The rain fell like dry sand against the roof tiles—scratchy and wrong.
Lu Qing sat cross-legged in the dim light of his wooden shack, staring at the black-glazed teacup in his hand. Half-filled with red rice, it glowed with an eerie luster under the flickering oil lamp. This cup of rice was his final "anchor"—the only thing in this fading house that still felt heavy and alive.
Then, he heard it. A faint, crisp sound, like a cicada shedding its shell—crack.
Without any external force, the teacup began to peel. The jade-like, iridescent black glaze curled up like parched skin, then snapped off with a sharp pop, falling into the red rice.
Where the glaze had vanished, it didn't reveal clay. Instead, it exposed a piece of ashen, moldy bone.
"Damn it..." Lu Qing hissed, his heart hammering. He instinctively gripped the cup, trying to stop the collapse. But the moment he tightened his hold, a piercing sensation of "nothingness" surged through his fingertips.
He watched in horror as his own fingerprint—the very skin of his right index finger—began to slide off like a poorly glued sticker.
The fingerprint hit the floor without a sound. Where it had been, there was no blood, no flesh. Only a translucent, skeletal structure remained, looking like cheap glass. He could see the rotting wood grain of the floorboards right through his own finger.
He was losing his "weight."
At that moment, the shadows in the corners began to writhe. His own shadow pulled itself off the wall, stretching into a two-dimensional silhouette that reached for his red rice with paper-thin hands.
"The gold dust... is not enough..." a raspy voice whispered, sounding like dry rags rubbing together.
"Get lost! This is my dinner!" Lu Qing roared. He grabbed a battered brush from the table. As his fingers closed around it, the tip suddenly bled a single drop of thick, mercury-like dark red ink. He swung the brush, slicing a streak of ink through the air.
BOOM!
The light stroke hit like a sledgehammer. The ink became impossibly heavy, crushing the shadow into the floorboards, which collapsed into a grey, bottomless void.
Lu Qing slumped to the ground, gasping. Outside, the world was molting. His neighbor, Old Wang, walked past the window. As a gust of wind caught him, a patch of skin on the back of Wang's head peeled away, flapping uselessly to reveal a hollow skull stuffed with moldy, yellow straw.
This wasn't just a storm. The reality of this world was rotting to its core.