The year was the seventeenth of Chongzhen, or what little remained of it. The Ming Empire bled from a thousand cuts. In the north, Li Zicheng's rebel hordes swallowed counties like locusts. In the heartlands, drought had cracked the earth until rivers ran as dust and men spoke in whispers of eating their own dead. Feng Kuan cared for none of it. Not anymore.
He was forty-eight winters old, and every one of them sat heavy on his bones. Once he had been Captain Feng of the Shanxi border garrisons, a man who could drill a hundred conscripts until they moved like one blade, who had tasted victory against northern raiders when the empire still pretended strength. Then came the disastrous campaign along the Yellow River bend. Bad orders from eunuch generals in the capital. Ambush. His troop slaughtered to the last runner while he survived with a broken shoulder and the shame of retreat. They flogged him in the public square, stripped his rank, and spat on his name. "Coward. Drunkard. Failure." The labels stuck better than the lashes.
Now he wandered the borderlands between Shaanxi and Henan like a ghost that refused to lie down. His robes were patched and filthy, once imperial blue now the color of dried mud. A wide-brimmed bamboo hat shaded eyes that had seen too much. At his belt hung the old dao straight-backed with a gentle curve near the tip, the kind Ming soldiers favored for chopping through flesh and bone. Beside it, the gourd. Cheap sorghum baijiu, harsh as regret, the only friend that never betrayed him.
The sun bled low across the barren hills. Dust devils danced over fields that should have been heavy with millet but now lay cracked and empty. Distant smoke rose in black pillars, rebel fires, or perhaps villages burning their own to stop the plague. Rumors traveled faster than armies these days: the dead walked. Not the honorable ghosts of ancestors, but stiff corpses that rose from shallow graves, driven by some demonic qi born of heaven's wrath. Feng Kuan had laughed at first. Then he saw the first emptied hamlet, bodies with throats torn yet still twitching.
He spat and took another pull from the gourd. The liquor burned down his throat, warming the hollow where purpose used to live. "Heaven's curse," he muttered. "More like the emperor's incompetence." His voice was gravel, rough from disuse and drink.
The path climbed toward an old temple perched on a rocky shoulder of the mountain. Crimson walls faded to dull rose, tiles missing like missing teeth. It had once been a place of Taoist cultivation and martial training warrior-monks who blended scripture with spear and fist. Pilgrims came in better years. Now it stood isolated, half-forgotten, a possible roof against the coming night and whatever hunted in it.
Feng Kuan's boots worn military issue, soles splitting, scuffed the stone steps. The gate hung crooked on one hinge. Inside, the courtyard was silent except for the wind moaning through broken lattice screens. Overturned bronze incense burners lay cold. Blood, dark and dried streaked the flagstones in long smears. No bodies. Only the smell of old death mixed with something sharper, like spoiled rice wine and rot.
He drew the dao halfway, then let it slide back. If trouble waited, steel would answer. For now, he sought only a corner to drink until the world blurred and the cries in his head quieted.
Deeper in, past the main hall where a chipped statue of Laozi stared with blind eyes, he heard it.
A thin, high wail. Not the howl of wind. Not the groan of settling timber. A baby's cry.
Feng Kuan froze. His hand tightened on the gourd. Infants did not survive long in these times. Not with famine stripping villages to bone, not with rebels taking what they wanted, and certainly not with whatever plague turned men into monsters.
The cry came again, weaker, from a side chamber behind a half-collapsed screen painted with faded cranes. He pushed through, boots crunching on broken pottery. Inside: a small room that might once have been a monk's cell. A simple wooden cradle lay on its side. Blood pooled beneath it.
The old master or what remained of him slumped against the far wall. Gray robes soaked crimson. Throat torn open in ragged strips, as if clawed by something with long nails. His eyes stared at nothing. In his lap, clutched in rigid fingers, a small bundle wrapped in saffron cloth.
The bundle moved. Cried again.
Feng Kuan approached slowly, dao now fully drawn. The blade caught the last light from a high window, nicked edge, darkened with old stains he had never bothered to clean. He nudged the master's shoulder with his boot. The body toppled sideways with a wet sound. No rise of chest. No breath.
Only the infant remained.
A girl, he guessed. No more than five months. Tiny face red from wailing, fists no bigger than walnuts waving in futile anger. Black hair fine as silk, eyes squeezed shut against a world already too cruel. She wore a simple inner garment, stained but not torn. The master must have hidden her before the end.
Feng Kuan stared down at her. Forty-eight years had taught him many things. Chief among them: attachments killed men slower than blades but hurt longer. He had buried comrades. Lost a wife to fever years before the disgrace. No children of his own, the gods had spared him that mercy. This was not his burden.
He could leave her. Walk back into the twilight, find another ruin, drink until the cries stopped mattering. The empire was dying anyway. One more small life would change nothing.
The girl's cry sharpened, piercing the heavy silence. It echoed off the temple walls and spilled out into the courtyard.
Then came the answering sounds.
From the main hall: a low, guttural moan. Not human. Not quite animal. Followed by the distinct hop, thump… thump… of rigid limbs striking stone.
Feng Kuan's blood ran cold despite the baijiu in his veins. He had heard descriptions from half-mad survivors on the road. Jiangshi. Stiff corpses. They rose where the qi turned sour famine graves, plague pits, battlefields left unburned. Blades passed through their flesh like water through rice paper; the wounds closed in moments. Only fire ended them for good.
He sheathed the dao and scooped the infant up with one scarred arm, clumsy and unpracticed. She was lighter than he expected, yet the weight settled on his soul like lead. Her cries vibrated against his chest. "Quiet, little ghost," he growled under his breath. "You'll bring them all."
Too late.
The first jiangshi appeared in the doorway, a former monk, perhaps, still in tattered robes now stiff with dried blood. Skin pale as rice paper stretched over bone, eyes milky and sightless. Arms outstretched straight forward, long nails black and curved like hooks. It moved with grotesque hops, legs locked, body rigid. The stench hit like a fist: rot and corrupted incense.
Feng Kuan backed away, one hand supporting the baby, the other freeing his dao again. "Stay back, devil."
The creature did not listen. It hopped forward, faster than its stiffness suggested, drawn by the infant's wail and the living heat of blood.
He struck a powerful downward chop that should have split skull to jaw. The dao bit deep, cleaving flesh and bone with a wet crunch. Black ichor sprayed. The jiangshi staggered… then straightened. The wound bubbled, flesh knitting before his eyes. It lunged, nails raking the air inches from his face.
Feng Kuan cursed and retreated deeper into the chamber, heart pounding with the old soldier's rhythm even as age and drink slowed his limbs. Another hop. Another slash but this one across the torso. Same result. The thing regenerated, relentless, qi twisted into something that mocked death.
More moans echoed from the courtyard. Two… three… more coming.
The baby screamed louder, terrified by the violence and the stench. Her cries pulled them like moths to flame.
Feng Kuan's back hit the wall. No way out except through them. His gourd swung at his hip, sloshing. In desperation he drew it, yanked the stopper with his teeth, and took a burning swallow for courage. Some spilled down his chin, onto his robes, onto the dao blade as he raised it again.
The jiangshi hopped close. Steel met claw in a ringing clash. Sparks flew and dull orange against the gathering dark.
The spilled baijiu ignited.
Flame raced along the blade in a whoosh of blue-white fire. The alcohol burned hot and fast, coating the edge. Feng Kuan swung on instinct, a desperate horizontal cut across the creature's neck.
This time the wound did not close.
Fire seared the corrupted flesh. The jiangshi let out a piercing shriek that sounded almost human, pain, rage, something dying. Black smoke rose as the neck cauterized and charred. The head toppled. The body collapsed into twitching limbs that finally stilled.
Feng Kuan stared, chest heaving, the flaming dao casting wild shadows. The baby's cries faltered into hiccupping sobs against his shoulder.
One down. But more thumps approached from the hall.
He looked at the tiny girl in his arm — nameless, fatherless, a burden he had not asked for. Leaving her now would be simple. One step past the burning corpse, into the night alone.
Instead, something cracked inside the old drunkard. Not hope, there was none left in this dying empire. Not love, he barely knew what that felt like anymore. Just a stubborn refusal to let the last spark of meaning gutter out without a fight.
"Damn you, little ghost," he whispered, voice thick. "You'll get us both killed."
He tore a strip from the dead master's robe, wrapped it hastily around the infant to bind her securely against his chest, freeing both hands. Then he kicked over a brazier, scattering hot coals. More baijiu splashed onto rags and his blade.
The temple was wood and dry thatch. Fire would spread fast, as dangerous to him as to the dead.
But for the first time in years, Feng Kuan felt the old captain stir beneath the ruin.
He raised the burning dao, alcohol flames dancing along the edge, and stepped toward the oncoming moans.
The night outside the temple waited, vast and merciless. The empire crumbled. No safe zones. No cure. Only the road, the hunger, and the small weight against his heart that refused to let him lie down and die.