"Ashes, ashes..."
"We all fall down..."
In the darkness, a weightless humming drifted from near and far, impossibly soft and gentle, like a lullaby meant to coax a child to sleep—yet heavy with death.
Qi Si remembered that song. It was called Ring Around the Rosie, a nursery rhyme from the time of the Black Death, symbolizing "the death of children."
Ashes from burning corpses blotted out the sun. Beneath the gray sky, children covered in red rashes gathered to play. When the game ended, they all collapsed at once, only to be thrown into the flames by adults in black robes and beaked masks...
For a long time in the past, this sort of grotesque, tragic beauty had perfectly suited Qi Si's tastes. Naturally, he had read stories along those lines many times in his childhood.
"Doctor Cheng, wake up... The ward has been cleaned up." The humming vanished with the sound of a woman's voice.
Qi Si opened his eyes once again and found himself sitting on a bench. All the surrounding patients had disappeared, leaving only a nurse in white looking at him with concern.
Her uniform was still speckled with blood, though not conspicuously enough to trigger his hemophobia again. Still, faint threads of bloody scent slipped into his nostrils. He could not tell whether they were real or imagined.
Qi Si smiled gently. "You should probably change out of those clothes and wash them."
The original Cheng An had been someone who "loved cleanliness," so the nurse was not suspicious. She said apologetically, "I've washed it many times, but so many people die every day that the blood just won't come out."
Qi Si badly wanted to ask, "How did those people die?" But to avoid exposing a flaw in his act, he could only