The autumn morning breeze carried a biting chill as it swept relentlessly through the half-bare poplar trees, occasionally tugging a dry leaf or two from their branches. Those withered, yellow leaves danced in the wind, drifting aimlessly like a lone boat lost at sea, steeped in an air of sorrow and desolation.
Near the eastern side of the crematorium, in an open area fenced off by barbed wire, twenty-six death row inmates knelt in a neat row, each clad in prison garb. Over a hundred heavily armed paramilitary police stood guard around the execution ground, their faces grim and resolute. Rifles loaded and aimed at the prisoners, they awaited only the final command from their officer to carry out the sentence.
Yang Hongtao knelt among the group, his hunched body rigid, as lifeless as a dried-out stump. He knew it was too late for words, that struggling or resisting would only hasten his end. Back in the courtroom, he'd briefly considered recanting his confession—especially when he saw Xiaoya, the girlfriend he once loved dearly, walk in arm-in-arm with his boss, Huang Lianshu, the man who'd framed him. The sight ignited a fury so fierce it nearly consumed his sanity.
But then his gaze shifted to the public gallery, where his elderly parents and his sister's family sat, their faces streaked with tears and etched with concern. That flood of familial warmth doused his rage and smothered the fleeting spark of survival instinct. He knew he could never outmatch Huang Lianshu. It wasn't even a fair fight—they weren't on the same playing field.
Once he calmed down, Yang Hongtao realized that even if he threw caution to the wind and spilled the truth in court, it wouldn't matter. He had no hard evidence to pin Huang Lianshu as the mastermind behind the string of financial fraud and criminal acts. Even if the judge believed him, Huang could easily scapegoat someone else to take the fall, losing little more than some pocket change in the process.
And the aftermath? Yang wouldn't escape Huang's ruthless retaliation. Death would still find him, and worse, his family—his parents, his sister, her kids—would be dragged into the crossfire. He couldn't bear the thought of them paying for his defiance. So, in the end, he gritted his teeth and shouldered the blame alone.
Stepping out of the courtroom with a death sentence hanging over him, Yang Hongtao had convinced himself he could face his fate with peace. Yet now, as he felt the cold barrel of a gun pressed against the back of his head, radiating an unmistakable aura of death, fear crept in despite his resolve.
Ready or not, the end was coming. With a sharp command from the paramilitary officer, the sound of bullets being chambered echoed behind him—a crisp, mechanical click-click that felt like an invisible hand pounding on the gates of hell.
"Ready—fire!"
The order rang out, and a volley of gunfire erupted across the execution ground. Twenty-six 7.62mm rifle rounds, blazing with lethal intent, tore through the air and burrowed into the back of each prisoner's skull.
In the split second before the shots rang out, Yang Hongtao—knowing his life was at its end—felt an overwhelming attachment to the vibrant world he was leaving behind. His mind flickered like a film reel, flashing through every unforgettable face from his short life: his gentle mother, his stern father, his doting sister, the innocent girl next door from his childhood…
Then came Xiaoya's beautiful yet heartless face, followed by Huang Lianshu's sinister smirk, dripping with disdain. Those two visages froze in his mind, growing larger and larger until they loomed like mythical soul-reapers, their cold, mocking eyes taunting the condemned man about to lose his right to live.
A torrent of rage and resentment surged within him, a wildfire scorching his soul. But as that fury reached its peak, something strange happened—his emotions flipped to an eerie calm, as if the extremes had canceled each other out.
Call it fate or divine intervention, but in his final moment, the last face to surface in Yang Hongtao's mind wasn't family or foe. It was an old, weathered face, creased with wrinkles—an elderly lama he'd met three years ago while traveling in Lhasa. He'd stumbled across the man in a dilapidated temple, where the lama, with his wise eyes and saintly air, had somehow conned Yang into buying a jade pendant for 500 yuan—a trinket worth no more than five on a street stall.
Etched in Tibetan on the pendant were the famous Six-Syllable Mantra of Buddhism. The lama had claimed it was the mantra of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who had chanted it eons ago to attain enlightenment. After the sale, the old man enthusiastically taught Yang to recite the mantra a few times. Yang had found the lama's pronunciation awkward, like a foreigner stumbling through Chinese, which made the encounter stick in his memory.
Now, in this fleeting moment before death, that sly old lama popped into his head. Almost instinctively, Yang silently recited the mantra the lama had taught him.
Om Mani Padme Hum—
What Yang Hongtao never could've anticipated was that as the six syllables echoed in his mind, he seemed to see them manifest—six enormous characters rising into the air, transforming into six glowing white rings of varying sizes. The rings radiated a sacred light, enveloping him entirely. Before he could grasp what was happening, they began to shrink rapidly.
Though his body remained kneeling, Yang felt as if he were a fluffy marshmallow being squeezed and compressed by those six rings, molded into a tiny, hard candy. In an instant, he lost all control over his physical form. His consciousness was forcibly condensed into a single point in his mind.
At that exact moment, a searing bullet tore through the back of his skull with a deafening crack, carving a path of destruction through his brain. By some uncanny twist of fate, the bullet passed precisely through the center of the six shrinking rings—not a hair off, not a fraction misaligned.
In that same instant, the six white rings vanished, as if they'd fused into an invisible web etched onto the bullet's surface. The projectile didn't falter; it sped onward, exiting through Yang's gaping mouth with a faint ding as it struck the ground seven or eight meters ahead, tumbling into the dust.
The gunfire ceased. Twenty-six bodies slumped to the ground, each with a peanut-sized hole blasted into the back of their heads—gruesome craters like the eyes of demons staring up from hell.
The paramilitary soldiers moved swiftly to clean up the site. Medics probed the bullet holes with specialized tools, twisting them to confirm death, while pairs of soldiers hoisted the numbered corpses onto trucks. Cleanup crews followed, sweeping bloodstains with handfuls of yellow dirt and collecting spent casings and bullets. These would be processed later—melted down in a factory to forge new rounds.
Per protocol, every casing and bullet from an execution had to be recovered, but sometimes, due to the angle of the shot, a few bullets exited through a prisoner's mouth and buried themselves in the soil. No one was about to dig up the entire field for a stray round or two, so missing a couple was no big deal.
This time, three bullets went unaccounted for. The cleanup crew didn't bat an eye. Once the blood was covered and the recovered ammo bagged, they piled into their vehicles. Amid the blare of horns and clouds of black exhaust, they sped off, leaving the site behind.
Yang Hongtao's consciousness felt like a tightly compressed block of cheese, trapped within the cold, unyielding confines of a bullet. No matter how he struggled, the moment he brushed against the invisible web coating its surface, he snapped back to its center. The bullet lay tucked beneath a flat stone, and through the gaps in the rubble, Yang could still see everything unfolding before him.
He watched "himself"—a lifeless shell with vacant eyes—collapse into the dusty earth, a mangled corpse soon carted away on a truck. His emotions were a tangled mess: grief, shock, or perhaps a twisted thrill?
So, there really was a soul after death! Maybe the tales of reincarnation were true too. But then why was he different? Why were other souls free to drift, while his consciousness was shackled inside a tiny bullet, unable to move an inch?
Indeed, Yang could see the souls of the other twenty-five executed prisoners. To his eyes, they appeared as translucent shadows, lingering near their bodies, drifting aimlessly like lost children locked out of their homes. The soldiers' aura of deathly authority terrified them, though. When the bodies were loaded up, not one soul dared follow, instead hovering helplessly where their corpses had fallen.
Yang Hongtao couldn't fathom his rotten luck. Framed and scapegoated in life, now cursed to be imprisoned in a bullet in death. Was it because he'd recited that Six-Syllable Mantra at the end?
Oh no. That mantra was a sacred Buddhist chant, meant to banish evil spirits. But the moment he'd finished reciting it, he'd become a ghost himself—one of those "evils" the mantra was supposed to purge. Had he unwittingly cursed himself in his final breath?
As Yang wallowed in self-pity, cursing his foolishness, the hazy sky brightened. At last, a warm sun peeked over the eastern hills, casting golden rays across the boundless earth.
In an instant, the wandering souls in the execution ground reacted like chickens tossed into a boiling pot. Piercing, otherworldly shrieks filled the air as they flailed in helpless panic, scattering in all directions. To the living, their cries were silent, but to Yang—a fellow spirit—they rang with raw despair and terror.
Their struggles were futile. The omnipresent sunlight pierced through their ethereal forms like razor-sharp blades, riddling them with holes. Within moments, every soul was tattered and broken, not yet gone but mere steps from total annihilation.
Yang watched, dumbfounded, his own fear undiminished by his temporary reprieve. His soul might be crammed inside a bullet and shaded by a stone, safe from direct sunlight for now, but even the reflected rays seeping through the ground felt like he was being roasted on a grill.
In ten minutes—maybe less—the sun would shift westward, and its light would stream through the gaps, striking the bullet directly. What then? Could his trapped soul survive that?
Sure, Yang Hongtao was already dead by any standard definition, but the discovery of his soul's persistence had rekindled his will to live—or exist. The death of his body no longer scared him as much, but the prospect of his soul dissolving under the sun's rays? That was true oblivion. If his soul scattered, Yang Hongtao would vanish from the universe forever.
No—I won't let my soul disintegrate! I don't want to die again!
As he watched the other souls melt away in the sunlight, Yang screamed silently within the confines of his mind, a desperate roar against his fate…