Chapter 1: Champagne Fountain of Petrification
The music in Huang Manor was all wrong.
That was Wei’s first thought, standing on those glaring black-and-white tiles. It wasn’t the soaring classical strings he’d expected from a billionaire recluse’s party. It was something else—a low, cello-heavy thrum that seemed to vibrate in his molars, mixed with the faint, rhythmic click-click-click of something mechanical deep in the house’s bones. The air was cold and smelled too clean, like a hospital scrubbed with lemon polish, but underneath it was something else. Metallic. Like the smell of his keys after he’d held them too long.
“Stop being a neurotic turtle,” Jian said, slapping him on the back. Jian looked like he belonged here, his easy smile reflecting in the miles of polished dark wood paneling. “The guy’s a legend. He throws one party a year. We got invited.”
“A paper invitation slid under our door isn’t exactly ‘Invited: Plus One’,” Wei muttered, but he followed Jian further in. His eyes tracked the details: the chandeliers overhead, each crystal teardrop holding a core of viscous, amber fluid that pulsed faintly with the music. Not wax. Something thicker. The guests were all guys from their university and others like it, all around their age. No women. Everyone was dressed in the same slightly-too-formal suits they’d rented or borrowed. It felt less like a party and more like a very stylish draft.
“Champagne?” A servant appeared, silent on the polished floor, holding a tray of flutes filled with bubbling liquid the color of honey.
Jian took two, handed one to Wei. “See? Classy.”
Wei took a tentative sip. It was crisp, dry, and delicious. Expensive. He felt his shoulders relax a fraction. Maybe he was being a turtle. The foyer opened into a vast gallery room. At its center was a fountain. It wasn’t water. It was more of that champagne, cascading over tiers of smoked glass into a broad, shallow basin. People were gathered around it, laughing, filling their glasses directly.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Jian said, his eyes lighting up. He moved toward the fountain, weaving through the crowd. Wei followed, the sense of wrongness nagging at him again. The fountain’s flow was too perfect, too consistent. No bubbles formed in the flowing stream. It looked like liquid gold.
Jian got to the edge, leaned over, and dipped his glass into the flow. As he pulled it out, dripping, he threw his head back and laughed at something someone said. His back was to Wei.
The laugh cut off halfway.
It didn’t fade. It stopped, like a switch had been flipped. Jian’s body stiffened. His arm, holding the glass aloft, locked at the elbow. His spine straightened into an unnatural, rigid line.
“Jian?” Wei called out, taking a step forward.
The change was slow and horrifyingly fast all at once. It started where the champagne had splashed onto Jian’s hand. His skin lost its texture. The pores vanished. The color leached away, replaced by a smooth, neutral grey that spread up his wrist, over his forearm, like fast-drying paint. No, not paint. It was a transformation of the substance itself. The skin became smooth, seamless, polished.
“Jian!”
Jian didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His face was turned in profile, his mouth still open in the remnant of that laugh, but his eyes were wide with a terror so absolute it froze Wei’s own breath. The grey stone—it was marble, Wei’s mind supplied uselessly—crawled up his neck, over his jaw, across his cheek. It smoothed his hair into rigid, stylized waves. It filled his open mouth, sealing the sound inside.
His clothes underwent the same metamorphosis, the fabric of his suit hardening, flattening, becoming part of the statue, the tie a frozen slash of darker stone against the shirt.
The process took maybe ten seconds. The final click was audible—a soft, definitive settling, like a lock engaging. Where his friend had stood was now a perfect, life-sized statue of Jian, captured in a moment of animated joy, one arm extended, holding a stone flute towards an invisible companion. The pose was graceful, even beautiful. A perfect arabesque of agony.
Silence pooled around the fountain. The music seemed to swell, the cellos weeping. No one screamed. The other guests simply stared, their faces blank with shock, glasses hanging forgotten in their hands.
Wei’s legs gave way. He caught himself on the cold floor, his palms slapping against tile. He couldn’t look away from Jian’s petrified eyes, the horror trapped within the stone. A thin trickle of the golden champagne dripped from the stone flute’s lip into the basin below. Click. Click. Click.
“A tragic accident.”
The voice was calm, cultured, and came from behind Wei. He twisted, scrambling backward on the floor.
Mr. Huang stood there. He was older, maybe fifty, dressed in a immaculate charcoal suit. His hair was silvered at the temples. He held a glass of water, not champagne. His face was kind, concerned, but his eyes were the problem. They were flat. Empty. Like two polished stones set in his skull.
“The… the fountain,” Wei stammered, pointing a shaking hand. “It… he…”
“A faulty pump, I’m afraid,” Mr. Huang continued, shaking his head with a sigh. “A chemical leak from the cleaning solution. A terrible, terrible shame. It reacts with certain… organic compounds. Causes rapid calcification.” He took a slow sip of his water. “Such a promising young man.”
Wei stared at him. A chemical leak. Calcification. The words were logical, delivered with polite regret, but they were lies. The lie was in his eyes, in the perfect, undisturbed flow of the fountain, in the way none of the other servants reacted.
“We need to call an ambulance,” Wei said, his voice cracking. “We need to—“
“All taken care of,” Mr. Huang interrupted, his smile not reaching those dead eyes. “The authorities have been notified. In the meantime, the party must continue. It’s what he would have wanted, don’t you think? To not be a cause for gloom.”
He gestured with his free hand. The other guests, as if released from a spell, slowly began to murmur again. A few turned their backs on the statue of Jian. One even reached out, hesitantly, to touch the stone sleeve of his jacket, before pulling his fingers back as if burned.
Wei pushed himself to his feet. His heart was a frantic bird in his chest. His eyes darted to the main door, a towering thing of dark wood and iron fittings across the cavernous foyer. It was shut. A servant stood beside it, hands folded, gaze fixed on nothing.
“I… I need some air,” Wei managed to say, his mouth dry.
“Of course,” Mr. Huang said. “The garden doors are just through the archway to the left. Please, take a moment. We shall have this… situation… cleaned up shortly.”
Wei didn’t wait. He walked, forcing himself not to run, away from the fountain, away from Jian, away from Mr. Huang’s placid, monstrous gaze. He passed under a stone archway into a long, glass-paneled corridor that looked out onto a night-shrouded garden. His reflection ghosted alongside him—pale, wide-eyed.
He needed a plan. He needed to get out. He fumbled for his phone in his pocket. No signal. Of course.
At the end of the corridor was a set of French doors. He could smash the glass, get to the garden, find the wall. He was fast. He could—
He pushed open the door and stumbled to a halt.
The garden was not a garden. It was a gallery.
Lit by soft, ground-level lights were more statues. Dozens of them. All young men. All caught in poses of conversation, laughter, reaching for a drink, checking a phone. They were arranged in elegant, seemingly casual groups on the manicured gravel paths. Their faces were frozen in various expressions—some smiling, some mid-sentence, a few with the dawning horror he’d seen in Jian’s eyes.
Wei recognized one. A guy from the rowing team who’d gone missing last semester. The news said he’d transferred. He was here, forever poised to toss an invisible stone into a koi pond.
His breath came in short, sharp gasps. The cold air held the scent of damp earth and that underlying metallic tang. It wasn’t a chemical leak. It was the party. The party was the event.
From behind him, back inside the house, he heard the music shift. The cellos faded, replaced by a lighter, almost playful chamber piece. He heard the murmur of voices again, a forced, polite social hum.
They were continuing. Mr. Huang was right. The party went on.
Wei turned, pressing his back against the cold glass of the door. He was in a garden of trophies, and the hunt was still happening inside. He had to move. He had to get past the door servant, or find another way. His eyes scanned the dark, statue-studded grounds for a gate, a break in the high wall.
A soft click-click-click sounded from the hedge to his right.
He wasn’t alone out here either.