Moonlight in Cappadocia, Turkey, flows like liquid silver through a forest of wind-eroded rock pillars. Alex Carter kneels at the bottom of the archaeological pit code-named X-7, his surgical mask unable to filter out the smell of rust that has stuck stubbornly in everyone's nasal cavities since he dug up the first piece of basalt engraved with the reverse cross three days earlier.
"The radiation detector went crazy again." Emma the intern's voice came over the intercom with an electric murmur like a crevass glacier. She's supposed to be analyzing pottery shards in a makeshift lab 20 meters away, but right now the Geiger counter is lying at Alex's feet, the pointer stuck in the red zone.
He held up a strong flashlight, and the moment the beam cut through the darkness, the relief on the rock wall came alive. Ancient Greek carvings that were supposed to depict Apollo's chariots are twisted into tangled guts, and in the oval recess of the central arch, a polygonal crystal oozes a pitch-like substance. Alex felt a burning pain in his wrist. His grandfather's Rolex Datejust was burning and tiny beads of blood were congealing on its surface.
"Carter! Professor Black's roar sent the night ravens flying. As Alex turned, the flashlight slipped through his trembling fingers. Beams of light cast a gnarled shadow like a gigantism on the pit wall, and his mentor was standing at the edge, holding Emma by the scruff-the girl's sunblock covered in frost, the half-broken shovel in her right eye socket.
"This is the seventh time." Black's voice sounded like a patchwork of rusty gears. "You're never going to keep the Archaeologist's Oath." He unclenched his fingers and Emma's body fell into the pit, the thud of the back of her head against the rock wall reminding Alex of the dodo skull he had touched as a child at the Natural History Museum.
Alex stepped on something as he stepped back. In the last glimmer of his flashlight before it rolled off, he saw five mummified bodies scattered at the bottom of the pit-all dressed in eighties adventure suits and bearing the same picture on their name tags: a younger version of Professor Black stroking the bronze staff now embedded in his spine.
The watch suddenly sent out a viper letter of neighing, the moment the dial glass burst, Alex saw those black substances wriggling in the flesh. Like oil that had been imprisoned for half a century, they rushed through his veins to his fingertips, forcing his hand to press toward the crystals.
There are women whispering in the dark. The sound reminded him of the melting snow at his mother's funeral, with a certain non-human resonance frequency: "The city of Eternal Night needs the memory of sinners..." When his fingertips touch the crystal, Alex's optic nerve is flooded with images: some red-haired woman in a Victorian dress stabbing him through the heart with a dagger; A samurai sword seeping blood from a Tokyo museum display case; In a cyberpunk urban sky, giant mechanical eyeballs stare out at all brain-computer interface users.
When he regained consciousness, Alex was lying in a ward at Cappadocia General Hospital. News anchors quickly broadcast in Turkish the early-morning quake, showing footage of rock formations they were digging that had collapsed into craters. The nurse said the rescue team only found him, holding a basalt covered in weird runes.
"Concussion can cause short-term memory disruption." The attending physician's pen circles the shadow of the hippocampus on the CT, "You may forget some..." Alex did not hear the second part of the sentence, the fluorescent blue number floating on his retina: 71:23:17. As he gazed into the mirror of his ward, his reflection flashed an unhuman smile -- the white of "Alex's" eyes were covered with black veins, and he had written on the mirror with his index finger the ancient Greek word "μῆνις"(anger).
The corridors of the inpatient department were uncharacteristically quiet late at night. Alex used a stolen scalpel to cut open his left wrist. The wound was bloodless, and black mucus was wrapped around two sacred letters that rotated counterclockwise. As he unconsciously pronounced the syllables, the emergency lights all over the floor burst at the same time, and in the instant of darkness he saw the mirror ripple and the silhouette of the red-haired woman flash through the depths of the mercury.
"Find the triple helix..." The woman's voice was mixed with the clatter of a phonograph, then drowned out by the siren. The security guards who arrived saw nothing but broken glass all over the floor and a warning written in slime on the wall - words Alex didn't recognize, strokes that gave all the witnesses severe migraines.
The next afternoon the university archives smelled of mildew. When Alex rummaged through Professor Black's files, he noticed that the place that should have been the tutor in the 1993 archaeology team photo had been left blank. The moment he touched the picture, cold slime oozed from the paper, and Emma's face emerged in the blank - a shovel in her left eye socket, her lips opening and closing to convey a silent message.
The door of the archives room was suddenly pushed open. The real Emma stood in the backlight, scaly scars at the edges of a medical eye patch, clutching a bronze dagger common in museums. They gave me two memories." There was a double echo in her voice, "One says you killed me, the other says..." The moment the blade struck, the mucus between Alex's wrists congealed into daggers carved all over his eyes, and muscle memory responded before consciousness.
As the blade sank into Emma's heart, Alex heard the crystal whisper, "The first sacrifice is done." The bodies turned to ashes in the wind, and the ashes formed the shadowy figure of Lilith, who reached out to touch Alex's eyes, and the memory of Eternal Night took root like poison ivy - a city where the blood moon was pierced with the spires of its bell towers, where every street lamp was a crystal that imprisoned souls.
Footsteps were heard in the hallway. As Alex ducked into the fire escape, he saw that instead of his own face reflected on the dagger's surface, it was a monster with Lilith's eyes. The phone suddenly vibrated, and an unknown number sent a message: "The neon lights of Seboyuan Ruins are better for hiding than the blood moon of Eternal Night City." Attached is a stolen photograph of a Heian katana seeping black liquid from a glass case at the Tokyo National Museum.
As he walked out the back door of the university, the window TV was showing breaking news. As the camera sweeps over the earthquake ruins, a man in a suit and tie stands outside the police line smiling - it's the supposed dead Professor Black, his shadow with seven arms.
Cappadocia General Hospital's disinfectant smells of something rotten and sweet. Alex Carter stared at the water stains on the ceiling of the hospital room, the brownish yellow markings creeping slowly in the morning light, forming the shadow of Professor Black's missing head. The Rolex between his wrists had long since stopped running, but the trembling aftertaste of the second hand still walked downstream of his skin, like a swarm of bees trapped in amber.
When the nurse brought breakfast, the stainless steel plate reflected the side of his face -- black slime oozing from the scrape that stretched from his cheekbone to his jaw. As the nurse turned her back to tidy the curtains, Alex quickly scooped up the slime with a spoon, and the metal handle was instantly covered with barnacle bumps.
"We have a visitor today." The nurse's voice sounded like it came from deep water. On the registration form she handed over, the column for yesterday's visitors was filled with symbols of unknown significance, but the last line clearly read: Emma White, 9:47 a.m.
Alex's temples jumped. He clearly remembered Emma's ashes floating in the archives corridor, but now he flashed through the shadows of the trees outside the window a familiar beige suntan shirt - the one with the cut on the right shoulder from the shovel.
The fountain pool in the hospital garden glows with an oily rainbow. Alex followed the figure through the laurel trees and found on the bench a collection of Ancient Mediterranean Inscriptions. The page stops at chapter 77, where a reference to the Triple Spiral Temple is circled in red: "... The sacrificial must return the stolen time within three days, or the warp and latitude of time and space will be permanently broken..."
Between the pages is a photo of Zhang: Professor Black in 1993 standing in front of the X-7 pit as five team members push a bronze coffin into the ground. Alex's breathing stopped - the reverse cross engraved on the lid of the coffin mirrored the slime writing on the wall of his hospital room.
On the back of the photo are coordinates written in aged blood: 38°39' N, 34°51' E. When he looked up, a vision of Emma was standing in the middle of the fountain, the click of a gear turning from under a medical eye patch. Her lips split to the tip of her ear, revealing the intricate metal structure of a clock movement: "They are waiting for you in the temple... With the bride's dowry..."
Alex stepped on something as he stepped back. I looked down and saw Rolex gear parts all over the floor, each engraved with a miniature Egyptian holy book. When he tried to pick up a gear, the hospital radio suddenly played Chopin's Funeral March, and all the Windows oozing asphalt-like material from the music.
When I got back to my room, there was a fedex package on my bedside table. From "Eternal Night City Memory Bank", postmarked July 12, 1923. The package contained a bronze compass, the needle replaced by a specimen of Lilith's hair, and the inside of the glass cover was covered with frost flowers. When Alex touched the compass, the frost spread quickly across the wall, revealing a frozen scene of the City of Eternal Night - each window displaying a forgotten piece of his life: the tortoiseshell cat that went missing when he was five, the chapter his senior thesis had been deleted by his tutor, the clay tablet of Babylon he had stolen from the British Museum.
The compass suddenly vibrated violently, and blood oozed from the cracks in the frost. Alex wrapped the sheet around the compass and rushed to the bathroom, where Lilith's face was reflected in the mirror. Her red hair was wrapped in memory film, and her emerald pupils rotated in triple spirals.
"You stole time." Lilith's voice was crackling with the crack of the ice. "Now the void is coming to collect." She reached through the mirror, her fingertips leaving frosty palm prints on Alex's chest. Through the pain flashed fragments of the picture: Professor Black slicing his wrists in front of the bronze coffin, thick black blood pouring into the coffin, awakening a creature with a lamprey's mouth parts.
The sound of the alarm tore the silence of the ward. Curled up on the tile floor, Alex found the frost Lilith had brought climbing against gravity to the ceiling, congealing into a line of fluorescent blue countdown: 68:11:49. As the guards yelled from the hallway, he grabbed his compass and jumped out the window, landing in a black pudl of slime that was eating away at the hospital walls and masonry like a hungry Slime.
The telephone box on the corner suddenly rang. Alex rushed in, grabbed the receiver, and heard Elena's mechanized laughter: "Did you like my greeting? The ice beauty of the Night City is much more difficult than the crying katana in Tokyo..." In the background, a server overload alert says, "By the way, you have 67 hours and 53 minutes to stop the parasite in my head from taking over the North American power grid."
Before the phone hung up, a sheet of heat-sensitive paper exhaled from the slot, printing a surveillance screenshot of the Tokyo National Museum: a Heian katana in a display case twisting into a vertebrae, the home mark on the handle turning into a bleeding eye. "Michiko's family secrets are more interesting than Bushido's - like the knife in which her grandfather's ribs are still stuck," was scrawled underneath the picture.
Alex walked into the convenience store to buy coffee when the cash register screen flashed green. Commodity price lists have become a constantly refreshing countdown to death: employees at a power station in New York melt into jelly, the eyeballs of subway passengers in Paris burst into crystal clusters, the skyscrapers of Lujiazui in Shanghai slowly sink. When he tried to touch the screen, all the pictures collapsed into Lilith's lips: "Find the triple helix..."
As night falls, Alex finds more changes at the motel: the TV automatically plays the 1947 weather report, and the host repeats "The blood moon is coming"; Scaly blood flows from the shower head; On the inside of the matchbox is Professor Black's face, his seven spinal appendages dragging some red-headed woman into the ground.
At 3:17 a.m., Alex woke up with a sharp pain in his wrist. Black slime forms a bust of Lilith on her skin, her dagger pointed out the window - seven headless figures in the moonlight carrying the bronze coffin toward the ruins of the hospital.