Bear-Trapping Bottle

The little wooden cabin was old, with a layer of dust covering the floor.

The kitchen stove stood beside the dining table, the bathroom was next door, and the bedroom was on the left. Its door stood open, revealing that it, too, was completely empty.

Zhang Ze placed Little Zhou on the sofa.

He noticed several paintings hanging inside the cabin that were different from those in the cartoon.

They were all covered in thick red ink, so red it had almost turned black, making it impossible to tell what the paintings actually depicted.

There were four or five such paintings, all neatly arranged on the walls of the living room and bedroom.

"Big brother, do you think my painting looks nice?"

Little Zhou pointed at one of the paintings.

"Did you draw this?"

"My sister taught me how."

"That big sister in red, Uncle Bald Strong, and the Little Bear—they're all your friends. Are you sure they won't hurt you?" Zhang Ze still found it hard to believe Little Zhou.

After all, what had just happened had been far too dangerous.

One wrong move, and they could have been dragged into a deadly fight.

Zhang Ze was now nothing more than an ordinary person. He had no means of resisting Fierce Ghosts. If he really encountered one, death would be the only outcome.

"Mm-hm, really!" Little Zhou nodded with a solemn expression.

Zhang Ze glanced outside through the window. The sky was red as blood. He shut the window, inspected the cabin, and after confirming there was no danger, sat down and asked Little Zhou,

"What else do you know about this world?"

"You weren't scared at all just now."

Little Zhou raised his head and looked at an oil painting in the bedroom smeared with red ink. "This world is my sister's home."

"This world was painted by my sister. She loved painting, but she no longer has hands, so she can never paint again."

"Just like Uncle."

"Uncle was very smart when he was little too, but his father wouldn't let him invent things. He could only listen to his father and become a lumberjack. Luckily, he met the Little Bears and became friends with them."

Little Zhou looked toward another painting.

It was as though the people he described were the subjects of those smeared paintings.

"Little Zhou, friends don't fight each other. Friends might have conflicts and arguments, but they would never come to blows or try to kill each other," Zhang Ze told him seriously.

Judging from what had happened earlier,

there was not the slightest sign of "friendship" between them.

"Wolves and sheep can become friends, so why can't the Little Bears and Uncle be friends?" Little Zhou asked innocently. "Besides, that's just how they get along every day."

"Today the Little Bears win. Tomorrow Uncle wins."

"No matter how badly they're hurt—stung by bees, falling off cliffs, getting shot—they'll be back to normal in the next episode!"

Zhang Ze was speechless.

Little Zhou was actually right.

Cartoons certainly did not strive for realism. No matter how severe the injury, everyone recovered by the next episode. That was the hallmark of episodic shows.

But the Door-After World could not possibly work like an episodic show.

Take Old Zhou, for example.

When they died, they truly died.

They would die in reality too.

Zhang Ze glanced at the television. It was an old-fashioned box TV, the kind that had been obsolete in reality for many years, yet it still worked here.

Could the television receive a signal?

A thought surfaced in Zhang Ze's mind.

He tried plugging it in and turning it on.

"Bzzzt..."

After a burst of static, an image appeared on the screen.

"Episode 52."

"Bear-Trapping Bottle."

It could actually play normally.

However, after watching for a while, Zhang Ze realized that what it showed was completely different from the cartoon's plot in reality.

In reality, the plot of this episode was that the villain, Strong, bought something online called a Bear-Trapping Bottle to catch Big Bear and Second Bear. He put nuts into the bottle, and once the bears reached in and grabbed the nuts, their paws would get stuck and could not be pulled out.

As a children's cartoon,

the episode naturally ended with Strong's failure. The two bears easily pulled their paws free, beat Strong up badly, and ate the delicious nuts.

But the version playing on this television was different.

The forest was quiet. Other than the Little Bears and the Deformed Human Shadow, there were no other animals. There was not even a phone call from the boss urging him to deliver lumber. It was as if the entire world contained only the Deformed Human Shadow and the Little Bears.

One day, the Deformed Human Shadow returned to the little wooden cabin.

It carried several round ceramic jars out from the storage room, each slightly wider than an ordinary vase, then poured honey into them to make "Bear-Trapping Bottles."

The Deformed Human Shadow placed the Bear-Trapping Bottles throughout the forest.

The Little Bears found the Bear-Trapping Bottles and tried reaching in for the honey. As expected, their paws could not be pulled back out.

Up to this point, everything was fairly normal.

Other than the slightly strange art style, and the character models looking less like normal computer animation and more like they had been hand-drawn stroke by stroke.

At least the plot was still normal.

But what happened next made Zhang Ze's eyelids twitch.

After seeing the Little Bears try every method without success, he watched them actually find an axe and chop off their paws.

The honey jars containing their severed paws were carried back to the Tree Hole.

And the Little Bears got to eat the honey, just as they had wished.

End of episode!

"What kind of joke is this? You call that a cartoon?"

Zhang Ze could not believe it. Could this cartoon actually correspond to the experience of the Red-Clothed woman? Both involved severed hands. It was hard not to connect them.

"Big brother, look. In the next episode, their paws will get better again," Little Zhou said.

Sure enough, in the next episode, the Little Bears' paws had returned to normal, without a trace of having been chopped off.

But several honey jars had appeared inside the Tree Hole.

Was this the rule of the Door-After World?

No matter how serious the injury, they would recover completely.

Just as Zhang Ze was astonished,

a sudden creak came from the cabin's bathroom.

"You stay here."

Zhang Ze immediately switched off the television, told Little Zhou not to make a sound, then grabbed a feather duster and peered through the crack in the door toward the living room, directly opposite the bathroom.

Inside the bathroom,

Li Yang clutched his head and staggered out.

"Hiss..."

"It hurts."

"Did I die again?"

"Damn it... I can't remember anything. I think Old Zhou's kid, and that guy named Zhang Ze, came in?"

"I need to find them quickly. If I'm too late and the two of them die, that'll be trouble."

Li Yang had revived.

Zhang Ze remembered that Li Yang had clearly been killed by the Red-Clothed woman earlier.

Why had he been reborn inside the little wooden cabin?

He looked at the television, and an unbelievable thought gradually surfaced, steadily taking over Zhang Ze's mind. He vaguely formed a guess.

Everyone who entered the Door-After World would become something similar to the Little Bears and the Deformed Human Shadow.

If they died once, they would die in reality as well.

But their souls would be trapped in the Door-After World. No matter how badly they were injured or how many times they died, they would revive at a fixed location.

The number of people was always kept at four.

Only when newcomers entered the Door-After World would Crow eliminate the previous residents and inject fresh blood into this game.