"The Gilded Pavilion—where the dead blow their last cent just for one final look at the mess they left behind."

  The GPS’s voice—sharp, distorted, and glitchy—echoed through the pitch-black mountain pass.

  “Please… keep your head down… Please… keep your head down…”

  It didn’t sound like a navigation app anymore. It sounded like a liturgical chant recited through a throat made of rusted metal at a funeral where no one came to mourn. My hands were slick with sweat on the handlebars, the heat of my palms warring with the bone-deep chill of the mountain air. I couldn't tell if I was burning up or freezing to death.

  On either side of the road, the trees cast twisted silhouettes in the weak glow of my headlight. Each trunk looked like a struggling human figure, frozen in a permanent, agonizing escape. Their branches ground against one another in the wind, making a scritch-scratch sound—it didn’t sound like wood snapping; it sounded like laughter. A dry, hollow laugh from a thing without a throat or lungs.

  Just as the bike’s engine gave one final, dry retch and the headlight began to dim, the visions slammed into me.

  They weren't memories. Memories have weight, scent, and warmth. These had none. These were shards—someone else’s jagged fragments—wedged violently into my vision from a place that didn't belong to me.

  An old hallway. Black blood oozing from the cracks in the floorboards—slow, silent, rising from somewhere deep beneath the earth. Students in uniform lined up in a row, their faces like melting wax. Their features flowed and collapsed within their outlines, unable to find a single place to settle.

  Then the shards shattered. Vanished. All that remained was the dying glimmer of my headlight—and her.

  She appeared out of thin air, as if she’d been standing there all along, waiting for the right angle to be seen. A girl in a sailor-style school uniform, standing dead center in the mountain path. Her uniform was a black so deep it felt like a tidal vortex, stained with a bizarre shade of cyan—not the blue of faded fabric, but the color of a thing’s final breath before it rots. Dark brown spots littered the cloth, ancient stains of unrecognizable origin. She didn't look up. Her tangled black hair hung over her face, masking everything, but I knew—

  I didn’t want to know what was behind that hair.

  Then the smell hit me. A cloying, nauseating stench of dead fish mixed with formalin. It was sweet—sickeningly so—like someone had dumped too much sugar into a vat of rotting liquid, trying to mask the fact that the core of it was "broken."

  Her right arm was twisted and snapped at an impossible angle, the bone pushing a grotesque arc against the skin. Then, that broken limb shuddered and rose, a fingertip pointing toward a narrow path almost swallowed by weeds. The air from that trail smelled of damp decay, like a place that hadn't been opened in centuries.

  I wanted to run.

  Every fiber of my being, every primitive instinct I possessed, was screaming at me: Leave. Now. Do not take that road.

  But my body wasn't listening.

  It was as if I’d been nailed to the seat. My fingers twisted the throttle on their own. The tires turned on their own. Following the direction of that broken arm, step by step, I rode into the stench of that narrow trail. My will and my flesh had completely split apart.

  Along the way, the trees began to leak.

  Something thick and black oozed from the cracks in the bark, crawling down the trunks and dripping onto the ground with a stomach-turning patter. My headlight swept over them, and that’s when I saw it.

  They weren't trees.

  They never were.

  They were bones. Massive, sharpened skeletal remains driven into the earth, lined up like fence posts, draped with rotting clothes that swayed in the windless air—a ghost’s laundry mat. As I rode past, the tattered edges of the fabric brushed against my helmet. The sensation made my scalp shrink.

  And then, I rode into the building.

  No. That’s not a building.

  From the outside, it looked like one, but inside? The walls were pulsing. They weren't made of brick or concrete; they were layers upon layers of stacked meat. The surface rose and fell in uneven, sluggish rhythms, like it was breathing. Or more accurately, like the entire structure was the abdominal cavity of some gargantuan living thing, and I had just ridden into its digestive tract.

  Thousands of Taipei City street plates were embedded into those fleshy walls. Every road name, every house number. Some plates were dripping with viscous cellular fluid that ran down the embossed characters. “Zhongxiao East Road, Section 4,” “Nanjing West Road,” “Zhongshan North Road”—every familiar landmark I knew had been turned into a specimen label here.

  This was the Interior.

  Not a different world. Not a parallel dimension. Not some clean, sci-fi concept.

  It was a city built from the forgotten malice of humanity. It was the pile of everything discarded, suppressed, and unwanted—rotting, fermenting, until it finally grew a shape of its own. It was a Kowloon Walled City where not a single wall belonged to a human.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I killed the engine at a corner.

  In front of me stood a shop.

  Neon. But not the warm, welcoming kind. This was a corrosive, bruised purple—like someone had taken the color of an infected wound and pumped high-voltage electricity through it. The characters for "Gold Shop" warped and contorted amidst blood-colored haze, flickering every few seconds until the word "Gold" looked like something else entirely—something predatory. Next to it, under a massive sign for "Pawn," several shriveled cloth bundles hung from the eaves. Their silhouettes were blurred, swaying in a wind that wasn’t there, emitting low, rhythmic moans.

  It wasn't the wind. It was sobbing.

  My hand reached out and pushed the door open.

  I didn't decide to do it. My hand just… moved.

  A wave of heat hit me square in the face. It wasn’t the dry warmth of a heater; it was wet, heavy with body heat, and carried a suffocating, organic stench. It was the smell of a crowd—the radiating warmth of a thousand bodies packed into a tight space. Except these people had been dead for a very long time.

  The shop was wall-to-wall with "people."

  I use quotes because I don’t know what else to call them. They had the silhouettes of men and women, the height, the clothes from a dozen different eras—but their sockets were hollow. Not blind. Empty. Stuffed into those holes were nests of golden maggots, a writhing, pulsing mass of larvae. Occasionally, a few would squeeze out from the corners of their eyes before being sucked back into the meat.

  The moment I stepped inside, the maggots turned toward me in perfect unison.

  Not the faces. The worms. Thousands, tens of thousands of golden maggots, all swiveling their heads at once. That synchronized movement sent a jolt of pure, lizard-brain terror straight up my spine.

  "A living thing..."

  "Warm blood..."

  The whispers leaked in from every direction. Black bile ebbed from their mouths, dripping down chins and leaving ring-shaped stains on the floor. Then, a blurred shape lunged out of the crowd—a thing covered in weeping pustules, each one bloated and translucent, stretched to the bursting point. It slammed into me, shoving a slimy, wet bundle into my hands.

  I looked down. The package was a bruised crimson, the texture of raw, unprocessed offal. And it was still throbbing.

  "Sell it to me! Sell it to me! I'll trade you this!"

  Its voice was a rasp, like sandpaper on bone. Every word sounded like it was being squeezed through a throat that had been shredded from the inside. Its hand reached for my collar, cold fingertips brushing my skin—

  "Didn't your mother ever teach you? Don't touch things that don't belong to you."

  The voice came from behind me. Cold. Dry. Carrying a weight that made the entire room go dead silent.

  It was her.

  The schoolgirl was standing right behind me, but the silent, fragile creature from the mountain path was gone. One of her hands clamped onto my shoulder like a hydraulic iron vise. The grip was so brutal I could hear my own scapula groaning under the pressure. Her other hand snapped out, swatting away the pustule-covered fingers with a movement so precise it lacked any wasted motion.

  Then I saw what was on her arm.

  Those weren't tattoos. Tattoos are static. These were alive. Ancient Sanskrit characters and gear-like occult sigils crawled from her fingertips to her elbow. Every letter, every line pulsed beneath her skin as if something were trapped inside, gasping for air through her pores. The black ink throbbed in time with her heartbeat, and with every pulse, the air bled the scent of sulfur and scorched flesh.

  "Get lost," she said.

  It was casual. She raised her hand and delivered a light palm-strike to the mass of pustules.

  The moment they touched, the sigils flared with a sickly, bruised-purple light. There was a dull crack—not the sound of breaking bone, but something deeper, heavier. It was the sound of something being unmade at a structural level. The creature didn't even get a chance to scream. Its entire arm and half its chest disintegrated into black soot, drifting through the air like burnt paper ash before vanishing into nothing.

  The shop fell into a tomb-like silence.

  The maggots in the spectators' eye sockets retreated deep into the skull the moment they saw those black sigils, as if they’d been scorched—or as if they recognized a symbol that commanded their terror. Thousands of larvae flinching at once made the very air vibrate.

  The girl didn’t spare them a glance. She scanned the room and raised her voice.

  "Uncle White! Uncle White, where the hell are you?"

  Her tone was that of someone calling for a late shop assistant, completely devoid of the suffocating pressure she’d just unleashed. Yet, the menace remained, seeping from the fading ink on her arm. It kept me frozen, breathless, unsure if my lungs were even working.

  From the deepest corner behind the counter, footsteps emerged.

  He walked slowly.