Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 26
The Faceless Monk
Alex Moonn
Five hundred and twelve zeros. A number that only shows up when there's nothing left to measure.
Taiyuan, China, January 2026. For six years the narrator has worked on the eleventh floor of a tech company, fixing the errors of facial-recognition cameras forgotten in the middle of nowhere. One of them stands in front of a temple gate in Baihe, a village in the Taihang Mountains. For forty-one consecutive nights, always at 4:12 a.m., it detects a face: a kneeling figure, hotter than a human face should be on a night of minus eleven, that the system cannot measure.
English edition, available on Amazon.
Read an excerpt
Jìngtái couldn’t say that face belonged to anyone. It couldn’t say it didn’t, either. I asked the system who was kneeling in front of that gate, and the system answered with the one word it never used: undefined.
Distant would still have been an answer. Unknown too, an uncomfortable answer, but one with a place in the world. Undefined is the machine telling you the question doesn’t make sense.
English edition, available on Amazon.
