The next morning, I was jolted awake by Ren Xing pressing down on me. At first, I thought he was making a move, but his expression suggested otherwise. He was looking down at me with a grim, scrutinizing intensity, his eyes flashing with a hint of hostility. This sudden, aggressive attitude from someone I knew frightened me; after all, I had witnessed the horror of a person’s mind being entirely replaced. I feared the same had happened to Ren Xing.
However, I quickly dismissed that theory. Ren Xing released me and muttered in a low voice, "You’re finally awake."
His voice was hoarse and exhausted, and heavy dark circles hung beneath his eyes. Once he stood up, my view was no longer obstructed, and I realized the room had changed. The curtains were still drawn tight, blocking out every sliver of light, and only the bedside lamp was on. But the walls were covered in drawings of various sizes, sketched with the black ash Ren Xing had swept from the walls the night before. Every single one of those shapes was identical.
"This is...?" My head felt like it was splitting open.
Ren Xing stared at me, silent.
I read the meaning behind his silence: "Me? I did this?"
Ren Xing turned his head away, got out of bed, and once again brought over the dustpan and broom to start sweeping the charcoal drawings off the wall. I sat on the bed, a chill running down my spine.
According to him, less than an hour after he had fallen asleep last night, he was awakened by my movements. I had been wearing only my boxers, crouching by the wall in an unnervingly bizarre posture, silently dipping my fingers into the ash in the dustpan to draw. He tried to wake me, but I was completely devoid of reason; I hissed at him, making strange, guttural noises.
Fearing my aggression, he didn't try to stop me further. I had spent the entire night crouching by the wall, drawing. There was a lattice shelf by his door, and I had even climbed it barehanded, gripping the glass frame with my toes to continue my illustrations. It wasn't until about five in the morning that I climbed down, lay back in bed, and slept until now.
"If it weren't for the strange things we've been through, I would think you'd gone mad," Ren Xing said.
Hearing his account, I felt myself begin to break down.
Ever since these bizarre events started happening one after another, I had doubted everything around me, but I had never doubted myself. There had always been a veil between me and that unknown terror. But now, it had finally descended upon me.
Was I being controlled by something, just like Zhang Litian?
Would I disappear like him, too?
To become a vessel for some unknown, horrific entity, losing my own consciousness forever.
A profound sense of unease washed over me. It was a feeling colder than death; death, at least, belongs to oneself. But the problem I faced now was being replaced. I could vanish at any moment under circumstances no one would ever understand.
Seeing me sitting on the bed, terrified and weeping, Ren Xing walked over and patted my head.
"I'm sorry. I'll move back in today."
"Sorry for what? Why are you moving?"
"Officer, where do you get such courage? The person staying with you last night wasn't me. And maybe one day, it won't be me anymore."
"But aren't you back now?"
"One day, I might never come back."
Ren Xing smiled faintly. "Then we'll worry about that when the day comes. Until then, I will protect you."
He smiled with a rare tenderness, but I couldn't bring myself to smile back.
I stared at the bedroom, which now felt as sinister and peculiar as Lao Chu’s room, and gazed at those patterns. Then, I called Lu Daoshi and asked to meet him.
Lu Daoshi appeared at the breakfast stall right on time. While he was busy eating his jianbing guozi, I used a pencil to sketch the pattern from the wall onto a piece of paper.
By now, I had remembered what it was.
It was the face of the gold coin I had seen in my dream at the hospital. In that dream, Jin Mu had fallen from the edge of the rooftop without warning. He had been clutching a gold coin. The coin had been flung high, spinning in the air, pausing at its zenith before beginning its descent. It fell rapidly, its two sides alternating repeatedly until it landed face-up with a sharp *clack*.
Even though I had only seen it for a split second as it fell, that moment seemed to have been infinitely prolonged. I hadn't remembered it clearly at the time. I only knew I had seen a close-up of the coin.
Incredibly, during my first night after waking up, I had unconsciously drawn the face of that coin countless times, to the point where the image was now burned into my mind. I could still trace its shimmering golden silhouette stroke by stroke, as if it were sitting right in front of me.
The edges of the coin were smooth but uneven, with varying thickness, suggesting primitive minting techniques. The face of the coin featured three concentric circles in relief. The space within the outer ring was filled with outward-expanding triangles, giving the entire coin the appearance of a sun. Inside the inner circle was a human face, highly abstracted, with its features compressed until only a large, diamond-shaped mouth remained—a striking image. The style of the entire coin was archaic, with a tight arrangement of shapes and lines that felt ancient and eerie. Beyond that, I knew nothing; I was certain I had never seen anything in a similar style.
That was why I thought of Lu Daoshi immediately. He read a wide variety of obscure, heterodox books and possessed a broad knowledge of both the ancient and the modern.
Sure enough, Lu Daoshi took a glance while sipping his yogurt. "This looks like a Mesoamerican art style."
"Mesoamerican?"
"Mayan, Aztec, Incan... basically the indigenous peoples of the Yucatan Peninsula. Where did you see this?"
"In a dream."
Perhaps because I spoke through gritted teeth, Lu Daoshi paused, startled, and asked when I had become interested in such things.
I wasn't interested; I was being coerced. But what brought me a measure of relief was that the abnormality occurring within me didn't seem intended to harm me or those around me. Instead, it seemed to be reminding me of information I had overlooked—information that had originally been conveyed to me by Jin Mu.
Was there a connection between the basement level Jin Mu showed me in the dream and this Mesoamerican coin?
I decided to find time to visit him at the hospital again to see what I could fish out.
Because I had met Lu Daoshi in the morning, I was late for class. The lecture had already begun by the time I entered. In the large lecture hall of two hundred people, I spotted my roommate at a glance. He sat with a straight back and looked over at me without any other sign of recognition. I nervously pushed through the crowd to sit beside him. He pushed a cup of soy milk toward me, signaling for me to drink. I was overjoyed. But when I tried to talk to him, he ignored me.
After finishing the soy milk, I began to feel drowsy. The 8:00 AM general education course on Calculus and Linear Algebra was tedious. Most students were still wallowing in their morning grumpiness, sleeping fitfully and looking miserable. I was no different. In contrast, my roommate, who insisted on sitting in the front row and was meticulously transcribing every single digit from the blackboard, seemed like the ultimate academic overachiever. Normally, I disliked people like that—not so much because I hated their diligence, but because I lamented my own laziness and helplessness. However, because it was my roommate, I felt a subtle sense of dissonance. My roommate felt out of place doing anything "normal."
I didn't want to listen to the lecture, and I felt a bit guilty toward him. Since I hadn't come home all night and had even spoken ill of him behind his back, I was worried he was mad at me. I kept trying to strike up a conversation, but he ignored me. I even touched his hair, and he still didn't respond. Having been rebuffed, I turned to look at his writing. I suddenly realized his way of holding the pen was very strange. He was one of the few left-handed writers I had ever seen, and his scratch paper was exceptionally chaotic and unsettling.
"Brother Liu, why are you holding your pen like that...?"
Just as I was shamelessly pestering him, the professor on the podium suddenly pointed at me. "The student in the blue shirt, please answer this."
"Eh? This..." I looked at the matrix on the screen, my head throbbing. I hadn't listened to a word. Even if I had, I wouldn't have understood.
My roommate pushed his scratch paper over. On it was written "48."
"...48?"
The stern professor adjusted his glasses and told me to sit down.
I broke into a cold sweat. "Brother Liu, you're amazing. How did you calculate that so fast? ...Wait, what are these?"
The scratch paper he handed over was covered in symbols I had never seen before.
"What is this?" I realized my voice sounded off.
This time, my roommate didn't ignore me. He said those were operational symbols he had defined himself while solving problems, which could greatly simplify the calculation process. I couldn't even understand the unsimplified version, but he didn't explain further and quickly crossed out all the symbols. From my observation, however, he had written them entirely unconsciously. As he took notes, the tip of his pen would flow into something that was neither the Chinese nor the mathematical symbols I recognized.
Furthermore, he was definitely not the type of model student who felt the need to copy down every single word—his expression said as much. Aside from his meticulousness, a hint of mockery would occasionally surface. In all the time I had spent with him, today was the first time I saw such a look of disdain on his face; his "scorn" skill was definitely maxed out. I had originally thought he was a very honest and simple person. But while listening in class, he seemed possessed by something, revealing a side of him that was dismissive to the point of being sinister.
Thus, my roommate, focused on solving problems and listening to the lecture, possessed a strange sexiness alongside a peculiar eeriness. I realized I could now calmly accept this harmless weirdness. I even began to speculate: what exactly was he? An alien? A ghost? Regardless, given how much he looked down on the teacher, he had to be a deeply hidden genius.
During the break, as my roommate was writing, his head suddenly tilted and rested on my right elbow. I couldn't help but nudge him twice. "What's wrong? Didn't sleep well last night?"
From my angle, I saw his long eyelashes quiver. Then, he said in a muffled voice, "You didn't come back yesterday."
"About that... I stayed at a friend's place. I'll probably be staying there for a while longer. He thinks my health hasn't been great lately, so he took me out to rest and recover..."
"I'm angry," he said.
"Hehe, don't be mad. I'm just moving out for a bit... I'm scared when you're not around, too. I ran into something terrifying..."
"Are they dead?" my roommate asked.
It took me a moment to realize he was asking if those shadows were dead. "...They're dead."
My roommate nodded, indicating that if they were dead, then it was fine. But then he huffed again, acting dismissive while simultaneously explaining with great patience, "Angry. I'm angry."
*How can you say you're angry with such a calm, expressionless face!* I couldn't help but reach out and poke his handsome face. *Poke~*
"Be serious. I am angry."
"Oh, come on, you'll have more space sleeping alone..."
"I waited all night."
"..."
"I need to perform an inspection."
***
