After hanging up, Lin Qiushi got out of bed. He went to the living room to check on the door and television, making sure both those things were still the same as they had been during daytime yesterday.
After that, Lin Qiushi left the apartment in a hurry. Halfway out he even got a call from Wu Qi, asking why he wasn't at work.
"There's something I have to do." Lin Qiushi was already in a car and had honestly completely forgotten about going to work. He tried to wheedle: "Ask for time off for me."
Wu Qi, "okay, how long should I ask for?"
Lin Qiushi, "half a year?"
Wu Qi, shocked, "...half a year?? Are you planning on resigning?"
Lin Qiushi glanced at his watch, not thinking of work at all.
"Or yeah, you can just resign for me."
Wu Qi seemed like he had something to say, but whatever words were on the tip of his tongue never made it out—he only sighed: "Fine, I'll get time off for you. If there's something going on you've got to tell me, alright? Don't carry it all on your own."
Lin Qiushi made a noise of agreement, expression still pensive.
The car continued on, and over an hour later, it arrived at where Lin Qiushi wanted to go. Lin Qiushi got off, went upstairs, and knocked on the door—every motion done in a single smooth breath. The truth was, however, that these few simple motions were only possible after extensive emotional preparation done during the car ride.
The door he knocked on opened after a bit, revealing a beautiful middle-age woman—it was Ruan Nanzhu's mother.
Because before they'd entered the door, Ruan Nanzhu had taken Lin Qiushi home. Now Lin Qiushi had a clear memory of where Ruan Nanzhu's old house was. Coming here this time was simply to confirm one thing...
"Hi Auntie," Lin Qiushi greeted politely.
"Hello." The woman watched Lin Qiushi with curiosity and asked, "is there something I can help you with?"
"I wanted to ask, do you know who Ruan Nanzhu is?" Lin Qiushi asked carefully.
"Ruan Nanzhu?" The woman's tone of doubt sent Lin Qiushi's heart sinking, and the question on her face only grew stronger. "Sorry, I don't know who that is."
"Then do you know Ruan Baiye?" Lin Qiushi brought up another name—this was the name of Ruan Nanzhu's older bother.
"Baiye? He's my son..." Mama Ruan said. "He's not home right now, but he'll be back later tonight. Are you looking for him?"
Lin Qiushi, "ma'am you...only have one son?"
Mama Ruan nodded as the way she looked at Lin Qiushi got stranger and stranger. Which was fair. Suddenly coming to her house and asking questions like these, Lin Qiushi didn't seem like a normal person at all.
Lin Qiushi had no idea what else to say either. After bidding Mama Ruan goodbye, he rushed back downstairs and hurried off to another location.
Ruan Nanzhu's existence had been completely wiped. There was nobody in this world named Ruan Nanzhu, not even to his parents, and even Obsidian, the organization that he led, had stopped existing...
This time, Lin Qiushi's destination was Li Dongyuan's White Deer.
When he arrived at White Deer headquarters, Lin Qiushi discovered that the building that once belonged to White Deer was now commercial offices, labeled with the name of XX Bank. Lin Qiushi was standing in the doorway contemplating how to sneak upstairs when he saw a familiar face leave the building. That person was wearing a suit and speaking to someone beside him; judging by appearance alone, he was that baby-faced Li Dongyuan that Lin Qiushi knew.
Seeing this Lin Qiushi hurried forward and called, "Li Dongyuan!"
Li Dongyuan's feet stalled, and he glanced in Lin Qiushi's direction. With eyes both cautious and distant, he asked, "who might you be? If you'd like to discuss something please book an appointment with my secretary first."
"I—" Lin Qiushi said. "Do you know me?"
Lin Qiushi lifted an eyebrow and didn't speak. His expression though, gave Lin Qiushi an answer—he did not know Lin Qiushi, and even thought Lin Qiushi's question odd.
"You don't recognize me?" Lin Qiushi also couldn't quite convey how he was feeling just then.
"Should I recognize you?" Li Dongyuan smiled a smile that wasn't quite a smile as he scanned Lin Qiushi up and down.
Lin Qiushi suddenly recalled something else. He said, "then do you know Zhuang Rujiao?"
Li Dongyuan didn't answer, and still seemed unfamiliar with the name.
"What about Jin Yurui?" Lin Qiushi tried again.
"You know her?" Li Dongyuan's smile, however, faded. "You're one of hers, then?"
Lin Qiushi could finally be sure why some people didn't exist in this world—because they were still alive. If they still survived in the world outside the door, then they did not exist inside this door. Both Li Dongyuan and Jin Yurui were dead, so they had new identities inside this door.
And, those who had died inside the doors aside, the people who were competely unrelated to the doors did not seem affected by this rule at all. They existed both inside this door and outside it, and had nothing to do with living or dying.
"Is there anything else?" Eyeing Lin Qiushi, who was deep in thought, Li Dongyuan lifted his chin with a cold expression. "If there's nothing else why don't you take your leave? This is a place of work."
Lin Qiushi took one last look at him before turning to go.
"Who is that?" the person standing beside Li Dongyuan asked as they watched Lin Qiushi leave.
"I don't know," Li Dongyuan said. "Looks kind of familiar though. Never mind, bring me that data and let me confirm..."
Lin Qiushi left White Deer headquarters and glanced at his watch. It was already twelve noon. An idea surfaced in his mind, and Lin Qiushi got out his phone to book a roundtrip flight for C City the next morning.
There were some matters he wanted to confirm in C City; it was already too late to go today, so he could only hurry there tomorrow morning and try to make it back in one day.
Fact of the matter was, Lin Qiushi didn't want to try spending the night on an airplane. Hell knows how terrifying that would be.
After taking care of lunch at a random spot in town, Lin Qiushi returned home and took a nap. As he thought about what would happen later that evening, Lin Qiushi thought he wouldn't be able to sleep. But in fact he slept quite well, passing out the moment he hit the bed. When he woke it was already five in the afternoon. Chestnut sat by his side, meowing, looking to be hungry again.
Lin Qiushi got up and, after fixing up some food for Chestnut, called some delivery for himself. He ate while watching TV.
He saw the trailer for Tan Zaozao's new movie. From the language of the advertisement, Lin Qiushi figured out that Tan Zaozao had already won the award. The award-winning movie was exactly the same as it had been on the outside, only the director was a different person this time and not Zhang Yiqing.
This world was so very similar to the world that Lin Qiushi lived in, but there was one fundamental difference—Ruan Nanzhu, the person Lin Qiushi most wanted to see, was not here.
Good thing that was so, actually. This door, for a lot of other people, would likely be of insurmountable difficulty. Like Zhuang Rujiao. Or Cheng Yixie for that matter. That was because here, they could once again see their most beloved person...
The night deepened, and Lin Qiushi got everything ready.
Around ten in the evening, it suddenly began to rain outside.
Water came down as if tossed from a ladle, washing clean the earth scorched dry by the sun. Lin Qiushi stood by the window, watching as passersby scampered home along the sidewalks until only streetlamps were left on the empty streets, with only the occasional car passing by.
Chestnut fell asleep sprawled out on the couch. The atmosphere grew quiet. Some senseless program played on TV as a queer sort of silence began to crawl out inside the house.
Lin Qiushi smelled petrichor. He used to be quite a fan of this smell, until he encountered a particular door. After that, this tainted scent of rainwater became something a lot more unpleasant.
The hour hand turned bit by bit, and twelve o'clock was nearly here.
Lin Qiushi sat in the living room, as if a spirit waiting for the death god's verdict. The switch from day to night came, and the clock hanging on the wall finally began to ring: ding dong, ding dong, ding dong...Twelve chimes heralded in another world.
The moment it became twelve, someone was immediately knocking at his door once more. Backpack on, Lin Qiushi came to the door, and through the peephole saw a woman standing on the other side, smiling at him.
He remembered the woman's name. It was the NPC hidden among the crowd in the Sister's Drum door, Xu Jin.
"Hurry up and come out already," Xu Jin told Lin Qiushi. "Come out already, my sister's coming to find you."
Lin Qiushi didn't open the door. He heard a soft noise from the window, however, and when Lin Qiushi turned, he saw a figure pressed against the glass.
It was a person with all her skin stripped off, her body a mess of blood and flesh from head to toe. The bloody face pressed against Lin Qiushi's glass and her mouth split open, showing Lin Qiushi her stark white teeth. It looked like she was trying to open up the locked window, and judging from her motions, she seemed close to succeeding.
Opening the door looked to be the only option right now. Gritting his teeth, Lin Qiushi twisted open the door handle and faced Xu Jin, standing on the outside.
Xu Jin clearly knew what Lin Qiushi was worried about, and began to chuckle.
"How could I bear to hurt you?" A pause, as her gaze lingered on Lin Qiushi's backpack. "My diary is still in your hands. Did you give it a good read yet?"
Lin Qiushi, "..." Why did he feel like he was being teased?
But there wasn't time for him to worry about that, because Xu Jin's sister was about to come in though the window. Xu Jin grabbed Lin Qiushi by the arm and ran. The two made their way down the hall and came to the elevator.
"Go on inside, but watch out," Xu Jin said. "There are other things that want you dead."
Lin Qiushi asked, "what about you?" He recalled that Xu Jin didn't have a very good relationship with her sister.
"Me?" Xu Jin's eyes curved up in a sudden smile. "How do you know that I don't want you dead?"
As soon as she said this, the skin on her body began to fall off patch by patch. The startled Lin Qiushi rushed into the elevator and pressed a number.
Xu Jin was chuckling again, and though her laugh was bright like silver bells, her terrifying appearance struck a sharp contrast.
Even though she now looked scarier, she didn't seem keen on pursuing Lin Qiushi.
The elevator started. In theory, Lin Qiushi ought to be safe, but that weird sense of danger once again assaulted the top of his head.
Lin Qiushi looked all around him, and when he spotted a certain something hanging in the elevator, goosebumps appeared all over his body. He'd spotted behind him, on what should have been an empty elevator wall, a huge black picture frame. There was nothing inside the frame, but the frame was pointed at exactly where he was standing.
Lin Qiushi reacted swiftly, hitting the button for the floor closest to him. At the exact same time, black water stains began appearing on the white paper inside that frame. First there was only one drop. Then it began spreading on the canvas paper.
He watched as the shape of that stain began to look more and more like a woman. It dispersed across the canvas and, in a short amount of time, managed to coat the entire large canvas.
Luckily it was then that the elevator reached the nearest floor. Lin Qiushi immediately took off, and the moment he cleared the elevator, a pair of pale white hands burst out of that canvas paper, searching around like it was looking for something to grab hold of.
Lin Qiushi was currently on the sixth floor. The moment he was out of the elevator he turned for the emergency exit right next door, bounding quickly down the stairs.
It was dim in the stairwell, with just enough light to see the path beneath his feet. Lin Qiushi ran down two stories before feeling something was off. He took a closer look, and discovered that he'd been turning round and round on floor six.
The stairs seemed to have become a mobius strip—up, down, backward, forward, it all came back to the sixth floor.
Lin Qiushi's feet screeched to a halt. He took in his surroundings, and noticed, on the white stairwell ceilings, little black spots of water appearing. That chilling stench of rain too was spreading through the air.
The thing had found him. Lin Qiushi made an executive decision and left the stairwell, stepping out onto the hallway. But back in the hall, Lin Qiushi discovered that the corridor had underwent a terrifying change: black frames hung on both sides, and inside each frame was a human head with its expression all twisted up. As for the ceramic tile floor, there was now a new carpet, thick and black—the pattern on it looked the same as in a door they'd encountered before.
Lin Qiushi looked up and saw, on the other other end of the hallway, another painting hanging. That painting was a woman in black with a long, sharp hat. Her eyes were half closed, but it felt like she was staring right down the hall and meeting Lin Qiushi's eyes.
Lin Qiushi wanted to leave the hallway, but when he glanced back, he found that the stairwell he had just came from had disappeared. The length of the hallway too seemed to be slowly shortening; Lin Qiushi could sense the painting of the woman getting closer and closer, closer and closer...
At that moment, a drop of water fell onto Lin Qiushi's forehead. Lin Qiushi gave it a wipe, and realized that it was blood. On reflex he looked up—a black hole had appeared above his head without him noticing, and blood was dripping from its edge onto his head. A pair of black eyes glimmered faintly in the dark, and then right after, a pair of pulpy, bloody hands reached out of the hole for Lin Qiushi.
Lin Qiushi's instincts were to back away, but the strange thing was, the hands stopped when they got to him. As if a miracle, he sensed no animosity from this pair of hands.
The hallway was still getting shorter and shorter, as if it were becoming a cage keen on trapping Lin Qiushi inside. With a clench of his teeth, Lin Qiushi reached up and grabbed the fleshy mess of those hands, and then felt a sudden force as he was brought out of that shrinking hallway.
"Aiya, looks like you can't manage without me after all."
The voice belonged to Xu Jin, but from appearance alone, he couldn't tell it was her at all. The skin on her body was completely gone, leaving only scarlet flesh and blood. She was grinning brightly at Lin Qiushi, and the contrast between her smile and appearance was strange, but Lin Qiushi didn't find it scary at all.
"Thank you," Lin Qiushi said to her.
Xu Jin didn't speak. Her gaze instead leaped over Lin Qiushi to look behind him.
Sensing something, Lin Qiushi too twisted around, and spotted on the other end of the darkness a pair of glowing red eyes.
"Meimei, my sister."
The owner of those eyes was also a skinless monster. She didn't have any legs and could only walk on her hands, but that didn't mean she was slow. She glared at Lin Qiushi with vitriol and bared her teeth; like a hyena hunting its prey, the sheer amount of hatred in her eyes was strong enough to materialize.
"Why did you betray me?" she said. "Do you like him that much? Since you like him so much, why don't I keep him here for you?"
Xu Jin tilted her head, and also smiled.
"But Jiejie, even if you did that, I still won't like you."
After that, she told Lin Qiushi to run, and threw herself at her sister. The two monsters clashed and tangled together.
Lin Qiushi got up and sprinted in the direction of the light. By the time he reached its source, he found that he'd already escaped from the apartment building, and was standing in the yard of the residential block.
It was still raining outside. Lin Qiushi pulled an umbrella out of his backpack and slowly pushed it open, stepping out into the curtaining rain.
The rain came down in sluicing torrents, and the streets were completely empty, with only water splashing along the ground. The rain ought to have been noisy; but at a time like this the loudness of the rain only made the world sound more silent in comparison.
"Help me—help me—"
There was a sudden cry for help. A silhouette came stumbling out of the rain, and Lin Qiushi could just make it out: she was a pitiful-looking young woman, staggering through the rain in a long dress. It looked like she was being pursued by something, and when she spotted Lin Qiushi standing not too far away, it was like she'd found an oasis in the middle of a desert—she came running immediately.
"Help, help!! Please, I'm begging you please help me, something wants to kill me..." She fell to the ground, looking up pathetically at Lin Qiushi. "You're also someone going through the doors, right? So am I, this door is so scary—"
Had this been reality, Lin Qiushi would've definitely helped the young woman up by now. But at this stage he wasn't moving, and a light furrow had appeared between his brows. The truth was, he found the person before him a bit familiar—more specifically, everything that appeared at night now was familiar, and he was certain he'd seen this person somewhere before.
"Mister, mister." The woman collapsed in the rain saw Lin Qiushi unmoved, and slowly crawled forward. She wiped at the rainwater on her face and said, shakily, "I know a safe place, and I can bring you there. Do you want to come with me?"
Lin Qiushi said, "do I know you?"
The woman said, "we met once in the door, and you even helped me out." Her lashes lightly trembled, looking vulnerable as anything. "But I didn't deserve that mercy, I still didn't make it."
"We met inside a door?" Lin Qiushi now found the shape of her eyes familiar. "Which door?"
The woman approached Lin Qiushi, saying, "you know, that one."
As Lin Qiushi watched her, he suddenly spoke: "There's something behind you."
The woman halted.
"A giant picture frame," Lin Qiushi said. "She's here."
The woman wheeled around in fright, but when she didn't see anything behind her, she suddenly realized that Lin Qiushi had recognized her. What had been a pitiful expression immediately went cold.
"It's been a while," Lin Qiushi said, "Yang Meishu."
The woman chuckled coolly.
"You still recognized me?"
Lin Qiushi shrugged. "I didn't want to, but I can count the people who wanted me dead on one hand. Since you're not a ghost, you must be somebody who hates me..."
He paused, and quickly announced, "she really is here."
But Yang Meishu didn't believe him. She said, "do you really think I'm that dumb? You've fooled me once already, you think you can do it again? I—"
As she spoke, getting more and more agitated, she felt a sudden breeze behind her. Yang Meishu glanced back, and found the woman in black standing right behind her. The woman's white face was impassive, and in her hands was a black picture frame that she swung right at Yang Meishu.
Yang Meishu knew this was likely it for her, and a terrible scream came out of her mouth. Right after she screamed, she became a portrait in the hands of the woman; soaked from head to toe, her expression bore both fright and a lively, vivid resentment.
Lin Qiushi took the opportunity to run further away. The woman didn't seem intent on chasing after him either, only watched him go with an icy gaze.
The rain came down in torrents, and Lin Qiushi was completely soaked. In such a strong rain, the umbrella was practically useless. As he ran, he fished out his cell phone and sent Ruan Nanzhu a text.
How are things on your end? After some thought, Lin Qiushi added: I'm fine over here, don't worry about me.
After the text was sent, he didn't get a reply for the longest time. It wasn't until Lin Qiushi found a place to hide from the rain that the message notification dinged, displaying four simple words: I'm good, don't worry.
Seeing the message, Lin Qiushi huffed a bitter laugh. Because how could he not know? Had Ruan Nanzhu truly been alright, the text would not have been so short. Ruan Nanzhu had trained his way through so many doors, so god only knew how many malicious NPCs and dead people from the inside he would meet at night. From what Lin Qiushi understood of him, if he had everything under control, he would've definitely sent a message first asking about Lin Qiushi's situation. Now, even his text message was so short. The situation on his end could not be good.
He wanted so badly just to be by his side—Lin Qiushi clenched his phone and thought bitterly. Whatever he had to experience would be fine, as long as he could be by Ruan Nanzhu's side.