but could make out only half of it.
I didn't know who had written those words. But I recognized the handwriting.
It was my partner's handwriting.
And she said she'd never carved them.
