Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
Clatter!
The tape recorder tumbled from the hands which could no longer hold it, falling onto the ground.
The tape hissed, as if stuck.
Sun Zheng stumbled to his feet. The flashlight swept across the ground with the shaking of his body and hands.
His head was full of buzzing noises. It was as if all the people and voices in the hospital were crashing into his head all at once, surging and churning inside it.
Just like there was a bomb planted in his head, and was on the verge of exploding
Humans,
These were humans.
Sun Zheng finally mustered enough strength to lift the flashlight in his hand.
There was a round object at eye-level.
He squinted his eyes, but his instincts had already told him the answer faster than his brain could comprehend, and he began trembling violently.
It was a person’s head!
He tossed aside the flashlight immediately, covering his eyes with his hands.
Still, he couldn’t stop what he’d seen at that split second from filling his mind.
A head, a head which was so shrivelled that even the outline of the bones could be seen so visibly. It only had a thin layer of skin left, no, perhaps that couldn’t even qualify as ‘skin’ anymore, but a mere dry, cracked and darkened covering which was wrapping around the round head. Two protruding lumps were in the skull, under closed lids, but it felt as if they were looking in his direction.
As if they would open at any time. As if they had been staring through the darkness at the door all this time, staring at him.
A human head which had been sucked dry, looking as though it was pieced together by tying black weeds on the ground together. Its dry, flaking skin was akin to the surface of cracked earth. Black air seemed to be seeping out from every crevice on the face. It looked so fragile that it seemed as though it would crumble when the wind blew, as though the skin would fall off upon contact, revealing the dark eye holes and nostrils underneath.
That image had penetrated so deep into Sun Zheng’s mind that it almost pierced into his bone marrow. He couldn’t stop himself from recalling, from visualising that strange and terrifying sight of that human head.
There was nothing under the head… The head was at his eye-level, but there was no body under it.
Before he knew it, his fingers had already dug into his skin, yet he didn’t feel any pain from it.
This head… was hanging in the opposite direction!
This corpse was hanging upside down!
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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“Ktlr lr j qgfrfgnfv mbgqrf… j wewws…” Tjc Tjcu rqja bea kbgv ys kbgv. “Cii bo atfrf…jgf wewwlfr.”
“Ktfgf lr bcf wbgf, ibbx eq.”
Tjc Tjcu qjerfv obg j rfmbcv, jcv tlr nblmf tlamtfv. “C mja?”
He came to a sudden realisation. “Could it be that this cat was the beginning of everything? Was this the cat Liu Qin was rearing? What was she planning to do… why would she hang it here in this manner and even preserved it so well…?
“This is… a sacrificial ritual… of yin-followers.”
“What do you mean by that?” Yan Yang could not help but ask further.
“This is…the price of surpassing the taboo of life and death.”
Yan Yang, from the other end of the tape, audibly froze, yet he seemed to have noticed something and immediately reacted. “These corpses… All of these corpses are patients who have died in this hospital… So what this sacrificial ritual needs is for a dead body to be tied upside down in this room? A dead sacrifice? No, that’s not right, it also requires a living person… a living sacrifice, which will be brought into the chasm by ‘it’ to change for the life of another person… Lu Xiaoyun, this is impossible, this…”
Lu Xiaoyun fell silent.
“There were so many innocent people who entered the chasm. Don’t tell me Liu Qin never thought about it before? What on earth is ‘it’? What on earth is the chasm…” Halfway through his sentence, Yan Yang suddenly noticed something. “Wait, At the end of the rope, there’s…”
“Don’t look!” Lu Xiaoyun raised his voice all of a sudden. It was followed by Yan Yang’s ‘huh’.
Buzz.
Buzz.
Restless noises sounded from the tape.
Yan Yang’s voice came from afar. “Lu Xiaoyun…why did you cover my eyes…you…”
“Close your eyes. No matter what happens next, don’t open them.” Lu Xiaoyun’s voice changed a little, yet it was difficult to say what had changed about it. “This is…the exit…”
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Sun Zheng shuddered, and slowly lowered his hands from his face.
Relying on the direction of the light, he retrieved the flashlight.
Then slowly, starting from that head, he moved the light up little by little.
It was a mummy, a corpse which had shrunk almost by half because it was completely sucked dry.
He didn’t know Liu Qin made and preserved these corpses.
Stained hospital gowns, which were originally white, were loosely put on these upside-down corpses. If it weren’t for the heads hanging from necks which were as thin as dry wood, those ill-fitted hospital robes might have fallen off onto the ground long ago.
Sun Zheng took a small step closer. Other than a strange smell emanating from the corpses, they were generally rather well preserved, with no signs of bugs or worms. He didn’t know what secret preservation method the yin-follower Liu Qin used. There even seemed to be a tag hanging on the clothes.
A blurry tag.
Written on it was a number: 03.
He turned to the corpse beside it.
It was a similarly shrivelled head, with a black cloth over the eyes.
Number: 02.
He screened the room with the flashlight. There was more than just one head. It was practically a forest of corpses hanging upside-down. There were ropes secured tightly around their legs, and it felt as though they would move with even the slightest of breezes, akin to windchimes hanging on strings.
Sun Zheng finally completely understood what Lu Xiaoyun meant back then.
The starting point of all this…was Liu Qin’s cat.
The reason why she started performing this sacrificial ritual was beyond comprehension. Was it because the death of her cat made her go crazy?
In any case, that cat was the very first sacrifice, made in exchange for the life of the patient on the operating table that Chen Zhiwei miraculously saved.
Sacrifice No. 02, the corpse with its eyes covered with a black cloth, was the one Lao Zhang saw back then.
That was the second time the hospital conducted this kind of sacrifice. ‘It’ took Lao Zhang away, but no one knew whose life it was in exchange for.
03, 04, 05…
How many times did Liu Qin perform this sacrificial ritual in the past few years, and how could Chen Zhiwen remain proud of these traded achievements while brushing past against ‘it’ time and time again?
‘It’ had not only taken away the living substitute needed for the sacrifice, but also countless other innocent people who accidentally entered the chasm, those innocent people who could never return to their reality, to their bright world.
What exactly was the chasm? Why did Lu Xiaoyun suddenly understand it?
So… In that sacrificial ceremony where they foiled Liu Qin’s plans, the sacrifice involved a certain dead person and a living person who would be sent to 315 as the living substitute. Yan Yang managed to delay the living person, yet ‘it’ came out, and found another substitute instead, the person closest to it then—Chen Zhiwen.
During the ensuing chaos, Liu Qin ended up leading Lu Xiaoyun into the chasm. The dead sacrificial offering, the living sacrifice, the new life, and ‘it’. Within these four, only the identities of ‘it’ and the living sacrifice were still uncertain. And she… Liu Qin used herself as the dead sacrificial offering, and planned to make Lu Xiaoyun into the living sacrifice in order to complete the ritual?
Since Lu Xiaoyun knew her plan, then why did he willingly follow Liu Qin into the chasm?
Suddenly, a distorted object hidden within the rows of corpses caught Sun Zheng’s attention.
It was a face, a pair of eyes.
Staring at him.
That was…
Sun Zheng’s brain suddenly felt as though it had exploded. He violently pushed past the body before him which resembled dried wood, and rushed madly to the one at the furthest corner of the room, the one that was hidden the deepest.
‘He’ seemed to be staring straight at him, watching him shove past those dry and cold swinging corpses bumping into him, watching him staggering forward between those rattling heads, and the corners of ‘his’ tightly pursed lips appeared to show the hint of a disconcerting smile of satisfaction.
Sun Zheng nearly threw himself onto that head. When his hand came into contact with that face, he felt a cold and tingling sensation.
Suddenly, the arm hanging down from the corpse moved and touched Sun Zheng’s back.
He turned sharply around. The hand swayed with his motion, and then slowly lowered itself.
Perhaps it was because of his earlier motion.
Sun Zheng’s gaze followed that hand, trailing up its length, past the hospital gown, and over the pair of legs which were tightly wound by the rope.
The end of the rope was not the end. It was a long, long rope, extending…
Something was wrong. The space above where the ceiling should be, that was…
All the images which had flashed across his mind earlier surged back into his brain, spreading viciously outwards and deep into his bone marrow.
Exit.
Sun Zheng suddenly smiled too, eyes crinkling, a slight curve playing at the corners of his lips.
He touched the face of the hanged corpse, and slowly, slid his hands down along its dry and cracked surface, brushing across the eyes, as if he was wiping away the tear tracks on them.
The blurry voice of someone speaking came from the tape.
“We… were wrong…”
After so many years of fighting with ‘it’, they had finally realised they were wrong.
.
Sun Zheng was holding the recorder. The tape inside had stopped spinning. He made his way quietly to the door. His mind and heart had never been this quiet before, and he felt as though he was immersed in a silence so all-encompassing it seemed to be one with the hospital.
He walked to the hidden room in this hospital. He heard a soft knock on the door, and a voice which sounded like a woman speaking softly.
There was the faint scent of Florida water and sesame oil.
Though this fragrance was not good, it did the job of covering up the strange smell from this room.
That’s right, the person hanging at the corner of the room was the male patient who the woman at the door—the person who Deng Yun wanted to touch all those years ago.
She saw what was hung upside-down at the end of the rope, and entered the chasm. Then, while upside-down, she walked up to the female nurse named Yang Fei, patting her, trying to wake her up, without even realising that her hair was hanging down over her own face.
And her afterimage after entering the chasm repeated this action, day after day, night after night.
Sun Zheng smiled lightly again. He opened the door and walked out.
Sun Zheng, are we going to ignore the Lu Xun you left behind? 😭😭