Chapter 2: First Customer
~2.5k words · 2026-06-20
Chen Wei locked the shop door at 1 AM and climbed the narrow stairs to her apartment. The walls were covered in maps — not tourist maps, but genealogical maps tracing bloodlines across centuries.
The largest of these maps belonged to the Wang family. Li Wei Wang's family.
She sat at her desk and pulled out the leather journal that had been her mother's, and her grandmother's before that. The first entry was dated 1945. The last was dated June 2, 1997.
October 19, 1945: "The excavation on Wulumuqi Road has stopped. The workers refuse to go any deeper. They say the temple predates anything they have ever seen — Tang Dynasty at least, maybe older."
March 14, 1997: "The laboratory has been built directly over the site. Wang Group funded the entire project. They say they're researching geothermal energy, but I have been seeing things in the basement."
June 2, 1997: "I have made a terrible mistake. The thing we uncovered is not a temple. It was never a temple. The carvings on the foundation stones are not prayers — they are warnings. And the date they warn about is not in the past. It is in the future."
The journal entries stopped after June 2nd. On June 3rd, the laboratory burned. Thirty-seven people died. Chen Wei's mother survived because she'd been sent home early — pregnancy complications, the official report said.
But Chen Wei's grandmother had told a different story: "Your mother was never supposed to be in that laboratory. Wang needed someone who could read the old script. And when she read it — when she understood what they had found — she set the fire herself."
Chen Wei closed the journal. Li Wei Wang's death — she had seen it the moment he walked through the door — was July 15th. Three weeks from now.
The thing in the foundations. It was still there. They never destroyed it. They just built over it.
And now, somehow, it was waking up.
The largest of these maps belonged to the Wang family. Li Wei Wang's family.
She sat at her desk and pulled out the leather journal that had been her mother's, and her grandmother's before that. The first entry was dated 1945. The last was dated June 2, 1997.
October 19, 1945: "The excavation on Wulumuqi Road has stopped. The workers refuse to go any deeper. They say the temple predates anything they have ever seen — Tang Dynasty at least, maybe older."
March 14, 1997: "The laboratory has been built directly over the site. Wang Group funded the entire project. They say they're researching geothermal energy, but I have been seeing things in the basement."
June 2, 1997: "I have made a terrible mistake. The thing we uncovered is not a temple. It was never a temple. The carvings on the foundation stones are not prayers — they are warnings. And the date they warn about is not in the past. It is in the future."
The journal entries stopped after June 2nd. On June 3rd, the laboratory burned. Thirty-seven people died. Chen Wei's mother survived because she'd been sent home early — pregnancy complications, the official report said.
But Chen Wei's grandmother had told a different story: "Your mother was never supposed to be in that laboratory. Wang needed someone who could read the old script. And when she read it — when she understood what they had found — she set the fire herself."
Chen Wei closed the journal. Li Wei Wang's death — she had seen it the moment he walked through the door — was July 15th. Three weeks from now.
The thing in the foundations. It was still there. They never destroyed it. They just built over it.
And now, somehow, it was waking up.