1 I found some bones!

"Tonight, the dogs have been acting strangely."

Cheng Yan muttered to himself while dragging his legs as he crossed a grove to reach his home alone.

"I can't even feel my shoulders today. Those kids at my private class were real idiots! I won't even be teaching them European History if I didn't need the money," he continued dejectedly.

"That's the seventh dog that has run out from the forest this evening. Dogs are getting crazier by the minute."

It was already dusk. Stars were slowly appearing in the sky as dusk turned into night and as the sun left for the other half of the world. It was a typical hot and humid summer in Nanjing. And Cheng Yan always took the forest route to his home although it was longer in order to escape from the smothering heat of the air.

As he kept on walking towards the deeper part of the forest, he felt calmer. The breeze was cooler and gentler. And the moon was lazily climbing the night sky giving almost a sick glow to his surroundings. Suddenly he noticed a soft ivory glow from the base of an old tree that was closest to him and he could see some digging signs that had revealed that glow.

"Ah," he thought, "those dogs must have come here sniffing around for something."

"Looks harmless," he said to himself as he noticed that a bone was sticking out from a pile of dirt on closer inspection.

"Now, why would the dogs leave this good piece of bone and run the opposite way? Was it too old to be edible?" he asked himself. And then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled out the bone from the dirt and threw it inside his backpack. [Hey, he is a History nerd. Old things like this make him happy.]

But he failed to notice that there were some characters on the bone which he had neglected to check as he was too exhausted, hungry and he couldn't see properly under the sickly city moonlight even with his thick glasses. And the bone still had some dirt on it.

And while he was lost in his thought congratulating himself on getting a room decor, the old tree had silently swooped down its branches behind him like the wings of a fallen angel and enveloped him whole. He was too shocked to even scream and only tried to do so when his soul left his body. The tree had smothered him to death squeezing his soul out of his mortal body.

The tree dropped the body to the ground and resumed its previous indifferent posture. Cheng Yan's body looked like it was sleeping under the security of the tree. The odd thing about his death was that there were no signs of injuries on the body. It was like the tree really did squeeze out just the soul and left the body intact.

While this soul traveled to another world leaving this city and this current world behind.