Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
The sounds stopped abruptly.
The tape ended here.
They will never hear the voice of Lu Xiaoyun or Yan Yang again.
“Did you hear that?” Sun Zheng approached Lu Xia and asked, “Your brother, he was the next ‘it’ chosen by ‘it’, and Liu Qin became the substitute…”
Lu Xia’s eyelids twitched. He glanced up.
“That’s what I admire about your Lu family,” Sun Zheng looked back at Lu Xia. “He was the first person to win against ‘it’.”
Lu Xia’s gaze shifted to the giant clam key lying on the ground. There was a faint crack on it.
A guess he was least willing to consider before this felt like it was about to become reality.
“Even until now, I still think that Lu Xiaoyun was born to be ‘it’. The ‘it’ left in the chasm actually succeeded in managing to prevent anyone else from entering this place after that,” Sun Zheng said, shaking his head, as if in disbelief, “No one, not even a single person.”
Lu Xia’s fingers slowly closed into a fist.
Yan Yang went out.
Since then, there have been no one who’d gone missing in the hospital.
“Now you know… why it took you so long to receive this key, right?”
The tape that couldn’t be taken away, the secret that was sealed in the hospital.
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.
Ktja kjr kts atf uljca mijw xfs lc atf fcnfibqf tjv ab yf xfqa j rfmgfa ecali atf ijra wbwfca.
“Fcobgaecjafis, sbeg ygbatfg ofii rtbga. Lf ifoa yftlcv j qfgrbc ktb rtbeiv tjnf cfnfg yffc ifoa yftlcv.” Qtfc tf rjlv atlr, Vec Itfcu’r ojmf ugjvejiis mtjcufv. Llr rwlif vlrjqqfjgfv mbwqifafis, jcv tf kjr fcnfibqfv lc jc jegj bo gfrfcawfca. “Oe Wljcu.”
This name snapped Lu Xia up from his trance, and he suddenly reached out and grabbed Sun Zheng’s shoulders. “So, among the people hanging upside down in 315A…was there one, was there you?”
Sun Zheng didn’t flinch away from Lu Xia’s hold. “Yeah… When I saw that face, I remembered it, I remembered everything…”
He paused, as if he recalled something. “Really though, that nurse, her name is Deng Yun, right? She shouldn’t have been able to find me…”
Lu Xia’s hands were digging in tightly but Sun Zheng didn’t seem to feel any pain at all.
He continued, “Because Lu Xiang was very afraid of me, extremely afraid… Do you know why that female nurse couldn’t find 315A later? Because Lu Xiang, hahaha, Lu Xiang sealed the entire door of 315A. He painted it himself, over and over again.”
“That night, he kept painting. The white paint got all over him because he kept shaking and saying, sorry, sorry… It was so pathetic, Dean Lu, he really looked so pathetically hideous then…”
“He thought that no one would ever find this room again. He thought that I would never be able to leave this room again…”
Lu Xia’s gaze faltered. The Sun Zheng before him felt surreal, felt too unfamiliar, and he couldn’t tell whether this was a dream or reality.
However Sun Zheng, from entering the hospital to the present, had indeed changed step by step, bit by bit, in aspects which he’d previously neglected, or perhaps, in aspects which he had tried his best to overlook.
From that first time he disappeared, to the way he didn’t utter a single word when they saw the bloodied lump of flesh. From the time he started commenting about the afterimages being pitiful, from the time he had a headache upon hearing the names of Chen Zhiwen and Lu Xiang…
He tried his best to piece together these Sun Zhengs who were not Sun Zheng, to piece together the man with the gloomy smile in front of him.
“I kept reminding myself, yet I kept forgetting. But none of this is my fault.” Sun Zheng stared at Lu Xia in the eye. “Because my thoughts have been broken into countless fragments, and even I myself, can no longer piece them back together.”
Seeing Lu Xia’s bewildered expression, he went on to say, “You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you? It was you who put together my memory all along the way. In that operating room, I saw a man sitting by the window of that room, smiling at me, as if to say, come over, come over…”
Lu Xia remembered Sun Zheng’s strange behaviour in that room. He was pointing to the blurred area in the darkness, but clearly spoke as though he could see, look, that room!
“Then I suddenly remembered that the man who smiled at me was actually myself!” Sun Zheng clapped his hands together, letting out a chuckle. “Hahaha, hahaha, how many times have I sat by that window and looked at the world outside the window full of hatred? Ah… I thought, come over, all of you, come over, come with me…”
His smile vanished. “But, I should have remembered it the moment I came to the third floor. You remember, don’t you, how this entire floor reeked of the scent of death…”
The memory of the moment when they came to the third floor from the fourth floor surfaced in Lu Xia’s mind again. The stairwell, Sun Zheng’s strange reaction, the rustling in the corridor.
“Because on this floor, in this operating room, there are memories of death.” Sun Zheng pointed to his own head. “Memories of death… mine, many, many other people’s… even your brother, what he left on the door of that third room should have jogged my memory too, with the way it zapped me so harshly…”
“What the hell are…” Facing this Sun Zheng, Lu Xia obviously had many, many questions, yet he couldn’t bring himself to form a complete sentence.
“By the way, we even met ‘me’ then. I was crawling on the ground, bleeding all over… We were so scared, but it was just ‘me’…” Sun Zheng pointed to his hand and began to tremble slightly. “I couldn’t reconcile the discrepancy with myself, so I crawled up to myself and when I saw that face, I suddenly recalled, that was my own face…”
At the far end of the trail of blood, was a lump of something.
It was crawling, moving, wriggling.
Rustle. Rustle.
It was like a human body, yet that distorted shape was not one a normal human could make.
“Whenever I saw those selves, I would get a splitting headache. All of those faces were imprinted with my past, because every single one of my previous desires have turned into despair. Lu Xia, you have never seen those things from the front. If you’d mustered up the courage to even take a single glance at it, it would have been so funny!”
Every rustling crawling lump of flesh had Sun Zheng’s face. Those in the corridor on the third floor, those in the laboratory hall on the second floor, those in the darkness on the first floor, and those who fought with Lu Xia on the third floor, all of them have Sun Zheng’s face.
“No, it’s impossible…” Lu Xia twitched, but he didn’t have the strength to push himself up into a sitting position. “All of that is impossible!”
Sun Zheng gently stretched out his hand to help Lu Xia to sit up before saying softly, “Didn’t you also tell me that there are many things in this world which cannot be explained using common logic? When you told me this, I still didn’t remember anything. It was you who led me step by step, led me to find…”
“Zheng, there is something wrong here,” Lu Xia interrupted, regaining his thoughts and tightened his hold around Sun Zheng’s hand. “Weren’t you here to see the dentist? Then I happened to meet you, and we accidentally entered the chasm together. Everything in this chasm had nothing to do with you…”
“How could it have nothing to do with me?” Sun Zheng gave him a shallow smile. “This world is the world I live in. Since a long time ago, I have already forgotten how the outside world looked like and how I should behave in the outside world… after all, it had been many years, far too many years.”
“….many years?”
“Yeah, many years, so many years that I always remember then forget, forget then remember again.” Sun Zheng patted himself on the head, as if lamenting his poor memory. “So when you were trapped in the room where the fire broke out and then escaped, I thought I was the one who let you out. Because, I forgot that I had already seen every detail of that reenactment of that fire. I had also once rushed to open that door too…”
“But then I realised that no matter how many times I open it, everything that had happened was all in the past and was irreversible… just like, no matter how many times I stand in front of that elevator…”
“The person who would be reflected in the mirror would always only be myself.”
“I will put a mirror at every entrance found in the cave. If you see ‘it’ in the mirror…which is a person that isn’t beside you, but is reflected only in the mirror, you must remember to not move around randomly. Close your eyes at once, and use your skin to feel your surroundings and slowly walk towards the side where it is warmer.”
……
Once again, the elevator doors slowly separated inch by inch to the left and right.
The first thing that greeted him was a mirror! Its bright polished surface reflected the slowly parting elevator doors and Sun Zheng’s stiff expression.
“Lu Xia, why don’t you look at me? I can tell you with certainty,” Sun Zheng raised his eyebrows. There was a twisted kind of joy in his expression. “I am the ‘it’ now.”
This was a fact which Lu Xia could already guess. It was also a fact which brought Lu Xia despair.
His elder brother was the ‘it’ in the past, and Sun Zheng in front of him was the ‘it’ now.
Lu Xia let go of Sun Zheng’s hand.
Sun Zheng’s countenance changed. He grabbed Lu Xia’s hand back at once and straight straight at Lu Xia. “Why, are you afraid of me? Yes, I am also very afraid of myself. I was not chosen by ‘it’. I had such a deep hatred, such a deep grievance, that I unknowingly seized control of this world…”
“Wh-What happened?”
Sun Zheng met Lu Xia’s dazed and dull eyes, yet his gaze seemed to penetrate Lu Xia, passing through him into a memory in the distant, distant past. “It was also a chaotic afternoon like that day…”
I have so many questions 😭 I don’t really get how Sun Zheng was like, in the outside world to go to the dentist, and then here! If he is ‘it,’ how did he get out? Or was he turning into ‘it’ while in the chasm?
Secondly, the two worlds are not entirely separate, and falling into the chasm might not be immediate too. We see this from how Liu Qunfang could hear Chen Juan hammering on the door of the traditional chinese med room and the cat lady acting weird for some time before vanishing. This would likely be why Lu Xia never noticed he was in the chasm until the lights went out. And the lights only went out after Lu Xia talked about his uncle, which jogged Sun Zheng’s memory.
To answer the other portion of your question, Sun Zheng never got out of the chasm. Lu Xia came in instead, and at that time, Sun Zheng was already ‘it’. Also yes, Sun Zheng turned into ‘it’ in the chasm — but this was during the time after his sacrifice and before Lu Xia appeared.
I always thought about the chipped teeth while everything was happening because it wasn’t mentioned again, and because I read somewhere about how you need to fix it! (Was low-key worried about him 😭)