Doomsday Wonderland

Burp.

As the bandage coiled tightly around her upper torso, a gush of air rose from her stomach and she burped. She heard Mrs. Manas chuckle, then she felt the depletion of her strength begin to slow down gradually until it finally came to a complete stop.

Using the dim light as her sole light source, she looked down and saw that her entire upper torso was wrapped in what seemed to be a bandage as it was white in color. Blood spread and sank into the bandage but soon stopped completely. She turned her eyes to the roll of gauze in her hand and realized it had shrunk to half of its original size. It was now expanding and contracting arduously on her palm, seeming to gasp for breath.

“Bandie!” Hiding in the bush, Ryuji shouted. Lin Sanjiu had no idea why but his voice was shaking slightly, “Is…is Bandie okay?”

‘Bandie? Is that the name of this roll of gauze? What a casual and cute name…’

Looking at the wheezing bandage, Lin Sanjiu did not know if she should cut it off from her body or not. Since this little thing had a name and could breathe, she feared that she would hurt it when she cut it with a knife.

“Oh, I see it. That’s great,” Ryuji sighed and she could sense the slight relief in the timbre of his voice. “Can you throw it back to me? It will detach itself from your body.”

As if it heard its master’s voice, Bandie reeled back slightly and then tore itself from Lin Sanjiu’s body. The remaining bandage then made a knot and fell silent as if it had become a real bandage.

“But I can’t return it to you now,” Lin Sanjiu said apologetically. Her voice was still faltering from the injury. “Before I clear the mystery, nothing can leave the pocket dimension.”

Staring at his Bandie, Ryuji rubbed his face and took in a deep breath. When he raised his head, his expression changed. He pointed a finger behind her, and before he could warn her, Lin Sanjiu had already leaped out to the side. At that moment, she sensed a glut of decaying and rotten stench graze past her shoulder. Even though she was gripped by the sharp pain that burst from her chest, she still escaped unscathed.

Like Bandie in her hand, she wheezed heavily due to her severe injury.

She admitted that she had underestimated the effect of the “fatal injury” that the corpse had transferred to her. She did not expect it to affect her so much.

Lin Sanjiu converted the roll of bandage into a card and then spun her head to look at the communication device in the distance. She had summoned it because contacting her grand prize was the only thing in her mind while she was lingering on the line of unconsciousness. Right now, two minutes had passed, yet her grand prize still had not called in yet.

‘Is he in trouble? Should I call him instead?’

However, she soon rejected the idea. Since Ji Shanqing did not call her, he must be in some kind of trouble. She was worried that if she were to call him now, he might get distracted from whatever he was doing and end up in a dangerous position.

In a split second, the corpse began to make a beeline for her once more. Its head was deeply sunken into its chest, and its limbs were flailing madly in the air. It did not seem like it was moving on its own but rather was pulled forward by a thread of some sort. According to her experience, the dead body would belch out decaying breath whenever it came near her.

She suspected that it was the decaying breath that gave her the injury.

She was certain that she could not keep running forever like this. She had to find a way out of this pocket dimension.

Drawing a deep breath, Lin Sanjiu pressed the wound on her chest and hightailed it to her [Ability Polishing Agent]. She had been circling around the warehouse so many times, yet she still could not figure out how the murderer had escaped from the locked room. Although she had read a handful of detective genres before, they had just been to pass time. She often waited until the story unraveled the mystery on its own as she found it no point killing her own brain cells for such kinds of things.

Scooping the silver bottle up and holding it in her hand, Lin Sanjiu finally felt a little at ease.

“Ryuji!” The only person that could help her right now was the man who was sitting idly outside the pocket dimension.

“Help me think—” Before she could finish her sentence, she was interrupted by a long, stifling fit of coughing. She spat on the ground and wiped her lips before continuing, “How the murderer escaped from here.”

Ryuji did not respond. It was only when she ran past him that she saw the deep frown on his face. Sensing that she should not interrupt his thoughts right now, Lin Sanjiu picked up her pace again despite her body screaming at her not to and she put a large distance between her and the dead body once more.

She was confident that she would be dead by daylight if she kept running like this in her current condition.

‘How amazing would it be if I could imitate the grand prize? This kind of mind-twisting game is a piece of cake for him…’

However, she could not do that as she had lost the ability to imitate her grand prize right after she realized he was trying to lock her up in that universe. She clearly remembered how the bud of fear began to sprout from the depths of her heart when she had sat in the sand and wind. That had been the first time that she had felt so afraid of the teenager who behaved like her brother—or her sister.

Fear sprang from ignorance, and ignorance meant lack of information or knowledge. Without the needed information, the imitation would not succeed.

“It’s weird, don’t you think? I love him and I miss him, yet I’m afraid of him…” she said as she stifled a bitter smile. Despite that, when she passed by the communication device, she still went for it after a slight pause.

“I don’t understand why you are willing to pick up his call but aren’t willing to call him yourself?” Mrs. Manas asked.

Lin Sanjiu was stumped.

“Yeah, why not?”

The speed of the corpse increased again, so she had no choice but to follow suit. However, with every step, she would cough up blood. With her mind fully occupied by the name “Ji Shanqing”, she muttered, “I always felt that if he reached out to me, I still would have some room to run away, but if I take the initiative and go to him…”

She would feel like a mosquito flying into the mouth of a Nepenthes.

Of course, she was certain that the last thing her grand prize would do to her was hurt her. The only thing that was waiting for her would be a long and endless…love?

“You don’t understand him, so you don’t want to see him,” Mrs. Manas said softly, sounding even more like a consciousness. “In other words, the more you know about him, the more secure you feel when you see him.”

“But how?” Lin Sanjiu forced another bitter smile. Perhaps due to his identity, the teenager had mutated into something bigoted and intense while being very gentle and soft at the same time. He seemed to know that he would cause a situation she did not favor, so he had held himself back. He was greatly tortured by such restraint, and the fence that was holding him back would collapse at any moment.

‘Hold on a sec…’

Like a dust-filled memory that had been opened, something in her head snapped the chains that were binding it.

With slight disbelief, Lin Sanjiu activated her [Higher Consciousness Mimicry], and her target was none other than Ji Shanqing.