After returning to the city on Sunday, Ren Xing collapsed and fell into a deep sleep. Enduring the intense discomfort, I forced myself to take my first bath since the incident. It was then that I felt a dull, agonizing pain in my lower body—a true ordeal. Even more terrifying was that what I washed out didn't seem to be semen, but a transparent liquid with a much more pungent odor, incredibly viscous and revolting. I felt like there was more inside me, but I couldn't get it out; it was buried too deep. I had a good cry in the bathroom, only finding a modicum of relief when I realized I couldn't get pregnant.
Later, while doing the laundry, I unexpectedly washed a scale out of my shirt pocket.
At first, I didn't realize it was a scale. It was sticky and indescribably filthy; I thought it was half a seashell and tossed it into the trash. But halfway through the laundry, the stench became unbearable—a sharp, piercing odor so foul it even woke Ren Xing, who was sleeping behind closed doors. I had to find a way to deal with it. My first thought was to wash it clean before throwing it away. I ended up rinsing it with several buckets of water, yet it remained caked in something like mud. Worse still, the more I washed it, the stickier it became, resembling boiled Chinese yam with long, mucus-like strings. Eventually, I lost my patience.
However, once rinsed, it was easier to see. It didn't look like a clam shell; it was a scale, though I couldn't tell what creature it belonged to. I suspected there were growth rings on it, but I couldn't distinguish them because they were so dense, compressed into a series of shifting gradients of color. I found some plastic wrap, bundled it up tightly, then placed it inside a plastic bag, sealing it firm. I called Lu Daoshi and asked him out for a meal. While waiting for him, I threw all the windows open and borrowed several electric fans to blast the air out. Only then did Ren Xing manage to go back to sleep.
When I headed downstairs, I noticed the air was exceptionally fresh. I initially thought it was psychological, but the entire residential compound was indeed overflowing with wildly growing greenery. In the short time it took for me to open my car door and sit inside, the magnolias hanging from the branches transformed from tight buds into a full, snowy bloom. It was like a time-lapse video from a nature documentary.
I rubbed my eyes and finally stepped on the gas to head to school. I met Lu Daoshi at the dormitory entrance and handed the scale-like object directly to him. "Be careful, don't open it. It's incredibly smelly—it'll practically kill you with the stench."
Senior Lu opened the transparent plastic bag, looked at the contents, and asked where it came from. I told him I found it in my shirt; I was too embarrassed to admit it was a scale from the beast who had violated me. Senior Lu tucked the scale away, said he had things to attend to, and left.
I wasn't sure if it was just psychological, but ever since I saw the discharge after my bath this morning, my stomach had been feeling uneasy. I felt a lingering sense of dread and wanted to see a doctor. However, hospitals were too much of a psychological trauma for me now, so I decided to find my roommate to bolster my courage. I knocked, but there was no answer. Pi Zhang passed by and mentioned that my roommate hadn't returned.
Seeing him reminded me of yesterday's events. "Did Zhang Litian give you guys any trouble afterward?"
Pi Zhang asked back, "Zhang Litian? Who's that?"
"What kind of memory do you have? Zhang Litian, the guy who was hassling me yesterday before lunch. Weren't you talking to him earlier? You looked like you knew him well..."
Pi Zhang just said, "What?" His expression made it look like I was the one who was crazy.
Seeing him like this made me flare up. "Stop playing dumb! Did you forget? How terrifying that group was? They rushed up to grab me, and I even jumped onto the windowsill!"
Pi Zhang called me a psycho and walked away.
What the hell was going on?!
I felt this was far too bizarre. Was Pi Zhang's memory just that bad? It was the same last time, when he claimed he knew nothing about the divine talismans drawn in Old Chu's room...
At that thought, a sudden shiver ran down my spine.
I remembered that yesterday at noon, neither Pi Zhang nor Lu Daoshi had asked me a single question about Zhang Litian. Not one. It defied common sense. After the scene ended yesterday, none of the students passing by showed even a hint of surprise or fear regarding what had happened at the school hospital construction site.
Could they not see it?
No, both Pi Zhang and Lu Daoshi had spoken to Zhang Litian. Pi Zhang had even had physical contact with him.
Then... had they forgotten?
My first reaction was brainwashing.
Who did it?
Zhang Litian?
He didn't want people at school to know he was different, so he brainwashed everyone who had witnessed his abnormality?
To verify this, I called Lu Daoshi. Sure enough, he had no memory of the conflict at the school hospital site yesterday noon. I decided to be thorough and checked the campus intranet. Not only was there not a single mention of the incident, but I also discovered that Zhang Litian's Renren account had been deactivated.
The doctor had previously given us a list of the hospitalized students; that list was now on my desk. The first thirteen names had been completely crossed out with red lines. I suddenly had a very bad premonition, because I suspected the person who had crossed out those names was my roommate. I searched for those thirteen people; none of them had active Renren accounts anymore.
If my roommate was the one acting, would he stop at just deleting their social media?
I immediately took the list to the school's Registrar's Office. Fortunately, there was a student on duty whom I knew quite well. He seemed to be from the Institute of Science and Engineering. Our school leaned toward the liberal arts, so the Institute of Science and Engineering only had two classes in total. I asked him, "Is there someone in your department named Zhang Litian?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. Never heard of him."
He typed Zhang Litian's name into the computer. The result: *No such person found.*
Amidst the rapid tapping of the keyboard, it was "No such person found" thirteen times over.
I felt my throat tighten.
I spent the entire afternoon trying to track down those thirteen people, but I had never had contact with most of them; I knew nothing but their names. Unfortunately, their files had all vanished into thin air. The only lead I could grasp was Zhang Litian.
I tried to find any trace of him online, but there was nothing—absolutely nothing. I noticed he wasn't in the Institute's freshman group photo. The number of students in the Class of 2008 announced by the Registrar's Office was exactly 53 from start to finish. Every one of those 53 people could be accounted for with a name, a file, and a photo. But there was no Zhang Litian.
Finally, I called Ren Xing. He was still sleeping. I asked him to use the police department's ID system to help me look someone up. While grumbling about me waking him up and taking his car, he hailed a taxi to the station.
When we enroll in university, our household registration is usually transferred to the school's collective permanent residence. But at our school, there was no one named Zhang Litian.
In the most authoritative population archives of the People's Republic of China, there was also no Zhang Litian who had enrolled in my university.
But Zhang Litian had attended classes with me. He had gone out for drinks with me several times. He had even helped me cheat on an exam. Later, because of a bizarre incident, he became my strange and terrifying nightmare—an event that was reported in the newspapers. Since then, he had been trying everything to harm me.
I was trapped in a paradox: I knew some people had disappeared, but I had no way to prove they had ever existed.
I gripped the list in my hand.
Next, there would be over twenty more.
The next one to be crossed out should be a boy named Lin Cong from the School of Social Sciences.
I asked the Registrar's Office to copy his file for me. They refused, so I turned to Ren Xing. Ren Xing checked his household registration, so I knew he was a local. His father was named Lin Youcheng, and his mother was Liu Liqing. They lived in the west of the city, a thirty-minute drive from our school.
But just as Ren Xing was reading the address to me, something eerie happened.
Ren Xing said, "The system glitched."
The security level for the police household registration system is extremely high. But after Ren Xing restarted it, Lin Cong's file had already vanished.
Ren Xing arrived at my dorm shortly after. "What's going on?"
"Someone is wiping out their personal information."
I held the form in my hand. If my roommate were here right now, would he be crossing out Lin Cong's name?
Ren Xing asked a question I desperately wanted to ask: "Have their physical bodies been eliminated too?"
"I don't know."
We didn't have Lin Cong's phone number, so we could only go to the School of Social Sciences to look for him. But similarly, no one remembered there ever being a person named Lin Cong.
Finally, we went to Lin Cong's home. It was an ordinary apartment building in an old residential area, its exterior looking much like Ren Xing's place. We ran into a middle-aged man on the stairs; he was carrying a briefcase, just returning home from work. When he saw us stop at his door, he asked very kindly, "Who are you looking for?"
"Are you Mr. Lin Youcheng?"
"I am."
"Do you know where your son, Lin Cong, is?"
Lin Youcheng froze for a moment, then smiled and answered, "My wife and I... we were never able to have children."
Ren Xing and I exchanged a look.
Even the memories had been deleted.
My entire being was in a state of chaos. I spoke to Lin Youcheng incoherently, telling him he had a son, that he was my classmate, that he had disappeared and might have been kidnapped, hoping he could give me some help. If Ren Xing hadn't shown his police badge, I think Lin Youcheng would have kicked me out.
He believed I had the wrong person.
Fortunately, Ren Xing was there. He claimed this involved a criminal case, successfully bluffing Lin Youcheng into letting us inside to talk in detail. Then Ren Xing kept shooting me looks; he had no idea what I intended to do by entering this home.
I didn't know either. I only felt my heart sinking to the bottom of an abyss, my whole body gripped by a sense of weightlessness. I was desperate to grab onto something to prove that our lives weren't just someone else's game. To have one's existence erased so easily—is this truly the essence of being human?
People often say that looking at the sky makes one feel small because of the infinity of the universe.
But looking at the list in my hand, I felt that *this* was true insignificance.
While Ren Xing was talking nonsense with Lin Youcheng, I scanned the thirty-square-meter living room. The room was clean, with many photos hanging on the walls. Some featured two people, some featured one, and some... featured no one.
I knew it wasn't supposed to be like this.
I asked Lin Youcheng, "When you take photos with your wife, why do you stand so far apart? And why do you take so many photos of old furniture to hang on the wall? Don't you feel like something is missing?"
Lin Youcheng stared at the photos, looking thoughtful.
Almost frantically, I opened every door in his house, finally finding a bedroom filled with footballs, trophies, and records. In the bedroom, goldfish were still swimming back and forth by the window.
"Is this room yours, Mr. Lin?"
Lin Youcheng never did remember, not even at the end. When he saw us out, he only looked disoriented, as if he had lost something he couldn't name.
"I don't know when all this extra stuff appeared in the house. If only it were real, that would be nice," he said with a smile, looking helpless.
He said "extra," not "missing."
I began to realize that it wasn't just one person's memory; everyone's memory of Lin Cong had vanished. Aside from me, there was no evidence of this person remaining in anyone's mind, including images captured by machines.
A total, absolute disappearance.
If they could achieve this, what did the physical body even matter?
What a ruthless, mighty power this was.
I swear, the red lines my roommate used to cross out names on that list were the most harrowing things I had ever seen in my life.
***
