Doomsday Wonderland

On the night when Wu Yiliu did not send a timely message to report his safety, Qiao Yuansi sat alone in the living room, thinking for a long time.

Her age no longer allowed her to escape. She could still drive, and her savings were enough for living, but she became inexorably sleepy and tired by nine o’clock at night. In Qiao Yuansi’s eyes, colors were no longer so bright, and objects in life became particularly cold and rigid, even car seat cus.h.i.+ons would ache her bones after a while.

She forgot when it started, but she felt her life slowly exhaling a long breath. This breath was light and slow, but it would eventually come to an end. In this process, she was gradually becoming dry and brittle. She couldn’t just make up her mind and fly away like when she was young.

Perhaps she was destined never to see what the end of the world looked like. It was just a pity for that boy.

Qiao Yuansi lived in the ensuing silence for three days, secretly waiting every day for the door to be kicked open or for the car to be stopped. By the third day, she understood: Wu Yiliu hadn’t transformed.

The child might be dead or trapped – the former possibility being greater – but he was definitely not a Changeling now. Otherwise, he would have turned her in long ago.

Another proof was that the bank card given to Wu Yiliu had never been used again. If he had transformed, the balance on that card would have been emptied by now.

So how could she find his whereabouts?

Qiao Yuansi sighed in her heart, continuing to read the bank card statements on the computer, attempting to reconstruct Wu Yiliu’s tracks on the day of his disappearance through the location of each expenditure. The child’s spending was not much, a small withdrawal, a few necessary expenses; from the statement, she could see that he had followed the clues she had given him to find that women’s clothing store and even bought some clothes. However, after that, all signs of activity ceased.

Wu Yiliu was inquiring about posthuman whereabouts that day, likely leading to his disappearance; since he hadn’t transformed, could it be unrelated to the Changelings? Was he killed by a posthuman?

But in these days, she had been closely following the local news, but had not seen any reports of murder or the discovery of an unidentified male body.

Where had the child gone?

Sighing, Qiao Yuansi closed the bank statement. She suddenly paused and opened it again.

Earlier, she had been too focused on Wu Yiliu’s activities before seven o’clock that evening and had momentarily overlooked his first expense of the day: recharging his mobile phone.

He had recharged in the morning, disappeared at night, and the phone must have fallen into someone else’s hands. Most likely into the hands of a Changeling, as posthumans wouldn’t need the phone or search a commoner’s body after killing them.

If a Changeling had taken the phone, they likely hadn’t removed and discarded the SIM card, especially since there was a fair amount of money on that number. Even if it might expose the fact that they had someone else’s phone and were responsible for the person’s disappearance, a Changeling wouldn’t let go of even a little bit of gain.

To verify this a.s.sumption, Qiao Yuansi called Wu Yiliu’s number using a colleague’s phone.

The call connected.

After hearing just one ring, she hurriedly hung up, her heart pounding for a while. She deleted the call record and quietly put the phone back on her colleague’s desk.

Wu Yiliu’s phone had indeed fallen into the hands of a Changeling. Things would be easier now; she was most worried that the child had been killed by posthumans and the phone was also destroyed.

Qiao Yuansi bought a lottery ticket, took a photo of it, and uploaded it to her computer. According to that day’s winning numbers, she chose a smaller prize and altered the numbers in the photo. If Sh.o.r.eis could see this scene, would he laugh and say to her, “Yes, that’s what I meant. Altering photos is useful, isn’t it?”

She paused for a moment.

People say that as one ages, they recall the past more, but she was not entirely like that. After so many years, she began to imagine again, imagining what Sh.o.r.eis would be like if he had never left, what he would say, what he would do – he was like the backdrop on a stage curtain, and under this curtain, her life was playing out.

Qiao Yuansi slowly shook her head, refocusing her mind on the matter at hand. She sent the picture to Wu Yiliu’s number, attaching a message in a man’s voice. “Bro, I can pay back the money I owe you. I’ll just give you this lottery ticket.”

“You can transfer it to my account.” Only a few minutes had pa.s.sed when she received a reply, and the serious tone could not hide the underlying itch of excitement. The other party probably went to check the lottery prize amount.

“I can’t go to claim the prize, remember?”

This time, it took nearly ten minutes for the other party to reply, saying, “Oh, right. In that case, I’ll have someone collect it on my behalf.”

Qiao Yuansi couldn’t help but smile. This was simpler than she thought.

“Okay, who? What do they look like?” she texted.

According to the reply from the Changeling on the other end of the phone, Qiao Yuansi would see a man wearing a green coat and slippers, 1.75 meters tall—she indeed saw this person.

After identifying her target, Qiao Yuansi turned off her phone and continued to watch the man as he looked around, shuffled his feet, and after waiting for half an hour without seeing anyone, pulled out Wu Yiliu’s phone to call Qiao Yuansi. After several unsuccessful attempts to get through, he waited another half hour before finally cursing and kicking over a trash can on the roadside.

Qiao Yuansi silently followed him.

Being an old lady had its perks; people tend to ignore her. They often feel that the elderly are not a threat, as though vitality, time, ambition, and desire have all left them; they become these genderless gray beings. As long as they didn’t act out of character, even Changelings seem to ignore whether an old person had transformed.

For a while, she walked almost shoulder to shoulder with the man in the green coat, and he never gave her a second look. In her youth, she thought all strange old ladies looked alike; change a garment, and you couldn’t recognize them.

Her original intent was merely to find out who this man was, hoping to further uncover how he got Wu Yiliu’s phone. But perhaps heaven pitied her hard life, or knew her time was running out, Qiao Yuansi soon found herself following the man to the outskirts of the city, near a vast area of buildings blocked by temporary construction walls, where she was stopped at the entrance.

The face of the guard at the gate never transformed.

“This is a pocket dimension,” he said sternly. “What evidence do you have to prove your ident.i.ty? You must prove it before you can enter the pocket dimension.”

Qiao Yuansi was taken aback.

A pocket dimension? Had she heard wrong? In a world without the power to evolve, let alone produce—wait, could this pocket dimension be something the Changeling constructed themselves? The man who had Wu Yiliu’s phone entered from here, and he was definitely not posthuman. He even swiped a card before entering. Plus, the guard didn’t recognize her as a mere human, indicating he wasn’t posthuman either. Why would there be so many ordinary people in a pocket dimension?

Although Changelings were aware of the existence of posthumans, from recent news, shows, newspapers, and other public information channels, posthumans were virtually non-existent to the general public, definitely not a common public knowledge. If they wanted to gather and isolate posthumans, keeping most people out wouldn’t be hard.

If she answered with “Do you want my ID?” or “What ident.i.ty do I need to prove?” she would immediately be identified as “non-posthuman,” right?

“Was this place originally a pocket dimension?” Qiao Yuansi pondered aloud, buying herself some time. “You want me to prove I’m a posthuman? Isn’t it obvious?”

Come to think of it, a posthuman who accidentally came there, hearing that this place was a pocket dimension, wouldn’t voluntarily go in, would they? What methods were they using to lure posthumans?

“Just prove it casually.” The guard softened a little at the word “posthuman,” but he didn’t let her in just yet.

Qiao Yuansi raised her hand, and the silver ring on her finger shone with specks of light under the sunlight. Even after all these years, even though it had lost its function and couldn’t be activated, it had never rusted or dulled. Under the guard’s gaze, she took off the ring and pulled her wallet from her pocket.

With a “snap,” she slammed the ring down, and the silver circle instantly dispersed into several points of light, merging into the interior of her wallet.