The reborn personality

Heavy midnight rain swept into the alley, where a corpse leaned silently against a wall.

The wind blew its long hair aside, exposing a face as thin as paper, its head lolling helplessly.

Something seemed to have snapped its neck through brute force, leaving it twisted at a grotesque angle.

But as a raindrop entered its wide-open eyes, the broken bones cracked, and the unfocused pupils began to draw together.

Thought began to reorganize and recover.

At the same time, two agitated voices sounded inside his head.

"Who am I?"

"You're Ji Li."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Ji Li too.

We're all Ji Li! We're all Ji Li! We're all Ji Li!"

The chaotic voices churned through his mind. Under their relentless provocation, the corpse suddenly tensed, then sprang to its feet, scattering rainwater.

"Whew!"

Ji Li had died, then come back to life.

"I failed..."

He exhaled a cloud of white vapor and rubbed his aching neck. His gray, clouded eyes surveyed the rain-soaked world, washing away the confusion of his resurrection.

After a long while, he abruptly stepped forward and roared at the voices inside his head, "Shut up!"

The world inside his head fell silent, and so did Ji Li.

Leaving the filthy alley for the glittering city, he walked faster and faster toward a certain destination. Neon lights stretched his silhouette ever longer.

For a fleeting moment, there were three shadows on the ground.

Shanming City, across the moat.

Ji Li silently studied the public restroom before him, seemingly lost in thought. After a moment, he reached out and pushed open its small door.

In an instant, the world changed.

Beyond the door was not a restroom, but a lavishly decorated hotel lobby.

Under the brilliant lights, a golden glow illuminated Ji Li's deathly pale face, while a gentle warm breeze quickly dried his soaked clothes.

He silently gazed at the seventeen black-and-white memorial portraits hanging in the center of the golden lobby, utterly at odds with their surroundings.

"Congratulations to Mr. Ji Li, Acting Manager of Tianhai Hotel's Shop No. 7, on your successful return.

Although you did not complete the reception mission, you may still choose to rest and enjoy a cup of warm tea to ward off the chill of the autumn rain..."

Ji Li waved a hand, cutting off the sweet female voice over the speakers, and headed toward the stairs on the left with a sour expression.

"That thing just snapped my neck, and it still hurts! Can we find someone to give me a massage?"

"Main Personality? Main Personality? Are you still there?"

The earlier voice inside Ji Li's head began chattering again. He frowned and ignored it.

Since waking here six months ago with all his memories gone, he had already died twice.

Although he could be "resurrected" completely unharmed each time, the price was another "personality" appearing inside his head.

By now, counting the main personality, his soul had been divided into three parts.

After losing his memories, he could remember nothing. Even the name "Ji Li" had been the only word left in his mind when he woke.

Thus, he was certain his name was Ji Li, but not whether he was a normal human being.

"Tsk!"

Ji Li's thoughts were interrupted as a vast quantity of crimson blood suddenly welled up from the carpet beneath his feet, thick enough to pool together.

"205! 205! Could you slit your wrists in the bathtub next time? Your blood's seeping out through the door!"

At his words, the blood on the carpet immediately began to recede, withdrawing from the corridor through the gap beneath the door.

Ji Li had barely turned his head when he heard the repeated bouncing of a glass marble from deep within the corridor.

He narrowed his eyes and looked closely. In the passage outside Room 210, a glass marble was bouncing up and down with no one touching it.

"210! Get back in your room!"

A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the hotel's second floor.

It shone on Ji Li's profoundly grim face and briefly revealed a headless figure beside the door to Room 210.

After inspecting all ten rooms, Ji Li finally returned to his own room on the Third Floor.

He took off his damp coat and slumped weakly into a chair. The glowing computer screen illuminated his pale face.

Tianhai Hotel was an eerie hotel hidden beneath the mundane world.

Half a month earlier, Ji Li had awakened here after losing everything.

The hotel had been deserted then. The instant he woke, a female voice sounded over its speakers.

"Welcome, Mr. Ji Li, to the Tianhai Hotel Seventh Branch, where you will serve as Acting Manager.

You have two duties:

Bring new residents to the hotel and supervise them to prevent their escape.

Reception missions currently apply to you alone.

When a mission becomes available, its details will be sent to the hotel's official email account. Please register and log in within five minutes so that you can check future messages.

For resident supervision, once residents have checked in, hotel staff need only conduct nightly patrols to prevent them from escaping.

Shop No. 7 is currently at the lowest tier, 'ordinary hotel.' To advance to 'one-star hotel,' you must bring in three residents.

The hotel tiers are: ordinary, one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star, and five-star.

Hotel advancement is based on the number of residents brought in.

Each new tier will grant the staff of the relevant branch corresponding 'benefit rules.'

Upon reaching the 'five-star hotel' tier, all employees of that branch will leave the Heavenly Sea and regain their freedom.

Please do your utmost to complete missions and advance your hotel."

Those few brief statements were the only voice Ji Li heard after awakening.

At the same time, he saw a brand-new phone lying on the floor at his feet. Its screen was still lit, displaying a registration and login page.

No normal person would obey orders from this inexplicable hotel.

Ji Li was no exception, and so he discovered his ability to return from the dead for the first time.

He chose to ignore the phone and walked out through the hotel's main entrance.

The moment he opened the door, he found himself facing Shanming City's moat, while behind him stood an utterly plain public restroom.

The door remained open, and the hotel's opulent golden light still gleamed inside the restroom. Ji Li could not believe his eyes.

Yet this utterly bizarre sight represented a terror unlike anything Ji Li had ever encountered!

At the same time, the five-minute deadline the hotel's female voice had given him to register an email account expired.

The price of Ji Li's inaction was being engulfed in flames on the spot and reduced to ashes in an instant!

That was his first death, and the beginning of the Second Personality's rebirth.

With no choice, he returned to the hotel, picked up the phone, and registered, becoming Acting Manager of the Tianhai Hotel Seventh Branch.

Over the course of that day, Ji Li's life was completely overturned.

He had thought himself merely a pitiful man who had lost his memories. But after he died and was reborn, and the Second Personality revived within him,

he suddenly realized that he was not a normal human being!

The hotel's official explanation was sparse. It did not even tell him who the residents he was meant to receive were.

What truly made Ji Li understand his situation were the seventeen black-and-white memorial portraits on the lobby wall.

They depicted Tianhai Hotel's successive former managers, all of whom had died without exception.

Yet in the corner of each portrait, someone had written the hotel's unspoken rules in pen, including details of the reception missions that had killed them one after another!

Once he had absorbed all the rules, his understanding of the world was utterly shattered.

Where there was light in this world, there was darkness. Where there were humans, there were ghosts.

And humans could neither harm ghosts nor fight against them.

They could be considered humanity's natural predators.

Yet Tianhai Hotel's two duties forced humans to confront these ghosts!

"Reception missions" required them to travel to supernatural locations and bring ghosts back to stay at the hotel!

"Daily supervision" meant patrolling each night to prevent the ghost residents staying in the hotel from escaping!

Not one of the hotel's past managers or employees had entered willingly. Like Ji Li, they had all been inexplicably dragged into the hotel and made staff members.

From then on, they were forced to carry out missions.

For both the living and ghosts, the hotel was an existence of the highest order.

None of its instructions could be refused. Disobedience meant instant death!

It was like a curse whose seed had been planted the moment they entered the hotel.

According to the inscriptions along the edges of the portraits, people had tried to flee, but all had met gruesome deaths.

Just as when Ji Li had failed to obey the order to log into the email account, an inexplicable fire had instantly burned them to nothing.

But none possessed Ji Li's strange, mysterious physical ability to start over.

Still, although the reception missions that had nearly wiped out the seventh branch were the harder of its two duties,

some outstanding managers had survived for quite some time, completing several missions and bringing back ghosts.

And they had left behind guidance on how to complete those missions.

"Ghosts can kill, but they are still bound by restrictions and rules."

Ji Li committed that sentence to memory. After later experiencing reception missions himself, he reached conclusions of his own.

Ghosts had to follow specific rules when killing. As long as those rules were discovered and overcome,

they could no longer attack the living. This also counted as a successful capture, and bringing them back to the hotel would complete the mission.

Even so, the death rate remained extraordinarily high.

Including the mission he had just failed, he had undertaken three reception missions and died once more.

The two ghosts in "205" and "210" were his only achievements over the past half month.

As for the rule that he could only escape the Heavenly Sea after reaching the "five-star hotel" tier, Ji Li still could not imagine it.

According to the inscriptions on the portraits, the highest tier Shop No. 7 had ever reached was two-star, after bringing in six ghosts.

But immediately after becoming a two-star hotel, its entire staff had been wiped out.

Ji Li had speculated that perhaps each time the hotel reached a new tier, the ghosts they faced would become more terrifying!

So terrifying that even the added "benefits" would not allow them to fight back!

This made Ji Li afraid even to contemplate whether reaching five-star status by bringing in eighteen ghosts was actually possible!

Ding-dong!

The computer screen lit up brightly, and a new email notification appeared in the lower-right corner.

Ji Li rubbed his neck miserably, sighed, and clicked it open.

Recipient: Ji Li, Acting Manager of Tianhai Hotel's Shop No. 7.

Please proceed to Beggars' Alley in this city's western district at midnight on October 21, 2015. Find a means of survival within three hours and bring the new resident back to the hotel.

This is a star promotion mission. Upon completion, Shop No. 7 will advance to a one-star hotel.

The benefit for this hotel tier is: staff recruitment.

Sender: Heavenly Sea.

Before Ji Li could speak, the Second Personality inside his head started ranting.

"What the hell does the hotel think it is? It keeps sending me emails, telling me to fetch some goddamn ghost resident! How am I supposed to do that?"

"What's a ghost resident...?" the newly formed Third Personality asked quietly.

"A ghost is a ghost! A ghost that kills people!"

Their bickering made Ji Li's head throb. He slammed his hand on the desk. "Both of you, shut up!"

He tilted his head back and sighed. In fact, the mission he had just failed had already been a promotion mission.

It seemed the Heavenly Sea's rules had changed because of his peculiar inability to die.

Still, the promotion "benefit" of staff recruitment pleased him greatly.

As he saw it, the reason he had failed last time was that he had been fighting alone all along.

With others to help him, they could at least share the risk of being attacked by a ghost!

A long while later, Ji Li was still staring at the computer, its screen long since dark. With a grim expression, he raised his arm.

A black dashed line had appeared midway along his fair-skinned arm, as though foreshadowing some kind of division.

Ji Li slowly closed his eyes. He could feel his vitality weakening with every resurrection. His final death was no longer far away.

He struggled desperately onward only because he wanted to uncover the truth.

What exactly were the memories he had lost?

Who had granted him the power to return from the dead?

Why had he awakened inside Tianhai Hotel?

Behind all of this, an immense, unseen hand was clearly looming over him.

And this conspiracy, so obviously involving supernatural forces, inevitably led his thoughts to Tianhai Hotel, which possessed similarly terrifying powers!

Ji Li was different from every manager who had come before him.

He did not live merely for the sake of living...