Xin Hexue followed behind He Qinghong into his own house. From this rear perspective, he could observe the other person a little less reservedly.
He Qinghong was tall and slender, appearing somewhat more refined and scholarly than Zhou Liao. The black clothes he wore visually restrained his body’s outline, concealing the originally lean and powerful impression given by his muscle lines.
When Xin Hexue left the house today, he overheard the neighbors’ evaluations of He Qinghong.
An unemployed young man, idle, with nothing to do, spending his days loitering. His daily activity was birdwatching in the park outside the Walled city.
Such people were not uncommon within the Walled city. After all, the housing prices here were the lowest in Beidao. Some youths who only took temporary jobs for two months a year and squatted at home for the next ten months, not caring much about living conditions or safety, would choose this place.
The neighbors said that among this group, only He Qinghong gave people a feeling that was too shady.
Xin Hexue had seen many people, so he often developed a kind of judgmental intuition upon first meeting someone;
There was something fishy about He Qinghong.
The neighbors’ idle talk said he was too shady, so they avoided him; this was actually an instinctive manifestation of people avoiding harm.
He Qinghong brought them a sense of oppression and crisis.
Until now, Zhou Liao had not returned.
And a new question appeared on Xin Hexue’s identity card.
[Please listen to the third question: Who is the executioner wearing a sheep’s skin hiding among the flock? (5 points)]
He Qinghong stopped walking. He turned his head to look at Xin Hexue, his pupils pitch black. “You said, what sounds?”
The entryway corridor was somewhat narrow, and Xin Hexue shifted his body slightly to the side. “I often hear the sound of marbles in the cabinet, and the sound of water…”
“Especially after night falls.”
He Qinghong: “The concrete and steel materials in the wall expand and contract with heat. The wooden cabinet might also release internal stress due to humidity changes and long-term force.”
He Qinghong: “That is the marble sound you hear.”
Seeing the other party showed a tendency to leave, Xin Hexue stepped forward and pressed, “Then what about the sounds of water?”
“…” He Qinghong paused, looking down at the hand holding his sleeve; the fingers were white, slender, and thin. “Please maintain some distance… Madam.”
Xin Hexue slowly withdrew his hand and clasped them together. “Sorry… but I am really troubled.”
His crow-feather-like eyelashes fluttered slightly, and his interlocked fingers unconsciously rubbed against each other; he indeed looked uneasy.
He Qinghong was aware of his own mysophobia. He originally thought he would feel repulsed by the other party’s overstepping action just now.
But the expected physiological nausea didn’t seem to rise in his chest.
Perhaps it was because the other party’s hands were well-manicured, with neat, rounded nail shapes, and the form of the fingers was particularly beautiful. In other words, He Qinghong thought these hands were very suitable for killing people, or handling corpses.
From an aesthetic perspective, these hands were also very suitable for being preserved in formalin for collection.
He Qinghong withdrew his gaze. “As for the sounds of water, would you mind if I look around?”
Xin Hexue shook his head. “Please go ahead. Mr. He, you can call me by my name.”
He Qinghong seemed not to hear the latter sentence. He pushed open the frosted glass door of the shower room by himself, looked around the room, and finally fixed his gaze ahead.
“It’s this.”
He twisted the faucet and checked the situation. “This won’t tighten properly, it’s leaking.”
He then turned to look at Xin Hexue and asked, “Do you have any hardware tools?”
…….
Most people who settled in Nanwan Walled City found work and established themselves here after making it their home; they wouldn’t go outside again, especially those who were originally illegal immigrants who came to Beidao through stowing away.
To meet the life and production needs of nearly forty thousand people, everything from restaurants to textile workshops could be found here. Hardware stores could be encountered on every street corner and alley.
Xin Hexue walked back with the tools.
Typhoon Rodney had passed through overnight, still leaving its traces here.
The strong wind had blown the mess of electrical wires crisscrossing above the narrow alleys into even more disordered, spider-web-like tangles. Xin Hexue walked up the stairs of Ju’an Building. The wall opposite the railing was mottled with moisture, causing the numerous red-background, black-character advertisements pasted above to lose their stickiness one by one and slide to the ground.
A rustling sound always followed like a shadow.
Xin Hexue steadied his steps. Just before the stair landing, he suddenly turned his head quickly to look.
There was nothing.
A gust of wind swept away several advertisements in the empty stairwell entrance.
“Drip.”
Xin Hexue looked up, searching for the source of the sound; it was the dripping from the first-floor corridor eaves.
‘An auditory hallucination?’
He frowned and continued walking upstairs.
As his figure disappeared around the corner, a puddle of black, living creature slowly squirmed down from a blind spot under the eaves. Mucus dripped from its curled mouthparts onto the advertisement paper.
It rapidly corroded and turned into water.
……
The first day after the typhoon passed also happened to be the Qingming Festival.
Most people in the Walled city could not return home to worship their ancestors; their roots were not here. They could only burn incense at their doorsteps to express their gratitude to their ancestors.
When Xin Hexue went upstairs, he smelled the strong scent of burning incense. White smoke from burning stick incense lingered above the stairwell, and he couldn’t help but cover his nose and mouth.
The thick white smoke was simply like public opinion after a disaster.
If this weren’t the Walled City, but some other modern building, the smoke alarm would probably have been triggered long ago.
Xin Hexue couldn’t help but cough twice, fanning the thick smoke in front of him with his hand.
The apartment he rented with Zhou Liao was at the end of the fifth-floor corridor, requiring him to pass by several households.
Every household had a burning brazier placed at their doorway, inside which paper money for ancestors and relatives was burning, mostly yellow straw paper. Red candles were inserted on both sides of the incense burner, and the accumulated dripped candle wax indicated they had been burning for quite a long time.
These people placed their incense burners and braziers out into the hallway, yet each door was tightly closed.
It was so quiet that the entire corridor had only the sound of his footsteps.
Tap, tap, tap………
Xin Hexue’s right eyelid twitched for a moment. He walked to the second-to-last room at the end, which had a vermilion painted door.
Wrong, very wrong.
The neighbor’s door was painted with green paint.
Due to the heavy smoke, he had to keep his eyelids drooped while walking over. Now, as he lifted his gaze to look at the room number, the incense smoke immediately made Xin Hexue’s eyes feel sore and burning, and tears welled up in his eyes.
The numbers on the doorplate read “410”.
‘Wrong floor?’
The moment Xin Hexue looked up at the doorplate, the red-painted door of room 411 opposite opened automatically without any wind.
A woman’s voice came from inside, “Xi Mei! Aren’t you going quickly to burn paper money for your great-grandpa and great-grandma? Say more nice words, ask their spirits in heaven to bless our Xi Mei to grow up quickly and tall, to progress in her studies…”
A childish voice said something unclear, and the woman’s tone suddenly raised, becoming sharp like a needle, “Mom is talking nicely to you and you won’t listen, is that it?! If it weren’t for dragging you, a cheap skeleton, around, I would have been living well who knows where long ago. Going to find Mingzhu again? Play, play, play, all you know all day is play, your heart has gone wild from playing!”
Xin Hexue tilted his head slightly. From within that dark, unseeable room, came several sounds of a rattan cane striking flesh.
The little girl’s voice was as thin and weak as her name, Xi Mei, crying out, “Mingzhu’s mother never hits her!”
The woman became hysterical, “Then go recognize that bitch as your mother! Get out, go quickly! Never come back!”
Intermittent sobbing cries continued. Soon, a small child was pushed out of the dark room.
She was still holding a basin filled with incense ashes in his arms, and her tears fell continuously into the pile of ashes.
Xi Mei, who lived in room 411, seemed to have just noticed the stranger standing in the corridor outside the door, and timidly raised her head.
Her dark brown eyes were large and alert, and tears streamed down profusely, soaking the faint circle of white fur around her eyes. Oval-shaped ears stood erect on top of her head, and the thin lips, evolved for nibbling tender leaves, moved nimbly, “… Big sister? Are you lost?”
This was a little girl with the head of a deer.
The unrealistic reality made Xin Hexue dazed for a moment, and he instinctively took two steps back.
But his back suddenly bumped into a solid sensation, and his heel also hit something.
“Aren’t you watching where you’re going? You stepped on me.”
A cold, questioning voice sounded.
“Sorry.”
Xin Hexue turned around, shifted his steps, and upon seeing it was a living person, his tense nerves relaxed a little.
Opposite him was a young, flamboyant face, and he was tall and long legged.
A lock of flame-like red was dyed amongst his black hair, and a silver bone stud was pierced in his left ear.
He looked like a delinquent high school student loitering on the streets of Beidao.
Before Xin Hexue could say anything, the boy said directly, “Come with me.”
The little girl with a human body and deer head was still crying and sobbing in front of room 411.
Only after entering the stairwell did the boy turn around and say to Xin Hexue, “Did you see it?”
Xin Hexue: “You mean just now…”
The boy seemed irritable. He fiddled with the strands of hair near his ear, just enough to cover his flushed earlobe, “Yeah, that little girl has a deer head. I asked other people, others can’t see it, and they scolded me for having mental problems.”
His words were direct, and he spread his hands out towards Xin Hexue, “Show me your identity card.”
He directly revealed his player identity.
Xin Hexue subconsciously tightened his grip on the identity card in his side pocket, glanced at the other person, and was about to leave.
But the path ahead was suddenly blocked by a strong arm.
“Why are you running?”
The boy pressed his palm against the wall, his tall young body forming a cramped corner space with the wall.
Just enough to trap Xin Hexue inside, without much room to turn around.
“I’m not going to steal your identity card; it’s bound to the individual player.” The young boy’s brows were furrowed, “You don’t even know this? Didn’t your incompetent agent K tell you?”
The other party seemed to know quite a lot.
Xin Hexue asked calmly, “Who are you?”
K had told him some things about the guests in this round of the game, but Xin Hexue hadn’t seen their photos.
Hearing his question, the boy, contrary to his previous forceful attitude, became inexplicably tongue-tied and flustered, “Ah……You’re starting to be curious about me? Uh, well, my name is Yu Xingzhou, there’s no harm in getting to know each other, right?”
‘Yu Xingzhou?’
Xin Hexue remembered the information about him.
Among the guests in this round, some were ordinary people, some were actors or artists like Xin Hexue. Probably worried they would be eliminated too quickly and the survival rate would look bad, the program group also invited several high-level player anchors of the game “Who Can Survive”.
Although the trial level showed the remaining survivor count was 10.
The initial number of guests was far more than this. K, probably based on the reduction in participants during the trial level, did not introduce all the guests on the initial list to Xin Hexue one by one, but mentioned a few names.
Among them was Yu Xingzhou, a popular anchor of the game “Who Can Survive”, known as the “Pub Star King”. He was a lone wolf player who didn’t form teams to clear dungeons.
K had particularly reminded Xin Hexue, saying this person’s character was bad, and that he should stay away from him.
Xin Hexue raised his eyes and scanned him once.
He did look quite “unproper”.
Yu Xingzhou took out his own identity card, “Exchange information? Can you show me yours now?”
Contrary to Xin Hexue’s expectations, unlike the previous situation where questions were solved sequentially, even though the third question hadn’t been answered yet, the stem for the fourth question had already appeared. It seemed that as the game progressed, one could skip questions and answer them out of order.
[Fourth question: Who is the most disobedient child in Flowers Kindergarten? (5 points)]
Yu Xingzhou raised an eyebrow and said, “Our questions are the same.”
[What level is he, to be doing the same set of questions as Little Snow Cat? He should be happy secretly.]
[Who is this guy? Yu Xingzhou? He sounds familiar.]
[I remember now. Didn’t I delete this guy’s main and small accounts? So annoying. He publicly said during a live stream interaction with the comments that current films and TV series are all poisoning minds and bodies, and criticized all three of Snow Cat’s previous works.]
[This guy also reposted a comment from Snow Cat’s black fan… If I remember correctly, the black fan’s original comment was implying that Snow Cat has no masculinity, looks like that, and you can’t even tell if he’s male or female……]
[I automatically take this as a compliment to the little cat’s androgynous beauty.]
[So then, what does this guy want to do now? Hunt down our little cat offline and cook him?]
[I knew something was wrong with the two sets of footsteps in the corridor just now; this guy was following our little Snow Cat.]
[Protect, protect, protect!]
Xin Hexue retrieved his identity card, “Is there anything else?”
Yu Xingzhou cleared his throat, “So, since it’s such a coincidence, do you want to team up with me?”
[?]
[?]
[Brother, are you for real?]
[Frontline news….This guy’s small account has been dug up.The latest reposted blog content, everyone please enjoy: When being slapped by a cat, first there’s the fluffy touch, then the silky smooth yet a little bouncy feeling of the paw pads. The cool, gentle sensation is imprinted on the skin according to the distribution of the small paw pads. It’s really very refreshing. *
This guy’s repost comment: meal replacement.]
[Brother, I want to ask you, what are you replacing?]
[So he’s a closeted Cat Caretaker + nisu…]
[Since it’s like this, we have no choice but to protect the little cat! ]
** “Cat Caretaker” is the fandom name. “Nisu” refers to fans who fantasize about their idols by “sex-changing” them…for example imagining a male idol as a female. But in this context, the person imagines a cat with human characteristics.
