Mai Minghe's horror comedy

In the instant heaven and earth tilted, Mai Minghe remembered only two sensations.

The first was sharp and intense, driving out all capacity for thought and bringing a distorted hallucination before her eyes-for some reason, she remembered a great tree she had seen in the countryside on an outing more than forty years ago.

It was the ugliest tree she had ever seen: infected by some fungus or virus, its entire trunk had been covered with knotted, twisted burls, piled one atop another, crisscrossed with galls. At first glance, it had scarcely looked like a tree at all, but rather a great mass of misshapen brown flesh, hardened and swollen with disease.

Sweating cold, trembling, and in agony, she looked down at what had once been her right calf and imagined she saw that tree from more than forty years ago again-she had not even noticed when her head struck the floor.

The slender patient's fingers wound around her calf, joint after joint, long and long.

The second sensation was not actually a sensation, but a dull thud she heard, as though something heavy had hit something not far away.

When Mai Minghe first heard it, pain had battered her mind blank, and she had not considered what the sound might be. But whether it was the slippery floor beneath her palm or something in the corner of her eye, something suddenly pierced her clouded awareness like lightning, illuminating her mind.

...So that was it.

Because the slender patient had deliberately tormented her, she had done almost nothing all this time except bend over and vomit desperately within the circle of roundheads. But no one in the ward had anticipated another unexpected consequence of that torment.

The ward's tiled floor was now covered in great sticky, slippery patches of vomit and gastric fluid.

During their game of "hawk and chicks," five or six pairs of feet had repeatedly trodden through that slick filth, smearing it everywhere-which meant that anything walking on two feet now risked one careless slip sending it sprawling hard enough to knock out its front teeth.

However strange those flesh tentacles were, they still walked upright on two feet. If they were going to fall flat on their faces, then fall flat on their faces they would, right?

The thought actually gave Mai Minghe strength in her body, which felt as though it were covered in tangled galls. As the slender patient's shadow loomed over her, she twisted around with all her might and saw it.

Not far away, a roundhead had indeed just fallen and was trying to stand, its feet slipping beneath it.

If Mai Minghe could have laughed at that moment, she would certainly have laughed aloud-serves you right for running!

However bizarre things appeared on the surface, they could not escape the logic governing them underneath. It seemed that basic physical laws worked on the strange things inside the nest, too.

For that instant, Mai Minghe forgot the slender patient existed. She lunged, stretched out her arm, and seized the roundhead's ankle.

At the same time, the slender patient's hand touched her lower abdomen again.

It would hardly have been surprising if she had lost consciousness; what was surprising was that she did not pass out.

The slender patient's shadow loomed high over Mai Minghe. She still dared not glance at its face, staring only at the ankle clenched in her left hand, staking her life on it.

Amid pain that blurred her consciousness, amid the emptiness and fear that grew little by little as the Snake Belt was peeled from her body, Mai Minghe maintained her death grip on the roundhead's ankle without loosening it at all-a trembling groan of pain that was not hers rose in the room.

"Tell... tell it to get lost..." she panted, her words slurred. "Or I'll never..."

It did not matter that she could not finish. The residents by the door understood.

Within seconds, a roundhead farther away spoke. "Make her let go!"

As though it could not hear, the slender patient continued peeling away the Snake Belt bit by bit, its movements careful, even gentle-yet however delicate its movements, the pain they provoked still blackened her vision.

"Hurry up,"

All the roundheads urged it together, striding toward the slender patient in perfect unison. "We can't lose a mature flesh tentacle. Make her let go, or else-"

"Understood." The slender patient really was wary of the roundheads. Seeing them approach together, it finally released Mai Minghe's calf-it held the Snake Belt in its other hand and was surely unwilling to let go of the simulacrum.

As soon as it released her, circulation gradually returned to her calf, turning it from a burl-covered tree back into a limb of flesh and blood.

Unfortunately, that did not help.

Mai Minghe watched a long, deathly pale hand in the air spread fingers with who knew how many joints and sweep down toward her arm. Quite apart from how much contact would hurt, she did not believe she could withstand that sweep without having her hand knocked away.

If it knocked her hand away, wouldn't all her effort be wasted?

Before it touched her hand, Mai Minghe pushed against the floor, barely managed to twist around, and reached out her right hand toward the roundhead's ankle-if one hand couldn't hold it, would two work?

She knew the idea might be naive. She knew she was trapped in a predicament an ordinary human could scarcely fight against.

This world seemed to roll over people again and again like a wheel, simply to make them bow their heads, reason with themselves, and swallow their resentment. Somehow, she had lived eighty-six years that way. Days that had seemed so long, so impossible to endure to their end, had passed in the blink of an eye.

If she had fought back once more from time to time, resisted a little longer, perhaps she would not be so full of regrets today that she dared not think about them.

Compared with all the tangled troubles and suffering people inflicted on one another, these strange things were simple and straightforward, direct to an almost endearing degree.

All she had to do was reach out one more hand. She could do that.

She certainly could-

Before the thought finished, Mai Minghe's mind briefly went dark, and she knew nothing.

When she could see her surroundings clearly again, she found herself lying on her side, both hands empty, limp against the floor.

The roundhead had long since climbed up and retreated. The slender patient was peeling a section of the Snake Belt from her back. One more loop, and it would be completely off her.

...Had she failed?

Even two hands had not held on to the roundhead.

Mai Minghe lay on the floor smeared with her own gastric fluid. Her body seemed to be preparing ahead of time for the return of her eighty-six years, weak and heavy.

The slender patient extended two fingers long enough to skewer a person clean through and rolled Mai Minghe over again like a slab of dead meat, laying her flat on her back to continue peeling off the final section of the Snake Belt.

As it turned her over, Mai Minghe's right hand flopped limply onto her chest.

...Hm?

Her fingertips were wet with blood or some filthy fluid. There was especially much beneath her nails, a thick layer that felt very uncomfortable.

Wait.

...Blood?

The thought rising in Mai Minghe's mind sent a tremor through her whole body. As though driven by survival instinct, she scratched at the slender patient's hand without thinking.

Contact with the slender patient clearly caused her unbearable pain, so it might never have expected Mai Minghe to touch it voluntarily-but there was something else it had expected even less.

The moment Mai Minghe's nails touched the slender patient, it abruptly erupted into a great mass of surging, churning shadows.

As though her touch caused supreme agony, the slender patient actually flung the simulacrum away. Its long body churned and trembled like a cloud of frightened gray-white mist rising into the dim air.

...Just as she thought.

Mai Minghe dared not delay. She immediately pushed herself up from the floor, and the Snake Belt promptly coiled around her body again as though alive.

Once upright, she hurriedly extended her hand and shook every bit of liquid clinging to her fingertips at the slender patient-as she shook it, she thought for a moment and could not help laughing breathlessly, her laughter like broken glass, halting, hard, and bright.

It was not that she had such an eccentric personality that she could laugh in these circumstances. The scene really was funny: a tall, thin shadow with its head against the ceiling twisted and rolled in the room, flailing its limbs, while a woman stood beside it, shaking one hand at it as though she were having a stroke. They looked exactly like a human and a ghost who had both stepped on high-voltage wires.

Anyone watching would have agreed that even if she had stumbled into a horror movie, it was a horror comedy.

"What's going on?" the red-haired man asked blankly from the other end of the ward. "Did it take the wrong medicine? Did you take the wrong medicine too?"

He was standing beside a hospital bed, pushing it toward the door. The sight of the slender patient actually stopped him in his tracks for a moment.

The moment Mai Minghe saw him, she understood what he intended and immediately shouted, "Wait! Take me with you!"

As she spoke, she had already rounded the slender patient and run toward the hospital bed. Before the red-haired man could react, she leaped and rolled onto it, shouting urgently, "Go, go! It's not going to die yet!"

The red-haired man looked as though he wanted to swear, but also as though he knew he had no time.

"You certainly know how to hitch a ride-"

He grumbled through clenched teeth, breaking off as he pushed the bed and began running with long strides. Just before reaching the door, he braced himself on the bed rail, pushed off, and jumped onto the bed-with its momentum carrying it onward, the bed rattled through the doorway and into the corridor with both of them aboard.

"Don't touch the floor!" the red-haired man shouted, kicking the wall to send the bed sliding farther down the corridor. "That resident is under the floor!"

"So it really is under the floor?" Clinging tightly to the bed, Mai Minghe said, "Before I told you not to go outside, I saw what looked like lots of thin lines drawn on the floor tiles between the roundheads. I thought something was strange about them. Good thing it wasn't invisibility."

"Invisibility has nothing to do with it!"

As the bed rolled past, the floor tiles by the door seemed to sense something. Threads of blood abruptly surfaced across them, like an eyeball filling with countless red veins in anxiety and anger. But both people sat on the bed without touching the floor, and the "eyeball" could only watch them recede down the corridor, bed and all.

"What made that tall, skinny thing suddenly go berserk?" the red-haired man asked, not forgetting his question as he pushed against the wall to move them along.

The explanation was actually simple: although Mai Minghe had failed to catch the roundhead earlier, her right hand had scratched open the skin of its ankle.

Before falling into the nest, she had been an old woman who was often bedridden. Her fingernails had gone uncut for a long time, and she certainly never filed them smooth-that desperate grab had gouged deep into its skin, coating her nails with the roundhead's blood.

"...Aren't the roundheads its weakness?"

Mai Minghe helped by kicking the wall too. The bed zigzagged down the corridor, hitting a wall with each advance and jolting whoever was speaking into a stammer.

"Then the stuff inside a roundhead's body must be its weakness too, right? So I smeared that little bit of blood on its hand. I really didn't expect it to work so well."

The red-haired man could not help laughing. "Is this really your first time in a nest? Nice work."

"Will they catch up?" Mai Minghe asked.

"Very likely." The red-haired man glanced back down the corridor, which remained empty for now. "Get ready. We'll slide a little farther, then we'll have to jump off and run."

As they spoke, the bed carrying them happened to slide past a room's window.

In the glass, Mai Minghe caught her reflection flashing past: disheveled hair, a pale face, grime still covering half of it...

But a smile rested at the corners of her mouth, and she was in the prime of her life.

I have to leave for the airport at five tomorrow morning to catch a flight, and the day after I land, there's another flight. It's exhausting. Watching the very last of my stockpiled chapters run out, I now feel like a rich landlord's wastrel son: my ancestors left me a thousand taels of silver and ten thousand qing of fertile fields, and I've smoked it all away. How am I supposed to live now!

Before boarding, let me solemnly thank the following new patrons:

Thank you to Hainiesi for the McDonald's (you even worked out what I should spend it on). Your support will surely turn into fat and stay with me on my body-possibly for the rest of my life...

Thank you to Tiejia Baitang for several cups of coffee (you've come back to read the new book! Coffee is the only thing in the world keeping me from becoming a zombie). If you smell coffee in a chapter later, part of it will be your support;

Thank you to Weiba de Weimao'er for the minoxidil. Why? Seeing your username gives me the distinct illusion that I'm the Monkey King. Can I pluck out a hair and blow on it to produce a reader who enthusiastically supports me? That's far too good a deal. I want to grow hair.

And thank you to vitang for the dessert (I don't ask much of life anymore), and to Kankankan Xialuoke, Miemie Jia de Xiao Feizao, Xuanfeng Feiwan, who treats tipping like a daily check-in, and everyone else for your encouragement. See you after I land.

(End of chapter)