The Prescription

The second loop.

Jiang Mingran hid among the clutter.

Stacked in front of him were dull yellow paper bags. Now that he was close enough, he could finally make out what they contained.

Chinese medicinal herbs.

All these dull yellow paper bags held medicinal herbs, with labels scrawled in messy handwriting: "Bupleurum," "white peony root," "dodder seed," "bugleweed," "spatholobus stem"...

The sharp, bitter scent of the herbs mingled with the faint stench of decay from the kitchen. The strange combination made Jiang Mingran feel sick.

Suddenly, something seemed to move inside a bag to his left.

Startled, Jiang Mingran whipped his head around.

The paper bag shifted a few times, then a gray rat scurried out.

Just a rat... Jiang Mingran breathed a sigh of relief, only for his heart to leap into his throat again.

Ever since childhood, he had been able to imitate a rat's squeaks perfectly. That was why he had instinctively chosen them as the signal to warn Shao Lan earlier.

But there were real rats here. If one squeaked, it would send Shao Lan the wrong signal.

Lives were at stake. Jiang Mingran offered a silent apology, then reached out and grabbed the rat.

He moved so quickly that the rat never even squeaked before he snapped its neck.

The dead rat dropped to the floor, a few drops of blood seeping from its mouth. Its clutched paws loosened, and a small round object rolled out.

Jiang Mingran looked closely and nearly threw up.

It was an eyeball.

Cloudy and shriveled, with blackened flesh clinging to it, it looked as though it had been separated from a corpse long ago.

Jiang Mingran turned his head and retched silently, forcing himself not to look at the dead rat or the eyeball.

He lifted his gaze toward the kitchen, then suddenly froze.

At some point, the kitchen door had opened.

It was pitch-black inside, with no figure in sight. Only a faint blue flame glimmered beneath the clay pot simmering on the stove.

The killer had come out!

Why had she suddenly come out??

Jiang Mingran instantly sensed something was wrong. He wanted to signal Shao Lan at once, but suddenly felt something.

Slowly, Jiang Mingran raised his head.

Above him, the woman bent at the waist, an eerie smile on her face, and reached out.

Her hands touched Jiang Mingran's head, then pressed down as though crushing an orange.

The last thing Jiang Mingran saw was red-and-white brain matter splashing out, soaking the dried eyeball on the floor.

Jiang Mingran finished writing.

His whole body trembled, and the fountain pen bled a patch of blue-black ink onto the paper.

Even now, he still did not understand how the woman had pinpointed his location.

"I'm certain I didn't make a sound..." Jiang Mingran wrote weakly.

Shao Lan was silent for a moment, then took the pen and wrote two words.

"Her nose."

Jiang Mingran's eyes widened.

He thought he was beginning to understand.

"The killer can't see. It isn't just her hearing that's heightened, but her sense of smell too," Shao Lan wrote. "But she isn't sensitive to every smell, or she would have found us long ago."

"What she's sensitive to is the smell of fresh blood."

In other words, the rat Jiang Mingran had killed had given away his location.

Jiang Mingran lowered his head, filled with regret.

If he had not drawn the woman out, would Shao Lan have survived?

Shao Lan seemed to read his thoughts and shook his head. "It wasn't your fault. We didn't have all the information."

"And..." Shao Lan thought of something that had been bothering him. "Do you remember what those medicinal herbs were?"

Jiang Mingran wrote down everything he could remember. After racking his brains for a while, he added a few more. "I really can't remember the rest."

Shao Lan studied the herbs listed on the paper: "Bupleurum, white peony root, dodder seed, bugleweed, spatholobus stem, raw cattail pollen, raspberry fruit, glossy privet fruit."

He read quite a lot and had a rough idea of what some medicinal herbs did. Bupleurum, for instance, soothed the liver and relieved stagnation; raw cattail pollen seemed to promote blood circulation and dispel blood stasis; spatholobus stem nourished the blood and improved circulation.

But he was not too sure about many of the others.

Just as Shao Lan was about to give up, Pancake Uncle leaned over.

"That looks like a prescription for an ovulation decoction. Women drink it when they want a baby."

Jiang Mingran was pleasantly surprised. "You know Chinese medicine too, Pancake Uncle?"

Pancake Uncle waved a hand. "No, I don't. Just a coincidence. When I was little, a barefoot doctor lived next door. Women in the village often went to him, and there was a rhyme we all knew how to sing-"

"Bupleurum, white and red peony, bugleweed, motherwort; spatholobus, achyranthes, vaccaria, teasel, cattail. Privet, raspberry, dodder, goji, psoralea too; soothe the liver, nourish the kidneys, help the egg come through."

Shao Lan compared Pancake Uncle's rhyme with the herbs Jiang Mingran had written down. Sure enough, most of them matched.

"So the herbs outside the kitchen are things a woman would take when she wanted to get pregnant?" Jiang Mingran said. "That clue doesn't seem very useful. It just means Pancake Uncle really did see right. That monster in the kitchen actually is pregnant."

No. That was true, but there had to be more to it.

Shao Lan stared at the paper as countless fragments of clues came together in his mind.

Those herbs were piled up like a little mountain. How long would it take to drink them all? Had she been drinking that bitter medicine for years?

What had the diary writer said? "I don't want to hurt her."

Of course. How could he not be conflicted and hesitant? After all, [she] was his wife. She had suffered so much to conceive their child.

Suffered through bitterness? Yes, she said "so bitter" when she killed...

Shao Lan closed his eyes. The pounding headache almost overwhelmed his senses.

Something was wrong, a voice inside him said. Something about this seemed very strange.

"Shao Lan." Jiang Mingran patted him.

Shao Lan opened his eyes and saw that both Jiang Mingran and Pancake Uncle looked worried.

Neither of them was good at making decisions. Right now, Shao Lan was the only person in this apartment they could rely on.

Shao Lan quickly wrote down his deduction: "Judging from the last loop, [the woman in the kitchen] can hear us making a phone call. Whoever calls the police will be killed."

Jiang Mingran went pale. "Doesn't that mean we're doomed...?"

They could not simply flee; they had to call the police. But only the landline in the living room could make a call, and using it would alert the killer in the kitchen.

Shao Lan closed his eyes. Looked at that way, it really was a dead end.

But he kept feeling that they had overlooked something.

Jiang Mingran watched him anxiously. Just as he reached out to pat him, Shao Lan's eyes snapped open.

He grabbed the pen and wrote: "Go outside."

"Outside?" Despair washed over Jiang Mingran, and he wondered whether Shao Lan had lost his memory. "Isn't that what we tried the first time? Going outside means instant death!"

Shao Lan looked at Jiang Mingran. "Where did we die?"

"In the stairwell..."

"Right, the stairwell. In other words, while going downstairs-what if we don't leave this floor?"

Jiang Mingran paused.

"Across the hall." Shao Lan pressed hard as he wrote the words. "The neighbor across the hall is dead. His apartment is empty."

Pancake Uncle looked completely lost, but Jiang Mingran remembered.

The diary they had found in the previous loop had said-

"When I came home from work, I saw the door across the hall standing open. Brother Wang wasn't home. I went into my apartment and opened the refrigerator. I saw Brother Wang. Brother Wang was in my refrigerator."

Brother Wang was the neighbor across the hall. He had offered to help [the diary writer], but had been killed before he could do anything.

"I don't know what this [game] actually is, but so far, every piece of information it's given us has been useful," Shao Lan said. "My guess is that our playing area includes [the apartment across the hall]."

Hope instantly flared in Jiang Mingran. "Then I'll go across the hall and call the police!"

As Jiang Mingran was about to jump up, Shao Lan caught him.

"It's only a guess," Shao Lan stressed. "If I'm wrong, you'll die instantly, just like the first time."

Jiang Mingran shuddered slightly.

"But we don't have any other way!" he said. "We have to go inside to find out!"

Shao Lan considered this for a moment, his gaze roaming around the master bedroom until he spotted a red alarm clock on the nightstand.

A faint hint of amusement appeared in his eyes. "No," he said calmly. "We won't be the ones going inside."

Jiang Mingran opened the security door, and the dim hallway came into view once again.

He cautiously slipped out and headed across the hall, toward [Brother Wang]'s apartment.

He put his hand on the handle and pulled gently. With a creak, the door opened.

It was unlocked! Ever since its owner had died, the apartment's door had been left ajar!

Jiang Mingran quickly took out the alarm clock and tossed it through the doorway.

It landed with a thud. Then the alarm clock began ringing shrilly.

"Ring, ring, ring-"

Jiang Mingran looked back.

At the other end of the hallway, the security door he had just closed swung open.

Then a mop-shaped shadow appeared on the wall.

It was the woman.

She was terrifyingly tall. Even standing in the hallway, she had to hunch her back to keep from touching the ceiling. Her long, thin body resembled a mop handle, topped by disheveled hair that covered her face. When she turned, her shadow shifted into profile, revealing a huge bulge partway down the "mop"-her swollen belly.

The woman slowly crossed the hallway toward the ringing alarm clock.

One step, then two.

Jiang Mingran broke into a cold sweat, not daring to make a sound.

He pressed himself tightly against the wall and held his breath, watching the woman walk past him.

Suddenly, the woman stopped.

She turned her head. A bloodshot eye emerged from her tangled hair and met Jiang Mingran's gaze.