Chapter 2: Memories of the Dead

Chapter 2: Memories of the Dead

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Yun Zhou! I know you’re in there!”

The door shuddered in its frame. A fine rain of dust sifted down from the ceiling, and somewhere below, a dog started barking in sympathy.

Yun Zhou didn’t answer.

He stood in the middle of the room with his shoulders sagging and his hands trembling, exactly the way a terrified boy should. His eyes, though, had gone somewhere else entirely. They were fixed on nothing, unfocused, the way a man looks when he’s reading a book no one else can see.

Three men, no hurry. They’ve kicked this door before. They know I won’t run.

Which means I have a minute. Maybe two.

He closed his eyes. Out in the hallway, the shouting kept going, but he let it blur into background noise, like rain on a tin roof. Then he reached down into the body he’d borrowed and pulled.

The memories came up all at once.

***

They didn’t come like his own memories, neat and ordered, each one filed by date and usefulness. These were messy. They hit him in a flood, tangled with smells and sounds and a kind of low, constant ache that had no source.

A kitchen. Yellow light. A woman’s hand brushing hair off his forehead. “Eat, Zhou-zhou. You’re too skinny.”

A funeral. Two black frames side by side. The air thick with incense, and a man in a gray suit telling him, very politely, that there had been an accident.

An orphanage dormitory. A thin mattress. Another boy’s laughter through the wall.

A classroom. A Hunter Aptitude test. A machine blinking red, then flashing a single word: DEFECTIVE.

Yun Zhou’s jaw tightened. He kept the memories moving, skimming past the sentimental ones the way a thief skips the family photos on the way to the safe.

Hunter registration. The cheapest guild would take him. He was seventeen, and he was scared.

Four years of Gates.

That was where the memories sharpened.

***

He saw them one by one, the way you see faces in a police lineup.

Bram. Broad shoulders, a jaw like a cinder block, a smile that never reached his eyes. The party leader. The one who’d said “Don’t worry, kid, we’ve got your back” on the first day.

Cassia. Sharp nails, sharper tongue. She handled the money. She always handled the money.

Dorian. Bram’s younger cousin. Pretty, bored, and cruel in the specific way of a man who has never been punished for anything.

Fenrir. A big, quiet coward who laughed at whatever Dorian laughed at.

Four years. Four years of carrying their gear. Four years of watching them split the loot into four shares while he got a “porter’s fee.” Four years of being the one who walked first into every unexplored corridor, because “you’re not worth much if you die, so you go.”

And then the last Gate.

The memory came up slowly, as if the body itself didn’t want to remember. A cavern. Blue light. Something large and wet breathing in the dark. Bram’s hand between his shoulder blades.

“Sorry, buddy. Someone’s gotta buy us time.”

The push.

The scream, his own, thin and high.

Then the crawling. Four hours of crawling through a collapsed tunnel with a broken leg, dragging himself toward a pinprick of daylight, while somewhere behind him the monster ate what was left of his gear.

He had made it out.

And when he did, the party’s names were already on the report. Survivors: Bram, Cassia, Dorian, Fenrir. One missing name, no explanation. A footnote that said “Porter. Lost to monster attack. Unavoidable.”

Yun Zhou opened his eyes.

His face was blank. Not sad, not angry. Blank, like a ledger that had just been totaled.

So that’s what broke him.

***

The knocking had stopped. Muffled voices now, arguing in the stairwell. Good. That bought a little more time.

He used it.

His body moved toward the folding table by the bed, slow and careful, as if each step cost money. He picked up the phone first. The screen was cracked in a spiderweb pattern, and when he thumbed it awake, the lock screen showed a wallpaper of a cheap sunset. Eleven percent battery. Four unread messages.

Marlo Chen: Today. Don’t make me come up there.

Marlo Chen: I mean it.

Koperasi Harapan Baru: REMINDER: Outstanding balance 48,000,000. Interest accrues daily.

Unknown: ur such a loser lol. glad ur dead — Dorian, probably. Sent two days ago.

Yun Zhou read that last one twice. His thumb hovered over it.

Glad you’re dead. A thoughtful gift to send a man before he hangs himself.

He didn’t delete it. He screenshotted it, backed it up, and filed it away under evidence.

A boy who died on a message like this is a boy who left a paper trail. Always keep the paper trail.

He set the phone down and opened the debt notice on the table next to it. A creased, coffee-stained sheet from the loan cooperative. He ran his finger down the numbers.

Principal: 12,000,000.

Interest, penalties, “administrative fees”: 36,000,000.

Four times the original loan. Taken out, according to the memories, to pay for a medical bill after the last Gate. The bill for the leg that Bram’s party had broken for him.

Yun Zhou made a small sound in his throat. It was almost a laugh.

“They pushed him into a monster,” he murmured, “left him to die, and then he had to borrow money to pay for the injury.”

Even in his old life, among Heavenly Demons and tyrant clans, he’d rarely seen a trap this clean.

***

He moved on to the closet. A hunter jacket hung on a bent hanger: gray, faded, the elbows patched with mismatched fabric. A small canvas bag sat on the floor beneath it, packed with a dented flashlight, two bandages, and a cheap folding knife with a cracked handle.

Everything a hunter needs, he thought dryly, if the hunter wants to die.

He was about to close the closet when his eyes caught something on the top shelf, half-hidden behind a pile of folded sweaters.

A box.

It was small, maybe the size of a shoebox, made of dark wood so old it had gone nearly black. The corners were worn smooth by many hands. A brass lock, no bigger than a coin, held it shut.

He reached up and took it down.

It was heavier than it looked. And cold. Not the cold of wood in a drafty room, but a flat, deep cold, like touching the side of a well.

Interesting.

He turned it over. On the bottom, scratched into the grain with a knife, were three words in a child’s careless handwriting:

FOR ZHOU. LATER.

His memories supplied the rest, slowly, grudgingly. His mother had pressed this into his hands on the night before the “accident.” “Don’t open it until you’re older. Promise me, Zhou-zhou.” He had promised. He had never found the key.

Yun Zhou stood very still.

He wasn’t a sentimental man. In ninety years of life, he’d been given a hundred “last gifts” from dying people, and nine out of ten had been traps.

But the box wasn’t a trap. He was almost sure of that. A trap felt like a lie. This felt like something waiting.

The body’s parents died the same night they gave this away. The same night someone cleaned the apartment. That isn’t a coincidence.

He turned the box one more time, studying the lock. Brass, simple, a child could pick it. He could pick it in five seconds.

Not now.

He put the box back on the shelf, behind the sweaters, exactly as it had been. He fixed the fold of the top sweater so the dust pattern matched.

Later. When there’s no one outside the door.

***

He walked back to the mirror and looked again at the face in it. The hollow cheeks. The rope scar. Eyes the color of strong tea.

The memories were all there now, laid out like a case file. A life, summed up in a few lines: orphaned at fourteen, a “defective” aptitude test, four years of being used, one betrayal too many, and a rope.

Yun Zhou studied the reflection with the cool, professional attention of a man evaluating a tool.

“You weren’t weak,” he said at last, softly. “People like to say that, don’t they? ‘He was weak. He gave up.’”

The reflection stared back.

“But weakness isn’t why you died. You died because you were alone. Nobody warned you. Nobody taught you to look at Bram and see a knife. Nobody told you that the people who say ‘I’ve got your back’ are always standing behind you.”

He tilted his head.

“I don’t pity you. Pity is a waste. But I understand you.”

A pause.

“And since I’m wearing your skin, I suppose I owe you something. A receipt, maybe.”

His mouth curved. It was not a kind expression.

“I’ll collect on everyone who did this. All four of them. You don’t have to ask.”

In the glass, the pale, hollow-eyed boy smiled back at him, and for just a heartbeat, the smile looked almost grateful.

Almost.

***

Crack.

The sound was sudden and enormous. A boot hit the door from the outside, and the cheap lock exploded off its screws. The door slammed against the wall hard enough to leave a dent, and gray morning light poured into the room along with three silhouettes.

In half a second, Yun Zhou’s face rearranged itself. Shoulders collapsed inward. Breath hitched. Eyes went wide and wet. His hand flew to his throat as if to hide the scar, trembling, pathetic, the very picture of a boy who had no more fight left.

Inside, the case file closed, and another, quieter voice spoke.

Three men. One carrying a steel baton. One in an expensive jacket, with a fresh gold ring on his right hand. One standing slightly behind the others, eyes on the floor, afraid of his own partners.

The leader is Marlo Chen. His ring is new. His watch is a knockoff. He’s stealing from his own boss.

Good.

Very good.

The man in the middle, a thick-necked bruiser with a gold ring and a smile like a shark’s, stepped over the broken door frame and grinned.

“Well, well,” said Marlo Chen. “Looks like somebody’s still alive.”

He cracked his knuckles.

“Time to settle up.”

***

To be continued in Chapter 3: “The Collector”