Soul Devouring Shadow

Author: Yan Le Sheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: It was boundless black, like the night. It was the shadow formed by the viscous substance after the body was consumed. Ten years of grinding a sword in the Jianghu, only Yan Le Sheng can write such extraordinary tales! Fantasy stories, chilling—Yan Le Sheng's chillingly terrifying follow-up to The Night Tales of the Buried Coffin! Legend Grand View's editor Qin Chengkang met a horror story writer named Wen Jianguo while pitching a story. But during their recent meeting, he discovered that Wen Jianguo's demeanor was abnormal—he was applying powder to his face, looking terrified. Soon after, because of a floppy disk with ink stains that Wen Jianguo provided, ink stains mysteriously appeared on Chengkang's computer screen, office ceiling, and elsewhere. Coincidentally, someone else began reporting to the magazine that they had seen moving shadows. When Chengkang started investigating, Wen Jianguo mysteriously disappeared. A few days later, his girlfriend became a floating corpse in a river.
2006, the first part of Yan Le Sheng's work Vampire Love Story—The Soul-Devouring Shadow!
Since the beginning of winter, the sky has been overcast, with rain every other day. The gloomy weather lasted for two weeks, and today it finally cleared. For those who are easily sentimental, rainy days might be pleasant—they might find them poetic. But for a bachelor like me, sunny days are better. I stretched at my desk, looking outside. The sun was shining, and the skyscrapers below sparkled like they had just been washed. My office is on the 12th floor. Looking down, cars occasionally passed on the street, but through the glass window, I couldn’t hear the sound, only glimpsed the fleeting shadows of the cars.
I am an editor for a newly launched popular fiction magazine. Because it’s difficult to obtain a publication number, most magazines now operate under old numbers with new names. This magazine is no exception—it’s called Legend Grand View·Strange Tales Edition. Legend Grand View was a short-lived magazine that appeared on street stalls a decade and a half ago. It was launched to compete in the booming market of street stalls magazines at the time, and it was quite successful. I was still in high school then, and I often saw classmates sneakily bringing copies of this magazine to school, which featured scantily clad women on the cover, and reading them in the bathroom.
I once read an issue that was full of cases like "body dismemberment" and "Mountain-Shaking Fist," with occasional graphic descriptions of sex that were quite explicit for that era. It probably enriched the cultural lives of migrant workers and high school students at the time. However, I had a bad impression of the magazine because I came across a story that could be called a piece of trash. The villain, who was utterly cruel, suddenly became gentle after capturing a beautiful woman, slowly removing her clothes piece by piece, while speaking incoherently. It took a long time to get to her underwear, and just as I was expecting something, a martial artist suddenly appeared, punched the villain into the ground, and rescued the woman. This anticlimactic martial artist made me so angry I could chew my teeth. The writing was also terrible—long sentences of three or four dozen characters appeared frequently. Back then, I had the habit of reading silently, but even so, these long sentences made it hard for me to breathe. If I had passed out from holding my breath and been discovered, people might have thought I was overexcited by the descriptions. I couldn’t afford that reputation. I even boldly thought back then that if I wrote, I would do better than him.
But over ten years have passed, and I still haven’t written a single story. And a decade later, this magazine was reborn through a borrowed body, and I ended up becoming one of its editors—a truly absurd turn of events.
Below, there was another "bang, bang" sound of hammering nails. The building we rented was sublet to seven or eight companies, and the one downstairs had just gone bankrupt recently, with new tenants still doing renovations. Every time I heard that hammering, my head ached as if it had become a wooden block, and the nails were being driven into my skull.
I tidied up the documents on my desk and went outside. This Saturday is the issue release day, and today is Monday. All the colleagues had left for the weekend.