I woke up inside the corpse of someone who had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Skin and bones, dried out all over. The body should have been cold for hours, yet its heart was still beating.
With every beat, I grew another layer of flesh.
In a daze, I saw a woman.
Dressed in red, she stood among a crowd of rotting corpses and reached out to call me. "Husband!"
I'd never seen her before, but her voice echoed through my soul, and my chest ached along with it.
If I wanted to live, I had to kill puppets and ghosts. For my heart to keep beating, I had to keep killing.
Everyone thought I was a puppet, but I was still damn well alive.
The Daoist priest said evil energy had entered my body. The girl in the classroom next door said my ability was strange.
The more puppet crystals I dug out, the more my strength slipped away, until I could barely clench my fist.
Then one day, nobody called me a puppet anymore, and I'd forgotten the woman in red.
She came looking for me, drenched in blood, black water streaming from her eyes. She raised a hand and pointed at the space between my brows. "How could you forget me?"
Behind her, countless rotting corpses twisted and howled.
