Doomsday Wonderland

After Lin Guoyun’s death, the rain was the first thing to stop.

The night was fading into nothingness like diluted dark coffee. The Hong Kong streets, the 18th-century scenery, and all the boxy vintage cars dissipated one after another from her vision.

After the game ended, Lin Sanjiu found herself standing inside a room made of cement.

The room was a dim, bare cube, merely about ten square meters large. “We were running, killing, and fighting in this small room just now? How incredible,” Lin Sanjiu thought. The room was ill-lit, and if it weren’t because somebody had left the door at the front opened, which exposed the desert outside and permitted some light to enter the room, it might have perhaps been complete darkness now, as there weren’t any light bulbs here.

The concrete room looked empty at first glance. However, as Lin Sanjiu continued to survey the room, she found a human figure lurking in a dark corner. She didn’t know how long he had been there. “There was somebody else here besides the Potato brothers and me!”

Pressing her hand against her raging heart, Lin Sanjiu found that the body was that of a man she had never met before. He probably died a long time ago, as rigor mortis had already set in. He had a beautiful face, but he died tragically. His clothes were all shredded into pieces, exposing his pale body. There was a bloodstain between his legs and a rope around his neck. It seemed that he was strangled to death while being sexually assaulted.

Lin Sanjiu hastily averted her gaze as her stomach churned badly. She and the dead young man were strangers, but a fire was brewing within her. It was as if something inside her was giving her the urge to burn the entire Pocket Dimension down into ashes.

She did not want to think about his tragedy. If she recalled it correctly, he must be the young man that the old man had talked of. Lin Sanjiu had never seen him before, and she had no idea which of the murderers was responsible for his death. Whether it was Jack the Ripper or the Rainy Night Butcher, neither of them had the habit of abusing male victims—

“The tunnel is closed.”

Just as Lin Sanjiu was thinking, the conversation between the Potato brothers wafted into her ears. She turned around to see that the elder brother, who had nearly been strangled to death by her, had recovered. The purplish hue was gone from his countenance, and his breath had become normal. He did not seem too concerned about her or the corpse lying in the corner of the room. He fingered the cement wall as if he was searching for something. He said, “It seems that I was not wrong; the space here is indeed warped.”

The younger brother crouched beside him and knocked on the wall. He then asked, “Where are the readers? Did you see them? I cannot find them anywhere.”

“Neither can I. I suspect that all the readers have dissipated along with the London and Hong Kong scenery. Hmm, interesting; I have never seen anything like this before. This could only mean one thing: the crevice exists here.”

“Will this mess with the transmission of data?”

“Well, we will only know after we get back.”

With the end of the simulation, the two brothers seemed to have lost interest in Lin Sanjiu. They didn’t care about her presence at all as they tapped and rapped here and there around the cement room. Lin Sanjiu stealthily inched to the exit as she eavesdropped on their conversation.

“I don’t understand why this time the simulation suddenly jumped from London to Hong Kong.” Crouching on the ground, the younger brother asked dejectedly, “Aren’t we just trying to connect Wisconsin and Illinois?”

“Perhaps it’s that once the bridge between two spaces is interrupted, it will cause a chain reaction.” The elder brother looked around, and when he saw Lin Sanjiu, his gaze just flitted past her as if she were someone inconsequential. She seemed to have lost her research value once the simulation had ended. “In the end, we did succeed in opening the portal between two simulations. In that case, I wonder how the girl escaped from Wisconsin alone.”

“Yeah, by right, she should’ve followed us into Pogo the Clown of Illinois once the previous simulation has ended. Even if the Plainfield Ghoul was caught, there’s no way she could have gotten out of the Pocket Dimension,” the younger brother said as he scratched his chin, “The only explanation to this situation would be that the rift between the two spaces is not entirely corrupted. That’s why when the three of us went into Illinois, the girl was left in Wisconsin.”

Their conversation involved a large number of strange nouns and details. Even if Lin Sanjiu listened with all her concentration, this massive amount of information just flew into one ear and came out from the other. She could barely remember the points, let alone understand them. However, summarizing from the minutiae she caught in between their convo, she grew a fuzzy understanding of the entire situation. All she needed now was just a few more pieces of the puzzle, and she could finish the whole picture.

Seizing the chance when the brothers were absorbed into their conversation, Lin Sanjiu exited the cement room.

The sandstorm buffeted her skin, and the light was dazzlingly bright. She walked out of the same house she had entered before, but apparently, the location of the “house” had changed. Lin Sanjiu realized this after she allowed her gaze to travel and found out that she was now at the edge of the desert. She could even see a forest peeking out from the horizon in front.

She looked around again and saw the old man—the same old man—standing by the door. His hands were behind his back as he greeted her. “…Have you finished? Was it fun?”

In the next second, Lin Sanjiu caught him by his collar and threw him onto the ground.

“You f*cking asshole! Tell me what’s going on in there!” With every word that escaped her mouth, Lin Sanjiu felt a deeper desire to kill the old man. Nevertheless, she pressed down the urge and hissed out her final accusation, “Haven’t you already gathered four posthumans to run the simulation?”

Drawing conclusions from the conversation between the brothers, it seemed like they had been inside the Pocket Dimension for quite some time. And they did not lie when they said they had experienced the historical fragments of four serial killers: The Plainfield Ghoul of Wisconsin, Pogo the Clown in Illinois, Jack the Ripper of London, and the Rainy Night Butcher in Hong Kong.

The simulation would not run without four people in a group. In other words, the old man had already gathered up enough participants to run the simulation. Aside from the Potato brothers, there were another two posthumans. One was the young man who died a tragic death, while the other was a girl who had escaped after the simulation of “Wisconsin Serial Killer” had ended. Although the culprit responsible for the crime had been caught, due to the Potato brothers’ interruption, the game went on, bringing the remaining three players into the next murder scene.

“Hey, hey, don’t hit me,” the old man rolled around on the ground and covered his head with his arms, “What’s wrong with you? I didn’t lie. It was the previous round. I don’t know what is going on in there now, but after the “Plainfield Ghoul” simulation was over, only one posthuman came out. I thought the other three wanted to go for another round, so I invited you…”

“How many historical fragments of a serial killer are there in a game round?”

“Only one, of course! This is a simulation, and it’s not dangerous—”

It seemed that the old man did not know that the Potato brothers had already caused havoc and messed up the Pocket Dimension. Right after the simulation of Plainfield Ghoul was over, the other three players were directly sent into the next simulation, so naturally, they would not have come out at the same time as the girl. Lin Sanjiu sneered, “You can tell that to the corpse later on.”

Hearing this, the old man rolled around and sat up, refuting. “Although somebody died this time, the game itself is not dangerous. The murderer has no direct relationship with the players—”

“That’s true.”

Just when Lin Sanjiu was about to say something, one of the Potato brothers’ voices suddenly erupted behind her. Their voices were similar, and Lin Sanjiu knew it was the younger brother talking only after she turned her body around. His two large eyes looked straight at Lin Sanjiu as he moved closer with his elder brother, who walked next to him. “The dead man you saw, he happened to know about the real identity of ‘Pogo the Clown’ and wanted to file a report to the police. Since we could not allow the game to end so early, as our experiment was still going on, we lured him to where the murderer was and had the murderer kill him. After that, we buried his body so that nobody would find out. It’s just that neither of us had expected that the corpse would come out along with us.”

Upon hearing the Potato brothers’ confession, a chill ran down Lin Sanjiu’s spine as a fire built up inside her heart. Before she could lash out, the younger brother turned to the old man and said, “Both of us want to join the next game. What should we do now?”

“Great, great. We can start the game again after we have another two participants.” The old man stood up, dusting his clothes. The Pocket Dimension being would only repeat the same thing again and again, day after day, without stopping. Perhaps he even had no idea that the Pocket Dimension had already broken.

“What do you want?” Seeing that the brothers were walking towards the entrance, Lin Sanjiu could not contain her anger anymore and exploded. At the same time, she had the [Recorder] card inside her palm.

The Potato brothers ignored her.

“The ticket is still the same. Please give me two white items, then please proceed to wait inside,” the old man said, rubbing his hands together.

“We need another ticket?” The elder brother was stunned. He turned to his brother, saying, “Do you have anything white?”

“All I have left is my socks.” As the younger brother replied, he sat down on the ground and began to take off his shoes and socks.

The old man was not going to touch the two socks, fresh with human temperature. He spun around and took a chest from the door behind him. He opened the chest and said, “Just put them in here—” Then, his eyes blurred, and he heard two thud sounds. Startled, he immediately recoiled two steps and saw what had happened.

The brothers were lying on the ground like two wooden logs, seemingly losing control over their bodies. They could blink their eyes, but they couldn’t talk.

The old man looked over his shoulder and saw Lin Sanjiu standing not far away. There was a recorder in her hand, and she kept the volume so low that he couldn’t hear anything from where he stood. The recorder seemed to have finished playing the tape, as he saw her close it with a snap.

The wind billowed through the desert, carrying the heat from the sun to every corner of the mass sand land. For a moment, the surrounding was so quiet that the sand scratching across the rooftop was the only sound audible.

Lin Sanjiu had never expected that she would get the two “Gods” in one shot.

Letting out a sigh, she walked two steps forward and took out two ropes from her card. The duration of the [Pygmalion Choker] effect was heavily affected by the amount of Potential Growth Value of its user. Lin Sanjiu did not know how long she could contain her opponent with her Potential Growth Value, so she had to act fast.

Grabbing the rope in her palm, Lin Sanjiu gave a sidelong glance at the old man, who was hugging the chest. His mouth and the chest were both wide open as if he still couldn’t comprehend what had just transpired.

Just when Lin Sanjiu wanted to shoo him away, she lowered her head, and she froze when she saw the thing inside.

There were all sorts of items in the color white inside the chest. She knew those were tickets, and her white towel with the hotel name written on top of it was amongst them. But it wasn’t the only one.

There was another towel, although looking a bit soiled, that was similar to the one she owned. It had the same hotel name written on top of it, and it sat obediently in the corner of the chest.