Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 13: Sleepwalking in Dreamland

1583: The Night with Qiao Yuansi

On the night when Wu Yiliu did not send a timely message to report his safety, Qiao Yuansi sat alone in the living room, thinking for a long time.

Her age no longer allowed her to escape. She could still drive, and her savings were enough for living, but she became inexorably sleepy and tired by nine o'clock at night. In Qiao Yuansi's eyes, colors were no longer so bright, and objects in life became particularly cold and rigid, even car seat cushions would ache her bones after a while.

She forgot when it started, but she felt her life slowly exhaling a long breath. This breath was light and slow, but it would eventually come to an end. In this process, she was gradually becoming dry and brittle. She couldn't just make up her mind and fly away like when she was young.

Perhaps she was destined never to see what the end of the world looked like. It was just a pity for that boy.

Qiao Yuansi lived in the ensuing silence for three days, secretly waiting every day for the door to be kicked open or for the car to be stopped. By the third day, she understood: Wu Yiliu hadn't transformed.

The child might be dead or trapped – the former possibility being greater – but he was definitely not a Changeling now. Otherwise, he would have turned her in long ago.

Another proof was that the bank card given to Wu Yiliu had never been used again. If he had transformed, the balance on that card would have been emptied by now.

So how could she find his whereabouts?

Qiao Yuansi sighed in her heart, continuing to read the bank card statements on the computer, attempting to reconstruct Wu Yiliu's tracks on the day of his disappearance through the location of each expenditure. The child's spending was not much, a small withdrawal, a few necessary expenses; from the statement, she could see that he had followed the clues she had given him to find that women's clothing store and even bought some clothes. However, after that, all signs of activity ceased.

Wu Yiliu was inquiring about posthuman whereabouts that day, likely leading to his disappearance; since he hadn't transformed, could it be unrelated to the Changelings? Was he killed by a posthuman?

But in these days, she had been closely following the local news, but had not seen any reports of murder or the discovery of an unidentified male body.

Where had the child gone?

Sighing, Qiao Yuansi closed the bank statement. She suddenly paused and opened it again.

Earlier, she had been too focused on Wu Yiliu's activities before seven o'clock that evening and had momentarily overlooked his first expense of the day: recharging his mobile phone.

He had recharged in the morning, disappeared at night, and the phone must have fallen into someone else's hands. Most likely into the hands of a Changeling, as posthumans wouldn't need the phone or search a commoner's body after killing them.

If a Changeling had taken the phone, they likely hadn't removed and discarded the SIM card, especially since there was a fair amount of money on that number. Even if it might expose the fact that they had someone else's phone and were responsible for the person's disappearance, a Changeling wouldn't let go of even a little bit of gain.

To verify this assumption, Qiao Yuansi called Wu Yiliu's number using a colleague's phone.

The call connected.

After hearing just one ring, she hurriedly hung up, her heart pounding for a while. She deleted the call record and quietly put the phone back on her colleague's desk.

Wu Yiliu's phone had indeed fallen into the hands of a Changeling. Things would be easier now; she was most worried that the child had been killed by posthumans and the phone was also destroyed.