Chapter 15: Everything he feared would happen.

Sang Chen lay on the ground, dizzy and drained of all strength. He forced himself to block out everything and just focus on recovering.

But childhood memories came rushing in, unbridled and relentless.

“Chenchen, stay here and reflect on what you’ve done.”

“Chenchen, do you know why I named you that? I wanted you to be like a speck of dust, not a pearl. Dust settles quietly on the earth. It’s safe that way.”

“Chenchen, if you enter that competition, don’t bother coming home.”

“Chenchen, I’m so disappointed in you. Are you planning to leave me?”

“Chenchen, if that’s what you’re thinking, then I’ll leave first. I’ll go somewhere you’ll never find me.”

“Get out! Get out of my sight! Leave!”

“I know you’ll all abandon me, leave behind this useless woman. Go on, then! Leave! Go chase your dreams!”

“I never abandoned you. How could you think that? It was you who abandoned me! You abandoned me…”

“Chenchen, if you step through that door, I’ll kill myself.”

Sang Chen pressed his hands to the ground, arms trembling as he pushed himself up. His body felt unbearably heavy.

One hand clutched his stomach, the other smacked against his head as if trying to shake loose the suffocating memories. With every step, he forced out a name: “Mao Ziyu… Gu Ziyan… Yan Mo…”

His movements were unsteady, his throat burning as though seared by fire. He kept walking, kept calling, but he knew—he didn’t have the strength to shout all three names anymore. So he focused on just one.

“Yan Mo!”

Again and again, his voice grew weaker until it was barely more than a whisper, swallowed by the thick fog.

He had no idea that his pale face was now covered in dark, twisting lines, creeping across his skin like cracks in a porcelain doll about to shatter.

Bang!

He didn’t know how long he’d been stumbling before he collapsed again. This time, though, he didn’t black out from exhaustion or suffocation—he had tripped.

On a leg. A long one, lazily stretched across the ground.

The owner of the leg was lying down, fast asleep.

For a moment, a sharp stinging burned behind Sang Chen’s eyes. With the last of his strength, he grabbed at Yan Mo’s pant leg, opening his mouth to call his name—

No sound came out.

The moment his fingers brushed against Yan Mo, an unbearable chill shot through him, like his bones were about to crack from the cold. But then, as soon as Yan Mo’s eyes fluttered open, the suffocating cold vanished.

Yan Mo’s gaze lingered on the redness in Sang Chen’s eyes for a moment longer than necessary. Just as he was about to speak, Sang Chen’s body gave out, and he collapsed onto Yan Mo’s leg.

—

When Sang Chen woke up again, he was on Yan Mo’s back, being carried through the fog.

His voice was hoarse beyond repair. “Why… why were you there?”

He had been trying to save himself. But deep down, he knew—the town’s fear mechanism had activated. No one should have been able to find him. He shouldn’t have been able to find anyone. If things had played out as expected, he would’ve suffocated alone.

Yan Mo’s response was as brief as ever. “I was sleeping. You woke me up.”

Sang Chen didn’t ask anything more. He lowered his head, watching the mist thin as they moved forward. The town’s houses were appearing again—identical, repeating structures. His voice dropped. “I think I get it now.”

Identical houses.

Only three types of interiors.

Only two types of ghosts.

A mall where only the entrance was normal, with empty stores beyond it. A bakery, its scent warm and inviting, oddly clear amidst the haze.

A haphazard townscape, cloaked in a deceptive sweetness.

“Beasts. Beasts, that’s what you become when you have a child like that. Beasts, beasts…”

“He’s so strange.”

“Why’s he so scared?”

“Never seen a car before?”

“It’s just an escalator.”

Cold, distant voices. Blurred, indifferent faces.

Slipping on the road, the sound sharp in his ears. Falling on an escalator. Tumbling into a toilet. Eating something only to feel it sprout in his stomach. Insects crawling under his skin. The ghost beneath the bed. Being abandoned—

Sang Chen blinked away the sting in his eyes, pushing down the nausea rising in his throat. He pressed his forehead against Yan Mo’s shoulder. “I understand now.”

Yan Mo: “You understand.”

“Yeah.” Sang Chen’s mind was clearing. “I know now. I know we made it out.”

Yan Mo: “…”

Sang Chen hadn’t questioned how Yan Mo found him, and Yan Mo hadn’t called him out for pretending to be clueless.

They reached the door of a house. Yan Mo set him down. Just as they were about to step inside, a voice called out—

“Sang Chen! You’re awake!”

Not far ahead, Mao Ziyu was carrying an exhausted Gu Ziyan on his back, slowly emerging from the mist. “We found something important…”

That was when Sang Chen learned that Zhang Guan’s team had discovered a crucial clue in a bookshelf while he had been asleep. Mao Ziyu and Gu Ziyan had decided not to wake him and had examined it themselves.

Sang Chen didn’t tell them what had just happened to him. Once inside, he took the book from Mao Ziyu’s hands. It was a children’s picture book.

Mao Ziyu was rubbing his temples, gasping for air. Even as an experienced player, today’s suffocating atmosphere had gotten to him. Carrying Gu Ziyan halfway back had drained him. He collapsed into a chair, panting, too out of breath to explain the key discovery.

Sang Chen flipped through the pages until he reached the part Mao Ziyu had mentioned.

Page 11. An illustration of a house with a pointed tower and an arched door—an exact replica of the residential buildings in this town. Not even the slightest detail was different. And inside the children’s book, that same house had the exact luxurious interior that Xu Feng’s team had stayed in yesterday morning.

Finally catching his breath, Mao Ziyu spoke. “I said before… I thought this game might be connected to space somehow. And it really is. But we still don’t get it. What the hell is going on? Why…”

He took another deep breath and continued. “Why does this town’s architecture match the houses in a children’s picture book?”

He was struggling to articulate his thoughts. Sang Chen, even worse off, said nothing. Instead, he grabbed a pencil and paper from the room and started writing down everything: every death so far, every phrase they had heard clearly.

Mao Ziyu glanced at the notes. At the end of the list, Sang Chen had written: Simple? Childish?

They finally got it.

Before, they had been too focused on how eerie and gruesome the incidents were, assuming they were straight out of a horror movie, something like Final Destination. But they had never really analyzed them properly. Looking at them now, these so-called “accidents” were actually incredibly simple. They didn’t require any special skills or knowledge. Not even basic life experience.

Like something a child would encounter.

Looking again at those words… Mao Ziyu realized that they sounded like something you’d say to a clueless kid.

He turned his gaze back to the children’s picture book in his hands. The houses in the book, the town’s houses, the town itself, with only one main road. The same houses, copy-pasted over and over. The only shops were a fruit store, a bakery, a sweet shop, and a maternity clinic…

He swallowed hard. It felt like he was on the verge of understanding something. He jerked his head up and met Sang Chen’s blank stare.

Sang Chen asked, “Do you… know what’s going on?”

Mao Ziyu: “A child. This is a child’s world. But the deaths… what about the deaths?”

“Is death really the key? But Fang Jing… Fang Jing… she’s still… alive.” Sang Chen pressed his forehead hard, breathing heavily.

“Yeah. She didn’t die,” Chou Ziyu said. “She’s afraid of sound. She’s not dead—she just can’t hear anything anymore. It’s like she shut down completely… Shut down!”

Chou Ziyu suddenly stood up. “We might be inside the consciousness of a child with autism. Or some other condition that affects perception.”

A child who had rarely—if ever—been outside. One who had only ever seen two types of houses. A child whose only experience of a shopping mall was eating at a restaurant, who had only ever watched clothing stores from the escalator but never gone inside, who had no idea what the inside of those stores looked like. A child who had only ever walked down one single street in their entire life.

That was why the town felt so sloppily thrown together, like a rough draft. Because this was all that existed in the child’s world. They had only seen these places, so they could only recreate these places.

This had to be a child who had spent most of their life locked inside a room.

A child with many fears—fears that most people would never understand.

And in this world, a world shaped by their fear, every single thing they were afraid of would become real.

Mao Ziyu thought back to the vague, indifferent townspeople. How they became even colder the closer you got. How their faces twisted in confusion, unable to comprehend why anyone would be scared of something as simple as the honk of a car horn. “It’s just an escalator.”

This child, maybe because of autism, or maybe some other condition, feared sounds. Sounds that others took for granted were an unbearable assault on their fragile senses. They had spent their life huddled in a corner, covering their ears, drowning in a sea of puzzled, judgmental stares.

The first time they saw an escalator, they were terrified. Too afraid to even step forward. And people pointed at them, whispering, “What’s wrong with them? It’s just an escalator.”

They were scared of falling. Scared of swallowing something and having it sprout inside their stomach. Scared that if no one checked on them, bugs would start growing on their body. Afraid of things that no healthy, rational adult would even think twice about.

They had lived their whole life in a state of constant fear. And in that fear, they were suffocating.

Back when they first arrived in town, they had run into an old man in front of the maternity clinic. His words had been the first truly clear sentence they had heard in this strange place.

“A beast. A child like that is doomed to be reborn in the beast realm. A beast… A beast…”

At the time, they had assumed he was talking about the baby growing inside Sang Chen.

But now they knew.

He had been talking about this child.

That phrase must have etched itself deep into the child’s mind. It had become one of their fears, and so it was carved into the very fabric of this town. A fear so strong, it was audible.

Xiangyang Town. Xiangyang Town.

Maybe… maybe this child’s name was Xiangyang.

And this was a world molded from Xiangyang’s fear. In this town, anything Xiangyang feared would happen. And the moment it found something—or someone—who shared that same frequency of fear…

Outside, a soft pattering sound started up. The group turned toward the window, even Gu Ziyan, who was barely conscious.

Rain.

Blood-red rain.

The murky, half-formed town was now streaked with crimson as the rainwater pooled and ran in sluggish, bloody streams through the uneven streets.