The Red Qilin Demon

The uncanny poured in from the northern frontier, feeding on human resentment.

The old dynasty's garrison surrendered without a fight and signed a secret pact with the uncanny: each city would offer three living people every month in exchange for its own temporary safety. Iron barrels were filled with cement, and living people were molded into bricks. Ghost cities rose one after another. Each brick sealed away a fellow human being buried alive, their screams turning into resentment for the uncanny to devour.

The gods fled far away, the old dynasty stood by, and the people waited to die to the sound of iron barrels rolling toward them.

Then a group of monsters with black scales and golden eyes crawled out of the bricks of a ghost city.

The old dynasty called them demons, claimed they had brought the uncanny, and accused them of slaughtering the surviving humans. The old dynasty gave Lin Xiaoman a book titled A Bestiary of Demons and told her: They are entirely responsible for your mother's death.

Lin Xiaoman believed them. She took a woodcutter's knife to kill the demon race, but at their first encounter, her right arm suddenly turned transparent. She heard her mother's voice coming from a crystal of resentment on one of the monsters. Her mother said one word: "Good."

To understand that word, she began to approach the demons, touching their wounds with her transparent right arm and listening to the voices lingering inside them.

She wrote down those voices in a notebook, piecing them together one by one, until she finally uncovered the truth:

The beings called monsters had people imprisoned inside them, people who were more human than any human.

And on the day she spoke the truth aloud, the old dynasty's blade was at her throat.