“Oh, new companions! Sorry about that just now. I thought you were bad guys.”
Qiu Chen enthusiastically held out both hands, apparently intending to grab Nan Junyi and Lin Xue. Nan Junyi avoided him without leaving any obvious trace of the movement.
Lin Xue caught his intention and voluntarily extended both hands instead, joking with a smile, “He doesn’t like physical contact much. You can touch my hand. It’s warm, and if that’s not enough, I have a pulse. As for listening to my heartbeat… men and women should keep an appropriate distance, so that part’s inconvenient.”
“No need for that.” Realizing his thoughts had been seen through, Qiu Chen smiled awkwardly. He did not stand on ceremony, taking Lin Xue’s hand and checking her pulse before finally confirming it with excitement and turning toward the ponytailed girl. “She’s warm! Fang Luyao, come feel! She really is alive!”
Fang Luyao stared at him in disbelief, the stool in her hands looking ready to swing straight at Qiu Chen. “…Are you a fucking idiot?”
“Why are you swearing at me?” Qiu Chen snapped.
Fang Luyao looked at him in despair. “If you already know she’s alive, why are you still holding her hand?”
Only then did Qiu Chen realize what he was doing and release Lin Xue as though shocked by electricity. His face flushed bright red, and he began stumbling over his words. “Um… sorry. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. I just wanted to make sure. You know, we’re in the middle of nowhere and I don’t know the place, so I have to be careful. Don’t take it the wrong way. Agh… what am I even saying?”
He clutched his head and yelled.
Lin Xue found it rather funny and shook her head. “It’s fine. I understand. I’ve run into something similar before, or I wouldn’t have cooperated so readily.”
Something similar before?
Fang Luyao keenly caught the phrasing but did not immediately press the point. Instead, she invited the two of them to sit by the fire first. “You’re both wet from the rain too. Come warm yourselves up.”
Everyone settled around the fire again. Someone tossed their makeshift weapon into the flames. Most of those weapons were simply rotten pieces of wooden furniture they had broken apart. They could barely hurt anyone and had really been intended as firewood in the first place.
The arrival of new companions clearly eased much of the newcomers’ tension, with one exception: a short-haired woman whose arms appeared tattooed. From beginning to end, she sat in a corner with her arms wrapped around herself, silent and almost completely cut off from the outside world. Aside from looking over in terror with everyone else at the start, she scarcely reacted to anything.
But were those really tattoos?
Nan Junyi narrowed his eyes.
After brief introductions, Fang Luyao could no longer contain herself. “Excuse me, what did you mean just now? You said you’ve experienced something like this before. Is this not your first time?”
The others, who had been snapping apart furniture for more firewood, all turned to look.
“This is my third time,” Lin Xue answered.
Everyone instinctively looked toward Nan Junyi. He had lowered his eyes and gave no reaction, plainly uninterested in supplying an answer. No one dared question him directly, so they quietly looked away and turned hopeful eyes toward Lin Xue, who seemed easier to talk to.
Lin Xue gave a wry smile. “I don’t know exactly which time this is for him either, but it should be around the same as me.”
“Uh.” Qiu Chen weakly raised a hand. “I want to ask… what does ‘third time’ mean? And what is this place?”
Nan Junyi finally spoke, his gaze passing over everyone. “Prism Sanatorium.”
He noticed that a young man in a floral shirt changed expression upon hearing the name. The other man said nothing, merely lowering his head again.
He reacted to the place name. Did he find an invitation?
Nan Junyi considered it silently.
Qiu Chen seemed to realize something vaguely and gave a cautious, strained laugh. “Prism Sanatorium? Where the hell have I ended up? What province is this in? What place? How do we get out?”
“There’s a bloody handprint outside,” Nan Junyi said instead of answering. “Whose is it?”
Everyone instinctively looked deeper into the room, their gazes settling on the short-haired woman.
Intimidated by Nan Junyi’s coldness, Fang Luyao forced down her own panic and confusion and asked carefully, “One of us got hurt by accident. Is something wrong?”
“Hold out your arms.” Nan Junyi’s tone was flat. “Those marks aren’t tattoos, are they?”
Realizing he was speaking to her, the short-haired woman finally reacted. Struggling to suppress her sobs, she blankly held out both hands. “No. I don’t have tattoos. I don’t have any body art. This thing just appeared. Everything here is… everything is inexplicable. And someone died. He died right in front of me…”
As she spoke, she broke down sobbing again. The crying that had badly frightened Nan Junyi and Lin Xue earlier had evidently come from her.
Both of the short-haired woman’s arms were wrapped in scraps of cloth, probably torn from someone’s clothing. Since there was nothing to secure them with, whoever had bandaged her had cleverly wound the cloth around several times and fastened the buttons through buttonholes to keep it from slipping. On the exposed skin, black fissure-like markings resembling tattoos could still be seen stretching upward.
There really was blood on her palms. It had already dried.
Fang Luyao explained, “When we came in, Jiang Ning nearly fell and caught herself on the front desk.”
Lin Xue came over and took both Jiang Ning’s hands. With a grave expression, she pushed the woman’s short sleeves upward. The black fissures extended all the way to near her shoulders. Fortunately, they had not spread toward her neck.
“Do any of you have these black markings?” Lin Xue asked the others seriously.
They shook their heads in unison. A few even instinctively rolled up sleeves or trouser legs to prove it. “We don’t.”
Qiu Chen craned his neck toward them. “What’s wrong?”
Lin Xue and Nan Junyi both frowned, momentarily uncertain where to begin. In the end, Qiu Chen read the room, clapped his hands, and said, “Hey, asking questions back and forth like this is too much trouble. You have things you want to know, and we have things we want to ask. How about this: I’ll tell you what happened to us first, and then you tell us what happened to you, or explain what’s going on. It’ll be faster that way. Sound good?”
“Fine,” Lin Xue said.
Qiu Chen immediately relaxed. “Basically, there were seven of us at first. Fang Luyao and I are the only ones who knew each other because we’re in the same university club. Just our luck, we were out buying supplies when fog suddenly rolled in, and then we ended up here. Everyone else had it even worse. None of them knew one another. They were just on the road somewhere, fog appeared, and suddenly they were here too.”
At this point, Qiu Chen could not resist asking, “Hey, what about you two? Did you get here the same way? You’ve already been through this several times. Don’t tell me we have to come back here again later?”
Fang Luyao clicked her tongue. “Finish your story before asking questions.”
“Fine. Anyway, none of us had any idea what was happening, and this creepy place was seriously terrifying. Our phones had no signal either, so while there was still daylight we decided to follow the road downhill and hopefully flag down a car.” Qiu Chen rubbed his nose. “Jiang Ning and another guy were track athletes from different schools. They didn’t know each other, but they happened to be competing in the same meet today, so the two of them offered to scout ahead.”
“And then… uh…” Qiu Chen looked at Jiang Ning. “Jiang Ning, you tell this part.”
Jiang Ning bit her lip. Apparently remembering something unimaginably horrifying, she began trembling again. “He… he ran faster than I did. I was watching him and then suddenly… I don’t know what happened. He just suddenly… right in front of me… I don’t know how to describe it. All I could see was blood. He exploded right in front of me… there was blood everywhere. I was terrified and I threw up. Then I realized my arms were bleeding too, and… and I couldn’t even feel any pain. After that… after that I ran back as fast as I could.”
The memory seemed to bring the scene back before her eyes, and she began dry-heaving again.
“That’s pretty much it.” Qiu Chen had not seen the death himself, so the impact on him was less severe. Once the initial shock of hearing about it passed, he quickly returned to normal. He tugged down his jacket, exposing half his stomach and a shirt obviously missing a huge piece of fabric, then tossed his hair with considerable flair. “Kindhearted me made a little sacrifice and donated my clothes so Jiang Ning could bandage her wounds.”
A cold draft blew through the room. Qiu Chen shivered and hurriedly zipped his jacket back up. “We hadn’t planned to come inside. But the rain outside wouldn’t stop, some of us weren’t wearing much, and everyone had already gotten soaked. Getting sick would’ve made things even worse, so we finally came in. We were in the middle of getting the fire going when we heard your footsteps. You know how deserted this godforsaken place is. We thought we’d run into ghosts, and then… well, you know what happened after that.”
After all that, it had turned out to be one enormous misunderstanding. They had taken the newcomers for ghosts, while the newcomers had taken them for ghosts too.