Chapter 63

The subway stopped.

—Ding-dong.

The chime sounded.

Liu Zhiyi grabbed the raincoat.

"You're getting off?"

The raincoat shivered, then pressed meekly against her hand.

Zhou Fuqing: "No… I'll see you home first."

The carriage doors slid open.

With the doors no longer in the way, the moon felt even closer.

In fact the moon lit the outside very brightly; it wasn't dark at all.

Yet Liu Zhiyi felt a strong unease.

Unlike the bustle of the last station, this one was very quiet.

No one got off, and the hospital entrance was empty too.

The last station had a tie to her, so its platform had to do with her family.

Looking at this mismatched hospital, Liu Zhiyi couldn't work out for the moment where its link to Zhou Fuqing was.

Zhou Fuqing: "I used to feel nothing at all."

The piano melody stopped.

—Drip.

The sound of raindrops in the earbud suddenly grew louder.

Liu Zhiyi's attention was drawn at once to the earbud; the raindrops slowed one after another, forming a strange little rain-melody.

Steady, and yet cold.

Music is a marvelous thing.

Not a line of lyrics, not a single word, and yet you can feel the composer's mood.

Zhou Fuqing: "It's hard to describe what that feeling is like, because when you can't perceive the outside world, there are no swings of feeling — no happiness, no anger… nothing at all."

Zhou Fuqing: "Maybe something in my brain went wrong somewhere, but I used to think it wasn't a bad thing. No feelings, no troubles, and certainly no wearing yourself down from within."

It sounded rather nice, actually.

Liu Zhiyi sometimes found feelings a nuisance too — she'd want badly to do a thing, only for her feelings to scatter her attention and slow her down.

Zhou Fuqing: "Because I'd never felt it, it didn't matter… but now I feel it."

The raindrops quickened, until they matched the rhythm of her heartbeat.

The piano sounded again, the bouncing keys mixed with a low, hoarse man's voice that set Liu Zhiyi's ears tingling.

Zhou Fuqing: "The first moment I saw you, I felt my heart speed up, like a little bird had been shut in my chest — I couldn't quiet down."

The earbud's score even added, right on cue, the sound of a bird beating its wings.

It sounded like something about to break out of the earth.

Zhou Fuqing: "I wanted to be near you, to talk to you, to stay with you."

Liu Zhiyi covered her ears.

That feeling of being spoken to right at her ear really did make her scalp tingle.

Zhou Fuqing: "…Good thing I saw you again."

—Ding-dong.

As the chime sounded, the doors slowly closed.

Zhou Fuqing: "Even if I may not see you again after this."

Overhead, the umbrella began its soft patter of rain again.

The mood and the music were too heartbreaking.

Liu Zhiyi even felt a stab in her heart.

Zhou Fuqing: "Once the next station arrives, you can get off."

That soon?

Realizing that this was the thought in her head, Liu Zhiyi startled at herself.

Was she reluctant to part?

Liu Zhiyi: "Wait…"

The carriage began to shake, lights coming on one by one behind the raincoat.

Zhou Fuqing: "I'm sorry."

The piano and the raindrops suddenly lifted, the lights blazing bright, so bright that Liu Zhiyi shut her eyes.

A blurred air-sound, light enough for the wind to scatter, drifted into her ear.

Zhou Fuqing: "…like you."

But it was too faint; Liu Zhiyi caught only a broken fragment of it.

Then a clamor of human voices surged in from all sides.

When Liu Zhiyi opened her eyes again, she was standing before the station gate.

…Out, then.

Still a little dazed, she first glanced at the watch.

The task showed complete, but a line had been added.

[An Unbreakable Bond: Goodbye, Zhizhi.]

Liu Zhiyi covered her face, a feeling she couldn't name in her heart.

This dungeon could be called baffling — in all of a sudden, and sent out with no warning at all…

Liu Zhiyi: "…What was that."

She dug out her phone; the game interface also rested on the subway background — so the game's progress matched reality.

She jabbed the screen a few times in vexation, but the game seemed stuck, not moving at all.

Liu Zhiyi sighed. She'd meant to use something to take her mind off things, so she wouldn't keep thinking of her grandmother and mother — and now, after all this, her mood was more agitated than ever.

She tapped a few more times; the phone had frozen completely.

She could only put the phone away and walk against the crowd toward the exit.

But before she'd gone a few steps, she saw Shen Songyue.

Shen Songyue: "Out?"

Liu Zhiyi handed her the phone.

"I'm completely lost… take a look, what's going on?"

Shen Songyue: "Did you bring the cat's body out?"

Liu Zhiyi shook her head. "It ended too suddenly."

The two walked out of the station together and stepped onto the exit escalator.

Shen Songyue said nothing, head down, fiddling with the phone.

—Drip.

Liu Zhiyi startled and turned to look out the station exit.

A fine rain drifted down, passersby holding umbrellas.

Shen Songyue: "It's raining. Did you bring an umbrella?"

Liu Zhiyi was about to shake her head when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something hanging under her backpack.

She reached back and felt for it.

It was a pink umbrella.

And on the umbrella's handle hung a plush little cat-paw toy.

Shen Songyue laughed.

"See — I said he'd send himself to your side."

The cat paw was black, but its pads were pink.

Liu Zhiyi touched the cat paw and found it warm, its pads even soft.

Liu Zhiyi: "…It's alive?"

Shen Songyue: "The cat's prop is rather special…"

Liu Zhiyi suddenly thought of the red thread, but a prop more or less touched on a person's past experiences, and asking would be a little rude.

Still, more than satisfying her own curiosity, what Liu Zhiyi cared about was what she'd seen in the dungeon.

Liu Zhiyi: "I got on a subway and saw Blood Pool Hell…"

She didn't know how to describe it.

Liu Zhiyi: "The cat — or rather Zhou Fuqing's severed hand — told me a lot, but I can't be sure of his state of mind."

So she couldn't be sure whether what Zhou Fuqing said in the dungeon was true or false, and could only check with Shen Songyue.

Shen Songyue: "Zhou Fuqing's state right now is a bit delicate — because the other body parts have no head, they may do things without thinking. Don't take it to heart."

His speech and actions really were a little hard to describe.

But set against an otome game's backdrop, it wasn't so out of place.

Liu Zhiyi's cheeks went hot. "It's true he said some cloying things in the dungeon, but that's not what I meant — it's the things he said about the dungeon, and the station he was getting off at."

Shen Songyue paused. "Tell me all of it."

Liu Zhiyi quickly told her everything she'd seen and heard in the dungeon.

After hearing her account, Shen Songyue knit her brows, and after a few minutes —

Shen Songyue: "Sorry, I don't quite understand why Zhou Fuqing's station would be like that either. He's a person unlike ordinary people."

Shen Songyue mused a moment, as if searching for the word.

"If I had to say how he's different… set in reality, he'd count as a psychiatric patient?"

Liu Zhiyi startled, not quite believing it.

"He doesn't seem it — his logic talking to me was smooth, he seemed perfectly normal."

"I find it strange too, but that's what's written in his records," Shen Songyue said. "It's just… he doesn't have a normal person's feelings."

Shen Songyue had mentioned this several times.

But honestly, Liu Zhiyi didn't feel it made much difference.

"…Is that a bad thing?"

Shen Songyue: "I don't think so. I only wanted to tell you why his station would be a psychiatric hospital."

But why, besides a psychiatric hospital, there was a Ferris wheel and other things that shouldn't appear in a hospital, Shen Songyue couldn't explain either.

Since there was nothing more to be gotten from talking, the two parted at the subway exit.

Before leaving, Shen Songyue turned her head.

"This might sound like nagging — this otome dungeon looks less dangerous, but it's still a dungeon. Don't drop your guard."

Shen Songyue: "Veteran players like us usually die not because a dungeon's too hard to clear, but from being careless and getting caught out."

She'd brought it up out of nowhere, leaving Liu Zhiyi a bit blank, but it was kindly meant.

"Thank you, I'll be careful."

After parting with Shen Songyue, Liu Zhiyi searched Weibo for Love Heartbeat.

Dungeon or not, it still had something to do with this otome game.

Plenty of people were talking about the game on Weibo, and arguing fiercely too.

The game drew mixed reviews — many praised it, many cursed it.

Liu Zhiyi skimmed and found that in different players' hands the game's plot differed — and it wasn't just her; other otome players had noticed this too.

GrilledSalmon: Did this game bring in some new tech? It fits my real situation so well that sometimes how real it is genuinely scares me.

BoomBoomClang: Good thing the men in this game don't put the player first, or I'd have spent myself into ruin whaling on the gacha.

Liu Zhiyi skipped past the squabbling and came upon a few long, detailed Weibo posts analyzing how Love Heartbeat worked.

She read a few and found that the choices at the game's start were actually a psychological test — first roughly determining the player's preferences, and by that setting the order the several male leads appeared in.

Then, following the player's choices deeper, it fine-tuned the plot bit by bit, so that the story fit the player's real life.

By rights, a game gone this far would have plenty of players hooked.

But this game had its own peculiar set of anti-addiction moves.

Liu Zhiyi glanced at the comments under the post.

SqueaksEatsFish: Dogs! They're all a pack of dogs! Do you think I don't know how to put the big picture first? Telling me nothing at all — do you think I won't agree with your view?

Loolala: I thought about it carefully, and these dogs' thinking is too extreme — verging on anti-human.

Liu Zhiyi looked closely at the views of the several men in Love Heartbeat.

She found these views overlapped with the extreme ones Shen Songyue's side had vaguely mentioned.

Because a dungeon is produced by people, get rid of humanity and the dungeons won't exist.

Seeing how a view like this could set Weibo boiling into a mess, no wonder the infighting inside Shen Songyue's organization had gotten so bad — bad enough to dismember the cat.

Thinking on and on, Liu Zhiyi's mind suddenly drifted to…

What were the cat's and Shen Songyue's views? Liu Zhiyi thought back on how the cat and Shen Songyue had treated her; they seemed like good people.

Surely… they wouldn't be that extreme.

Liu Zhiyi shook her head and decided not to think too hard about it; right now she was worried that entering a dungeon later, her wild speculation would throw the dungeon into disorder again.

Still in a fog.

Turning it over and over, Liu Zhiyi made up her mind to go into the dungeon again, and made a few phone calls to Shen Songyue.

Shen Songyue: "Sorry to trouble you — the way this is going, I'll have to ask you to enter this dungeon a few more times and bring back the rest of Zhou Fuqing's body."

Liu Zhiyi: "It's fine. You all looked after me before; this time I want to get off directly at Zhou Fuqing's station."

Shen Songyue sighed. "I've asked around with my other colleagues — that subway can travel between reality and the dungeons. Whatever you do, don't let the 'people' on the train find out you can see them."