Nine o'clock at People's Square Station was a symphony of ordered chaos. The human tide pouring from Subway Line 2 collided with the tide trying to surge in, creating a massive vortex of damp coats, weary sighs, and the thick, recycled air of the Shanghai underground.
Chen Wei was a discordant note in that symphony.
He stood pressed into a corner of the train car, his leather briefcase held tight against his side, trying to make himself invisible. After twelve hours of staring at soulless numbers on a computer screen in a Lujiazui skyscraper, his brain was a monochrome blur.
All he wanted was his small apartment and the silence it promised.
The light from the digital ad panels inside the car flickered, cycling from a promotion for a new milk tea to the face of a perfectly smiling actress. For most people, they were just annoying splashes of color. For Chen Wei, they were more.
He could feel them.
Not with his eyes, but with some strange, unnamable sense deep in his chest. The cool blue light of a banking ad felt orderly, sterile. The fiery red of a hotpot chain carried a simmering, vibrant warmth. He'd always dismissed it as a strange form of migraine, a side effect of living in a city that never slept.
"The doors are closing. The next train..." The automated voice announced, first in Mandarin, then in the local Shanghainese dialect.
Just before the doors slid shut, a figure slipped in.
It was an old woman, her back hunched, dressed in a dark, faded tunic. She was unremarkable in a city of tens of millions. But as she passed, an unnatural chill radiated from her. It wasn't the cold of the air conditioning, but a hollow cold, as if all warmth and life had been siphoned from the very air where she stood.
Chen Wei shivered involuntarily, pulling the collar of his shirt higher. His gaze drifted to her. Her skin was wrinkled like old paper, her eyes sunken and dark, like two bottomless wells. She stared at nothing, simply holding onto the metal pole, a silent, still point in the moving car.
The people around her seemed to notice nothing. They scrolled through their phones, leaned their heads against the windows, lost in their own worlds.
Only Chen Wei, with his bizarre sensitivity, felt that something was deeply wrong.
The neon green light of the milk tea ad next to her head began to flicker erratically. Its vibrant hue seemed to dim, to turn gray, each time she exhaled a faint breath. The warm, energetic flow Chen Wei usually felt from it seemed to stutter, to recoil like a threatened animal.
The old woman slowly turned her head, her vacant eyes scanning the crowd. They settled on a young man wearing headphones, his eyes closed, likely lost in his music.
She mumbled something, the words lost in the screech of the wheels on the track.
Instantly, the young man flinched, his eyes flying open. The healthy color drained from his face, leaving it a waxy, pallid white. He clutched his chest, gasping for breath, his expression one of pure bewilderment, as if his very life force had been unplugged.
No one else took note. They assumed he was just carsick.
But Chen Wei had seen it. He had seen a thin, almost invisible wisp of ash-gray smoke drift from the young man's chest and absorb into the old woman's dangling hand.
His world ground to a halt. His heart hammered against his ribs. What had just happened? A hallucination? A product of his twelve-hour workday?
No. The deathly chill emanating from the woman had lessened slightly, replaced by a faint spark of vitality. She seemed... sated.
And then, the worst thing happened.
Her dark, bottomless eyes slowly swiveled, passing over a dozen people, and locked directly onto his.
They weren't vacant anymore. Inside them was an ancient, cold, and terrible recognition.
She knew he had seen.
The chill rushed him, this time aimed and focused. It was no longer a radiating aura but an invisible spike, driving into his mind. His entire body went rigid. The light from the ads around him seemed to dim, swallowed by the encroaching shadow that surrounded him. The familiar warmth of the "urban qi" was snuffed out.
The train plunged into a tunnel. The main lights in the car flickered and died, leaving only the weak, yellow emergency lamps. The car was cast into relative darkness.
In that moment, Chen Wei saw more clearly than ever. The old woman was no longer just an old woman. Her form blurred, and for a split second, he swore he saw something else—a shadow with sharp, non-human angles.
Panic clawed at his throat. His survival instinct screamed. He had to do something. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image was seared onto the back of his eyelids. He tried to step back, but he was already flush against the wall of the train.
Desperate, his mind latched onto something to hold on to. Not a thought, but a feeling. He sought warmth, vitality, anything to fight the encroaching cold.
And he found it.
Through the window, the lights of a massive billboard outside the tunnel flashed past—a twisting, golden neon dragon. It was just an image, but Chen Wei felt a powerful, proud, and brilliant surge of qi from it.
On pure instinct, without thinking, he grabbed onto that feeling like a drowning man grabbing a rope. He took a deep breath, imagining he was pulling that warm, golden energy into himself.
A wave of warmth spread from his chest through his body, pushing the cold back.
In the gloom, the old woman's eyes narrowed. A flicker of surprise, almost fear, flashed within them. She took a small step back.
"Ding-dong. Arriving at Yuyuan Garden..."
The lights in the car flared back to life. The doors slid open. The chill vanished as abruptly as it had come.
The old woman, once again looking like a normal, hunched figure, gave Chen Wei one last glance. It was no longer a threat, but a cold, calculating warning. Then she melted into the crowd stepping off the train and was gone.
Chen Wei stood frozen, the back of his shirt soaked with a cold sweat. The young man from before had slumped to the floor, a few kind strangers asking if he was okay. The train car returned to normal.
But for Chen Wei, nothing was normal anymore.
The world he knew—a world of numbers, skyscrapers, and crowded subways—had just cracked open. And through that crack, he had seen something ancient, hungry, and utterly terrifying looking back.