Chapter 20

Liu Zhiyi closed her eyes.

"But in the back of my mind I also felt that if I didn't keep my mother she'd be angry, so I brought her a fish, hoping she wouldn't be so angry — and my mother liked fish too… I wanted to make it up to her. I wanted to make her happy."

So all of it had surfaced in the dungeon.

But she still wanted to leave this dungeon.

"I won't stay, and I don't want to die…"

Liu Zhiyi opened her eyes.

Even though she really, truly missed her mother.

"Can I ask you something, if you don't mind?" the cat cut into her thoughts.

Liu Zhiyi: "What?"

Cat: "Why did you want to work out of town? By your account, you and your mother didn't have much conflict — so it shouldn't be that you ran off to work far away to get away from her."

"It wasn't that. My mom nagging me about marriage got annoying sometimes, sure, but I went to work out of town because the pay there was higher, and it's by the sea, and…"

Getting to this part was a little hard to say aloud, because it sounded childish.

Liu Zhiyi: "I wanted to see something of the world, but I didn't have the money to stay abroad for long, so I figured I'd start by going somewhere else and having a look. Staying in one place, living one kind of life your whole life — it's pretty dull."

Cooped up in the dungeon so long, frightened the whole way, once she opened up she couldn't quite stop.

The cat said, satisfied, "Then you're set."

Liu Zhiyi: "Set how?"

"For the dungeons ahead." The cat's head toppled over in her palm; if it had had a body, it would have flopped flat as a pancake by now. "You cried the whole way here — I was starting to worry you were the sentimental type."

At those words, and seeing the way it lay, Liu Zhiyi felt something was off.

"…From your tone, why does this sound like you're settling your affairs?"

Cat: "I'm not doing so well to begin with — shouldn't I get everything said before I'm done for?"

No wonder it had been unwilling to say much before, and now looked ready to tell her everything.

Liu Zhiyi cupped the cat's head in both hands.

"Don't… don't…"

She didn't know what to say. She didn't know where the cat had come from, or why it had ended up like this.

But from the moment she'd started this ghost of a game, the cat had stayed by her side.

Liu Zhiyi couldn't put words to how she felt now — lost, helpless, afraid…

Liu Zhiyi: "…Don't go."

"Aiya…" The cat's head stood itself up in her hand, turning in circles with a meow, meow, meow. "Don't cry."

"All right, all right." The cat's head bounced a few times in her palm. "I can't hold out any longer — in plain terms, I'm low on energy. You need to find me something to top it up."

Liu Zhiyi laughed, and lowered her head.

"Something like what?"

"A prop." The cat's head toppled over again.

Liu Zhiyi noticed a few tufts of cotton wadding poking out below the head, where it had once joined a body; the electric crackle in its meows was nearly drowning out its voice.

Liu Zhiyi tugged at the watch on her wrist.

Cat: "Not that kind of prop."

"Besides the starting item, a dungeon has other props too — though not all of them are ones I can use."

The cat had to stop for a few seconds after each stretch of words, and the wadding pushed out further.

Cat: "I need the rag-doll sort — but the props a dungeon throws up are random; you won't necessarily find one."

Liu Zhiyi didn't know much about props; so far the only one she'd handled was the kids' watch on her wrist. But she knew rag dolls.

"I've got plush toys — my mom bought me a lot when I was little…"

Cat: "That doesn't mean those toys are props."

Liu Zhiyi: "It's worth a try."

Cat: "A try?"

"Obsession is the bedrock of a dungeon." Liu Zhiyi looked at the watch. "So do the props a dungeon throws up count as products of obsession too?"

The cat caught her meaning. "A person can't control their own obsession."

Liu Zhiyi: "I know. If I could, I'd have cleared the dungeon long ago."

"Ever since I went into the market, I've noticed that whatever can affect the dungeon all seems to come from the back of the mind…" Liu Zhiyi gently tucked the wadding back under the cat's head. "Feelings?"

She didn't know how to put it into words.

The cat supplied it: "Your heart of hearts."

Cat: "There's a saying that a dungeon shows a person's true self. People lie; they can fake their expressions; they can even steer their own minds away from what they don't want to think about, to hide what they really feel."

"But in a dungeon, the true self, the true thoughts — none of it can be hidden."

The cat's head came to rest on her watch.

"It always comes out on the props."

Because she couldn't let her mother go.

That was why her starting item was a kids' watch.

Liu Zhiyi: "One of my true thoughts right now is that I don't want you to leave me — so maybe that'll bring a new prop into being?"

The cat let out a breath.

"Where do you keep the toys at home?"

"In the master bedroom. My mother's body is in there too."

Liu Zhiyi made up her mind.

"Maybe it's time I faced my obsession head-on."

The market had been walled in by the government; to get out she had to climb over.

The wall was brick, and luckily the workers had cut corners laying it — the surface wasn't even, and the bumps and dips gave her something to grip.

Cat: "Careful — don't miss your footing."

Liu Zhiyi patted her pocket, made doubly sure the cat's head was tucked in tight, and only then started up.

"Save your words — don't burn through all your energy."

Since the game began, she'd lost all sense of time.

It had been dark when she went into the market, and it was dark now that she was out.

But by the feel of it, she'd been in the game a long time.

Liu Zhiyi glanced at the time in the corner of the watch face — still stuck at one in the morning.

"I remember it was… exactly this time when I got home from the hospital."

Cat: "The time inside the game doesn't change."

At that, Liu Zhiyi let out a breath. Her attention had been fixed on the game and "mama" this whole time, with nothing to spare for the real world.

If the time was fixed, then for now she needn't worry about her mother's body decaying, or about her grandmother lying in the hospital with no one to look after her.

Past a certain point of pain she'd stopped feeling the sting of her wounds; she scrambled and bumped her way up onto the top of the wall.

Before she got up there, the only light was the broken streetlamp on the wall, which barely lit a small patch around it; she'd managed the climb on feel alone.

And the moment she sat on the wall-top, a silver-grey gauze drifted slowly down from the sky and settled over her.

Liu Zhiyi paused, and put out her hand.

The next second her palm passed straight through the gauze; she tipped her head up.

It turned out the gauze was moonlight — shining straight down through the dust adrift in the air, the motes strung into lines, the lines into a sheet, until it looked like a veil of netting.

The moon was so big.

Liu Zhiyi gazed up at the bright moon overhead.

Was the Mid-Autumn Festival coming? The moon was so round.

Then again — was the moon ever this big?

Liu Zhiyi blinked; a breeze passed, sandalwood and incense-ash mixed into it.

She seemed to see smoke — like the column that rises from a village chimney at mealtime — drifting up from the market roof.

And not just one: in the highrises farther off, column after column of smoke rose up out of them, stretching upward, drifting all the way to the moon.

Liu Zhiyi looked at the moon.

She saw the smoke columns seem to join the shadow on the moon's surface, and then that shadow suddenly bulged.

Cat: "Meow?"

Liu Zhiyi came back to herself.

By the time she looked again, the moon was the same big moon; only the smoke columns were gone.

Cat: "What is it?"

Liu Zhiyi rubbed her eyes and looked at the moon a few more times.

"…The shadow on the moon — did it move?"

The words were barely out when she remembered the most pressing thing at hand, and pressed down the cat's head in her pocket at once.

"Never mind the moon — clearing the game and finding you a rag-doll prop matter more."

Liu Zhiyi climbed down off the wall.

She'd thought she'd have a stretch to walk back to the complex — the market was outside it, after all.

But the moment she came down, she saw the familiar door of her building.

She was right at the foot of her own block — home in a single step.

Liu Zhiyi: "This dungeon… sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't."

Scattered at the building door were a good many shards of glass — from when "mama" had shoved her out the window earlier and shattered it.

At the center of the heap of broken glass lay a few toppled cardboard boxes.

One of them had tipped onto its side, a gap torn open in it.

Liu Zhiyi saw a monitor.

It was the monitor of the desktop computer her mother had bought when she'd just started middle school.

A very old machine by now — and her mother had kept it after all.

When Liu Zhiyi was clearing out her mother's things, she'd shoved the computer into the living room because it took up space — and hadn't expected this "mama" to knock it out here with everything else.

A headset was still plugged into the screen.

Had she plugged the headset in when she packed it away? Could a computer monitor even take a headset?

The game struck Liu Zhiyi as odd — and just as she looked at the headset, the watch buzzed a few times.

Had the task updated again?

She looked at the watch.

The task bar hadn't changed, but a new feature had appeared on the watch.

Liu Zhiyi: "Tools?"

A wrench-shaped icon had appeared on the watch screen.

She tapped it.

On the tools screen, a small headphone icon surfaced.

[Bad Kid's Headphones: Sneaking TV and sneaking games on the computer are the best part of the whole day~ But today's homework isn't done yet, so listen carefully for mama's footsteps coming home, and don't get caught.]

That description was too cryptic!

Still, Liu Zhiyi could more or less guess what it meant.

Back in her school days she'd built up a real knack for listening to footsteps.

The old man upstairs walked with a cane; going up and down the stairs, the cane went first — a crisp "clack."

The one downstairs was a student, usually in sneakers, hurrying to and from school — a dense, muffled "thump-thump-thump."

And last, her mother, who wore low-heeled leather shoes to work; the heels striking the cement steps went "tock," sometimes with an echo.

Every time she heard that "tock," she'd switch off the TV at once and dart back into the second bedroom, pretending to do her homework.

Later, when her mother caught on that she watched TV on the sly, she took to walking on tiptoe — and the "tock" became a "tap."

Liu Zhiyi put the headphones on.

The instant they went on, the whole world fell silent.

The dungeon had been quiet all along, true, but she could still hear her own breathing.

Now, though, there wasn't a sound.

No — there was still one sound.

—Tap.

Liu Zhiyi looked up.

Because it was so quiet, she pinned down where the sound came from fast.

The sixth floor. Her home.

—Tap-tap.

Those were "mama's" footsteps.

The headphone icon flashed, and new text surfaced.

[With the headphones on, you can hear movements ordinary people can't — ghosts, for instance; mama, for instance.]

[You're very sensitive to mama's sound — you can even hear her from fifteen meters away.]

Fifteen meters — about the distance from the sixth floor down to the first.

Though in reality, if Liu Zhiyi could hear the ground floor from the sixth, that was only because the entrance door down there was so old and ill-kept that shoving it open made a racket.