Doomsday Wonderland

Pure and untainted: those were the only two words Lin Sanjiu could think of to describe the young lad whenever she saw him. His gaze was gentle and affectionate, which reminded her of clear waves. His posture was straight as fresh bamboo, which made his two overly-long arms that reached his knees a bit less awkward.

Raising one of his arms that were as long as half of his body, Ji Shanqing pointed to another mirror.

“Right on time,” He said, as always, with a placid tone. When viewing his profile from a certain angle, she found that compared to masculine features, feminine traits were expressed more dominantly in his face. “I suggest we work together. What do you think?”

“How?” Lin Sanjiu asked as she studied the mirrors on her two sides.

She couldn’t differentiate the shape of the previous mirror houses, but this one was different. This mirror house was a perfect triangle, and even without the use of her bondage rope, she could easily see that the angles of the mirrors on two sides were exactly equal.

“Neither of us knows which mirrors line the edge of the building, and since there are two of us now, I suggest we cooperate to survey the building. I’ll go to the left and you go the right, okay?”

Even though both of them came in from the same mirror, Lin Sanjiu had taken on a different form from him. She had turned into a pear shape. She looked at her stumpy legs, and her eyebrows were brought together tightly when her gaze fell on the mirror on her left side, “Then? Are you suggesting that we should sacrifice for the greater good of the other? If we follow your plan, one of us will end up losing his or her way in the mirror labyrinth.”

“I suppose you left some marks along the way, didn’t you?” Ji Shanqing tilted his head, giving Lin Sanjiu a smile that was as gentle as a spring breeze, “We should leave marks as we venture through the mirror chambers. After that, we’ll return to this triangular chamber and sketch out the shape of the mirror chambers we’ve seen.”

“Why would I do that?” Lin Sanjiu couldn’t understand. Her brows were knitted together even tighter in confusion.

“Words pale in action, let me show you,” Then, he took out a piece of paper and a pen from his trench coat before continuing, “I’m sure you already know this mirror chamber is an isosceles triangle, right? So when we warp out from the two mirrors nearest to the angle, one of us will end up on the left side while the other will fall on the right side of this mirror chamber. Before you got here, I had already gone through the right triangle. The shape of the next mirror chamber is like this…”

As he bent over, he laid his two apelike long arms on the ground and drew a heptagon on the paper. Looking at the geometric pattern, if she had to describe the drawing, it had to be a flat heart shape.

“Here is where I came out and here is the mirror that is right in front of me,” Ji Shanqing pointed two dots on either side of the “waist” of the asymmetrical heart, “If I go out from here, I can draw the shape of the next mirror chamber behind the heart-shaped chamber.”

Lin Sanjiu replied, looking wide-awake, “Ah, I can see what are you talking about: so you’re creating a floor plan!”

“Exactly,” Ji Shanqing nodded, his glossy hair slipped beside his ears, “Look, if we can sketch out the whole floor plan, we can more or less know the location of the edge.”

“Not only the edge,”  Lin Sanjiu thought, feeling a little bit uplifted,  “With a floorplan of this area as our starting point, figuring out the whole internal structure of the diamond building is no longer a pie in the sky!”

“I have a question,” After giving it a run in her brain, she questioned Ji Shanqing, “How can you be so sure that there are no mirror chambers behind the apex of this triangular mirror chamber? After all, judging from the angle, this apex is most likely situated at the edge.”

Ji Shanqing didn’t rush to reply to her and offered her an agreeable smile. Then, he went on, “I’m not sure about this, but I have a thought of my own. Would you like to listen to it? All the mirror chambers have no fixed shape and each of them is different; hence, no matter the arrangement, there is no way they could fit closely together in a straight line, and there must be a gap amongst two mirror chambers. Also, we must jump to the corresponding mirror when we warp. I think that’s why the amount of the mirrors is the same in each mirror chamber. For example, if you warp from mirror 5 in this mirror chamber, you would come out from mirror 5 of the next mirror chamber. As for the size of the gap in the middle, be it small or large, it doesn’t affect our progress.

“Moving on, the apex of this triangular mirror chamber isn’t exactly a mirror; in fact, it’s an angle formed when two mirrors are placed together, so we can’t warp through it. In other words, the apex has no corresponding mirror. If there is another mirror chamber behind the apex, then there must be a corresponding mirror to either of the mirror in this chamber or the next chamber.”

As Ji Shanqing spoke, Lin Sanjiu pictured the shape of the chamber in her heart. She couldn’t help but marvel at the quirkiness of his mind.

At the same time, she realized something else.

It was clear to her that Ji Shanqing was an extremely bright person as he could come up with this plan not long after he arrived in this isosceles triangle mirror chamber. Besides, like Lin Sanjiu, he was walking on the edge which implied that he probably entered into the diamond building at the same time as her. Though there might be some deviation, it wouldn’t be too large.

Before entering the diamond building, she had never met him at the final pitstop nor had she heard of him before. This could only point to one thing: Ji Shanqing came from another apocalyptic world.

The thought frightened Lin Sanjiu.

People from a different apocalyptic world were able to enter this diamond building with ease. This indicated that what Lin Sanjiu had seen and experienced in this diamond building was merely the tip of an iceberg, and there was more to come; perhaps, this building could even transverse across time and space. Hence, would a strategy that was formulated based on the location of the mirror chambers and the edge work according to what they had planned?

Despite that, there weren’t many options for Lin Sanjiu. This was by far the most feasible method they could come up with.

Since they had met not long ago, they chit-chatted for a while before parting ways after they had settled on the plan. Since Ji Shanqing had previously walked through the right path, he picked the left path this time whereas Lin Sanjiu went to discover the second mirror chamber on the right track.

“What a cautious guy,” Lin Sanjiu murmured as she warped out from the mirror chamber on the right.

Ji Shanqing’s motive for swapping with her was probably because he couldn’t believe in her just yet. He had to take a look at all the mirror chambers behind both sides himself.

Just like Ji Shanqing had illustrated, this mirror chamber was with a flat heart shape. Lin Sanjiu found the exit mirror opposite of her with a single glance. After she left a mark she paced toward the mirror in her gasoline barrel-like body.

Although the shape was simple, the area was so freaking small that she couldn’t even turn her body around.

The mirror she was heading toward formed a slit with another mirror. Just as she stretched her hand to touch the mirror, her second sight kicked-in, and she froze.

From the slit between two mirrors, something was dripping down slowly. After Lin Sanjiu narrowed her eyes to take a better look, she found out that it was gooey and slimy, exhibiting a soft flesh pink color. It seemed like a piece of brain tissue.

Probably due to the vibration sent forth by her steps, the brain tissue fell to the mirror on the ground, releasing a subtle “plop” sound.

“Somebody died here?”

After looking at it for quite some time, Lin Sanjiu decided she shouldn’t waste her time on something like this and went through the mirror.

Be that as it may, she still felt dubious as she had never encountered any emergencies while traversing through the other mirror chambers. She couldn’t think of any other better reasoning aside from attributing the owner of the brain tissue as a hapless victim of a fight between posthumans.

There was nothing worth mentioning in the next mirror chambers. After she had jotted down the shape and surface area of the five mirror chambers on a piece of paper, she felt it was almost time to return to the triangular mirror chamber. Since she had never drawn a floor plan before—not even in her days before the apocalypse—she had to cross check her drawing with the mirror chamber a few times before moving forward into the next mirror chamber, so she might’ve taken up more time than she should. On the other hand, Ji Shanqing had more experience in drawing floor plans had probably returned to the triangular mirror chamber already.

After she’d run the final check on the drawing she put away the paper and pen and prepared to turn around. At that moment, her hyper-sensory sensed something in the air, and before she could do anything, an object fell on the ground with a bang.

Startled, Lin Sanjiu quickly turned her head, and her gaze met the eyes of the man.

“H-How…” The man had yellowish black cheeks, and he looked unfamiliar to Lin Sanjiu. However, the way he looked, with his eyes filled with bewilderment at Lin Sanjiu, had made her wonder whether or not she had come across him somewhere else. He stumbled, “W-W-Why are you here?”

“I’ve met you before?” Lin Sanjiu replied a question of her own. Narrowing her eyes, she realized that the man did seem somehow familiar.

The man didn’t reply to her. Instead, he turned his head which surprised Lin Sanjiu. He extended his hand to touch the mirror from which he came.

He was much nearer to the mirror than Lin Sanjiu, so even after she’d finally came to her senses, she did not have enough time to pin him down. Just as she made her first step, surprisingly, what awaited her was not that man but a shower of blood. She was drenched wet in the crimson liquid from her head to her toes, even her hair and her newly bought battle shirt hadn’t escaped their fate.

There was even blood in her mouth. She couldn’t care less about the pieces of innards on her body and quickly raised her head to look ahead. She was stunned and saw that the man had exploded into a pile of meat pulp.

Until now, only she realized who the man was—she almost couldn’t recognize him after his horse face had turned back to normal.

“W-W-What is this?” She asked Mrs. Manas as her brain had gone blank.

“Hold on a sec, let me take a look first.” Mrs. Manas responded very quickly and went ahead to check it out. Then, she returned, very soon, with some information, “I’ve taken a deep look into the condition of the particles when you go through the mirror transmitter. It seems that these mirrors are programmed to be unidirectional.”

“Unidirectional? What do you mean?”

“It means that for the same mirror, you can only either go in or come out and reentering the same mirror is strictly prohibited. This is due to the setting which caused the mirror to be unidirectional, so the atomized particle cannot re-enter the mirror in a reverse direction. I suspect that the particles are treated as impurities or invading substances. To put it in a nutshell, you can’t go back now.”

Lin Sanjiu stayed blank for a few seconds before she took a deep breath as something suddenly crossed her mind, “Ji Shanqing! He might be in—wait, wait, wait, just wait for a sec. Didn’t he say that he had retraced his way back to the triangular mirror chamber before?”

“Impossible,” Mrs. Manas refuted. She sounded confident, “Either he has gone the wrong way, or he was lying to you.”

Lin Sanjiu’s furrowed her eyebrows, and her mind was all jumbled up, filling with fog. To iron out everything, she took out her paper and pen and began to scribble down whatever was in her mind.

First of all, she had seen with her own eyes that Ji Shanqing had precisely described the heart-shaped mirror house, so there was nothing wrong with it. But since he couldn’t go back, and he didn’t seem like a clumsy person who would mix up entrance and exit, how did he know about the shape of that mirror chamber?

Of course, considering that all of the mirrors on the two sides of the triangle are lined in a straight line, it was also viable that he could go out from the first mirror on the right side and return to the triangular mirror chamber through the mirror two. Be that as it may, he had no idea what the shape of the next mirror chamber was nor he was certain that he would be warped back to where he had started. He might be teleported to other mirror chambers; hence, this assumption was invalid.

Heaving a sigh, the fog in her mind had dissipated a bit as the remnant pieces of brain tissue in the heart-shaped mirror chamber surfaced in her mind.

Then, it clicked, “Unless—unless somebody and Ji Shanqing came into the triangular mirror chamber at the same time.”

That man must have told Ji Shanqing the next mirror chamber was a heart shape—no, perhaps he might even have filled him in with the contours of the following few mirror chambers; otherwise, there’s no way Ji Shanqing could explain the heart-shaped mirror chamber so vividly.

That might be the reason why he insisted on going the left path since going through the similar path again was pointless.

“So the brain tissue belonged to that poor fellow? What had happened between them? How did Ji Shanqing know that turning back could lead to death?”

Although all of those were just assumptions, she had gotten a better picture of the whole maneuver by just imagination alone.

“But it doesn’t make any sense at all,” Mrs. Manas sounded confused, “In the grand scheme of things, many hands make work lighter—He could have invited you to go on the same path with him. Why would he go so far as to lie to you?”

“Of course, he wouldn’t harm me if we cooperated just to look for the edge,” Lin Sanjiu pursed her lips, and her complexion turned cold, “Ji Shanqing is different from that Horse-Face. He is smart, and as an intelligent person, he must know very well that getting an ally is much better than gaining a foe on the way to search for the grand prize. Since he had set me up, he must have fulfilled two criteria.

“First, he must be sure that the grand prize doesn’t exist on the right path. Maybe he got that information from the dead person, I don’t know; perhaps, the person who has died might be Ji Shanqing’s real companion. Secondly, I’m guessing he already knew the location of the grand prize, so he didn’t want me to walk on the left path to eliminate the chances of me getting closer to the grand prize. He wanted the grand prize all to himself.”

“Not only has he pointed you in the wrong direction, he even planned to kill you,” Mrs. Manas concluded. Then, she sighed, “Phew, she’s such a beautiful girl, who could have expected her to be so black-hearted.”

“Girl? I thought he was a male,” Lin Sanjiu scoffed. When the three minutes limit was almost up, she proceeded to the next mirror chamber.

When she unglued her eyes in the next mirror chamber, she knew she had another three minutes.

“Everything we said just now is only our speculation,” Lin Sanjiu sighed, “If I want to know how close we are to the truth and locate the grand prize, I think I have only one option left.”

“Hey, stop. Don’t—”

Before Mrs. Manas could finish her sentence, Lin Sanjiu activated [Consciousness Mimicry].

“Target: Nüwa.”