Doomsday Wonderland

The subterranean lake in the Reverie Libretto was connected to a long river. The subterranean river wound around the mountainous rock and climbed upward. It flowed through the cleavage between two rocky walls and created two riparian lands.

Posthumans were being pushed by the waves into the distance one after another, leaving only Lin Sanjiu sitting on the riparian land and staring at the young man in front of her.

Her first-aid techniques weren’t at professional level and there were no medical facilities around here, so she was afraid that some complications might occur to him, especially when he’d just come back from death. After coughing violently for several minutes straight, the young man’s eyelids slowly fluttered open. Lin Sanjiu examined him for a while, and then let out a long sigh of relief.

Luckily, he was still all there.

“Is… is it over?” Yu Yuan’s weak and hoarse voice tumbled out of his mouth, and if Lin Sanjiu weren’t sitting next to him, she wouldn’t have believed that this was his voice. “Am I still alive?”

Lin Sanjiu opened her mouth, but no words emerged. She took a deep breath to calm herself down and offered him a wide grin. “Yes, you are still alive.”

“You went back for me,” said Yu Yuan affirmatively.

She nodded.

However, confusion still blanketed Yu Yuan’s face. He propped himself up with his arm, and then his expression changed.

He could raise his right arm, but his left one refused his commands. As if it wasn’t a part of him, his left arm laid softly on the ground, the skin pale. Yu Yuan clenched his jaw tight as a bad feeling began to swell up inside of him. He tried to kick his leg, and then his face went blank.

He couldn’t move his leg. Although the leg that had been destroyed in the dream looked perfectly fine on the outside, like his left arm, it had become a piece of dead meat that extended from his body.

Lin Sanjiu quickly went forward and helped him up. She wanted to say something to comfort him, but her tongue found no words. Yu Yuan leaned against her knees silently and stared at his leg. Silence hung between them for a few minutes. Then Yu Yuan suddenly spoke, shattering the silence first, “It’s okay. Losing an arm or a leg is better than losing my life.”

“But…”

“As soon as I get better, I will amputate my left arm and leg and replace them with prosthetic limbs.”

His voice was getting lower, and becoming more and more wheezy as if he was consoling himself. “I heard some prosthetic limbs move so well, you will feel as if they’ve grown out of your own body, so it’s okay…”

“But your arm and leg are still intact; there aren’t any wounds on them, so why can’t you move them?”

Lin Sanjiu was triggered by the word “amputate”. She bent over and poked his left shoulder. “Can you feel anything?”

But Yu Yuan did not give her any response. He stared straight into the air as if he did not hear her question.

Lin Sanjiu smacked him a few times, and then Mrs. Manas’s voice rang out in her brain, “It’s no use.”

“Why?”

“His problem is not with his body. Even if you stab him with a knife right now, he won’t feel any pain at all.”

The words tingled down Lin Sanjiu’s spine like a spider. She quickly added, “You know how to save him?”

Mrs. Manas sighed wearily. “Settle down. I am not sure if this will work or not. Think about it, you lost an arm in your dream, but why is it that your arm is paralyzed in the real world? I think it is because the dream was too realistic, so even though you know very well that it was just a dream, your brain thinks that you have really lost the arm. The information will remain in your brain even after you come out of the dream. That is to say, his arm, though intact, is cut off from the brain’s signalling system.”

Lin Sanjiu listened blankly to Mrs. Manas’s explanation, and then she looked at Yu Yuan. After he had woken up from his apparent death, the young man suffered yet another heavy blow. His eyes were half closed, his head held low. He looked as if he was about to pass out again. She hastily asked Mrs. Manas in her mind, “Can you reestablish the connection?”

Mrs. Manas did not respond to her question immediately, leaving Lin Sanjiu on the tenterhooks. When she began to speak again, Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help but let out a sigh. “Well, theoretically, it is possible.”

As Mrs. Manas understood the gravity of the situation, her voice was sterner and more serious. “I think the reason he’s unable to recover by himself is that he does not have a Higher Consciousness. You’d better let him go to sleep first, and then you inject your Higher Consciousness into his body. I will try to wake the sensory part of his brain towards his body. However, as this is my first time doing something like this, I am not very certain how it will end. Let’s proceed with caution.”

After Lin Sanjiu briefly explained about what they were going to do to the young man, she laid him down on the ground. There was faint unease written all over Yu Yuan’s face, but he did not say anything in the end and closed his eyes. His injuries were too serious, or perhaps it was just his brain thinking they were too severe, for after lying still for a while, he very soon fell unconscious again and his breathing became longer.

Carefully and cautiously, she injected a part of her Higher Consciousness into Yu Yuan’s body and formed a bridge between the two of them. Then, using the newly formed consciousness bridge, Mrs. Manas looked into Yu Yuan’s body condition. She took control over his paralyzed arm and leg, and fired a cascade of electrical pulses to his brain.

Lin Sanjiu did not know how many times they did this. At first, she felt excited when she saw his arm tremble. However, she ended up staring at it for so long that she became numb.

After seeing the left arm tremble again and leave streaks on the sand, she wearily raised her hand and rubbed her temples. When she put her hand down, she heard Mrs. Manas shout, “Did you see that?”

“Yeah,” she replied listlessly.

“It wasn’t me.”

After hearing what Mrs. Manas said, Lin Sanjiu became stunned for two seconds straight. When she finally snapped herself back to reality, her face flushed red with excitement and she stuttered, “Are… are you saying…”

“Yes. Finally, it is working.” Mrs. Manas sounded tired, but there was a tinge of triumph in her voice as well. “Let’s keep going!”

Inspired by their success, they continued trying for another two hours. During this period of time, more than one group of posthumans drifted past them in the river. The heat of the day had ebbed to a comforting warmth, like a teenager that shed away all his spikes.

Perhaps it was the heat from the sun or maybe Yu Yuan’s brain finally realized his body condition was perfectly fine, as color began to return to his face. When he once again cracked his eyelids open, Yu Yuan immediately shot up from the ground. It was only when he was standing on the ground that he realized what had happened. He lowered his head and stared at his arm and legs, disbelief filling his eyes as he muttered, “You… You cured me?”

Lin Sanjiu retracted her Higher Consciousness. Since she had just squandered a large portion of her Higher Consciousness, she threw herself onto the ground and closed her eyes. “Well, sort of… But to be honest, you weren’t actually injured. It was just that your brain was deceived.”

She received no reply even after she finished speaking. There was only silence in the air. Piqued by her curiosity, Lin Sanjiu opened her eyes, only to see Yu Yuan still standing there. He rubbernecked between himself and her as a bewildered expression dawned on his face.

“It… Is it you?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “Could it be that you are the one that woman was talking about?”

Lin Sanjiu shot up and dusted her body. “What? What are you talking about?”

Yu Yuan was stunned. He began examining her meticulously as if this was the first time he was seeing her. Lin Sanjiu began to get a little uneasy under his inquisitive gaze, and just when she was about to say something about it, Yu Yuan spoke up first. “Before I came to this world, I met someone.”

“Huh?”

“I still remember very well what happened that day. I stayed on a beach and decided to spend the last two months of my time there before the transfer.” He sat down next to Lin Sanjiu, but his eyes never left hers. “It was the most relaxing time I ever had in my life. Every morning, I would go fishing by sea to pass the time. But then, one day when I was fishing, a woman walked straight up to me from the other side of the beach.”

Lin Sanjiu raised one of her brows in question.

“She looked like a 30-year-old woman, but I couldn’t be sure; she could’ve been a lot older or a lot younger than that. I was very anxious at that time, and as I stood up, she smiled at me.” Yu Yuan seemed to have fallen into his memories, his brows tightly creased together. “I’d never seen such a warm and reassuring smile like hers before. She stood about ten steps away from me and said ‘Heaven Underworld?’.

“In that world, aside from the consular officer who issued me the visa, nobody knew which world I was going to.” Yu Yuan sighed, his tattoos glinting under the sunlight. “I don’t know why, but I had a feeling that she did not ask for my information from the consular officer but just guessed it on her own. She stood there for a long while and then she asked me, ‘You are going to Heaven Underworld, correct?’.”

A chill instantly crept down Lin Sanjiu’s spine, causing her blood to turn cold even though she was sitting under the sun.

“I answered yes. And then she smiled and asked me if I could help her deliver a message. And when I asked, ‘who do you want me to deliver the message to?’, she gave me a very strange hint.” Yu Yuan paused for a moment and looked into Lin Sanjiu’s eyes. Even though his face was covered with tattoos that gave him a menacing vibe, there was a stream of warmth in his eyes. “She said, bring my message to a woman who would restore me.”

Lin Sanjiu slowly opened her mouth. She felt raw in her throat and could not utter a word.

“I was kind of confused actually, but she was very serious. She took out a piece of paper and jotted something on it. After that, she insisted that I bring the message to you, and because of that, she even gave me a Special Item as a token of gratitude.” As Yu Yuan spoke, he shook his wrist and something dropped out of his tattoo. He picked it up from the ground and handed it to Lin Sanjiu.

The piece of paper had been folded numerous times and it seemed like it had gone through a lot. There were marks of dirt here and there, and the edge of the paper was torn. Lin Sanjiu clenched her palm again and again. She did not want to take the piece of paper, but she had no other choice. Slowly, ever slowly, she reached out for the paper and took it from Yu Yuan.

She slowly opened the paper. The moment the paper was fully unfolded, the first thing that greeted her eyes was a line that was written in cursive writing: I’ve finally figured you out.

“She said that you know her and her name is Nüwa.”