Chapter 35: Chaisi - The First Resident He Encountered

At first, there was a constant stream of people coming and going in the hospital room.

Unfamiliar faces drifted in and out, their facial features quickly blurring together until Chai Si could no longer tell who was who. He remembered traffic police, nurses, doctors, detectives, social workers... Every blurry, flesh-colored face would open its mouth, pouring an endless stream of questions over him.

Who is your mother?
Where did you get onto the highway?
Did you notice the car door? Was it closed? Did she jump out of the car?
Where is your father? Oh, you've never seen him?
Then what other relatives do you have at home?

Aside from being able to answer, "My mother's name is Daisy Munro," Chai Si could not answer a single question.

In the past, Chai Si sometimes fancied that he actually had a father—someone who was a CIA agent operating undercover abroad, or perhaps a top-tier scientist working on a secret project, which was why they couldn't meet. Those were just ordinary childhood fantasies.

However, during those days, Chai Si sat alone on his hospital bed with his arm in a cast, watching one stranger after another enter and leave, leaving behind snacks, empty paper coffee cups, cigarette butts, business cards, and countless questions...

All those previous naive fantasies peeled away in the face of reality, just like shedding a layer of skin that had long since stopped fitting.

"There's just me," he told the police officer. "Now there's only me left at home."

That day, he heard several people talking by the doorway—whether they were police officers, social workers, or someone else was hard for a child to tell.

"I've been in this line of work for decades, and I've never seen a mother run off like that," the middle-aged man said, chewing on his tobacco. "Parents who walk out in the morning and never come back are common enough... But how could she just vanish from a car accident?"

"It is weird. You couldn't tell how she vanished from the marks at the scene," another, younger-looking person said. "Though, ironically, if she hadn't suddenly vanished, that kid probably wouldn't have ended up with just a broken arm."

"Oh, right, you mentioned that earlier. Something about the direction of the steering wheel?"

"Yeah. Have you ever heard that drivers facing an emergency will subconsciously steer to the left, letting the passenger side take the impact? That saying isn't absolute; some drivers steer toward open space. But in this accident, the child's mother had no choice but to steer left—"

Because to the right was a sheer cliff.

This answer, at the exact moment the middle-aged man uttered a "Huh," surfaced in Chai Si's mind as well.

"She probably hadn't turned the steering wheel yet, or had just barely started turning it, when she vanished from the driver's seat. Once she let go, the steering wheel snapped back to the center, right? According to the child, after he realized his mother was gone, he instinctively grabbed the steering wheel... That way, it happened to make the car veer slightly to the right, yet cleverly not too far—not enough to crash through the guardrail and plunge off the cliff, but just right so that the boy suffered only the mildest injuries. It's nothing short of a miracle."

"Damn, what incredible luck," the middle-aged man said, before stopping himself. "...No, you can't really call it luck. He's only five years old, and now he has neither father nor mother. What's the next step?"

"His mother has a distant aunt living in Blackmoor City who agreed to come look after him for a few days," a third person chimed in. "Whether she's willing to be a long-term guardian is hard to say... If she isn't, the kid will just have to be sent to an orphanage or a foster home."

Chai Si was discharged on the third day, carrying a broken arm in a cast and a bill he had no idea how to handle.

His great-aunt was getting on in years; her glasses constantly slipped down the bridge of her nose, and she would start dozing off the moment the clock struck eight. Neither she nor Chai Si knew how to get along with each other, and the usually noisy, bustling little apartment was as silent as if no one lived there at all.

On the sixth night after the car accident, Chai Si couldn't fall asleep no matter what he did.

His arm hurt, for one thing, and his great-aunt snored constantly once she fell asleep. Every time he lifted his head, he saw a strange, mound-like silhouette sleeping in his mother's bed.

In the dead of night, unable to bear the boredom and torment any longer, Chai Si quietly climbed out of bed and entered the living room. Actually, there was nothing in the living room either. He thought he wanted to play with his toys, but after staring at the box for a while, he didn't even reach out to open it.

Chai Si walked over to the window and looked down at the deserted, familiar street below.

If only Mom could come back, he thought. Right now, walking back up the street, wearing the clothes she had on the day she disappeared, carrying the snacks and breakfast she bought him, her keys jangling with every step...

Although he was only five years old, Chai Si had long realized that his imagination would not become reality.

Therefore, when he actually saw his mother walking step by step up the street, he leaned forward in shock, and *thud*, his face smacked against the glass.

"...Mom?" he whispered.

The apartment was on the second floor, still a long way from his mother, but she seemed to hear him anyway and looked up at him.

At that instant, Chai Si didn't move a muscle, his forehead pressed against the cold glass.

Half of his mother's face was covered in blood.

The blood under the night sky was darker than the night itself, making that half of her face look as though it had been swallowed by a void. One of her eyes could no longer open; only the single eye buried deep within the pitch-black gore was looking up at him, its pupil glowing faintly.

Yet that was truly his mother.

At the moment their eyes met, his mother reached out her hand and waved it vigorously a few times, just like she used to do when she picked him up from kindergarten. Then she continued limping and staggering toward the apartment, nearly tripping in her haste.

This was the moment he should have quickly woken his great-aunt, but at that exact second, Chai Si didn't even remember there was an aunt in the house. He dashed to the door, pulled it open, and ran down the stairs with a clatter of footsteps.

"Mom!"

Chai Si sprinted frantically toward her, and if his mother hadn't quickly caught him with one hand, he would have collided straight into her arms, cast and all. "Mom, what happened to you?"

"I took a tumble," his mother gasped, half-hunching over as she let out a breathy laugh. "It hurts like hell. Your arm—"

"Where did you go?"

His mother first scrutinized him for a moment before saying, "A... a very strange place. But it doesn't matter. I'm back. Don't worry, I'm never going back there again..."

With those words, the strength that had just sustained her walk home seemed to drain away all at once. She collapsed onto the roadside like a pile of building blocks suddenly kicked over.

"Mom?" Chai Si panicked and hurried to support her.

Support her was hardly the word; he couldn't hold her weight, and instead simply clung to her arm, tumbling down to sit beside her on the ground.

Yet his mother waved a hand, signaling that she was fine. "I'm just tired... Just resting... Are you home alone?"

"Great-Aunt came from Blackmoor City," Chai Si replied.

"Go back inside... Have her call... call an ambulance..."

Chai Si lowered his head and found that the front of his clothes, his arm, and his plaster cast were all stained with blood.

"Go... go on," his mother said in a low voice, sounding as though a gust of wind might scatter it completely.

Chai Si nodded frantically several times. Before he stood up, for some reason, his hands trembled as he gently touched his mother's body.

Perhaps he wanted to see where her injuries were and how severe they were, but instead, his fingers brushed against something strange.

"Mom," Chai Si started, bewildered, "what is wrapped around you?"

At that moment, his mother's face froze.

In all his life, Chai Si had never seen a face so terrifying—because the owner of that face was herself consumed by an overwhelming terror.

A heavy, suffocating terror, thick as wet concrete, gradually crushed the air out of the space around them. For a split second, Chai Si suddenly wanted to shrink until he was tiny enough for no one to see him, including his mother.

His mother did not look down at her waist, as if refusing to look would keep her fear from becoming reality. Her only remaining open eye stared fixedly at Chai Si, shining with a terrifying intensity, and he couldn't tell if tears were welling up within it.

"Wh... what? What is... wrapped around me?"

Chai Si was already crying without realizing it, tears tickling as they tracked down his face.

"I—I don't know," he sobbed, unaware of what he was even afraid of, too terrified to even pull his hand back. It remained pressed against his mother's waist as he trembled, "It—it feels like a thin rope..."

Just then, he felt the rope beneath his fingers twitch slightly.

As if the other end of the rope had been pulled by someone.

The other end...

In a daze, Chai Si realized that the rope around his mother's waist must have another end.

"Don't look,"

He heard his mother's voice, pleading with him. "Don't look back, Chai Si... Go back inside, run..."

Yet Chai Si turned a deafened ear. His body seemed to have been taken over by another version of himself; he involuntarily stood up, took a step around her, and cast his gaze upon the ground behind her.

A length of rope lay limply there, stretching backward into the night until it vanished into the darkness that even the streetlights could not pierce.

...How strange. Who would tie a rope around Mom?

The rope twitched again.

"Chai Si! Come back!"

Chai Si started, realizing only then that he had unconsciously taken several steps forward, following the length of the rope. He glanced back at his mother, then turned his head once more—and this time, ahead of him was no longer just the dark night, the street, and the long cord.

The towering, dark shadow holding the other end of the cord was standing right before his eyes, seemingly out of nowhere.

"Run!"

His mother's near-shrieked roar snapped Chai Si violently out of his daze.

He didn't have time to make out the shape of the shadow; he whipped around and ran. He felt as though he had screamed, yet perhaps he hadn't; it felt as though a neighbor had turned on a light, yet perhaps they hadn't.

In that moment, the world suddenly ripped away the facade of rational order, revealing the pitch-black, sewage-like nightmare lurking beneath. Nothing felt real anymore.

He heard the shadow speak.

Its voice traversed the night air, drifting and echoing.

At the time, he couldn't understand it, yet every single word was deeply carved into his bones. Later on, Chai Si understood the meaning of those phrases, but by then, too much time had passed, everything was already too late, and he had long since stopped trying to think about it.

Only once, while interrogating a traitor, did those exact words of the entity suddenly flash through his mind for no apparent reason.

When Chai Si snapped back to reality, he was being held around the waist by someone pleading with him to stop; the traitor had already been beaten by his bare fists into a pulp of mangled flesh and blood, bearing less human form than a heap of rotting mud.

"Thank you so much,"

The entity had said. "The only way I could enter the mortal realm was to find a dog, tie a rope to it, and let it lead me in. You didn't actually think you escaped from my grasp, did you? You actually thought you could come back and reunite with your son? Ah, let me taste it... I hear that a human's dashed hopes taste the absolute best."