Stepping into the Finale

I had miscalculated.

The junk food and ice cream hadn't wrecked Maza's stomach. They had wrecked mine instead, and I had diarrhea that very night.

Perhaps sleeping on the sofa without properly covering myself had also let my stomach get chilled. Maza slept soundly through the entire night, while I was the one who had to get up and run to the bathroom. When I looked back and saw her innocent sleeping face, completely unaffected, I felt like I had lifted a rock only to drop it on my own foot.

That wasn't the only place I had miscalculated. While I was beneath the cave, I had wondered whether time flowed at different speeds in the real world and the otherworld. After returning to the real world, I should have been able to use my phone to confirm the time difference. But so many things had happened one after another that, by the time I finally remembered the question, my phone seemed to have automatically corrected its displayed time after connecting to the network.

I could tell Zhu Shi about what had happened with the cave, but I couldn't tell Maza. As for the black jade I had picked up beneath the cave, I had originally considered giving it to Maza for identification. Unlike me, Maza should have possessed knowledge of the strange and bizarre. Perhaps she could identify it.

But then I thought better of it. If she couldn't identify it, that would be fine. But if she actually determined that the black jade was a strange object, it might damage the relationship between us. In the end, I had no choice but to set it aside for the time being.

The next morning, I bought breakfast downstairs. After I returned, I called Maza up from bed. When she realized that she was sleeping on the bedroom bed, she looked at me in utter bewilderment again, as if she still couldn't accept my "kindness" toward her.

Naturally, I wasn't about to explain my sinister intentions. I merely offered a statement that conformed to common sense: "How could I let a delicate girl like you sleep on the sofa while I slept soundly in the bed?"

She sat on the edge of the bed and listened to me. Then she shifted uncomfortably and said unhappily, "Why are you saying things like that again... The Doomsday era doesn't distinguish between men and women, old and young. Besides, I'm not a delicate girl."

"But this isn't the Doomsday era, and I wasn't born in the Doomsday era." I spoke with a perfectly serious expression. "Besides, in my eyes, you are a delicate girl."

"I am not delicate."

"Who was it that kept passing out and falling over yesterday?"

"...Me." She answered reluctantly.

"Good answer." I handed her the breakfast from the plastic bag. "This is your reward."

She immediately forgot all her unhappiness and looked at the breakfast expectantly.

Breakfast was only the opening act. I hadn't forgotten that I had promised to make her something tastier yesterday. By evening, I would cook her a Sichuan feast packed with numbing spice, chili, great fish, and rich meat—a powerful assault meant to deliver a painful blow to her fragile digestive system.

This time, I absolutely wouldn't lift a rock only to drop it on my own foot—probably.

Still, it really wasn't sustainable to keep preventing her from slipping away after I fell asleep by having her sleep in the bed while I slept on the sofa. I had actually thought of a new method. One possibility was to make some modifications to "Firefly."

"Firefly" was my dispersed consciousness, and in a sense, also my clone. Although it couldn't think independently like my main body—that is, me—it should still possess a certain degree of adaptability.

For example, I could try inputting some "preset commands" into "Firefly," allowing it to respond accordingly whenever it observed certain changes in its surroundings. Taking Maza as an example, if Maza made an attempt to leave me, "Firefly," upon observing this change, would send an alert along its mental connection with me and wake me from my sleep.

I was still in the practice and testing stage. In theory, it should be possible, but its practical effectiveness would have to wait for further testing.

After breakfast, I told Maza that I still had to go out.

"Where?" she asked habitually, like a wife on guard against her husband's infidelity.

It wasn't entirely self-indulgent of me to make that comparison. Living with a beautiful member of the opposite sex, brushing your teeth, washing up, and eating together, then having one of you announce after breakfast that you were going out while the other immediately became alert—in such a suggestive situation, most people would probably make the same association.

Though the alert one was five or six years younger than me, and I had only formally met her the day before.

Still, I answered without changing expression, like a husband accustomed to cheating: "School."

"School... School?" She repeated it as if it were an awkward phrase, then suddenly understood. "Right. There are schools in this era."

There were no schools in the Doomsday era. That was only natural.

I lied to her again. I wasn't going to school later, but to the Fifteenth Floor room.

This time, it wasn't to explore the cave. I wanted to see how Zhu Shi planned to deal with the ritual formation. Of course, part of me also wanted to continue finding a way to establish contact with Luo Shan.

I had already resolved to distance myself from the interpersonal relationships of normal society, and that naturally included my dealings with Chang'an.

Zhu Shi was a Demon Hunter from the world of the strange and bizarre. She didn't belong to "normal society," and she also had the ability to protect herself. Maintaining a relationship with her wasn't as dangerous as maintaining one with Chang'an. However, she was a friend's younger sister, and if possible, I didn't want to drag her into dangers caused by me. Once I had officially established contact with Luo Shan, I would also need to distance myself from Zhu Shi.

At that thought, loneliness began to grow inside me.

If nothing unexpected happened, my connection with Chang'an—with this friend—was about to come to an end.

From childhood until now, only a handful of people had been willing to become my friends. At university, Chang'an had been the only one. Scene after scene of our journey from meeting to becoming close surfaced in my mind, then vanished one after another like candles blown out by the wind.

Actually, I should have done this even before meeting Maza. Even if I had never possessed any "jinxed constitution," as someone who pursued the strange and bizarre, I might bring calamity to the people around me. Casually associating with others was the irresponsible thing to do.

The experience beneath the cave had been a quest for me, but to the people around me, it was nothing but calamity.

Now was the perfect opportunity to kill my weak self. I was a villain who valued his own desires over friendship. If I truly believed that my friendship with Chang'an was more important than the door to the strange world that Maza had opened for me, I wouldn't have made that choice from the beginning.

After temporarily saying goodbye to Maza, I left "Firefly" behind to monitor things from the shadows, then headed toward the residential complex where the Fifteenth Floor room was located.

The battle between me and the Fallen Demon Hunter in that complex had certainly been caught on surveillance cameras, yet no one from any official faction had come knocking. I guessed that Zhu Shi and Luo Shan had already filed a report. Luo Shan's examination of the Fallen Demon Hunter's corpse last night seemed to have encountered some issue as well, and that was another thing I intended to ask about.

—This incident might not be over yet.

Zhu Shi had said that to me.

Although it was hard for me to believe that the Fallen Demon Hunter would rise from the dead, other unknown dangers might still be lurking in the shadows.

Could that danger spread to Maza through me as a bridge? I had considered that possibility. But unlike my attitude toward Chang'an and Zhu Shi, I had never regarded Maza as a weak girl who had been dragged into things. In my eyes, she was a mysterious figure who dragged everything around her into turmoil. I was also curious to see how she, who was always talking about the Doomsday and calamity, would react when faced with a truly strange object.

When I arrived at the Fifteenth Floor room, Zhu Shi had already gotten there first.

To my disappointment, she wasn't wearing last night's straw raincoat and bamboo hat. Instead, she wore a white women's shirt and a black skirt, with a large black guitar case on her back. She looked like a band girl who had slipped out of some rehearsal studio.

She must have just arrived as well. At that moment, she was walking around the ritual formation on the floor, while the wooden cover and the cave were in a vanished state. I hadn't encountered the agent she had mentioned last night, the one responsible for keeping watch. Most likely, he had left after she arrived. She was looking at the ritual formation as if considering where to begin erasing it.

The door wasn't closed, so I walked straight in. I couldn't close it even if I wanted to—the lock cylinder had melted when I destroyed it the night before. She heard the noise and raised her head warily. When she saw me, her expression relaxed first. Even so, she still looked utterly serious.

It seemed that she wasn't currently in her gentle "Junior Sister Zhu" mode, but in "Demon Hunter Zhu Shi" mode, where she addressed me by name. It was a little disappointing.

"Zhuang Cheng, why are you here?" she asked. "And did you destroy the door lock?"

"I did." I said, "I just came to take a look."

"Just to take a look? You don't want to enter the cave?" she asked suspiciously.

"I promised I wouldn't enter." I answered seriously.

She muttered under her breath, "How suspicious..."

"Speaking of which... why did the cave disappear?" I was more concerned about that now, so I took out my phone.

"You really do want to enter, don't you?" She was startled.

"No, no. I was just purely curious."

Based on my observations, the carpet rolled up to the side of the room was still in the same state as when I had just left last night. In other words, no one had covered the ritual formation with the carpet. The cave had disappeared on its own. To rule out the possibility that my memory was wrong, I even took out my phone and checked the photos I had taken last night.

With that, my deduction that "the cave's manifested state changes only after the ritual formation has been covered by the carpet" was disproven.

Of course, it was also possible that the cave itself followed a pattern of automatically disappearing after being manifested for a certain length of time, much like a phone automatically turning off its screen after remaining inactive for a while. That would also explain why the entrance and exit had disappeared automatically after I entered the cave last night.

Just then, footsteps sounded behind me, and another person entered the Fifteenth Floor room.