[SYSTEM RECORD: FILE #007]Subject: Entity Interaction (Class: Mimicry / Agricultural)Location: Dacun Township Vineyard, Sector 4Time: 01:52 AM

  [Investigator's Record]

  The backlash from using the "Future Sight" wasn't just pain; it was a complete system failure. The brief surge of adrenaline I had used to cross out the Pursuer's name just minutes ago had completely faded, causing my body to crash again.

  Before my muscles locked up entirely, I had managed to shove Pan's notebook and the bloody metal pen nib deep inside my jacket. Then, I collapsed back into the wet irrigation ditch between rows 14 and 15, staring up at the dense canopy of vines. Mud seeped into my clothes.

  I couldn't move. I could only listen.

  Squelch. Squelch.

  It was the sound of cheap rubber boots walking through thick, wet mud. They were slow, deliberate footsteps, coming from the next row over.

  Snip. A pause. Snip.

  The sound of rusty pruning shears cutting thick vines was getting closer. It wasn't the mechanical rhythm of a machine; it was the leisurely pace of an experienced farmhand.

  I tried to force my body to crawl, to inch away, but my limbs refused to obey. The metallic taste of blood from my nosebleed filled the back of my throat.

  The footsteps stopped right beside my head, separated only by a thin wall of grape leaves.

  The leaves parted slowly. A figure stepped through.

  It looked exactly like any elderly woman you’d see working the fields in rural Taiwan. She wore a wide, conical bamboo hat (斗笠) tilted low, completely obscuring her face in shadow. Her arms were covered by mismatched, brightly colored floral sleeve covers (袖套) to protect against the sun and insects, and on her feet were a pair of mud-caked, black "Dacin" brand rubber rain boots.

  It was a perfectly normal sight during the day. At 2:00 AM, deep in an anomaly zone, it was terrifying.

  She didn't seem to notice me lying in the ditch at first. She reached up with a pair of large, rusted iron shears and snip—cut a large cluster of grapes from the vine above me.

  She held the cluster in her gloved hand. Even in the dark, I could see the grapes weren't right. They were too large, too irregular. They glistened with a wet, oily sheen that didn't look like morning dew.

  Slowly, the bamboo hat tilted down toward me. I couldn't see eyes, only a void of shadow where a face should be.

  She crouched down, her rubber boots creaking. She held the strange cluster of grapes right in front of my bleeding nose. The smell hit me instantly—not the sweet scent of fruit, but the cloying, coppery stench of old blood and wet soil.

  A voice came from beneath the hat. It sounded dry and raspy, like dead leaves rubbing together.

  "少年欸 (Young man)..." she whispered, dangling the wet cluster closer to my lips. "Are these sweet?"

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  The question hung in the humid air. My heart hammered against my ribs. The pain in my head screamed at me to pass out, but fear kept me conscious.

  Rule 3: If a voice asks you, "Are these sweet?" you must reply, "Not yet, they are poisonous."

  My throat was dry. I choked on the blood in my mouth, coughing weakly.If I didn't answer, I was dead. If I said "sweet," I was fertilizer.

  I forced my jaw to unclench. "Not... yet," I rasped, my voice barely a whisper. "They... are poisonous."

  The entity froze. The bamboo hat remained perfectly still.For an agonizing ten seconds, nothing happened. Had I passed the test?

  Then, the shoulders beneath the floral sleeve covers began to shake. A high-pitched, giggling sound bubbled up from beneath the hat—a sound that belonged to neither an old woman nor a human being.

  "Poisonous?" The voice shifted, becoming deeper, wetter. "You're lying to A-p? (Grandma)."

  She pulled the cluster back and shoved the entire thing into the shadow beneath her hat.CRUNCH. SQUELCH.

  The sound was sickening—like biting into a raw, juicy steak full of gristle. Thick, black liquid sprayed out from under the rim of the hat, splashing onto my chest and face. It burned cold on my skin.

  "See?" she chewed noisily, dark juice dripping onto her floral sleeves. "Very sweet."

  She reached up and cut another cluster. This one was even bigger, throbbing slightly in her hand.

  She leaned over me, pressing her weight onto my paralyzed chest. The smell of rot was overwhelming. She held the throbbing cluster against my shut lips.

  "Now," she hissed, her voice layered with the sound of grinding teeth. "You try. Tell A-p? the truth."

  She was cheating. The rules were a game, and she was changing them because I wouldn't play along. This was the classic trap of the Taiwanese mountain ghosts—if you eat their food, you belong to them.

  My Hyperthymesia, still overclocking, forced my eyes to focus on the "grapes" pressed against my mouth. The glamour flickered and failed.They weren't grapes. They were clusters of human eyeballs, varying in color and size, strung together by thick, nerve-like veins. The one touching my lip blinked.

  Adrenaline flooded my system, momentarily overriding the neural agony. I couldn't let that thing into my mouth.

  I needed a distraction. Anything to make her recoil.

  My heightened memory flashed back to the exact moment before my nervous system crashed, thirty-seven minutes ago. The Pursuer. When the vines dragged him violently into the earth, his rifle had snagged on the iron trellis for a fraction of a second. I remembered the exact sound—a sharp crack of plastic and metal breaking, followed by a heavy object tumbling into the irrigation ditch right next to me.

  My right hand, still spasming in the mud, brushed against something hard and cold. The mount was snapped, but the metal tube was intact. The Pursuer's tactical flashlight.

  The entity was forcing my jaw open with her cold, wet fingers. "Eat..."

  I gripped the metal tube. My thumb fumbled frantically for the tail switch.I found it. I aimed it blindly upward and pressed hard.

  CLICK.

  A beam of 2,000 lumens of blinding white tactical light exploded in the dark, aimed directly up under the rim of her bamboo hat.

  The reaction was instantaneous. An inhuman shriek tore through the vineyard, shattering the silence. The entity recoiled violently, throwing her hands up to cover the space where her face should have been.

  In the split second of blinding light, I saw what was under the hat. There were no features. Just a vertical, lamprey-like mouth lined with rows of jagged, rusted teeth, squinting in pain from the sudden brightness.

  She stumbled backward into the vines, screeching, temporarily blinded by the modern technology she didn't understand.

  The shock gave me just enough motor control. I rolled onto my stomach, gasping in pain, and clawed my way through the mud. I didn't stand up. I crawled on my hands and knees, scrambling like an animal away from the shrieking "A-p?."

  I squashed fallen, overripe fruit beneath my bare hands and feet as I moved. Rule 4 demanded I take off my shoes if I crushed fallen fruit. I almost laughed through the pain and the blood in my mouth. I hadn't worn shoes since I fled the dormitory. I was already compliant.

  Fifteen meters ahead, the silhouette of a dilapidated wooden farm shed loomed against the night sky.

  The safe zone. I just had to make it before she recovered her vision.

  [Author's Note]

  Sydni Frey, who left the very first review for The Formosa Archives.