Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 13: Sleepwalking in Dreamland

1566: The Second Time

"There's another one after all."

It wasn't until her head heavily hit the stone pavement that she realized who had said those words.

That was the last thing Qiao Yuansi heard that evening. After that, everything turned into a silent pantomime. In the distance, sitting in the audience, was a world with deformed faces.

Fragments that were still remembered played in her memory so slowly that they seemed unreal.

Qiao Yuansi's foot kicked into the air, soundlessly striking the female staff member in the red uniform; a pair of hands fell and choked her neck, pressing her to the ground, immobilizing her; someone's high heels brutally and silently stepped into her stomach; her foot was held down, and heavy fingers forcibly pried open her eyelids.

That day was the first snowfall.

From the gloomy blue-grey sky, flakes of snow slowly swirled down. From the indiscernible tiny white dots high in the sky, they turned into increasingly large, blurred snow clumps; initially greyish white, they became orange under the streetlights, and finally deep blood-red in her eyes.

Jin Yan seemed to stumble and run away as they surged forward. When Qiao Yuansi managed to get up from the ground, coughing, the park was only her and the growing snow, and the increasingly deafening silence.

Her resistance had infuriated those people, turning the infection process into a prolonged, unnecessary beating and torture. Struggling to stand in her dizziness, Qiao Yuansi dragged her feet across her own trail of blood, step by step toward the park's exit, each step sending a pain like a spike into her tear glands.

The pedestrians she encountered on the way saw not her wounds but only glanced at her face; once they saw what they wanted, they turned and walked away.

Qiao Yuansi didn't even know how she made it home. She left her car outside the park, slowly dragging her body through the snow, and by the time she got home, her hands and feet were frozen like dead meat, as if they would break off if touched by anything warm.

Her hands had turned into two frozen pieces of dead flesh; she couldn't even pull out a book or hold a pen steadily. Yet, she struggled, piling up all the books she had read, all the objects she had used, all the records she had heard since her last recovery, on the dark red Persian carpet in the living room.

Though the most important one was missing.

Qiao Yuansi stumbled and fell to the ground, frantically turning over the pile of books, as snow, dirt, blood, and tears soaked the paper covers. That night, she passed out on the carpet, the pile of things like a bonfire of hope in the cold night, gradually extinguishing as the night deepened.

When she woke up the next afternoon, she sat on the carpet in a daze for a while, and besides the pain all over her body, that feeling of utter despair, like falling straight into hell, had vanished.

In the following two days, she had to take leave to recuperate at home; but that pile of records and books on the carpet, she didn't even touch them.

After a few days, Qiao Yuansi began to seriously consider the person, Shoreis.

Of course, she hadn't forgotten him, the posthuman from another apocalyptic world; she also knew that he did have some special means—last time, wasn't it because of him that she suffered so much unnecessary torment?

What if he comes back? After all, he still has eleven months left here. Judging from their previous time together, there's no guarantee he won't come back to see her before leaving.