The dreams were a chaotic, disjointed ss.
Lu Li walked in silence toward the foot of the towering World's Spine Mountains. Strangely, the closer he drew to the snow-capped peaks, the warr it beca.
Figures materialized on the roadside—the people Anna had killed while possessed. They hurled accusations at Lu Li, their voices thick with anger.
“This is all your fault!”
“You are to bla!”
“You condemned us!”
“Why didn’t you kill her?!”
Each phantom hurled accusations at him, but Lu Li walked on in silence, passing them without a word. He drew ever closer to the World's Spine, but a snowy mist veiled the peaks, blurring their outlines. Further up the road, Anna waited, clutching a small straw cat. As he drew near, her form wavered and changed, morphing into a figure in a black robe.
“Do you rember what I told you?” Friday’s voice echoed from beneath the hood. “Don’t look at what’s hidden under the black robe.”
“Never.”
Lu Li slowly opened his eyes.
Before him, a campfire crackled, casting warm, dancing shadows. The flas offered more than just warmth; they bathed the small, rocky cavern in light.
Across from him, Friday was eating sothing out of a paper bag. Inside were strange objects Lu Li couldn’t comprehend: nurous embryos, warped by so unimaginable power. They had lost their original forms, twisted into grotesque shapes and coated with a patchy layer of a black substance.
The black substance radiated a sinister aura. Upon contact with the warmth of a living creature, it would transform into a black ooze, enveloping its victim and draining their life force. And yet, it assailed all five senses—perhaps even a sixth—with an impossibly alluring fragrance, a siren's call to the weak-willed, tempting them to beco one with it.
It was as if each embryo was beckoning to Lu Li, yet his mind recoiled from the repulsive allure.
Friday quickly noticed Lu Li was awake. As if worried he might snatch her food, she hastily devoured the rest of the bag's contents. Then, she tossed the empty bag over her shoulder, letting it drop into the subterranean river, where it dissolved instantly.
Lu Li remained indifferent. Even if Friday had been feasting on screaming souls, he wouldn't have said a word.
“Where did the fire co from?” Lu Li asked, his eyes on the flas.
A layer of ash an inch thick suggested the fire had been started not long after he'd fallen asleep. It was the source of the warmth he'd felt in his dream. Without it, he would have either frozen solid or beco gravely ill.
“The river brings all sorts of things,” Friday replied. She was stirring the water with a branch she had just fished out, which she then set by the fire to dry.
He had to agree. At this point, even if the physical incarnation of an evil spirit had floated out of the river, Lu Li wouldn't have been surprised.
Despite the unsettling, chaotic dreams, Lu Li felt significantly better after the rest—a world of difference from when he had first woken up.
“How long was I asleep?”
Friday was drying her wet hands on a rock by the fire. “Ask
that when I fish an alarm clock out.”
“Just a rough estimate?”
“Half a year, maybe a year,” Friday replied flippantly.
Here, deep in this cavern, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of ters underground, the more the enigmatic Friday's words defied common sense, the more believable they seed...
That is, until Lu Li touched his chest. The wound felt exactly as it had when he'd first awoken, exposing another one of Friday's casual lies.
Once the last vestiges of sleepiness faded, Lu Li took stock of his remaining possessions.
The straw doll and the figurine from the Book of the Apocalypse were in his pants pocket. The first had protected him from Silence while he slept; the second had strengthened his body, helping him cope with the wound and the cold.
All four spirit pistols were lost, but the knife remained. The Anomaly Detector was in the inner pocket of his coat, but it was most likely ruined by the water. Lu Li placed it by the fire to dry.
The sole surviving stone dallion lay among the shards of the others. When Lu Li took it out, Friday glanced at him and said that the rchant wouldn't appear here.
Lu Li didn't bother to test her claim and put the dallion away. Interestingly, the coin he had received from the creature in the fog had survived—it was in his shirt's breast pocket, pressed against the wound on his chest by the bandages.
Lu Li took it out and moved it to his pants pocket. He then began to remove the bandages, but as he was down to the last layer, Friday stopped him.
“If I were you, I wouldn't look at a mortal wound.” Her words made no sense, a complete contradiction of logic. “See it, and you die.”
Lu Li froze and re-wrapped the bandage. He was trying to understand the true aning of Friday's words.
Was it a simple warning: “An open wound will lead to infection and death,” or was it sothing irrational: “You should have died, but because you haven't seen the wound, you're still alive”?
“Don't want to die?” Friday asked tauntingly.
Lu Li said nothing, because at that mont, his stomach rumbled.
“Hungry?”
“Not really.”
The hunger wasn't intense. The enhancent from the Book of the Apocalypse clearly had nothing to do with science. It doubled Lu Li's humanity and Mind Level, and also increased his endurance.
The rumbling in his stomach was more of a reminder that he hadn't eaten in a long ti.
“You should think ahead about food,” Friday remarked, sitting on the riverbank and dipping her hand into the swift current. “Is there anything you don't eat?”
Her tone was as if she were a waitress in a fine restaurant, taking an order from Lu Li seated at the opposite table.
“No,” Lu Li answered. Then, after a thought, he added, “As long as it's normal human food.”
Friday continued to sweep her hand through the water, as if she were plucking sothing from the river of ti itself.
After a mont, she caught a small, palm-sized cod and tossed it onto the bank. The fish was dead, its eyes staring blankly at the stone walls.
“A saltwater fish,” Lu Li noted.
“Then it must have drowned,” Friday replied flatly.
One fish was clearly not enough for two, not even enough for Lu Li alone. Friday continued fishing, while Lu Li gutted the cod with his knife, selected a suitable branch from the small pile of twigs by the fire, speared the fish on it, and began to roast it over the flas.
The fish's dark, mottled skin gradually turned golden.
“Catch.” Friday tossed a small glass bottle to Lu Li. He caught it—it was filled with salt.
“I was carrying it with ,” she said in response to his unspoken question.
Then again, Lu Li hadn't seen whether Friday had pulled the bottle from under her robe or from the river.
Soon after, Friday tossed him another fish—a small tuna.
“Do you like saltwater fish?” Lu Li asked.
“They have fewer bones,” Friday replied. “Besides, I'm not the one deciding. The river can bring anything, can't it?”
Faced with an obvious lie, they tacitly agreed not to expose each other.
Lu Li roasted the fish while Friday caught them—and in that silence, ti flowed slowly.
When the fish was golden brown, Lu Li asked, “How do we get out of here?”
“Is it so bad here?” Friday countered.
“We might live longer down here than the ones on the surface.”
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