Taipei’s nights never truly go dark.

  This city has a stubborn habit—using neon, streetlights, and the undying glare of convenience stores to squeeze the darkness into a thin, suffocating crack. Living here for over twenty years, I’ve grown used to that constant glow. So used to it that sometimes, standing on my balcony, I struggle to remember what the stars actually look like.

  But that night was different.

  The humidity was heavy, like an invisible hand clamped over my throat. Every breath carried a faint, sickly scent of decay—not flowers, but the kind of fermented sweetness that seeps from the bottom of a trash can full of rotting fruit. It was thick enough to make you gag. I was weaving through traffic on Minquan East Road, my helmet visor fogging up with a thin mist. The red lights, neon signs, and the shadows of umbrellas blurred together like an oil painting smeared by the rain before the paint could dry.

  Everything was normal.

  So normal it left me completely unguarded.

  Fuxing North Road intersection. Right turn. I leaned the bike low, knee almost scraping the asphalt, the engine's drone muffled by the damp air. It happened in that split second of the deepest lean—I didn't see it, I felt it. It was like something in the air suddenly went missing. Like the world had quietly swapped masks behind my back before I could turn around.

  And then, the lights went out.

  It wasn’t a blackout. A blackout has a process—the hum of appliances dying down, people shouting, phone screens lighting up like fireflies in the dark. Not this. The lights of the MRT station simply vanished as if they’d never existed, cutting out so clean they didn't even leave an afterimage.

  In their place were pillars.

  Massive, grey-white concrete bridge pillars erupting from the ground. Silent. Unexplained. They stood there, caught in the white circle of my headlight like the hollowed-out ribs of some prehistoric beast, radiating a cold, crushing pressure in the dark.

  The asphalt under my tires was gone.

  Crunch.

  The sound was wrong. I looked down, my fingers instinctively tightening on the throttle as the headlight hit the ground—white gravel. Fine, sharp, stretching into the void. It was as if someone had gutted the bottom of the Minquan underpass and replaced it with soil from a place I didn't recognize. It was dry, smelling of strange minerals, clashing with that rotting sweetness from before and making my stomach churn.

  The tunnel was still there.

  But it didn't lead to Songshan Airport anymore.

  It had turned into an unfinished tomb of a tunnel. Water seeped down the walls, and rusted rebar poked out from the concrete like snapped bones. There were no ceiling lights, just flickering construction lamps hung at intervals, staining everything in the pale, sickly hue of an operating room.

  That’s when I saw them.

  They stepped out from the shadows on both sides, forming a perfect line. One step at a time, moving in total sync, like their bodies were controlled by a single metronome. No talking. No looking up. Necks bent so low their chins touched their chests, hair falling forward to hide their faces—no, not hide.

  As I rode closer, I realized the truth.

  They didn't have faces.

  It wasn't the light or the shadows—there was simply nothing there. The skin where features should have been was as smooth as a peeled boiled egg. Flat. Blank. Possessing a terrifying, non-human wholeness. My headlight swept over them, but not a single body reacted. No flinching, no squinting—none of the primal reflexes a human has when hit by a blinding light.

  They just walked. Methodical. Silent. Slowly descending into the earth.

  I held my breath, hugging the wall as I slipped through the gaps between them.

  No one turned. I wasn't even sure if they knew I existed.

  The moment I broke out of the tunnel, I wished I hadn't looked ahead.

  The Dazhi Bridge was gone.

  In its place was a road I can’t describe in any normal language. It was impossibly wide, its borders swallowed by the void. No lane markings, no guardrails, nothing to tell you "this is a road." Just an endless, silent incline stretching upward into the night, leading somewhere that didn't belong to this city.

  The humid, rain-soaked night air vanished in a heartbeat. In its place came a wind that was bone-dry, thin, and carried the biting scent of high altitudes—as if I’d been plucked from sea level and dropped onto a mountain ridge in a single second. My ears popped painfully, that sharp pressure change you get on a plane, but more violent. It was so sudden my eyeballs felt like they were burning in their sockets.

  That’s when the crowd turned.

  It wasn't a turn of anger—it was synchronized, as if pulled by a single invisible wire. In one smooth, chilling motion, they all faced me and the few other bikers around. A sound began to rise from the depths of their throats—something I can’t quite name. It wasn't a curse. It was more like a chant from some ancient, forgotten ritual, thick with moisture and the metallic tang of blood. Low, monotonous, it crawled into my ears and refused to let go.

  Beside me, another biker drifted to a halt.

  He took off his helmet and placed it on his seat. His movements were slow, deliberate, as if he were handling something incredibly fragile. I caught a glimpse of his face—just one—and forced myself to look away. It wasn't that he looked monstrous; it was his expression that unsettled me more than any demon’s mask. There was nothing there. Not peace, just void. Like a container that had been hollowed out, leaving only the human shell—the shape of a man, but with the soul long gone.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He walked toward one of the screaming figures.

  A flash of steel.

  Blood hit the white gravel, a red so piercing it felt fake—as if someone had cranked the color saturation to the absolute max just to make sure you’d never forget that shade.

  The biker didn't give it a second look. He turned, kicked his engine to life, and vanished into the darkness of the incline. Clean. Precise. As if nothing had happened at all.

  And then, someone finally screamed.

  It wasn't a scream of surprise—it was a guttural, bone-deep howl forced from the bottom of the lungs. The sound of someone seeing something that shouldn't exist in this world and realizing they can no longer pretend they didn't see it.

  "Monsters—! Those are monsters!"

  The echoes bounced back and forth through the underpass, over and over, refusing to fade.

  In that moment, my brain pulled the plug. Total blackout.

  I don’t remember how I got out of there. I only remember death-gripping the throttle, tires fishtailing on the gravel, and shadows—both human and otherwise—lunging at me from every direction. Then there was the wind, the hammering of my heart, the sting of branches whipping my arms, and the sickening crunch of something with wings shattering against my helmet visor.

  By the time I snapped out of it, I was deep in the darkness of the mountain forest to the left.

  I didn't know how far I’d ridden. I didn't know how long it had been.

  There was nothing but trees. Massive, dense pillars of wood carving the sky into jagged shards. In those shards, there were no stars, no moon—only a shade of black deeper than the void, pressing down on me with a heavy, suffocating weight. The drone of my engine echoed through the woods, sounding like something was pacing me, hidden just out of earshot.

  I cut the engine.

  Silence.

  A silence so absolute I could hear the blood rushing through my eardrums.

  Trembling, I fished out my phone. The second the screen flickered to life, a burst of harsh electronic static exploded from the speaker. It sounded like something was trapped inside, clawing at the glass.

  "Beep—Coordinates detected... severe deviation."

  It wasn't that familiar, helpful female voice anymore.

  It was a dry, metallic rasp, a mechanical grinding where every word was separated by a haunting, rhythmic pause. It echoed through the valley as if something hiding behind the trees was using a mouth not built for human speech to mimic the words.

  I looked down at the map.

  The blue dot was twitching violently at the intersection of Yonghe, Xindian, and Wenshan. Like a dying heart, it thrashed between the three districts, unable to find a place to rest. The navigation system had automatically circled the area, covering it in yellow-and-black hazard stripes—the kind of warning signs used to keep people out of construction sites. The kind that says: Danger. Do not enter. Detour.

  Right in the center of the three districts, a row of crimson characters flashed with an ominous pulse:

  [ LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT ]

  My finger twitched, reaching to kill the screen.

  The mechanical voice suddenly spiked, taking on a nauseating vibration. It sounded like a laugh, or rather, something that didn't understand the concept of humor trying its best to imitate one.

  "Please... proceed straight... through the next intersection... toward the... Underworld. Current route... has been... excised from reality. Please... keep your head down. Please... keep your head down."

  On the last repetition, the voice warped, dropping into a register so low it didn't feel like it was coming from the speaker. It felt like a resonance rising from somewhere deep, deep underground.

  Red light bled from the screen, staining the back of my hand, the massive trunks around me, and the entire forest in a rotting hue—the color of the inside of an open wound.

  The phone slipped from my grasp and landed in the gravel. Faced up, the red glow hit the gaps in the canopy above.

  I slowly looked up at the blood-red treetops. I took a long drag of that dry, mineral-scented air, letting it fill my lungs.

  I wasn't lost.

  People who are lost are still in reality.

  I had been wiped clean from it by this city.

  I stood there for about five minutes.

  I didn't cry. I didn't call anyone.

  It wasn't that I didn't want to; it was that I ran through every contact in my head and realized I had nothing to say. "Hey, I think I just rode my scooter into Hell. You got a sec?" No one’s going to pick up that call.

  I picked the phone up, brushed off the dirt, and checked that the screen wasn't cracked.

  Then, I restarted the engine.

  I’m an engineer. I don’t deal well with things that don’t have an explanation. But I deal even worse with staying in a place that marks my destination as "The Underworld."

  So, I’d leave first. Figure it out later.