29 Confession

When that scrawny old wretch slammed headfirst into the coffin with a dull thud, blood instantly welled up from his forehead, drawing all our attention. Jin Ze was the quickest to react; with a few long strides, he was already upon him.

After swiftly handcuffing the man's hands behind his back, we couldn't be certain if he was dead or merely unconscious, but we had no time to move him out immediately. Others might still be lurking in the shadows, so we had to wait for backup from the rest of the police force. With my help, Jin Ze snuffed out the corpse-oil lamp atop the coffin. It was much like the human-head lamp I had seen back at my old home in the mountains—a vessel fashioned from an infant’s skull, filled with corpse oil and a wick.

As I blew out the flame, something felt wrong. Perhaps it was my familiarity with horror films and urban legends, but given how the old man had been stalling for time, he clearly had an affinity for the dark arts. This light, placed upon a coffin, was likely what they called a "Soul-Anchoring Lamp." Superstition held that it kept the spirit of the deceased tethered; as long as the flame burned, the soul within the coffin would not disperse.

By extinguishing it, we were supposedly letting that soul scatter. Of course, that was merely folklore, and I no longer believed in such things. After the recent earth-shattering events, I, like Jin Ze, had become a staunch atheist; everything that appeared supernatural was merely the result of human machinations.

Together, Jin Ze and I pushed aside the coffin lid. Inside, we found a body, though not an adult’s—it was a mummified infant, about thirty centimeters long. Despite being a mummy, it wasn't as withered as one might expect; the contours of its face and the texture of its skin remained surprisingly well-preserved. Knowing that newborns are typically half a meter long, this corpse must have been a newborn that had shrunk over years of desiccation.

There was still a damp sheen on the infant, as if it had been coated in a liquid recently. It certainly wasn't water—likely some sort of reagent used to prevent total decay or complete dehydration. This puzzled us; there was no reason to lavish such care on an ordinary infant corpse. Had it been like the others, they would have simply tossed it into a cold storage unit to freeze into solid flesh. This suggested the mummy held great significance—perhaps all those frozen dead infants were linked to it.

Jin Ze soon instructed me to stand guard by the coffin—partly to prevent the unconscious old man from waking and escaping, and partly so I could wait for the other officers. Jin Ze, meanwhile, gripped his weapon and headed toward the cold storage room; that was, after all, the primary objective of our mission.

Once Jin Ze stepped inside, I felt a pang of worry. It was freezing in there—would he be all right? As time dragged on without any sign of reinforcements, I instinctively turned back toward the entrance, and my anxiety deepened. It felt as though we had walked into a trap.

The slide we had used to descend was gone, and the light from above was nowhere to be seen. The entrance had been sealed off; we were buried alive. Still, I didn't completely lose my composure. The police were on the surface, and they must have seen us slide down. Surely they would blast through the entrance and come to our aid soon. Yet, just as the thought crossed my mind, a chilling sensation washed over me, and my scalp began to prickle.

Damn it. I heard a faint, grating sound, like teeth gnashing together. It wasn't coming from anywhere else—it was coming from the coffin right beside me.

My heart leaped into my throat, and I forgot how to breathe. *How could a mummified infant make a gnashing sound?* Then, I realized it wasn't teeth; it sounded more like fingernails scratching against the wood—a sharp, piercing, and unsettling noise that made my skin crawl.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and despite my better judgment, I couldn't resist peering into the coffin. The little mummy remained perfectly still, as it had been before. There was no sign of a "reanimation." The sharp sound ceased, and I shook my head vigorously, telling myself it was just nerves—a simple auditory hallucination.

Just as I was debating whether to go find Jin Ze, the piercing sound began again. This time, I was certain it came from within the coffin, and it dragged on, long and sharp, as if someone were dragging a fingernail from one side of the wood to the other.

*Could it really be a reanimation?* Was the spirit coming for revenge because we had snuffed out its lamp? But how could an infant have fingernails?

Driven by a mixture of fear and curiosity, I mustered my courage and took another sharp look into the coffin. I gasped, my soul nearly fleeing my body in that instant.

Damn it. Where there had been a thirty-centimeter mummy a moment ago, there was now a young girl over a meter tall. She stared at me with wide, fixed eyes. Her face was deathly pale, and her hair and eyebrows were white, as if coated in a layer of frost, as if she had just crawled out of a freezer.

The girl was Xia Tian—the same Xia Tian who had vanished so long ago.

Suddenly, she leaped from the coffin. She didn't run; she simply stood there, motionless, staring at me. I was too stunned to process it. How could a mummy grow into a living girl in such a short span of time?

My eyes caught a detail within the coffin, and it finally clicked. The infant mummy was still there, but a hidden compartment had opened at the bottom, and the mummy had fallen into it. The coffin base was thick, containing a false floor. Xia Tian had been hiding in that compartment. She must have been an accomplice who had just escaped the cold storage room and, having nowhere to hide, had slipped into the coffin’s secret space.

I took a deep breath, feigning calm, and prepared to apprehend her. Yet, I felt a strange conflict. If it hadn't been for the finger Xia Tian had given me, I never would have escaped the Dawn base. She hadn't harmed me; in fact, she had helped me. Did I really want to catch her?

As I pondered this, Xia Tian spoke: "Brother, you are already dead. In three days, you will die again."

Her words weren't new to me; she had told me I was dead before, but this was the first time she had been so specific. Before I could ask what she meant, she lunged at me. She was incredibly agile, her body as soft and fluid as a snake—the same way she had managed to hide in that tiny cabinet under Fang Lin's bed. She wrapped her legs around my waist and hooked her arms around my neck, whispering into my ear: "Brother, remember: he is not him, and you are you."

I didn't know what she