Chapter One: The Black Creature

At one in the morning, Donglan International Airport was so brightly lit that nothing seemed to cast a shadow. Lu Chen stood at the customs inspection station, wearing the blue badge of a temporary employee. His supervisor had told him to move bags, fill forms, and never create trouble. But when a silver suitcase transferred from Bangkok passed through the scanner, he stopped the belt. The image showed more than twenty narrow skeletons tangled together. The owner, a man with a gold watch, had declared them as resin garden ornaments. “Open it,” Lu Chen said. Inside, mesh bags of colorful lizards had been packed between layers of damp leaves. Several were already dead.