It was the most sombre Songkran Festival that Chiang Mai had ever seen.
In previous years, the heatwave in April, accompanied by frenzied laughter, had swept through every street. Silvery sprays of water splashed in the sunlight, washing away the dust of the old year. But this year, the sky was a sickly leaden grey, with thick rain clouds hanging low over the slopes of Doi Suthep like a giant beast covered in eczema and breathing out damp, oppressive air.
Malin knelt on the blue brick floor of the main temple hall, the biting cold seeping into her bones. Inside, hundreds of devotees chanted prayers; the sounds of wooden fish drums and the low murmur of scriptures formed an echoing, low-frequency torrent.
The normally sweet scent of jasmine water was now masked by an unsettling aroma.
It was the smell of rust.
Malin closed her eyes and forced herself to activate her 'spiritual vision'. In her vision, the world was composed not of bricks and flesh, but of wispy, purplish-black 'thoughts'. These threads, which should have risen from the heads of the believers into the void, were now being pulled down by some kind of gravitational force. They sank to the ground and disappeared into the dark, sticky shadows between the paving stones.
'The earth is weeping,' Marlene murmured softly.
She sensed the pulse deep beneath the earth — the underground water system, considered the lifeblood of Chiang Mai — emitting a heavy, dying wail. The spiritual energy was no longer a flowing spring but had turned into dried-up, solidified tar carrying a putrid desire.
As an old woman sprinkled holy water into the air with a silver bowl, Marlene saw a chilling reflection in the translucent droplets. At the centre of each one was a tiny black spore, resembling an insect egg.
This was not rain of blessing, but the fuse of plague.
"Don't touch that water!" Marlene's eyes snapped open, her voice jarring and shrill amidst the tranquil chanting.
The surrounding devotees turned, their eyes filled with annoyance at the disturbance and a blind devotion. However, Marlene turned deathly pale, sweat dripping from her delicate chin. She noticed a thick, rust-coloured liquid slowly trickling from the corner of the once benevolent Naga deity's eye in the shadows behind the Buddha statue.
The Buddha was bleeding. Outside the temple, along the moat, the music celebrating Songkran was deafening. Marlene rushed out of the main hall, the blazing sunlight almost blinding her.
The streets were a sea of revelry. Pickup trucks with enormous water tanks on their backs were spraying reckless jets of water into the crowds. But what Marlene saw was hell on earth: the water mist shimmered with an ominous dark red under the sunlight. Instead of evaporating, it landed on people's skin and quickly burrowed into their pores like some kind of living slime mould.
"Uncle Aka! Stop! Turn off the water tank!' Marlene stumbled towards a familiar stall by the roadside.
Uncle Aka, who was filling a water pistol, turned around. His weathered face was smeared with white talcum powder and he smiled somewhat stiffly. The skin around his eyes twitched slightly as if a tiny worm were crawling beneath it.
'Marlene, today is the Water Festival. Don't say such discouraging things.' Uncle Aka's voice held a hint of excitement as he pulled the trigger. A jet of water, smelling strongly of rust, grazed Marlene's cheek and splashed onto the red wall behind her, leaving a dark red stain.
The smell made Marlene's stomach churn. It was the smell of blood and resentment that had been building up for thousands of years and was now rotting in the riverbed silt.
'This water is wrong... the earth has been corrupted! Uncle Aka, get away from the water!' Marlene screamed, trying to snatch the hose from his hand.
'Let go! This water has been blessed by Buddha!" Uncle Aka suddenly exerted an astonishingly strong force, pushing Marlene to the ground. His eyes instantly filled with fine blood vessels and a purplish-blue, scripture-like growth rapidly spread across his skin, the force of his push seemingly illogical.
Marlene stood up, enduring the excruciating pain in her knee and realising that the pollution wasn't limited to the environment, but had also directly eroded people's sanity through the so-called 'holy water'.
Just then, a black SUV sped through the street, overturning a row of roadside stalls. The door opened and a blood-covered man rolled out. It was Apeng, the young man who had gone to Bangkok to buy goods just a few days earlier.
'Run... run...' Apeng's throat made a gurgling sound. His chest had been ripped open and bright red, thorny vines were wrapped around his ribs.
The laughter in the street ceased abruptly.
The drenched crowd began to convulse violently — first of all, Uncle Aka, who had pushed Marin down. He threw down the hose and clutched his throat in agony, digging his fingernails into his neck until it bled. Then a series of sharp cracking sounds echoed from his spine and his body contorted grotesquely, like an arthropod. A low chanting growl emanated from his throat.
"Sawadee (hello)…". Uncle Aka raised his head, half of his face having transformed into a mutilated stone Buddha bearing a benevolent smile due to bone spurs.
The first victim appeared: a young female tourist. Uncle Aka tackled her, and her terrified screams were immediately drowned out by the spray. Her blood flowed down the drain into the moat and stained the entire river dark purple.
Marin had to return to the secret chamber behind the temple to retrieve the ancestral 'Naga Staff'. It was the only thing that could temporarily suppress her desires. However, the path to the back mountain was already crowded with 'Desire Bodies', whose bodies were constantly sprouting vines and fleshy buds.
She picked up a fallen lighter and tore a piece of cloth soaked in strong liquor from an overturned stall. In her spiritual vision, she could see that these monsters were surrounded by heavy red shadows — the materialisation of greedy desire.
'I'm sorry...' Marlene trembled as she lit the cloth and waved the flames to drive back the approaching monsters.
The flames were the nemesis of these cold, damp curses. Running through the streets that had become a scene of carnage, Marlene made her way towards the ancient pagoda through the billowing smoke. The ancient city walls of Chiang Mai looked particularly desolate under the leaden clouds.
When Marlene finally pushed open the heavy mahogany door of the Ancestral Temple, she was completely shattered by the scene inside.
Her mentor, an old monk who should have been guarding the spiritual cave, was sitting cross-legged on a prayer mat. He hadn't mutated into a monster, but his body was completely enveloped by giant purple vines that had erupted from the ground. These vines pierced his eye sockets and mouth, greedily draining his spiritual energy.
"Master…" Marlene knelt before him, tears streaming down her face.
The old monk struggled to open one eye; his gaze was devoid of pain and filled only with profound compassion. 'Marlene, the flood of desire has breached its banks. This is not a plague, but the earth's 'judgement'."
His withered fingers trembled as he pointed to the memorial tablet in the centre of the hall. A thin crack in the tablet oozed purplish-black pus.
'Take your staff and go to Bangkok,' the old monk said, his voice growing weaker. 'There is an "undying gatekeeper" there, carrying a curse that devours lives. Only by working together can you stop this flood."
"I won't go! I want to stay here and save you!" Marlene clutched his robes tightly.
"Go!" The old monk mustered his last strength and thrust a jet-black Naga staff engraved with scale-like patterns into Marin's hand. The moment the staff touched her, a cool power washed over Marin, temporarily silencing the cacophony of whispers in her ears.
At the same time, the entire ancient city began to tremble violently.
The water level in the moat surged wildly; its once clear flow was now deep purple. Countless corpses dressed in Songkran attire floated on the surface. Instead of sinking, they held hands and formed a massive, swirling circle in the water.
It was a sacrificial ritual.
Standing on the hillside, Marin witnessed her beloved homeland being transformed into a ghostly realm in an instant. The mutated roars echoed across the mountains and plains, yet she vaguely sensed an overwhelming loneliness.
Far to the south, in the ruins of Bangkok, a decaying soul seemed to resonate with her spiritual power across hundreds of kilometres of gloom — a fateful connection.
"Ah Zhan…"
Marlene murmured the vague name in her heart. She didn't know who he was, but she sensed that he was a trapped beast who had struggled for far too long in eternal hell.
In the distance, Colonel Mann's helicopter squadron appeared on the horizon — they weren't there to rescue her. When the first incendiary bomb pierced the purple mist and burst into destructive sparks at the heart of the ancient city, Marlene knew that the old world, filled with the fragrance of jasmine, had been utterly destroyed in this bloody Water Festival.
Gripping her staff tightly, she turned resolutely and leapt into the shadows leading into the depths of the jungle. Meanwhile, atop the stupa behind her, the statue wearing a Naga mask seemed to turn its head, fixing its eerie green gaze on her retreating figure.
Marlene gripped the Naga staff so tightly that her fingertips turned white. The scales on its surface opened and closed slightly in her palm as if the wood itself were alive.
'Master, I...'
Before she could finish, the old monk's body suddenly snapped backwards. The purple vines within him immediately unleashed their power, like countless greedy giant leeches rapidly draining his flesh. The old monk's body collapsed rapidly before Marlene's eyes, leaving only an empty orange robe and a large, eerie, dark purple flower blooming from the tip of the vines.
That was the mother flower of the 'Desire Gu'.
'Hiss—'
A series of teeth-grinding, scraping sounds came from the beams of the main hall. Marlene looked up sharply. The dozen or so desiccated corpses that had been perched on the roof were now suspended in mid-air like puppets, pulled by vines. Their eyes had no pupils, only two writhing buds emitting an eerie green glow.
'Don't desecrate this place!' Marlene roared, the Naga bloodline within her, suppressed for so long, instantly boiling over.
She waved her staff and a transparent ripple seemed to spread through the air — the manifestation of spiritual energy. The staff sliced through the air of the hall, forcibly cleaving a crack in the previously stagnant purple mist. A mutated creature that had fallen from the beams crashed heavily into the spiritual energy barrier. The moment its flesh touched the barrier, it seemed to corrode as if touched by strong acid, emitting foul-smelling white smoke.
But there were too many monsters.
The spiritual energy of the entire ancient city had been corrupted, making it feel as though Marin were drawing water from a dry, glass-strewn well every time she tried to channel her own spiritual energy. This soul-crushing pain blurred her vision.
She stumbled out of the ancestral temple to find that the moon outside had turned a sinister dark red, illuminating the devastated landscape of Chiang Mai below.
At the foot of the mountain, the incendiary bombs of the task force had begun to burn, mingling crimson flames with purple mist and painting the ancient city of northern Thailand as if it were a post-apocalyptic oil painting. Marin saw several girls in school uniforms trapped on the edge of a pagoda as their neighbours, now distorted into skeletal masks, closed in around them.
"Help! Spirit Maiden, save us!' the girls screamed desperately.
Marin gritted her teeth — according to her mentor's dying wish, she had to head south immediately to find the 'Gatekeeper', but she knew she couldn't stop to help them. However, her heart skipped a beat when she saw the jasmine wreath clutched in one of the girls' hands.
It was the last remnant of Songkran's fragrance.
"Get behind me!"
Marlene roared, charging into the crowd and slamming her Naga staff into the ground. A surge of azure spiritual energy erupted from her, temporarily repelling any primal forces within a ten-metre radius. She grabbed the girls and pointed to a secluded path leading to a hidden passageway in the mountains behind them.
'Run into the forest! Don't look back! Don't touch any flowing water!'
Before the girls could thank her, a blinding searchlight shone down from the sky.
Colonel Mann's armed helicopter circled overhead and a cold, synthesised voice boomed from its loudspeaker: 'High concentration of spiritual energy detected. Suspected mutated source or illegal supernatural entity. 'Purification Bomb' authorised."
"No! Those are survivors!" Marlene waved her arms at the sky.
But she was met only with the dull thud of machine guns; the task force's logic was simple: an unidentifiable force was a threat.
Bullets exploded into columns of mud on the ground. Marlene clutched her staff. In that moment, her faith crumbled completely. The gods hadn't sent a miracle and the nation hadn't offered aid. This callous 'big picture' was the final end for this land. Marlene tumbled into the bushes, her robes torn by thorns and revealing a faint, golden, snake-like pattern on her back — the mark of the Naga — which was now flashing intensely in fury.
Hiding behind an acacia tree, she watched the girls ultimately fail to escape. They weren't killed by zombies, but struck by stray bullets from the task force, falling just metres from freedom.
The jasmine wreaths at their feet were stained crimson with blood.
'Is this the order you uphold?' Marlene dug her fingernails into the bark, blood seeping from them.
She closed her eyes, trying to calm her erratic breathing. In her utter despair, her 'spiritual vision' suddenly picked up a faint yet tenacious fluctuation.
It was pure, deathly desolation.
Hundreds of kilometres away, in the heart of Bangkok's concrete jungle, a frequency resonated with the staff in her hand. It didn't seem to be that of a living person, but rather a stubborn rock, polished for millennia in the abyss.
It was A-Zhan.
Although she had never seen this man before, she saw a scene through the convergence of her spiritual senses:
A man with black blood seeping from his chest sat in a dilapidated hotel room, nervously wiping a rusty folding knife. His eyes held no fear of death, only weariness from eternal solitude.
'Who are you?' Marlene asked in her mind.
The frequency vibrated slightly, as if sensing her gaze.
Marlene opened her eyes, her gaze shifting. The ethereal mystery of her former self had been replaced by a resolute wildness. She was no longer the spirit maiden who prayed for others at the altar; rather, she was a predator awakening in ruins.
She pulled a crumpled map of Bangkok out of her robes and circled 'Khao San Road' with her bloodied finger.
'If you are the gatekeeper of Hell, then wait for me,' she whispered, her voice like a cold wind through the forest. 'Before I decay, I will find you.'
She stood up, plunging into the primeval jungle, swallowed by the purple fog, without looking back. Behind her, the last pagoda of Chiang Mai's old city collapsed with a deafening explosion. The rising dust filled the damp night air like a belated grey ritual.
Meanwhile, in distant Bangkok, Azhan abruptly raised his head and gazed north.
The tattoo on his chest stopped pulsating for the first time ever, replaced by a long-lost, chilling coldness.
The gears of fate finally snapped shut with a heavy thud at the end of this bloody Songkran festival.