Chapter 6: The Grinning Shadow

Chapter 6: The Grinning Shadow

The first thing to return was sound. A steady, rhythmic beep, clean and insistent, cutting through a thick, dreamless fog. Next came the smell, sharp and sterile, the scent of antiseptic that scoured the inside of his nose. Finally, light—a flat, merciless fluorescent glare that made him squeeze his eyes shut even before they were truly open.

Li Wei’s consciousness seeped back into his body not like a flood, but like a slow, painful trickle into a dry riverbed. He could feel the cheap, starchy texture of a sheet against his skin, the soft plastic of an IV tube taped to the back of his hand. He flexed his fingers. They moved. They were stiff, weak, but they were his. Not woody, not gnarled, not fused to a cold, dead stone. He was alive. The overwhelming desire for that to be true, for the memory of the mummified husk to be nothing but a fever dream, was so powerful it was a physical ache in his chest.

“He’s awake! Doctor!”

His mother’s voice, raw with exhaustion and relief. He forced his eyes open. He was in a hospital room, white and sterile. His parents were there, their faces etched with a week’s worth of sleepless terror. They looked older, fragile.

A doctor bustled in, shining a light in his eyes, asking him simple questions he struggled to answer. His throat was a desert. The diagnosis was delivered in hushed, clinical tones just outside the door, loud enough for him to hear. Severe dehydration. Acute malnutrition. A profound catatonic shock.

“It’s as if his body was actively shutting down,” the doctor murmured to his father. “We almost lost him. Whatever happened in that room… he’s very lucky.”

The memory slammed back into him, not as a dream but as a brutal, undeniable reality. The mummified boy in the chair. The Umbral Plate. The agonizing moment of being trapped inside his own corpse. He had been dying. How was he here? How was he whole?

His mother sat by his bed, her hand clutching his. “Oh, Li Wei. We were so scared. We found you… your friend, the one who was visiting, found you on the living room floor, collapsed. And then when we went to your room…” She broke off, a sob catching in her throat. “You were just sitting there. So still. So cold.”

His friend? The duplicate. The last one. It had collapsed, and his parents had found it. They had found him. Both of him.

“The… the thing…” he croaked, his voice a dry rasp. “In my lap. The stone.”

His father’s face hardened, a flicker of the old disappointment mixed with new fear. “The paramedics took it. It wouldn't come off. They had to… break your fingers to get it free.” He looked away, unable to meet his son’s eyes.

Li Wei looked at his own hands. His fingers were splinted and bandaged. The ghost of an ancient, brittle snap echoed in his mind, but this time, the fingers were his own. The plate was gone. He was free of it. The relief was so profound it felt like drowning.

But his mother’s next words turned the relief to ice.

“And the news… oh, it’s all been so awful,” she wept softly. “The boy across the street. Yueming.”

Li Wei’s blood ran cold. He knew what she was going to say, but he was not prepared for the banal, clinical lie of it.

“He passed away, Li Wei. The same day you collapsed. The doctors found him… It was a terrible, rare genetic condition. Something that caused his body to… to fail. So suddenly. Such a perfect, diligent boy. Gone.”

The official story. So neat. So tidy. It covered everything. Yueming hadn't been murdered by a jealous, pathetic rival who ripped the life support from his withered hands. He had died of a tragic, unforeseeable illness. No one would ever know the truth. The obstacle wasn't a lack of evidence; it was that the crime itself was impossible, erased by a lie that everyone, from the doctors to his own parents, would accept without question. And he, Li Wei, was left as the sole keeper of the monstrous truth, the guilt a cancer in his soul.

For two days, he recovered, his physical strength slowly returning. But his mind was a prison of looping horror. The image of Yueming’s desiccated fingers, tangled like dead roots. The wet, organic snap as they broke. He was a murderer. The weight of it was suffocating.

On the third night, he was alone. The rhythmic beep of the heart monitor was a steady companion in the sterile silence. The fluorescent lights in the hallway cast long, sterile rectangles of light into his room. He was trying to drift off to sleep when a sudden, inexplicable chill seeped into the air. The hairs on his arms stood on end.

The beep of the monitor faltered. Beep… beep… be-eep… beeeeeep… It flatlined for a full two seconds before catching again, frantic and fast.

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep—

Li Wei’s eyes shot open. The shadow in the far corner of the room, the one cast by a large potted plant, was moving. It wasn’t trembling from a draft; it was congealing, pulling inward, gathering a density that was blacker than the surrounding gloom. It detached from the wall and stood.

It was tall and impossibly thin, a stick-figure silhouette of a man. It took a silent step forward, into the pale light from the hall. It wore Yueming’s face.

But it was wrong. Utterly, horrifyingly wrong. The handsome face was a mask of stretched, translucent skin pulled taut over a skeletal frame. The serene, confident smile he had envied his whole life was still there, but it was a fixed, predatory grin on a skull. The eyes were dark, empty pits. It was the gnarled thing from the window, given form.

"You," it said. The voice was not Yueming’s. It was a dry, whispering rustle, the sound of dead leaves skittering across pavement. "You broke my fingers."

It raised a hand, and Li Wei saw what he had only felt in his memory. Long, twig-like fingers, bent and twisted at unnatural angles. The ones he had snapped under the bed.

"Yueming?" Li Wei whispered, his voice trembling, thinking this was a ghost, a specter of his guilt come to claim him.

The creature’s grin widened, a grotesque stretching of the skin over its teeth. "No." The whisper was full of an ancient, alien amusement. "The boy is gone. A long time ago. He was the first battery. A very good one. He lasted for years."

It took another step, its movements fluid and unnatural, like a puppet pulled by unseen strings. "I am what wore him. I am what made him perfect. This reality is so… thin. It requires an anchor. A focus. A price."

The pieces slammed into place in Li Wei's mind. The doll-like perfection. The unsettling stillness. It wasn't Yueming. It had never been Yueming. It was a parasite, a consciousness that had puppeteered the boy, using the Umbral Plate as its anchor to the world, slowly consuming him until nothing was left but a mummified husk.

"You took my anchor," the entity hissed, its grin never faltering as it loomed over the bed. "You woke me up from a very pleasant dream. I am… untethered. It is uncomfortable. Now, you will give it back."

Panic, cold and absolute, seized Li Wei. "I don't have it! I don't know where it is!"

The creature tilted its head, its empty eyes seeming to bore straight through him, into the frantic, terrified core of his soul. It saw his fear, his confusion, his genuine ignorance. And it did not care.

"Find it," it whispered, leaning so close Li Wei could smell the dry, dusty scent of the grave on its breath. "You are marked by it now. Your life force is… familiar. A suitable replacement, should the original remain lost."

It straightened up, a shadow of perfect, terrible posture. "You have until the next new moon. Thirteen days. Return my anchor to me." The grin seemed to stretch impossibly wider. "Or I will start collecting. Piece. By. Piece."

Before Li Wei could scream, the creature dissolved, melting back into the corner of the room, becoming nothing more than a simple shadow once more.

The heart monitor shrieked, a single, unbroken tone, as nurses burst into the room, their faces masks of alarm. But Li Wei didn't see them. He could only stare at the empty corner, the creature's final whisper echoing in the screaming silence of his mind. He had escaped the plate, only to become the target of its master.