Han Jiang looked up at the spiderweb crack spreading across the ceiling of his dingy apartment. His phone was still in his hand, screen dim, light falling unevenly across his face and leaving most of the room in shadow.
It had already been a full month since he came to this parallel world.
On the surface it looked like Earth. Same cities, same language, same everyday life going on outside the window. But the longer he stayed here, the more things didn't quite line up. Small differences. Strange gaps. Things he couldn't really explain properly, just a feeling that something was off.
And that feeling hadn't gone away.
Han Jiang was still Han Jiang, still eighteen, still a nobody who failed at middle-of-the-road high school with poor grades and no talent. But the rest of it was all gone. In this world, his father had died when he was young-his first memories were those of the original Han Jiang, fragments of forgotten dreams. His mother, meanwhile, worked abroad and gave him a sum of money each month. He lived in this cramped one-room apartment across from school by himself, eating microwave dinners and cheap takeout.
The phone in his hand would be his only friend most nights.
He'd been browsing the forum "Strange Tales" for the last hour lying on his bumpy mattress with his legs up against the wall. Strange Tales was a widely visited forum online for the sharing of spooky stories, urban myths, and alleged supernatural encounters. Han Jiang found it quite amusing; finding good fiction was tough and some of these people were remarkably good writers.
He was reading through a post which read: I calculated with my fingers that you are reading this from your bed.
The post continued: I worked it out with my fingers that you are reading a novel from your bed with your legs raised against a wall, phone above your face, probably in the dark. Am I correct?
The responses followed suit, predictable of course, and were as follows:
"Fck, how did you know?"
"Get out of my house!"
"Bro's watching me through my camera, I'm covering it with tape rn"
"This is just probability. Most people read novels like this. Boring."
Han Jiang snickered and locked the thread. Stupid attention-whoring posts like these were common as dirt. He scanned the main page of the forum, trying to find something with more merit. His thumb halted on a thread with abnormally high click count-fifty thousand-plus views and rapidly ascending, created merely six hours prior.
[True Experience] I am the provincial physician at Provincial People's Hospital, Jiangnan province. At night, when I was on duty in the hospital, a frightful thing happened. I took my leave and now I am too scared to go back to the hospital.
The username was: "Dr_Chen_WhiteCoat"
Han Jiang opened and went in out of curiosity. The replies had already numbered hundreds, and are mostly doubting.
"Great, another doctor doing LARP. Those fake stories are becoming overused."
"Show us proof or it didn't occur."
"Let me guess, the ghost was a beautiful female patient who wants to marry you?"
"Jiangnan Provincial People's Hospital doesn't have a Dr. Chen in their directory. I checked."
"OP if this is real, why are you posting on a forum instead of reporting to authorities?"
Han Jiang thought that the dismissive replies were somewhat boring and was about to close the thread when he saw it-the original poster's content was collapsed behind "Click to Expand." The forum software only does that to posts with more than three thousand characters, so this wasn't a short shtpost.
He tapped expand.
---
The post began without preamble:
"I am a doctor. I practice emergency medicine at Jiangnan Provincial People's Hospital. I have been doing it for 8 years. I have seen every kind of death there is, from car wrecks, heart attacks, poisonings, to suicides. I thought there was nothing that could still shock me anymore. I was wrong."
" It is my paid holiday. My coworkers assume I am having stress-related hallucinations. My manager advised me to see a psychiatrist. I don't care what they believe; I know what I saw."
" Here's what I remember of three nights ago. I am writing this down so that I have proof, even if only for my own benefit. Because I am afraid it might happen again. And I may not live through it."
---
"Patient arrived at 11:47 p.m. Male, mid-30s, no ID. EMS brought him in after a bystander found him unconscious on the sidewalk near the old textile mill. Still breathing on scene, but weak pulse, cold extremities."
"We moved him straight into Trauma Bay 3. I was the attending physician that night. Nurse Wang and intern Liu were assisting me."
"First thing I noticed was his clothes. They didn't match anything current. A faded blue work uniform, the kind you'd associate with factory labor in the 90s. His shoes were old leather, nearly worn flat on the soles."
"He looked like he belonged to another time."
"But that wasn't what bothered me."
"His face wasn't damaged or disfigured. It was just… wrong. I don't really know how else to put it. His skin was pale, with this waxy, almost artificial look to it—like it didn't quite belong to a living person. Under the light it even had a faint, strange translucency."
"When I put my stethoscope against his chest, the skin felt off in a way I couldn't explain properly at first. Not cold, exactly. Just… missing warmth. Like ceramic that's been left in a dark room for too long."
"I checked his vitals. Heart rate: 42 bpm. Blood pressure: 70 over 40. Temperature—this was where I started to realize something was seriously wrong."
"The thermometer read 28.6°C."
"For context, normal human body temperature is 36 to 37°C. Medically, hypothermia starts below 35°C. Below 30°C, most people are unconscious. Below 28°C, cardiac arrest becomes likely, and at 24°C survival is almost impossible."
" This gentleman had a temperature of 28.6C. However he was breathing – poorly, but breathing. His heart was beating – poorly but beating. Medically, he should have been dead or in a profound hypothermic coma."
"But his eyes responded to movement. Nurse Wang walked past his bed and his pupils darted to her. When I talked to him his eyelids flicked. He was still conscious, or perhaps semi-conscious, when his core temperature should have already ensured he was brain-dead."
"I asked for warming, initiated testing. Bloods, ECG, CT scan. All come back... Bizarre. Oxygen sats were normal with body temp on him being incredibly low. ECG showed a normal rhythm, just incredibly slow sinus. The CT scan, absolutely nothing in the frontal lobes of the brain, the brainstem, however was functioning normal."
"It was as if his body was alive while his higher consciousness was... elsewhere."
---
Han Jiang shifted on the bed, lifting his legs and adjusting his position until he was sitting more upright.
The writing in front of him felt oddly formal. Too polished in places, especially when it started using precise medical terms. It almost sounded like it was trying to convince someone of its own credibility.
Han Jiang wasn't sure if the author even realized how strong that effect was.
But Dr. Chen clearly knew his field. That much was obvious. Confident, precise, and detailed in a way that didn't feel casual at all.
He kept reading.
---
"At 1:15 a.m., the patient flatlined."
We started resuscitation immediately. CPR went on for about forty-five minutes, following standard ACLS protocols. We gave epinephrine and atropine, kept compressions going, did everything we were supposed to do. Nothing worked. No return of circulation. I called it at 2:00 a.m.
That's where things started to feel wrong to me.
In med school, we learned about algor mortis—the way a body cools after death. In a normal room, say around 20 to 22°C, the body drops in temperature at roughly 1.5°C per hour at first, then slows down later. It's not exact, of course. Clothing, body size, airflow—all of that changes it. But it gives you a general expectation of what "normal" looks like.
And what I was seeing… wasn't normal.
"The patient's body temperature was 28.6°C when he died. When I declared him dead, the trauma bay was at an ambient temperature of 24°C."
"One hour later, when the morgue attendant arrived to pick up the body, I took the temperature again, mostly out of professional curiosity. It was 27.8°C."
"That 0.8°C drop over an hour matched what you'd expect from algor mortis, where a body that started at normal living temperature cools down toward room temperature. But there's an issue: the patient came in at 28.6°C. If he'd been a typical living person, he should have been around 36–37°C. To get down to 28.6°C, he would have needed to lose roughly 7–8°C of body heat."
With a cooling rate of around 1.5°C per hour, it should've taken about five hours for his body to drop that far—assuming he was normal temperature when he collapsed. But the ambulance report says he was only found at 11:30 p.m., just seventeen minutes before they arrived. Even if I try to stretch the timing, it doesn't really line up.
And that's the problem. It just doesn't line up.
It was about 18°C outside that night. In theory, his body should've been noticeably colder than what I saw. Not slightly off—obviously colder.
But what I couldn't shake wasn't even the temperature.
It was his hands.
When I checked them again, his fingers already had signs of cadaveric spasm setting in. Not fully locked, but enough that it made me pause. Like whatever caused it had started at the exact moment of death and just… stayed there. His fingernails had that faint purple tint too, the kind you associate with oxygen loss. Normally you don't see that kind of clarity until a few hours have passed—two, maybe four, depending.
And yet we only had him in the hospital for two hours and thirteen minutes total before I declared him dead.
That gap is what didn't sit right with me.
The math didn't work. The physiology didn't work either. Nothing about it really did.
Unless—
Unless he had already been dead much longer than the timeline suggested.
Based on the cadaveric spasm, the skin discoloration, and the temperature readings I took, I kept coming back to the same conclusion—he had probably been dead for over three days by the time he reached my ER.
It didn't feel right even as I thought it.
Because a man who was already dead had been breathing.
A man who was already dead had been following movement with his eyes.
And a man who was already dead had been brought into my hospital, treated like a living patient the entire time… and then died again while I was on duty.
---
Han Jiang felt a cold shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. He sat up, rested against the headboard, and kept reading.
The comments under that part had clearly changed. There was less sarcasm and more genuine curiosity:
"Hold on—can this really happen? Can a corpse show signs of being alive?"
"Dr. Chen, have you thought about catalepsy? It can make someone look dead when they're not."
"Catalepsy doesn't account for decomposition after three days. Either this is made up, or… I don't want to consider what else it could be."
"OP, what ended up happening with the body? Was an autopsy done?"
Dr. Chen had responded to a few of them, and he sounded more and more on edge:
"Catalepsy was the first thing I considered. I ruled it out. The autopsy was arranged, but—"
That was where it cut off. Han Jiang scrolled further down to see if the main post continued.
---
"I need to get the rest of this down quickly. I don't have much time."
The body was transferred to the hospital morgue at 3:00 a.m. I submitted an incident report for an unusual case, nothing more than that on paper. My supervisor told me to go home, get some rest, and stop fixating on statistical outliers.
I remember nodding when he said it.
I should've listened.
files, the temperature records, and the photos I'd taken on my phone. At 6:00 a.m., the morgue called me. The body was gone."
"Not stolen. Not misplaced. Just gone."
"When I got there, the morgue attendant—an older man named Zhou who'd worked at the hospital for thirty years—was completely panicked. He kept repeating, 'It walked out. It walked out by itself.' The security footage from the morgue hallway showed—"
"I can't really explain what it showed. The video is low quality, but you can make out the figure sitting up on the gurney. You can see it swing its legs over the edge. It stands, stumbles once, and then heads toward the door. The way it moves isn't right—too stiff, too abrupt. Like a puppet with some of the strings missing."
"The door was locked from the outside. The figure stopped in front of it, stood still for about forty seconds, and then the door opened. From the outside. No one was there. The figure walked through."
"The last footage we have shows it getting into the elevator. The elevator went down to the ground floor. After that, there's nothing. The exterior cameras don't show anyone leaving the building."
"The body of a man who'd been dead for three days walked out of my hospital and disappeared."
---
The comment section had exploded.
Skeptics were going back and forth with people who were clearly convinced something real had happened, and even the usual dismissive voices didn't sound as confident as they normally did.
"This has to be fake, right? Please tell me this is fake."
"I work in video editing. From the way that footage is described, it could be staged, but... why would anyone do this? What are they trying to get out of it?"
"Dr. Chen, are you still there? Can you give us an update?"
"OP hasn't responded in two hours. I'm starting to worry."
Han Jiang checked the timestamp. Dr. Chen's last reply really had been two hours ago. But the post itself had been edited just thirty minutes earlier. There was new material.
He scrolled down, with a creeping unease he couldn't quite put into words.
---
"I should probably add more context about the patient… especially what he was wearing."
The blue work uniform. I mentioned it looked like it was from the 1990s, but that's not just a guess. I grew up in Jiangnan Province. My father worked at the old textile factory before it shut down in 1998. I remember those uniforms. That exact shade of blue is hard to forget once you've seen it enough.
The factory logo was stitched on the left chest. A simple spool of thread, with the words "Jiangnan Textile" underneath.
The uniform he was wearing had the same company logo on it.
That factory shut down twenty-six years ago. Bankruptcy during the reforms. Thousands laid off almost overnight. My father was one of them. He never recovered from it—died a couple of years later, drinking himself apart after losing everything.
Something else comes back to me too, not from the report. From way earlier.
When I was in elementary school—third grade, maybe—there was an incident at that factory before it closed. A worker died. I didn't know the details back then, kids never do, but I remember the rumors. Older kids whispering about ghosts. A man falling into a dye vat and "melting," or something equally exaggerated. I didn't take it seriously at the time.
This morning, I checked the archives.
There really was a death at Jiangnan Textile in October 1997. A quality control inspector named Liu Wei, 34 years old, found dead in the warehouse. Official report called it an accident. "Unusual circumstances" were mentioned, but never explained. Case closed quickly. Factory shut down two months later.
The patient who came into my emergency room was wearing a Jiangnan Textile uniform. He looked to be around 35. When I later pulled up an archived newspaper photo of Liu Wei, I couldn't ignore it—the facial structure, the build… it was too similar.
I try to stay rational about all of this. Evidence, explanations, things that can actually be verified.
But I'm saying this plainly now: the man who died in my trauma bay three nights ago was Liu Wei.
The same Liu Wei who died twenty-six years ago. Someone who should not have been breathing on my gurney.
---
Han Jiang's mouth felt dry. He reached for the water bottle on his nightstand and took a long drink without taking his eyes off the screen.
The post was still going.
In the dim light, he had to lean in a little closer to read it. The words weren't exactly clear anymore—more like they were starting to blur together from how long he'd been staring.
---
"The key… I still don't know what it opens. It's old-fashioned, like something for a locker or maybe a factory door."
There's more. Something I haven't told anyone. Not the police. Not my supervisor. Not even my wife.
When we treated the patient—back when I still thought he was alive—I collected his belongings like normal procedure. In his pockets there was a worn leather wallet with no cash, no ID, just a faded photo of a woman and a child. A brass key, corroded with age. And a small notebook, water-damaged, pages sticking together.
At the time, I didn't look closely. I sealed everything in a plastic bag and put it in the patient effects locker. I told myself I'd go through it later, once things were settled, once we had an ID.
But after the body disappeared, I went back for it.
The bag was still there.
I brought it home.
I know I shouldn't have, but I needed something solid. Something I could actually touch that proved this wasn't just… in my head.
The photo in the wallet had a date written on the back: October 15, 1997. Three days before Liu Wei's recorded death.
This morning, I showed the photo to my mother. She grew up around the textile workers. She recognized the woman immediately. Liu Wei's wife. She remarried after his death and moved away to another province. The child in the photo would be in his thirties now.
The key—I still don't know what it opens. Probably a locker. Or some old factory door. Something simple. Something it shouldn't matter this much.
The notebook was the worst part.
Most of it was unreadable, ink smeared by water damage. But I managed to peel apart two pages that had stuck together.
One page just had a name written over and over again: Zhang Meili. Liu Wei's wife.
The other page… it was worse. Just one sentence, repeated again and again, like he couldn't stop writing it:
"I didn't fall. I was pushed."
"I didn't fall. I was pushed."
"I didn't fall. I was pushed."
Twenty-six years ago, Liu Wei was murdered.
And three nights ago, he walked into my emergency room.
He died again in front of me.
And then he… didn't stay dead.
---
The comments were spiraling now:
"OP WHERE ARE YOU"
"This is either the best creepypasta I've ever read or you're actually in danger"
"Call the police. Call a priest. Call someone."
"The old textile factory district—you said he was found there? That place is abandoned. Nobody goes there at night. Nobody."
"Dr. Chen please update"
Han Jiang checked the timestamp again. Five minutes ago. The post was still being updated live.
He refreshed the page.
New text appeared.
---
"I'm home now. I've locked every door and window. I even called my wife—she's staying at her mother's place tonight. I told her not to come back. I didn't really explain why. I'm alone."
Thirty minutes ago, the doorbell rang.
I live in a gated apartment complex. There's security at the entrance, cameras, a video intercom. No one is supposed to reach my door without being seen or announced.
I checked the camera anyway.
Nothing.
No one was there.
Then the bell rang again.
And again. Three times in total.
I went to the door and looked through the peephole. The hallway was empty. Completely empty. But something was on the doormat.
A box.
Cardboard. Old. Stained, like it had been sitting in water for a long time.
I shouldn't have opened the door. I know that. But I did anyway. I needed to see it up close.
Inside the box were the patient's belongings.
The wallet. The key. The notebook.
The same things I took from the hospital. The same things I personally carried home and placed on my kitchen table while I was writing the earlier updates.
I remember watching them the whole time. I didn't let them out of my sight.
And yet—
There were two more items in the box.
Two items I never placed in the hospital locker. Two items that were never in his pockets when he arrived.
A blue work helmet. Jiangnan Textile logo on the front. The kind factory inspectors used to wear.
And a photograph.
Not old. Not faded. A recent one. Taken on a phone. Timestamped yesterday at 11:47 p.m.
It shows me.
In Trauma Bay 3.
Leaning over the body. Declaring time of death.
My face is in it. But I'm not looking at the patient.
I'm looking over my shoulder.
Like something behind me just moved.
And there's a hand in the frame.
Pale. Resting on my shoulder.
The sleeve is blue. Jiangnan Textile blue.
---
That was where the post stopped. No signature. No final line. Just… nothing after that.
The timestamp said it had been posted two minutes ago.
Han Jiang kept staring at it longer than he meant to. His hand tightened around the phone at some point, but he didn't even notice when it happened.
His heartbeat was loud now. Too loud. It kept getting in the way of his thoughts.
The comments were still coming in, scrolling too fast to follow, but he wasn't really reading them. He kept going back to that last paragraph. Like something different would show up if he read it again. It didn't.
Then something clicked in his head.
11:47 PM. Arrival time.
11:47 PM. Photo timestamp.
He frowned a little, not even fully understanding why that felt wrong yet.
Then he looked at his own phone.
11:47 PM.
He just sat there for a second.
A notification dropped in before he could think it through.
Private message. Same forum.
"User 'Dr_Chen_WhiteCoat' has sent you a direct message."
His thumb hovered. Didn't press anything yet.
The air conditioner was still on, but it suddenly felt like it was right behind him instead of across the room. Or maybe the room itself just felt smaller. He couldn't tell.
After a moment, he opened the message.
---
"You read my story. You read it at 11:47 PM, lying in bed, legs against the wall, phone above your face. I counted on my fingers. I knew you would be there."
"I'm sorry. I needed someone to know. Someone to remember, in case I can't update that post again."
"The helmet is outside my door now. I can hear it. The box is inside. The hand was on my shoulder. I can still feel it—heavy, cold through my coat."
"He isn't angry. He isn't looking for revenge. He's lost. He's been lost for twenty-six years, moving between where he died and where he should have been found. He's searching for something. For someone who can see him. Someone who can hear him."
"I saw him. I heard him. And now he knows my name."
"If you're reading this, he knows yours too."
"Check your door."
---
That was the end of the message.
Han Jiang felt something cold spread through his chest. He tried to tell himself it was just fiction. A story. A scare post. The forum had plenty of those—people writing horror for attention, nothing more.
But his eyes still drifted toward the apartment door.
It was just a cheap wooden door. Thin lock. The kind you never think about in a place like this. Nothing ever happened here. At least, that's what he'd always believed.
Then the doorbell rang.
Once. A pause. Then again. And again.
Three times.
Han Jiang didn't move.
His phone screen dimmed slightly, then lit up again with a new notification.
Not from the forum this time.
A system message.
[Achievement Unlocked: First Contact
The Unseen System has been activated.
Host: Han Jiang
Status: Bound
Welcome, Host. You have been chosen to see what others cannot.]
He stared at it.
Not on the phone. Not really. It was just… there, floating in front of him, faint and blue, like it didn't fully belong in the room.
Outside the door, something was set down. Heavy. Cardboard scraping against concrete.
Then footsteps. Slow. Dragging. Moving away down the hall.
Han Jiang stayed still in the dark.
He didn't check the door.
Not yet.
But he already knew that whatever was out there wasn't supposed to be. Not alive. Not anymore.