Chapter 40

Liu Zhiyi let out a long breath. "Too slow — I held out this long before I finally found the door…"

She looked at Teacher Yang, her hand on the handle in her belly.

"Your son's here."

Teacher Yang went still.

Her mouth hung open, blood pouring from it without stop; the fruit knife dropped, bounced, and landed by Liu Zhiyi's foot.

"…Oo… don't."

Liu Zhiyi: "So you're afraid of your son seeing you too."

Her belly hurt like death, but the thought of her grandmother filled her with anger.

"If you can't get over your own troubles, fine — but why drag me in, drag my grandma in?"

"Because I'm jealous!"

Teacher Yang howled.

"Why should… why should…"

Teacher Yang: "Why, when your grandma's ended up like that, do you all still stay with her?"

"Why shouldn't we?" Liu Zhiyi couldn't follow her thinking. "When family gets sick you come and care for them — isn't that perfectly normal?"

"No… no…"

Teacher Yang shook her head without stop.

"No caring for them…"

Liu Zhiyi: "You're strange. You say jealous, but it's not as if your son were unwilling to come care for you…"

—Pat.

The door behind Liu Zhiyi shook.

"…Mom."

A man's voice leaked in from behind the door.

Teacher Yang startled, as if jolted awake, and lifted her own tongue in her hands.

"How awful, how awful… how did I turn into this."

Seeing her mind adrift, Liu Zhiyi pressed one hand to her belly, steeled herself, and pulled straight off the handle, lunging for the fruit knife on the floor.

But before she could reach it —

a tongue curled the knife up ahead of her.

Teacher Yang stared at her blankly, blood-tears running from her eyes.

"I don't want to die… I don't want to die…"

The words weren't out before —

that tongue, wrapped around the fruit knife, cut open Teacher Yang's own throat.

"…But I don't want to live like this either."

—Crack.

As the blood spurted, the cracking went on and on, fissure after fissure splitting open along Teacher Yang's sides.

Liu Zhiyi froze; she hadn't thought Teacher Yang would do such a thing.

The fissures spread fast; Liu Zhiyi thought of her grandmother, but before she could even lift a foot, her whole body dropped away.

When she opened her eyes again —

the hiss of wheels rolling over pavement, and the tap of people's feet coming and going, poured in.

Her mind was hazy, but she still remembered her grandmother, and struggled to get up.

"Don't move — there's a big hole torn in your belly."

Liu Zhiyi heard Shen Songyue's voice; her body had started to go cold and shake from the blood loss.

Liu Zhiyi: "Gran… Grandma…"

Shen Songyue: "Your grandma's fine. Xiao Xu, come here, give her a mouthful of milk."

Liu Zhiyi felt a bottle nipple pushed into her mouth, a mouthful of milk poured in.

The milk went straight down her throat, choking her; she shot up off the bed, covered her mouth, and coughed hard.

"Here."

Shen Songyue handed her a tissue.

Liu Zhiyi covered her mouth, looked down, and lifted the hem of her shirt.

Her belly was smeared with blood, but the big hole was gone.

Without even wiping her face, Liu Zhiyi went looking for her grandmother.

She was on a hospital bed, and her grandmother lay on the bed to her left.

Shen Songyue reached out to steady her, helping her over to her grandmother's bedside.

Liu Zhiyi looked her grandmother over head to toe, and seeing several doctors in white coats standing by the bed as well, finally relaxed, going limp on the floor.

Liu Zhiyi: "The game's cleared?"

Shen Songyue: "Mm. Faster than I expected. You did really well."

Liu Zhiyi shook her head. Once a dungeon was cleared, it naturally vanished.

"Big Sister Ma… and Teacher Yang and the others?"

Shen Songyue paused a few seconds, then asked, "They're still here. Do you want to see?"

Liu Zhiyi felt the question was a little odd; shifting her attention from her grandmother, she saw people standing all around, and that Shen Songyue's getup was a bit strange too — she had on a pair of glasses.

The bed she lay on was the one in the middle, and the one to her left, against the wall, was curtained off.

Liu Zhiyi: "…I'll see."

Shen Songyue drew the curtain around her grandmother's bed, then took off her glasses and tossed them onto a hook on the curtain.

Shen Songyue: "My glasses and earrings can wall off a little space of their own; your grandma needs a quiet place to rest too."

Only then did Liu Zhiyi notice a pair of earrings hooked onto the curtain of the bed against the wall.

A doctor in a white coat took the earrings off the curtain.

The instant the earrings came off it —

a scream stabbed out from behind the curtain, an unseen sound wave echoing round and round the ward, mottled bloodstains showing through the fabric.

Shen Songyue pulled the curtain open.

A long tongue, already somewhat charred black, slid down off the bed.

Liu Zhiyi drew a sharp, cold breath.

Teacher Yang wasn't dead yet, but she was not far from it.

Her whole body was in a kind of scorched state, white smoke rising off her without stop.

It looked like the ghost films she'd watched as a child — those ghosts that smoked when daylight came and the light touched them.

At the same time, Teacher Yang's wails filled the air.

Her tongue trembled, giving off a shrill, agonized cry.

Then the tongue suddenly sprang up and shot in front of Liu Zhiyi.

Liu Zhiyi jumped in fright, and Shen Songyue caught the tongue in one hand.

But the tongue was limp, with no power to attack at all.

"Sor… sor…"

Teacher Yang spat out a great cloud of white smoke mixed with bloody foam.

"…Sorry."

The white smoke gathered into a mass and left Teacher Yang's body, leaving only a curled-up corpse, kneeling and slumped in front of Liu Zhiyi.

Liu Zhiyi stood rooted there; she felt angry, because she found she was actually moved by Teacher Yang's apology.

For this person who had dragged her and her grandmother down out of one selfish grievance, she felt pity.

"Where's Big Sister Ma?" Liu Zhiyi turned her head away from the corpse on the bed.

Shen Songyue wiped her palm with a tissue. "At the foot of the bed."

Liu Zhiyi walked to the foot of the bed, taking a look around on the way.

Before entering the dungeon, they'd all been in one ward; now, out of it, they were still in the ward.

It seemed the dungeon didn't move their positions.

Liu Zhiyi looked down; there were dragged streaks of black char on the floor.

Even braced for it, Liu Zhiyi was still shaken by the sight before her.

A great charred mass, like a lump of meat burned to a crisp, was stuck to the ward door.

She couldn't quite tell the human parts of the lump apart, because they were all fused together.

She could dimly make out two heads squeezed one behind the other, and from the flesh below the heads reached out something shaped like an arm, stuck to the door.

A stick came in from one side, propping the lowest lump of flesh and turning it over.

Liu Zhiyi saw a face, its features twisted, the jaw stretched almost into a straight line.

Shen Songyue poked the face with the stick.

"That's this family's son."

Then Shen Songyue bent down, laid a hand on Liu Zhiyi's shoulder, and said one thing softly in her ear.

"I know it feels good doing this, but you'd better not do it again."

Liu Zhiyi was about to ask why when Shen Songyue patted her shoulder and pushed her inside her grandmother's bed curtain.

"Rest well. We've got the bodies to deal with over here."

Liu Zhiyi stepped inside the curtain.

The moment it fell, it was like entering another space, quiet, with only her grandmother's breathing and the cat's purring to be heard.

The cat was curled at the head of the bed against the wall, balled up into a fuzzy tuft.

"Done looking?"

Liu Zhiyi hung her head. "Mm."

The cat flicked its tail. "Did Teacher Yang say something to you?"

Liu Zhiyi sat down on the edge of the bed and tucked the quilt around her grandmother.

"…Mm. Some people, even when they turn bad, don't turn all the way bad. It's annoying."

The cat rose and jumped from the head of the bed to her side, turned around, and put its back to her.

Liu Zhiyi: "What are you doing?"

Cat: "I used to go online, and a lot of people said petting a cat puts you in a good mood. Have a pet."

Liu Zhiyi smiled and ran a hand down its back.

It couldn't really count as a normal cat; its fur felt a bit stiff and prickly.

But Liu Zhiyi's mood lifted a good deal.

Cat: "Words of comfort ring hollow if you say too many. But plenty of people are just like that — a mix of good and bad."

Liu Zhiyi: "I know."

Liu Zhiyi stopped dwelling on it.

"By the way, Shen Songyue told me not to have Big Sister Ma phone her brother in again in future. Why?"

Cat: "Hurting people inside a dungeon, and luring people from outside in, has a very high chance of being punished by the game add-on."

Liu Zhiyi paused.

Cat: "You should get a text telling you to register and log in at the game center in your starting item. Maybe because you went into the dungeon so fast, the text hasn't come yet."

The cat had barely finished when a text popped up on Liu Zhiyi's watch.

[Hello, player. Please tap the link below to enter the game center and register and log in as soon as possible, so you can look up game-related points to note within it.]

Liu Zhiyi tapped the link right away.

Registering and logging in was quick.

Once she was in the game center, Liu Zhiyi found it was a forum, and the pinned post was a ban on hurting or killing people inside a dungeon.

It noted that violators would be struck by lightning.

Though Liu Zhiyi hadn't been through many dungeons, from the way the cat and Shen Songyue treated and helped her, she could feel the environment of this game was fairly decent — at least on the official side, the relations between people leaned positive.

There was another thing that struck her as odd.

Liu Zhiyi thought of how much the authorities controlled inside a dungeon; it felt like they didn't understand dungeons all that well, yet they could still set up a certain order within one, and even had a set of punishments.

Liu Zhiyi: "It feels like the authorities can't control a dungeon — they can't even send people in as they please — yet they can punish players for certain unlawful acts inside. Why?"

"Same principle as before: a dungeon is shaped by people's thoughts." The cat tucked its two front paws under itself. "Shen Songyue should have mentioned collective thinking to you."

Liu Zhiyi nodded. "Right, that's where the Tang Monk Meat came from."

Cat: "In collective thinking, the government carries authority; the laws and regulations it issues are binding, and some things are already carved into people's minds — that you can't kill, or you'll go to prison, or be executed."

Liu Zhiyi grasped its meaning, and looked at the pinned post in the game center.

"So the authorities just use that impression — write the relevant rules out and pin them, and so shape players' thinking without their noticing?"

Cat: "Right, and that thinking then shapes them without their noticing too — kill someone and your first thought is that it's against the law, and deep down you feel you're going to be punished."

Liu Zhiyi: "And the pinned post says you'll be struck by lightning."

"Being struck by lightning actually draws on some of our folk beliefs too."

The cat paused, as if thinking how to explain.

But watching TV, or people arguing, Liu Zhiyi would sometimes hear it come up.

Mostly it was one side accusing the other of doing something wicked — aren't you afraid heaven will strike you down?

Hearing this, Liu Zhiyi sighed.

"People's thoughts really are a marvelous thing. It feels like every side of a dungeon reflects that."

Cat: "So having Big Sister Ma phone her brother was a very dangerous thing to do. If you'd had the least doubt in your heart, felt you'd done wrong, that it was a bad thing — you'd have been struck by lightning."