When Wenren Sheng woke again, he found himself suddenly seated behind a long table.
There were ten seats, arranged symmetrically along both sides of the long table. A numbered placard, from 1 to 10, sat on the tabletop before each seat.
At the narrow end of the table to his right was another seat, with a placard bearing the number "0" on the tabletop before it.
Wenren Sheng was seated at No. 3.
After thinking it over, Wenren Sheng decided this numbering arrangement had to be the work of some lousy programmer. Only they habitually started counting from zero.
Was this a meeting?
As he thought that, he noticed himself.
A black-and-white striped tracksuit, Asian skin—wasn't this the man who had jumped to his death earlier? His consciousness seemed to have attached itself to this man.
Right. That bastard Little Illusion had said she wanted to see what the man had really been thinking. Could this be related to her?
As he pondered, different people began appearing in the other seats one after another.
There were White people, Black people, Asians, men, and women...
Their shared trait was the same: bewildered eyes darting around in every direction.
"I hanged myself, didn't I? Why am I not dead? Is this hell?" A middle-aged woman in a long dress, seated at No. 8, spoke as she tried to stand.
Yet some force seemed to bind her to the chair.
The others also began shouting, "Where is this? Where am I? Who am I now? Didn't I die?"
They too tried to leave their seats, but could not rise. Only their upper bodies, hands, mouths, torsos, and heads could move.
Wenren Sheng's eyes shifted slightly. In an instant, he understood where these people had come from—all of them were suicides, though they had