Aberration

Aberration is a full-length horror and supernatural novel by the web author Black Fire Seed (real name Dong Xie), set in a modern city and unfolding along two threads: "precognition" and "curse." The core premise is that three people with special sensitivities can, to varying degrees, "see" supernatural deaths that are about to happen. Yet this foreknowledge brings no salvation: those they sense will be haunted by curses and evil spirits are, almost without exception, killed exactly as foreseen; more cruelly still, the seers themselves are destined to be killed by some unknown horror in the future. To escape their fate, the protagonists Yi Rundan and Yi Runli, a brother and sister, together with their companion Ren Jing, follow a chain of bizarre deaths and are led step by step toward the source of the terror. The story involves a series of urban-legend-style incidents — an evil ghost in a painting, a shape-shifter, a pentagonal haunted house, an apartment ghost — and gradually reveals a self-consistent system of concepts such as the "Sinister Realm," the "Death Report Spirit," the "Ghost Eye," and "curses." Unlike many works that rely on magic, leveling up, or "clearing monsters," this book offers almost no way to directly defeat the uncanny; the source of the horror cannot be dispelled, and the characters can only struggle for survival in despair and fight for a sliver of hope. The book runs to fourteen volumes and about 770,000 characters. It was first serialized and completed on Qidian, and in 2015 21st Century Publishing House released a print edition under the title Urban Ghost Tales; the work has also been adapted into the suspense web series Ten Nights of Talk and a web film of the same name.