Chapter 70

As he spoke, he even grumbled a little.

"Shen Songyue and I went to a lot of trouble to trick you into coming here."

The boy: "Here, whatever you want, you'll have."

Liu Zhiyi watched tree after tree spring up from the ground, a little house with gray tiles and white walls appear out of nowhere, standing by a lake.

It was her grandmother's house.

The boy: "This is the most middle-ground way I could think of — I don't have to control you, and I can still protect you."

"You really do fancy yourself my mother."

Liu Zhiyi was angered into a laugh.

The boy blinked, the yarn features on his face unchanging.

"I'm sorry."

That manner, yielding to neither hard nor soft, thoroughly deflated her.

Little as she wanted to make the connection, his tone and the way he did things really were like her mother.

Only, her mother in life wouldn't have said this much to her.

The boy: "Is there anything you'd like to eat?"

Liu Zhiyi: "Whatever I want appears anyway, so what's the point of asking me?"

"That's different," the boy said. "I'll make it for you. A thing wished into being isn't the same as a thing made."

It sounded just like her mother saying food from outside wasn't clean.

Because of this facing-her-mother feeling, Liu Zhiyi grew terribly irritable.

Liu Zhiyi: "I don't want to eat. Stop talking to me."

"All right." The boy's yarn eyebrows drooped, a little downcast. "Is there anything else you want to ask?"

Just hearing his voice vexed Liu Zhiyi now.

"You didn't used to talk this much — how did you get so fond of talking now?"

"I don't know either."

The boy came to her side, his movements careful, as if afraid of displeasing her.

The boy: "It's strange — I don't feel this way about anyone else, but when I talk with you I can't help wanting to talk, wanting to say one thing over and over."

Liu Zhiyi ignored him.

But the boy kept talking, just like when she'd worked away from home and her mother would go on and on about household trifles over a voice call.

"The effect's better than I imagined." The boy propped up his head and looked at the sky.

Yiling was all shrouded under the pitch-black cloth.

The boy: "At first we thought raising the concentration enough to affect the area around the fault line would about do it… people's fear of natural disaster is beyond imagining."

The boy: "It went more smoothly than I expected. I wasn't even sure whether burying the pieces of my body along the fault would set off an earthquake."

Liu Zhiyi half-understood the principle behind it, but she was too vexed to talk to him of her own accord.

Still the boy talked on his own.

"Players like us pollute the environment around us, raise the concentration, speed the birth of new game dungeons. Burying the pieces of my body was based on this idea too."

The boy: "Once a dungeon forms and is then sealed, it makes a disaster; burying it on the fault line also borrows collective thinking — steering the disaster toward an earthquake, since 'fault lines are prone to quakes' is common knowledge everyone shares."

The boy: "News about dungeons is polluting."

Liu Zhiyi tipped her head back and gazed at the sky.

So an earthquake happening was the same as spreading the polluting information out.

Liu Zhiyi: "You've really got the nerve."

"Willing to talk to me now?"

The boy and the cat flanked her, one on each side.

"The problem has to be solved."

The boy: "Did you and your mother talk much, usually?"

The sudden change of subject left Liu Zhiyi blank; then she answered, impatient.

"Why are you asking that?"

"Because I felt a loss." He paused a few seconds after the line, as if thinking. "And a little loneliness."

Liu Zhiyi went still.

The boy: "I never had this kind of feeling before, so I think it's probably a feeling your mother once had."

Truthfully, her mother wasn't a mother of especially good temper.

A single mother raising a child alone, having to earn money and mind a child both.

People driven hard by life don't have much patience.

Yet her mother did love her child.

After losing her temper she'd feel regret.

So in childhood Liu Zhiyi had felt her mother's moods were a bit unpredictable.

But never to the point of hysteria.

Only, not so gentle.

At some point she couldn't name, her mother's words grew many, and grew careful.

At some point she couldn't name, the words she said to her mother grew fewer, and she grew impatient too.

Liu Zhiyi: "I didn't know what to say to my mother."

The boy: "Life's hard, isn't it."

Yes.

Work was busy, she ran herself ragged, with little energy left to tell, on the other end of a voice call, what her mother was feeling.

And the wrongs and pains she suffered out there were of little use to speak of — they only made her mother worry.

So in the end there was nothing to say.

Why hadn't she talked with her mother more?

Many images flashed through Liu Zhiyi's mind.

The little gray-tiled, white-walled house trembled, the trees all around shivering and shrinking back into the ground.

Then an old tube-apartment block rose from the earth, streetlamps standing up one by one.

The bang-bang of a spatula striking an iron wok echoed through the stairwell, a breeze carrying the smell of cooking up against her cheek.

Liu Zhiyi knew this scene too well.

After school let out, no matter how much homework there was that day, no matter how many hateful math classes there'd be the next, in this moment she was at ease.

Because her mother had made her favorite dishes and was waiting for her.

Then the two of them would sit at the table, and her mother would now and then tell some funny thing from work, or complain about which vegetable had gone up in price at the market lately.