As the world spun around her, Mai Minghe instinctively grabbed at a patch of white beside her, but still failed to steady herself. She landed hard on the icy tile floor with a hoarse groan.
Oh no. Had she broken a bone?
Pain blurred Mai Minghe's vision. She could not even tell which bone was going to kill her-a single fall could shatter her, scattering her in pieces across the floor.
Surely the caregivers would have to take her to the hospital now. But after she caught her breath, the caregivers who should have rushed over still had not come. No one asked, "Are you all right?"
What was going on?
Mai Minghe narrowed her eyes for a closer look and froze.
...This was not her room.
The room was dim and murky. By the sliver of white light coming through beneath the door, she could just make out that it was very large. There was an empty narrow bed in front of her and another behind her. What she had grabbed was the corner of a bedsheet.
She let go of the sheet and looked around.
A row of hospital beds on wheels, a small bedside cabinet beside each one, curtains around every bed... This was clearly a hospital ward. She had been hospitalized several times and recognized it at a glance.
How strange.
How had she ended up in a hospital ward? The caregivers must have brought her, right?
How could she have completely forgotten being brought to the hospital? It was as though it had never happened, as though a black hole had opened in her memory.
Holding back her panic and pain, Mai Minghe tried to think, but the last thing she could remember was still crashing into the television. She remembered the world tilting amid excruciating pain, and then, the next second, falling onto the ward floor.
It was almost as if she had fallen straight from her home into the hospital-but that was impossible.
Had she passed out then, and that was why she could not remember?
"Is anyone there?" Mai Minghe called hoarsely. "Nurse? I've fallen..."
In the cold, silent ward, her plea for help was like a shard of ice slowly sinking into a cold river, as though it had never existed.
Whether from pain or cold, she kept shivering uncontrollably. Something terrible would happen if this went on. She had to call a nurse over at once-right, hospital beds usually had call buttons by the headboard.
Mai Minghe struggled to prop herself up and tried to stand, but the pain in her leg bones would not allow it. Her limbs were weak and unsteady; she slipped and nearly fell again.
With no other choice, she crawled toward the bedside cabinet inch by inch, braced herself against its edge, and stretched her arm as far as she could. Her fingers barely reached the call button by the headboard.
"If I were you, I wouldn't press that."
The sudden male voice gave Mai Minghe such a fright that her chest seemed to explode. Blood surged upward as though it might burst the blood vessels in her brain.
She steadied herself through the dizziness and turned toward the voice. Only then did she discover another hospital bed behind her.
Its curtain had been drawn, but not all the way, leaving the feet of the patient in the neighboring bed exposed.
The feet were bare, with nothing on them, and white as snow, as though thickly dusted with powder. The toes were slightly curled and utterly still.
Mai Minghe could not help feeling relieved-thank goodness, there was someone else in the room.
"Are... are you a patient here too?" Her breathing was still uneven as she spoke, reaching for the call button again.
"You really want to call a nurse?" the patient behind the curtain asked.
"Yes... I've fallen. I have to."
Had it been something minor, she would have avoided calling a nurse in the middle of the night if she could. Mai Minghe understood the neighboring patient's concerns.
She pressed the call button. No sound rang out in the room.
"Look at that. You pressed it anyway."
Yet the patient in the next bed knew. He began to laugh, a stiff, flat sound, as though he were deliberately contracting his diaphragm over and over, each segment precisely the same length.
Mai Minghe withdrew her hand and slowly slid down to sit on the floor, her entire body sagging weakly. Quietly, she glanced at that curtain out of the corner of her eye.
"Wouldn't listen... People really do get more stubborn as they age. I was only trying to help you."
"What... do you mean?"
He gave two more stiff, measured bursts of laughter, but did not answer.
Something seemed wrong, though she could not say why.
Mai Minghe was hesitating over whether to ask again when a deafening announcement suddenly tore through the deathly silence of the corridor outside. An electronic female voice rang out and echoed, penetrating the ward door: "Bed 03 in Room 3 is calling for a nurse. Bed 03 in Room 3 is calling for a nurse!"
Startled by the announcement, she clutched her chest tightly with one hand as it thudded painfully. Relief that someone was coming mingled with an irrepressible sense of puzzlement.
...How strange. Did pressing the call button normally trigger an announcement? So loud, in the middle of the night-weren't they worried about disturbing people's rest?
Was this some new hospital rule?
The announcement stopped.
For a moment, only Mai Minghe's trembling breaths remained in the silent room.
"Attention," the announcement suddenly blared again, just as startlingly loud, making her jump once more. "A figure pretending to be a nurse will arrive in Room 3 within five seconds. Countdown: five-four-three-"
Mai Minghe froze.
Her eyes and ears must have been failing her. Surely she had only misheard the announcement saying "a figure pretending to be a nurse"?
The patient in the next bed began chuckling again, his laughter divided into separate segments.
"What that announcement just said..."
Before Mai Minghe could finish her question, there was a sudden bang as the ward door slammed hard against the wall. The deafening, terrifying crash made a dull ache stir in her chest again.
As the ward door opened, white light spilled in from the corridor. Within it stood an extremely tall, thin black figure, its head hidden above the doorframe.
The figure twisted its right shoulder forward and stepped with its right foot. As though the joints of its limbs were misaligned and stiff, it took a crooked step through the doorway, its head still outside.
That couldn't be a nurse.
The thought intensified the waves of pain radiating outward from the left side of her chest. Her entire left arm felt as though someone had seized its tendons and was pulling them out. Soon, she felt unable to breathe.
"Huh? It's this one?"
The neighboring patient's chest contracted over and over as he laughed. The snow-white feet outside the curtain remained utterly motionless.
"I could say you're unlucky, but what you summoned wasn't a resident. Then again, I could say you're lucky... but you've gone and had a heart attack at this exact moment. You still won't survive."
The black figure turned its left shoulder and stepped with its left foot. Its swaying head brushed past the edge of the wall as it came inside. Leaning sideways, it took another step toward bed 3.
Beyond the wide-open door, someone roared from a distance, "Who's closest?... Hurry to Room 3 and intercept it! Don't let whoever rang the bell get away. How dare they steal our stuff!"
...What was happening?
Would she live through today?
Backlit, the black figure's features remained indistinct no matter how Mai Minghe squinted. It walked with the arm and leg on the same side moving together. It seemed to have taken only two or three steps, yet it had already reached the foot of the bed, trapping her between two hospital beds.
She wanted to ask who it was, but she could no longer speak.
Someone was racing down the corridor. The pounding footsteps drew closer and closer; she could almost feel the floor shaking. Deaf to the commotion outside, the black figure swayed up before Mai Minghe.
Was this... human? she thought hazily on the brink of death. Surely not?
Before she could understand, this life was about to end.
The black figure slowly bent toward her.
Although her consciousness was fading, Mai Minghe finally saw the first face she had encountered since entering this hospital.
Beneath a mass of unruly black hair, what extended from its neck was an oval, smooth, hard mirror. Below the mirror was pitch black.
It was not someone wearing a mirror over their face.
Where a face should have been, there were no contours of features or bones. There was only a mirror in their place, growing out of the flesh around it, facing Mai Minghe squarely.
Her old, withered face was reflected in the mirror. At that moment, it was as though the one bending toward her was Mai Minghe herself.
Was she dreaming? The mirror face, the heart attack... they were all a dream, weren't they?
To think she would see something so... strange before she died.
Dream or reality, at least she had finally witnessed something beyond the ordinary for the first time in her life-and the last.
Mai Minghe made no expression, yet the old face in the mirror smiled faintly, as though, when someone was utterly helpless, there was nothing left to do but smile.
Her reflection opened its mouth. Its lips moved, silently speaking to the Mai Minghe outside the mirror.
If I could live my life again...
I would ride the merry-go-round to my heart's content,
I would travel around and try everything,
...I will pick more daisies.
Mai Minghe could not move at all. She did not know whether her mind had been immobilized or whether she could no longer rouse her old, weary heart as it drifted toward sleep.
The movements of the lips in the mirror grew blurrier and harder to make out. The black figure kept drawing closer, until it finally enveloped her completely.
...If you were given another chance, what would you do to make this new life worthwhile?
Coarse, tangled black hair brushed Mai Minghe's forehead. Immersed in thick darkness, she could see nothing. Two excessively long arms wound around her body again and again, wrapping her tightly, squeezing ever harder, as though they would twist apart every bone inside her-
"Let go of me."
Just before the air in her chest was cut off, Mai Minghe finally began to struggle. She pushed with both hands, but instead of meeting the resistance she expected, she pushed against empty air.
She hurriedly steadied herself and sprang up from the floor. Only then did she realize there was nothing before her. The black figure had vanished.
Wait...
Belatedly, Mai Minghe realized something.
Had she just sprung to her feet, easily and cleanly?
Mai Minghe raised a hand to her chest. It was as though the pain had never happened. Deep inside her chest was a steady, familiar rhythm.
Her hands... seemed a little different.
Mai Minghe held up both hands and found their skin full and smooth, their nails translucent and lustrous, without a fold of excess wrinkled skin in sight. Lowering her head, she stared blankly at the legs and feet exposed beneath her pajama bottoms, evenly fleshed, smooth, and strong.
She must have gone mad.
Youth, it turned out, was an illusion so sweet, so ardent, so brimming with fullness that she did not know what to do with it.
For a moment, she forgot everything and frantically felt all over herself. Her fingers plunged into thick hair. Her arms and thighs bore firm muscles she had not felt in so long. Her back was straight, and she was taller... Mai Minghe let out a "ha," her voice trembling.
A young, clear voice she had not heard for at least several decades flowed into the ward's cold air.
Somehow, she had been released from the far side of decay, darkness, and ashes, born into the world a second time-no, wait, was any of this real?
"Here!"
A sharp shout rang out from the doorway. Mai Minghe jolted and raised her head.
Her vision was no longer blurred and gray. Even in the dim light, she clearly saw a man charge through the doorway, his face full of wariness.
"There's a woman here, but I don't see the Phantasm."
Staring fixedly at Mai Minghe, the man called back to his companions, then snapped at her, "Whose Hunter are you? You've got it, don't you? You dared intercept the Phantasm Mr. Wei Xilai wanted?"
"What?" Mai Minghe asked blankly, her mind crammed with a bewildered tangle of thoughts. The man's seemingly nonsensical questions could only seep into her head a little through gaps in that tangle.
The man was about to step inside when his gaze suddenly swept past her side, and he stopped dead.
"Get over here," he called out through the doorway. "There's a 'resident' in Room 3!"
A resident? What was he talking about?
Judging from that glance of his, there seemed to be something in the room, not far from her.
Mai Minghe turned her gaze in a daze and discovered that, at some point, the curtain had been drawn around bed 3 beside her, which had originally been empty.
The curtain was not fully closed, exposing a pair of feet so white they seemed dusted with powder. The toes tilted to either side, motionless, as though frozen.
...Huh? Hadn't he been in the next bed just now?
When had he moved into bed 03?
"It wouldn't be right to call you an old lady anymore," the patient behind the curtain said with a laugh. "I should call you a young lady now. Young lady, what you just got is something exceptionally good. How about letting me have a look?"
I'm getting on a plane today. With the pressure to update, I'll have to write on the plane. I hope I don't end up next to another guy who likes peeking at other people's screens. Once, when I was writing Doomsday on a plane, a guy one seat beyond the one beside me suddenly grew an extra five centimeters of neck. Like a crane, he twisted his neck over and asked, "You're writing? What are you writing?"
Tell me, is nearsightedness still not widespread enough?
(Why I'm always getting on planes and traveling far from home really is an unanswerable question...)
(End of chapter)
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