Friend 1

Chang'an had never been good at disguising himself, and as his friend, I considered myself fairly familiar with his personality.

There was an obstinate side to him—or perhaps an awkward one. If you directly asked him to do something, he might comply. But if you strictly forbade him from doing something, he might become rebellious and insist on doing exactly what he had been forbidden to do, making a huge show of it as if afraid no one would know.

So I knew perfectly well that if I suddenly distanced myself from him without saying anything, or directly told him here that we were no longer friends, he definitely would not accept it. More than that, he might even come harassing me every day. That was something I did not want to see. I did not want to pass the disaster of infecting Maza on to him as well.

I already had a concrete plan in mind to distance myself from Chang'an and all other normal human relationships. This distancing would not happen overnight, but gradually.

I had originally prepared what I was going to say, but the moment I saw Chang'an's face, I suddenly did not know how to say it. The speech I had painstakingly composed vanished without a trace.

All I could do was try to regain the state of mind I should have had.

Perhaps all of that was merely an excuse. I just wanted to talk a little more with my good friend during our final days together. Anything would do.

Chang'an and I sat together at the long table in the fried-chicken shop. Smiling, he tugged at his loosened collar and began telling me about the past two days. "I'd been staying at the military hospital the whole time. The food there is healthy, sure, but it's awful to eat. And there was no one to talk to. My mom can't talk either."

I gave a dry reply. "How is your aunt doing now?"

"Same as ever. Lying in bed without responding," he said.

Chang'an and Zhu Shi's mother was in a vegetative state. According to Chang'an, she had suddenly fallen into a mysterious coma one day and never regained consciousness. Although all her physical examination results appeared healthy, she simply would not wake up. If not for her continuing biological activity, she could essentially already be considered a corpse.

Naturally, Chang'an could not make head or tail of it, but Zhu Shi surely understood. And now, I did as well.

It was Soul Deprivation Syndrome.

Its source of transmission was unknown, its method of transmission unknown, and its treatment unknown... It was not even an illness that fit the normal medical definition. It was closer to a curse caused by something supernatural. Those afflicted had lost their souls. It was a supernatural phenomenon spreading throughout the world.

Maza was the only person in the entire world to have awakened, which was the fundamental reason Luoshan had searched the whole country to find her.

If Maza truly was a time traveler from the apocalypse, then logically, her awakening had nothing to do with Soul Deprivation Syndrome. Studying her would yield no answers, much less help Chang'an's mother.

But I had other thoughts about it. Why had she happened to transmigrate into the body of a Soul Deprivation Syndrome patient—and why had that patient's body been nearly identical to her original one? Was her transmigration really unrelated to Soul Deprivation Syndrome?

From my perspective, if she refused to remain in contact with me, I could only imprison her and hide her somewhere no one could reach. Conversely, as long as I could ensure that we remained connected and she was willing, then even if Luoshan wanted to use her to search for a cure to Soul Deprivation Syndrome, it would not be impossible. That was certainly something Chang'an would be happy to see.

But there was a crucial issue here. Certain forces within Luoshan had shown disregard for Maza's basic rights while searching for her, and I could vaguely smell something underhanded about it. I was hardly in a position to accuse them of disregarding other people's basic rights, but that did not prevent me from remaining wary of anyone who behaved similarly.

Chang'an continued complaining. "My sister has it easy. She used to visit Mom all the time, but as soon as I went, she vanished instead, leaving me to face everything alone. Don't you think that's strange?"

I knew Zhu Shi had been busy with the Fallen Demon Hunter incident at the time. Since I could not tell Chang'an about that, I gave a bland reply. "Maybe your behavior is usually so terrible that she hates you."

He paid no attention to that and merely sighed. "When she was little, she was such a cute girl who loved music. She even liked playing with a guitar. Look, she still carries a guitar case around everywhere. She's probably playing in a band somewhere. But ever since she changed her name a few years ago, she's been inexplicably cold toward me..."

What Zhu Shi carried in her guitar case now might not be a guitar at all. It was probably the sharp sword she had drawn in front of me last time.

As I thought this, I caught the key information in Chang'an's words. "Changed her name?"

Chang'an seemed to have mentioned something similar to me before. At the time, however, I had not known Zhu Shi's true identity and had been only mildly interested in her, so I had let the subject slip by.

"Yes. She's called 'Zhu Shi' now, right? Don't you think that name sounds unlike a girl's name?" Chang'an asked in return.

"Zhu Shi does sound fairly gender-neutral, but giving a girl a gender-neutral name isn't all that strange."

"I'm telling you, the 'Shi' isn't the 'shi' meaning 'to pick up.' It's the 'Shi' used for the formal numeral ten." Chang'an gave me the answer from an unexpected angle. "The Zhu family has a rather strange tradition. For some reason, they always give their descendants numerical names. For example, my mom's name is Zhu Jiu. Before her, there were Zhu Ba, Zhu Qi, Zhu Lu..."

That was indeed a rather mysterious tradition.

The Zhu family was a hidden local tycoon family, and I had never connected them with anything supernatural.

When I had previously seen Zhu Shi hiding the fact that she was a Demon Hunter from Chang'an, I had assumed she was a lone Demon Hunter whose family knew nothing about it. But now, could it be that the Zhu family itself held certain secrets, secrets Chang'an simply did not know?

"What if there are other brothers and sisters?" I asked.

"Usually, all the children are first given names that aren't numbers. After choosing an heir from among them, they change only that heir's name," he said. "For example, my sister used to be called Zhu Jiuxing. After she started middle school, she began going by Zhu Shi."

"You're called Chang'an, and she was called Jiuxing. Those really are names suited to a brother and sister," I remarked.

"Though we aren't biological siblings," he said sadly. "You know that. I'm just the bastard son my scumbag father had with another woman. And the person lying in the hospital isn't my biological mother either. In my heart, though, she's my real mother, and she treated me very well, but..."

"Is that why you've never gone to visit your aunt?"

"I know I'm the one being difficult, but... do you think Zhu Shi is keeping her distance from me because of this too?" he said hollowly. "My dad never comes to see me. Could that be because..."

He always acted thick-skinned in front of others, but at that moment, he revealed his vulnerable side to me.

Because he was my friend, I had made inquiries in the past. His father was a high-ranking official in the government forces and had been missing for many years.

It was not that Chang'an's father had met with an accident somewhere. Rather, he seemed to be secretly engaged in covert activities that could not be disclosed to the outside world. Perhaps they were related to some classified government project. He still held his official position; he simply was not at his post. He also seemed to be quietly watching over Chang'an from the shadows. Whenever Chang'an did something bad that required his father to clean up after him, he would specifically send people to handle it.

He was the Zhu family's live-in son-in-law, so his position was not particularly secure to begin with. As his illegitimate son, Chang'an naturally could not feel any normal familial warmth in the Zhu family. I had once wondered whether Chang'an's constant troublemaking was not only an outlet for his negative emotions, but also concealed a desire to attract his father's attention.

"He should be caring about you in his own way too. It's just that his work makes it inconvenient for him to appear in public," I consoled him.

"I hope so." He ended the subject perfunctorily, then turned his attention to something else. "By the way, Acheng, about that cave... the cave in the Fifteenth Floor room. You remember it, right?"

"Of course I haven't forgotten."

"I actually... regret it a little. I wasn't interested in supernatural things only after meeting you. I'd always wanted to prove that they existed. But I... I ran away from that cave. I didn't even dare go inside." He gritted his teeth. "These past two days, I've kept having nightmares. I dream that a huge hand reaches out from inside the cave and drags me beneath its pitch-black depths. Then the entrance disappears, and no matter how hard I look, I can't find a way out... I figure that instead of staying frightened all the time, I might as well..."

Toward the end, he suddenly grew dejected and said self-mockingly, "Sorry... what nonsense am I talking about? Just forget what I said. No matter how you look at it, it's too crazy..."

"I'm sorry. You may be disappointed by what I'm about to tell you," I said. "As for the cave you mentioned, it won't appear again."

"...Huh?" His eyes widened. "What!"

"Actually, I asked you out to tell you about this." I steeled my resolve. "I've already explored that cave. Due to certain circumstances I can't explain, the cave has now completely disappeared."

"Wait! Don't just gloss over it. What do you mean, circumstances you can't explain?" he pressed.

I took a breath, steeled my resolve again, and began weaving my lie. "The problem isn't there. It's what happened afterward."

He stared at me. "Afterward?"

"I may have been cursed by that cave. The reason I can't tell you the whole process is that I don't know whether the information I tell you could harm you. You should know, right? Simply being aware of a supernatural thing can itself be dangerous." I adopted a serious tone.

"Ah, yeah. Some new ghost stories have settings like that, something about memes..." He nodded in partial understanding, then suddenly looked shocked. "So you've been haunted by one of those things!?"

"Yes. If I only told you over the phone, you might not get a real sense of it, so I wanted to tell you face-to-face." I spoke solemnly. "For a while, it would be better if we stopped keeping in touch."