By all rights, three or five tall, muscular, hostile strangers pouring through the door should have been the threat that warranted the most vigilance, right?
Whatever else, they ought to have been more dangerous than a patient lying in a hospital bed.
Yet somehow, Mai Minghe could not help staring fixedly at the pair of white feet protruding from behind the curtain. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, her palms were cold and damp, and she could not spare the strange men so much as a glance.
At that moment, she was wedged between the patient in bed 03 and bed 02, with a bedside cabinet and a wall behind her. The men blocked her way forward. She could not get out.
She glanced at the patient in the next bed again.
Compared with when she had first seen them, the feet looked a little different now. She could not say what had changed-but looking at them now provoked an instinctive, biological revulsion, as though she wanted to open her mouth and vomit up the sight before her eyes, the air she had breathed that had touched those feet, and all her internal organs.
Looking up again, she found that the strangers might have felt the same way. For all their aggression when they had burst in, their eyes were now rolled upward, their gazes floating in midair. Not one would lower his head to look at the feet on the bed-at first glance, they looked like a group of blind men who had just taken off their sunglasses.
Mai Minghe wiped her nose.
Perhaps her fear and tension were so extreme that her nervous system wanted to release the pressure; perhaps becoming young again possessed an intoxicating, surging magic that even fear could not dispel; perhaps the men opposite her simply looked too funny-she suddenly could not help bursting into laughter.
"How did you do that?"
She stopped laughing, not wanting the men to think she belonged in a psychiatric hospital. She said to the patient in the next bed, "I don't know why, but one look at you turns my stomach inside out. You ought to take a part-time job here, pumping stomachs."
The red-haired man opposite her, who seemed to be the leader, said nothing, but his expression made his opinion of Mai Minghe abundantly clear-not quite right in the head.
"Young lady."
The male voice behind the curtain sounded like a sack of stones coated in thick phlegm, indescribably unpleasant to hear. "This is your first time entering the Nest, isn't it?"
Mai Minghe had already heard a string of incomprehensible terms: a figure disguised as a nurse, hunters, a Phantasm... Now there was the Nest, too.
"This isn't a hospital?" Mai Minghe asked.
Although she had asked a question, the answer was already perfectly clear in her mind: of course this was not a hospital.
Somehow, she had arrived in this place called "the Nest," and that "somehow" seemed closely connected to her falling onto the television.
"It is a hospital. Why wouldn't it be?" the patient behind the curtain replied almost warmly. "A hospital inside the Nest is still a hospital."
Buying time, Mai Minghe spoke as she thought. "You say this is a nest, but you don't look like much of a chicken to me."
The red-haired man let out a sound through his nose that he had tried and failed to suppress, then coughed to cover it.
"She doesn't even know what the Nest is," one of the men by the door muttered to a companion. "It really is her first fucking time here. No wonder she's still in pajamas."
"But if it's her first time, how could she have caught a Phantasm?" another murmured.
"Wait and see," the red-haired man instructed. "Be ready. If she can't hold out, we'll have to snatch it from the resident."
As they spoke, they practically treated Mai Minghe as though she did not exist-or rather, as something that would soon cease to exist.
Too many incomprehensible developments had occurred in a mere minute or two. Right now, Mai Minghe could only hold tightly to two things.
First, after entering the Nest, she had become young again. Second, whatever had made her young again also seemed to be what both sides wanted.
Even if she knew nothing else, she knew she was now a child carrying a fortune through a bustling marketplace-more like a ghost market-and that was hardly good.
Behind the curtain was dead silence. The toes of the two bluish-white bare feet rested on the rail at the foot of the bed.
"What do you want?" Mai Minghe asked, watching the feet behind the curtain, though she already knew the answer. "How about this? Tell me what's going on, and I'll give you whatever you want. Wouldn't it be nice if we all got along?"
The patient behind the curtain considered this for two seconds.
"Feel around your body." His voice had grown a little calmer, less unpleasant than before, but he still refused to explain further, saying only, "You should be able to feel something, shouldn't you? Take it off and give it to me."
Mai Minghe slipped a hand inside her pajamas and felt her back and lower abdomen. The moment her fingers touched it, she got a fright.
Something slightly raised and icy cold, like a strap, was wound around her torso in coils. Beneath her fingers, it felt almost as though a great snake were wrapped around her.
Right-the arm of that dark silhouette had seemed to coil around her like this earlier.
"You found it, didn't you?" the patient in the next bed suddenly hissed, mucus churning in his throat. "Give it to me."
Mai Minghe felt along the edge of the "Snake Belt." It seemed very reluctant to part from her skin; she had to exert some force to dig her fingertips between it and her flesh.
"All right, all right, I understand. I'll give it to you now." It really could be removed. As she raised her hand, she had already pulled a little of the "Snake Belt" away.
Another question occurred to her.
"I was having a heart attack earlier. It only stopped after this came. If I take it off, will the attack continue?"
"You may be old, but you're quick-witted. I don't believe so. What it reverses is aging, not illness. The illness disappearing as a result is merely a side effect. It won't necessarily return with your age."
The voice of the patient in the next bed was thick and sticky. "Of course, I could be wrong, but you have no choice except to be optimistic. All right, take it off."
Just as he had said, she had no other choice.
"Good thing I've always been an optimist." Mai Minghe exhaled, first pulling the "Snake Belt" away from her lower abdomen, then following it around to her back, removing it from her body little by little.
The tail of the pitch-black "Snake Belt" slipped limply out of her pajamas and dangled in the air, swaying as though alive.
"Wait, don't give it to that thing," the red-haired man suddenly shouted, stepping forward and spreading his hands. "Give it to me! It'll come after me and leave you alone!"
Had he called the patient "it"?
The thought flashed through Mai Minghe's mind. With no time to dwell on it, she had already realized this was a lifeline-with this brief opening, perhaps she could escape the ward alive. Seizing the opportunity, she immediately shouted to the red-haired man, "Catch!"
Then she swung her hand up, pulled a dark shape from behind her, and tossed it toward his raised hands.
Perhaps it was her imagination, but Mai Minghe felt that, for one tiny instant, the patient behind the curtain in the next bed had also been distracted.
With a smack, the dark shape landed in the red-haired man's hands. At that same moment, Mai Minghe seized her chance, rolled across bed 02, and landed on its other side-so a young person's body was this strong, agile, and balanced. Her movements were smooth and light, so pleasurable that for an instant, she almost forgot she was fleeing for her life.
The dark shape sat fluffy and soft between two hands, surrounded by a ring of faces staring fixedly at it.
"A pillow?"
Once the red-haired man got a clear look, he could not help freezing. He flung the pillow Mai Minghe had taken from bed 02 onto the floor and shouted, "Do you want to die at the resident's hands?"
Mai Minghe had no time to answer. She had only just found her footing when she turned and discovered that the patient had followed her-the curtain around bed 02 had been drawn shut.
But not completely.
The curtain seemed to have expanded a little. At some point, a pair of lower legs had emerged, the knees pressed tightly together, bent over the edge of the bed and hanging down.
The patient from the next bed was lying flat, with only his legs lowered. That in itself was not strange. What was strange was that the bloodless, bluish-white bare feet planted squarely on the floor had twisted around at the ankles to face Mai Minghe.
This was too much like an absurd dream. If she opened her eyes the next moment and woke in a hospital bed, Mai Minghe would not have been surprised.
"Back away."
His face taut, the red-haired man retreated from bed 02 with the others behind him.
Even the air seemed to be tightening and thinning. They seemed like wild animals that had lingered here for years, sensing danger a step ahead of an ignorant outsider like Mai Minghe.
After thinking for a moment, she asked the patient in the next bed, "Were you hospitalized for broken ankles?"
As Mai Minghe spoke, she vaguely felt as though something were tugging at her waist.
"Or... are you really not human?" she called to the red-haired man. "Hey, young fellow! If it isn't human, what is it? Really a chicken?"
Everything was so unbelievable that she found herself almost incapable of surprise. She just wanted to understand what was happening-after all, nobody could keep startling that frequently.
The red-haired man did not answer.
He and the men behind him were all staring at the lower legs hanging beside bed 02 and at the floor, as though Mai Minghe had already been erased from the situation and simply did not know it yet.
The curtain rustled. Someone was slowly drawing it open.
Mai Minghe did not want to see what the person behind the curtain looked like-it could hardly be a pretty sight.
She immediately lowered her head again. As her gaze fell on the feet before her, she discovered that the neighboring patient's left foot had taken a step forward at some point.
Although she had not moved at all, her own left foot had also taken a step forward.
It was as though two old acquaintances were walking toward each other for a reunion.
No wonder it felt as though something were tugging at her waist...
How strange. Why had merely seeing the other party's feet made her own feet slip beyond her control and follow their movements-no, now was not the time for puzzling over it.
Despite keeping her head lowered, she could tell from the corner of her eye that the curtain had been drawn open.
On bed 02 beside her, a long, human-shaped shadow lay indistinctly.
Mai Minghe drew a deep breath.
Had she been the Mai Minghe of the past, she might have kept the peace, put her own safety first, and given it the "Snake Belt." On their first time living, people always feared that one careless mistake would cause irreparable, unbearable consequences and make this life hard to get through.
Later, when she grew old, she discovered that her decades of life had been filled with loneliness, regrets, and expired wishes. Life had not been much easier. Opportunities no longer came her way, and she no longer had the strength.
This "Snake Belt" could be the last extraordinary encounter of her eighty-six years of life, but it could also be the first choice of her future life.
She wanted to try.
Mai Minghe knew that when she pressed the call button, no sound would interrupt the room's dead silence.
"Bed 01 in Room 3 is calling for a nurse!"
The female voice over the loudspeaker, so loud it was almost shrill, shattered the room's silence without warning.
Before anyone could react, Mai Minghe pressed the call button several more times in succession.
As though provoked, the loudspeaker announced into the corridor with mounting urgency, "A figure disguised as a nurse will arrive in the ward within five seconds-a second figure disguised as a nurse will-a third figure disguised as a nurse-a fourth figure disguised as a nurse will arrive in the ward within five seconds!"
Amid the increasingly urgent announcements, Mai Minghe thought she faintly heard the red-haired man curse, "You're insane!" Immediately afterward, a succession of footsteps retreated into the distance, as though the men had seen things going wrong and fled the ward first.
She had kept her head lowered the entire time.
Mai Minghe sensed the dark shape beside her rising section by section. Its thighs left the mattress, its pelvis hung halfway in the air, but its upper body remained on the bed.
In her dim peripheral vision, that head turned toward Mai Minghe and said in a voice utterly unlike a human's, "For an old lady, you're very bold."
Just then, a heavy object was abruptly hurled across the room and slammed down between her and the patient from the next bed with a tremendous thud, smashing the bedside cabinet into several pieces. The figure tumbled to the floor, then hurriedly got up against the wall. It turned out to be the red-haired man. Finding himself wedged directly between the patient and Mai Minghe, he swore under his breath.
Mai Minghe did not look at him.
She stared only at the ward's doorway and said quietly, "Look more closely. I'm not an old lady anymore."
Not now, and not tomorrow, either.
She was going to seize this second life for herself, for real.
By the time you read this chapter, I should be on the plane. I scheduled this chapter to post automatically-having a backlog really gives you confidence! You can even schedule posts! Back when I was writing Doomsday, it was feast or famine!
Unfortunately, even counting every last bit, my backlog will only last a little over a week... I hope I can write at least one chapter on the plane, so I can start posting extra updates to repay my debts once I land.
Speaking of repaying debts, aren't you grannies being a little too swift and decisive? The Phantasm Report was only just born, and you're already stuffing red envelopes into its hands. Isn't that a little early? What if the kid grows up to be the Hunchback of Notre Dame?
It feels like every time I close my eyes and open them again, I've picked up another debt...
Oh my goodness, boarding's about to start! There's a huge line at the gate, and here I am still sitting cross-legged, typing. Wait until I land, and we'll properly work out how much more I owe.
Isn't it just a matter of working like a donkey? I'm a century-old establishment at that! My donkey tail rakes in the cash!
Before you continue