A hospital visit

The Inverted Room.

A man wearing a black tricorn hat.

The pupil of one of his eyes was white; the other was blue.

He wore a trench coat as black as night, reflecting no light at all. Through that pitch-black mass, only the outline of its wearer's figure could be made out.

He sat beside an antique wooden dining table, wearing white gloves. A pocket watch lay on the table.

An enormous red liquid creature with long, slender limbs stood motionless before him, like a specimen.

A multicolored flame burned constantly over its body, giving off the sizzling sound of evaporating moisture, yet that utterly terrifying monster made not a sound, as though it were dead.

Liu Guangyao knew what this creature was. It was the blood god... he had seen it in his dreams more than once.

Against the pitch-black background, a blonde maid with her eyes closed stepped gracefully into view, carrying a long blade.

She approached the blood god roasting in the Prismatic Flame and sliced the "meat" from its body, piece by piece.

Liu Guangyao did not know whether he should call it meat, because liquid clearly should not be called meat. Yet when the maid handled those liquids, they distinctly displayed the springy texture of fresh flesh.

The maid placed the steaming meat on a silver plate, then scraped some wax powder from a red block of wax on the table and sprinkled it over the meat. Finally, she brought the plate to the man.

"Thank you, ■■■."

"Please enjoy your meal, Lord ■■." Liu Guangyao's head throbbed!

Those two strange syllables burrowed into his head, like a dull knife repeatedly stabbing his scalp and scraping against his skull. It was as though an electric drill had bored through his temple, whirring as it churned his brains into a uniform slurry. He felt as though his head were about to explode!

I'm going to die!

If this keeps up, I'm going to die!

"Aaaaah! Aaaaah!!"

Liu Guangyao let out an inhuman scream and jerked upright in his hospital bed, convulsing. His heart hammered violently in his chest, every beat sending a tremor through his throat. Apart from the pounding of his heart, all he could hear was a buzzing in his ears.

Drenched in cold sweat, he looked as though he had just been dragged out of the water. The sheet beneath him was almost soaked through.

He raised his trembling right hand and touched the crown of his head, brushing loose his sparse hair.

What kind of dream was that?

It seemed like someone had eaten the blood god.

Click!

The ward door suddenly opened, startling Liu Guangyao so badly that he jolted and let out a strange cry.

A middle-aged man in a white coat entered the ward. Seeing Liu Guangyao's deathly pale face, he frowned and asked, "Mr. Liu, did you have another nightmare?"

"Yes." Liu Guangyao nodded blankly.

"The same dream as last time?"

"No, not that one. But this one was even stranger."

As Xia Shou looked at the half-bald patient before him, his brow slowly furrowed.

Ever since he had entered the ward, he had smelled a faint odor of decay in the air. It was like the smell of a dead rat that sometimes appeared in a room: a careful search would fail to locate its source, yet just as one was about to forget it, it would suddenly return.

Xia Shou had read the patient's file before entering. He was only twenty-five and worked as an accountant. The photograph on his work ID showed a very handsome, vibrant young man, but now he looked so haggard that he could have passed for a middle-aged man of forty.

His sparse hair could not cover his acne-riddled scalp. His dark circles and bloodshot eyes made him look as though he had stayed awake for three days and nights and was already on the verge of sudden death. His neck jutted forward like a turtle's, his cervical spine bent into an unhealthy curve.

"Mr. Liu, this is Doctor Xia. He holds doctorates in both psychology and biology," Doctor Wang introduced him, bestowing an extraordinary set of credentials on Xia Shou without hesitation.

Xia Shou nodded. "Could you let me see the condition of your arm?"

Liu Guangyao sighed wearily and unwound the bandages from his arm, layer by layer, exposing blue-black skin. An unbearable stench wafted from beneath the bandages-the kind of smell only a severely decomposed corpse would give off!

"Is there no sensation?" Xia Shou asked.

"There's still a little. I can feel it a bit if I touch it," Liu Guangyao said.

Standing beside Xia Shou, Wang Long said quietly, "We took samples. The nerves are already necrotic, and the cells have stopped metabolizing. But blood from the rest of his body can indeed still circulate through his right hand."

In other words, what was attached to this man's body was a completely dead, rotting arm. And that arm was still an integral part of his body, part of his overall blood circulation. Healthy blood flowed through the already rotten vessels before returning to the normal parts of his body.

Could that really happen without causing any problems?

"How did you discover this?" Xia Shou asked.

Wang Long shook his head. "When he came in for a consultation, his hand had already lost all viability, medically speaking. Even the nerve reflexes were gone. Really, it should have been amputated.

"But strangely, he could still move his fingers a little at the time. That's why we asked you to come.

"He also has very severe insomnia. Every time he has a nightmare, he dreams of the same scene. These are the pictures he drew based on his dreams."

Xia Shou took the stack of papers. The drawings depicted a room turned upside down, with an alien creature with long, slender limbs crouched in its center. Hairlike lines spreading from the creature's head covered half the room's ceiling and floor like climbing ivy.

The moment he saw the drawing, Xia Shou understood why the Containment Bureau had sent him to handle this case. The creature in the picture was the Blood Demon, so the abnormal condition of this man's arm was very likely connected to the Blood Demon as well.

But hadn't I killed and eaten the Blood Demon? Why hadn't the anomalous incident ended yet?

"Can you tell me about your dream?" Xia Shou sat down beside the hospital bed.

Liu Guangyao lowered his head and stared at the white sheet, speaking in a daze. "I dream that someone is hunting me down in my home. But all the furniture is upside down. The ceiling is under my feet, and the floor is over my head. I'm the only one at home.

"Someone I don't know breaks into my home to kill me. He doesn't kill me right away. First, he catches me and ties me to the bed, then cuts off my right hand. After that... after that, he takes my right hand away. I don't know what he does with it. When he comes back after a while, he kills me."

"Is your hand like this in the dream too?"

"No. In the dream, my hand is fine."

"Could you draw a portrait of the person who kills you?" Xia Shou asked.

Doctor Wang Long explained from the side, "He can't remember what the person in his dream looks like."

"No, I think I can remember now." Liu

Guangyao murmured, picking up the pen and paper on the bedside table and slowly beginning to draw.

While he drew, Xia Shou waited quietly beside him.

Halfway through the drawing, Liu Guangyao suddenly asked Xia Shou, "Doctor, have we met before? You look so familiar to me."

"I think this is our first meeting," Xia Shou replied.