Chapter Twenty-Four: The Figure Behind the Scenes and the Past

They laughed softly among themselves, and the man lying on the ground was laughing too. He propped himself up, carefully gauging the pressure on every part of his body.

Pain, surging blood, dizziness—those relentless forces battered his body.

He knew: someone was growing impatient.

“Trying to drive me away? Want to reach that world?” He looked up with a smile. “It seems… my memories haven’t been taken from me yet.”

This was Chen Qing’s unique confidence.

He gazed at the two figures above, and even as he murmured to himself, he forced his battered body upright.

Standing before the code console, he entered the numbers of the pillars, each multiplied by two.

“This is a mirrored world,” he whispered, locking eyes with the two figures above.

They turned their heads, clear confusion and astonishment in their eyes.

Yet though they looked back, their feet continued forward without pause.

Chen Qing was baffled.

“What’s going on…? The code is correct… Why can they still walk out?” He frowned, closing his eyes.

Everything flickered before him as if playing in reverse.

“They were one and the same person…” he murmured.

“This was once a mirrored world, a world of reflections…” he whispered, opening his eyes to the sky.

“The code is right. In this world… nothing whole can exist.”

He spoke quietly, gradually coming to an understanding.

“The code is right. Because this is a mirrored world, everything here exists as a halved form—physical objects, living things, even the environment. So those pillars… their true number should be double!”

Chen Qing laughed again, struggling to his feet, and shoved the code console pillar. In that instant, he collapsed at the very center of the threshold.

“Everything here must be halved,” he said, watching the two figures above, whose steps seemed to quicken.

He lifted his head and saw a slip of paper floating down from the sky.

“All things in this world exist by halves.”

He watched, stretching his limbs out, lying comfortably on the ground.

“Yes… this is the final missing piece for everyone who reaches this place.”

Chen Qing smiled as the world before his eyes began to split in two.

He watched the world above grow ever brighter; the two figures ascended, walking into the light.

He saw the environment around him dim, colors draining from the scenery.

He watched as darkness slowly consumed him, and before him a mirror appeared.

It was a small mirror, no bigger than a palm.

Beside the mirror lay a katana.

The sword’s proportions were strange: the hilt half an arm’s length, the blade only as long as the hilt, making the whole sword much shorter than a normal katana.

Chen Qing looked at it, a faint smile of relief finally appearing on his face.

It was the smile of a parent watching a child finally grow up and stop causing trouble.

He picked up the sword, a trace of ferocity at the corners of his mouth.

He looked around; the darkness was already rising.

He cast aside the scabbard—the blade was reversed.

It was a reverse-edged katana.

A blade that could kill no one but its wielder.

He held the sword before himself, his lips still curved in a smile as he gazed at his reflection in the blade.

“Let’s take a gamble… If I lose, let the floodwaters rise after I’m gone.”

His voice was soft; this was a blade that could only kill its owner.

He shouted loudly, raising the blade high.

At the border between darkness and light, at that very moment—

A burst of brilliant sunlight outshone the sky, sweeping away the darkness on the ground.

Slowly, he pressed the blade into his abdomen, the stabbing pain and loss of blood making it ever harder.

Bit by bit, he pushed, vision fading from his eyes.

He felt only darkness, felt the pain in his belly dissolve.

He could no longer feel his lower body.

He began to let go.

He released the blood-stained blade, dipped his fingertip into the river of blood.

“With my own body…”

Word by word, he wrote on the ground.

“I pray for dawn, to see the truth of all causes.”

As he wrote, his fingertips seemed to grow cold.

Was it the blood that had cooled? Or had the warmth left his fingers?

He pondered, but the moment seemed to last an eternity.

The world dimmed… though it had clearly changed.

And then, slowly, he drifted into sleep.

…

But did it truly end there?

The moment he lost consciousness, the Chen Qing above began to bleed.

His body split open down the center, skin peeling away to expose naked bone. As the skin tore, the bones began to break.

The bones were crushed to powder, drifting down like dust.

Then blood rained down.

And then, he plummeted.

It was as if the ground beneath his feet had vanished, his body calculating the force and distance of a freefall, landing heavily beside Chen Qing.

With his fall, the darkness was stained crimson.

The blood seeped outward, and after half a minute, merged with Chen Qing’s.

They lay side by side, but the pool of blood began to ripple faintly.

At first, it was just a few small waves, circles spreading outward.

Then, several tender vines writhed up from the river of blood, squirming across the ground like earthworms.

The fleshy tendrils grew longer, fiercer.

They began to strangle their companions, wrapping tightly around one another.

They stretched, and when they collapsed, became food for the others, piling up until in the places where the blood was thinnest, not a single worm remained.

But on Chen Qing’s body, and on the one who had crashed to the ground, blood splattering everywhere, meters-long tapeworms crawled over him, burrowing inside. With each inch they entered, their tails grew longer.

They devoured the fresh corpse, until only writhing vines remained.

They churned, too busy to fight one another now, swelling the corpse by several centimeters.

Soon, the marrow was gone, the meter-long spine packed with four or five tapeworm-like vines, entering tail-first, pushing the spinal cord with their heads.

Quickly, the body was devoured completely.

Facing a corpse white as jade, the worms searched for a place to bite but found none.

They searched, and just as their gaze fell upon a companion, a faint scent of blood drew them away.

That scent seemed to disgust them, as if the blood were something filthy.

They hesitated, hundreds, thousands of tapeworms swaying uncertainly over the bones.

Soon, the small, famished vines began to bite at their companions’ tails.

It was the easiest, softest place to attack.

They gnawed at each other, and the largest tapeworms began to crawl, slowly, toward the last traces of blood.

The biggest led, the smaller followed.

They chewed each other’s bodies, seeking to survive until they reached new blood.

They squirmed, inch by inch, returning to the home that had once spawned them.

They wriggled, and in that instant realized the true meaning of soul-deep fear.

They turned to flee, but just as they began, a larger vine—a true vine—sprouted from Chen Qing’s abdomen.

This fleshy vine swept up all the tapeworms trying to escape, dragging them, struggling and resisting, back into Chen Qing’s body.

They thrashed wildly in the blood that had given them birth, but could not stop their dissolution.

They struggled, more and more of them being drawn into the stomach.

Their numbers dwindled, and the distance between Chen Qing’s upper and lower body grew shorter.

At the moment the wounds met, consciousness returned to his mind.

He heard the mutterings and howls of a madman at his ear, shrill wails rising and falling.

He realized he was not dead.

In that instant, the world before him turned brilliant with color, and he felt fleshly vines writhing and dancing across his body.

He forced himself to endure, pulling from his pocket the last scraps of food.

Not much, but enough to fill a palm.

After swallowing them, the hallucinations and cacophony faded.

Only then did Chen Qing realize the world around him had become a paradise of birds and flowers; the gray-brown vegetation was gone.

He was about to speak, but as he did, everything before him vanished.

In its place appeared a pale yellow wall stretching to the sky, as if separating the entire world, and the world within the wall was where he stood.

He was about to step forward when a crisp snap sounded beneath his foot.

Looking down, he saw he had broken the leg bone of the skeleton at his feet.

He glanced downward, and as his gaze shifted he failed to notice, some ten meters away on an open patch of ground, a figure had appeared.

Perhaps the figure had appeared the very moment Chen Qing looked away.

Or perhaps it was in the last instant as he lifted his head…

He looked at the figure—a body shriveled and dry, lifeless long ago.

One could barely tell it was human; it resembled a mummy.

“Is it…” He fell silent, a vague sense of unease creeping in.

He had once prayed at the shrine to see the mastermind behind it all.

Was it him?

He took two steps forward, and a faint blue light flared in the mummy’s eye sockets.

He was dead, yet still alive—caught in an ever-narrowing space between life and death.

He spoke softly, lowering his head to look at a skeleton, white as jade.

“You are… the first investigator to arrive here alive… It’s you… It’s really you!”

He looked at Chen Qing and let out a crackling laugh, a sound laced with mockery that made Chen Qing frown.

“Investigator?”

“Yes… Yes, just as before,” he replied with biting sarcasm, his body twitching slightly. “Investigator—a job title born of the ‘Lanting Nightclub’ system.

Call yourself what you like—mercenary? Detective? Whatever suits you.” He regarded Chen Qing with a strange patience that unsettled him.

There was something deeply wrong in every word, every inflection… but where did that feeling come from?