Kaleidoscope of Death

Kaleidoscope of Death by Xi Zixu

Daytime. Lin Qiushi woke up filled with energy. He washed up and ate breakfast before picking Chestnut up and sitting down on his couch to watch TV. Though he was only sitting at home, his heart had already flown to the school where he and Ruan Nanzhu had been. He’d begun to sift through what Ruan Nanzhu had told him last night about the Obsidian senior and the door.

But before he could get much of a lead on anything, he got a call from Wu Qi, asking if Lin Qiushi was still going to come to work. If not then he would really turn in a resignation letter for Lin Qiushi.

Lin Qiushi’s answer was straightforward: “I’m not going. Resign for me please.”

Wu Qi was a bit shocked when he heard this, because Lin Qiushi had always been a responsible person. There were still things about Lin Qiushi’s job that needed transitioning, and he’d thought that no matter what, Lin Qiushi would at least help with that before quitting. He never imagined that Lin Qiushi would leave so abruptly, and not even bother to turn in the resignation himself.

For Wu Qi’s shock, Lin Qiushi had nothing but a noncommittal laugh. The truth was that this world still felt so illusory to him, and because of that feeling, it was difficult to develop any sense of responsibility.

At home he feasted and he hydrated, and then he went off to take a lovely afternoon nap. Around six in the evening was when Lin Qiushi headed to the school.

He got to the school and snuck in as before. Class had just ended, and he watched the students with their backpacks on happily leave the campus. It was Friday today, and most students didn’t have school the next day. So compared to regular days, there was some extra bit of joy on their faces. The younger you were, the simpler things had to be to make you happy. One short little weekend could evoke such brilliant, sunflower-like smiles on their faces.

Lin Qiushi strolled along, and arrived near the tracks where he and Ruan Nanzhu had rendezvoused the night before.

He found a stone bench to sit on, before fishing a candy out from his pockets and popping it into his mouth. Before evening arrived for the past few days, he’d always feel a bit anxious. Today though, knowing he would get to see Ruan Nanzhu, his emotions were quite calm. He even felt a hint of anticipation.

The moment twelve o'clock came, the air around the school changed.

Ruan Nanzhu’s figure appeared at the other end of the tracks. He walked towards Lin Qiushi, and even waved.

Lin Qiushi grinned and met him in the middle. Their hands clasped together once again.

Tonight would be particularly dangerous; Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu’s doors were overlapped, which meant the ghouls and monsters would show up in twice the quantity.

But on some level, this wasn’t actually too awful, because a door that Lin Qiushi had been quite worried about—the Human Oil Lamp and the Landlady—clashed with a ghost from one of Ruan Nanzhu’s doors.

It was a total coincidence. At first, the Landlady had chased after Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu until they were stumbling and scrambling to hide. However, as they ran and ran, they realized the Landlady was no longer in pursuit. When they found some high ground and looked down, they spotted the Landlady fighting with a tangle of hair.

“What’s going on there?” Perched up high on a school building, Lin Qiushi was completely flummoxed by what he was seeing.

That clump of hair seemed to be alive, tangling itself viciously around the Landlady’s body, and the Landlady’s long blade was of no use at all. She just kept roaring in anger and rolling about on the ground.

“I think it’s a ghoul I pissed off from another door,” Ruan Nanzhu said. “This one’s a bit of a woman-hater, and hates me in particular.”

Lin Qiushi, “hates you? Aren’t you a man th—”

He shut his mouth before he’d even finished speaking, because he’d recalled that most likely, Ruan Nanzhu had been in drag when he entered that door.

Ruan Nanzhu obviously knew what Lin Qiushi wanted to say, and shot Lin Qiushi a look without a word.

Lin Qiushi motioned a shrug.

“Clearly, she doesn’t have great vision.”

As for which ghoul came out the winner, Lin Qiushi had no clue. The number of doors Ruan Nanzhu had gone through was large enough on its own, and now with the overlap, the entire school had basically become an amusement park for ghosts. Even just walking on the pavement Lin Qiushi could see pallid white arms reaching out of the ground to pull them in.

Faced with such a situation, Lin Qiushi asked Ruan Nanzhu, “so how many doors have you been in?”

Ruan Nanzhu, “before you came, I was averaging a door every three days. You do the math.”

Lin Qiushi, “…” Oh, that wasn’t too many. Just…several hundred.

So they kept appearing. The two of them stood at a crossroad in the middle of the schoolyard, and in front of them was propped a terrifying doll in red. Behind them, a ghost in white floated. To their right, arms were sticking up all over the earth, and to their left was empty—but that tombstone standing in the middle of the road was pretty suspicious no matter how they looked at it.

In the end Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu decided not to go down any road. They’d wait for the things to come to them.

Lin Qiushi still startled some in the beginning, but afterwards he grew numb to it altogether. He and Ruan Nanzhu were utterly exhausted by the run for their lives. They didn’t even dare to sit down when they sidled up to the school buildings, and could only lean against trees to catch their breath. Of course, even while they were resting they had to keep an eye on the branches above their heads, lest there was a hanging corpse ghost or something.

The silver lining was that while the number of these ghosts were great, they weren’t of particularly high quality. It must be because Ruan Nanzhu trained for the most part in low-level doors. Had he trained in more high-level doors, Lin Qiushi thought that they wouldn’t even need to be running—they could just sit where they were and wait to die.

“Tired?” Lin Qiushi asked Ruan Nanzhu.

“I’m alright.” Ruan Nanzhu dabbed away the sweat from his cheeks and looked at his watch. “Two hours left.”

After a beat of silence, Lin Qiushi laughed. “Truth is…I don’t really want the morning to come.”

At daybreak, Ruan Nanzhu would disappear.

Ruan Nanzhu grinned along with him.

Just as the two caught their breaths, all the lights in the building behind them flashed on. A voice called out Lin Qiushi’s name: “Qiushi—”

The smile froze on Lin Qiushi’s face. That voice belonged to the adult Ruan Nanzhu—low and a little bit smokey. It was a lovely voice.

Ruan Nanzhu too had heard his own voice. He looked at the building, expression displeased.

“Qiushi…Qiushi…” Ruan Nanzhu was still calling from the building. “That person’s a fake, you must be careful…”

Lin Qiushi glanced at the young version of Ruan Nanzhu beside him. When their gazes met, a look of malice appeared in Ruan Nanzhu’s eyes.

“Lin Qiushi,” he said, “you didn’t even realize that I was a fake?”

Lin Qiushi, “…”

Ruan Nanzhu pushed up on tiptoes and nipped at Lin Qiushi’s lips, not too hard and not too soft. He said, “so, what, you want to go in and save him? Then you have to pay some kind of price, right?”

Lin Qiushi stared into his eyes and sighed.

“What do you want then?”

Ruan Nanzhu, “me? Naturally, I want you—”

Lin Qiushi picked Ruan Nanzhu right up as if picking up an adorable little doll.

“You have to get on tiptoes just to kiss me, and you’re saying you want me?”

Ruan Nanzhu ground his teeth. “Is this a mutiny?! Put me down right n—”

“Nah,” Lin Qiushi laughed. “Didn’t you want me to pay some kind of price? I’ll pay you right now.”

Ruan Nanzhu, “you’ve changed!”

Lin Qiushi, exasperated, “and you’re still acting at a time like this—aren’t you worried I’ll really doubt your identity?”

Ruan Nanzhu harrumphed, and said, “that voice inside sounds awful, how could it possibly be mine? If you believed it, I'll…”

Lin Qiushi, “you’ll what?”

Ruan Nanzhu got up close to Lin Qiushi’s ear and murmured, “I’ll really fuck you good.”

Lin Qiushi stared at the teeny tiny Ruan Nanzhu in his arms and couldn’t help himself—his shoulders trembled with the effort of forcing down his laugh.

Ruan Nanzhu glowered. “What are you laughing at?”

Lin Qiushi, “no…nothing…Just don’t say stuff like that with that face on, I feel like I’m committing a felony.”

Ruan Nanzhu, “…”

Even while they talked, that imitation of Ruan Nanzhu’s voice had not yet stopped. Only, there was a touch more frustration in the voice. Perhaps it was peeved by the two of them.

When Lin Qiushi approached the window and looked inside, he really did see Ruan Nanzhu there—rather, he saw someone who looked exactly like Ruan Nanzhu.

He was seated in the classroom, entangled and struggling in a mass of black hair. When he saw Lin Qiushi approach, his expression grew frantic.

“Qiushi, he’s not real! Even if you don’t believe me, just stay away from him—”

Lin Qiushi looked at him and said, “you know where you went wrong?”

Ruan Nanzhu, “what are you talking about?”

Lin Qiushi, “the real Ruan Nanzhu wouldn’t say something like ‘even if you don’t believe me.’”

“Hmph.” The youth standing next to Lin Qiushi puffed up his cheeks in a pout, saying, “the hell is this? It didn’t capture my essence at all.”

As he finished speaking, the fake Ruan Nanzhu inside the room began to melt, a terrible wail coming out of its mouth. Just as Lin Qiushi wondered which door this was, he saw an oddly shaped woman crawl in from the doorway. All four of her limbs were snapped into weird shapes, and her eyes were terrifyingly huge with a dark green sheen.

“Hako Onna?” Ruan Nanzhu recognized this “old buddy” of theirs, and said, “it’s been a while.”

Hako Onna climbed onto the window ledge and pressed her pale white face to the glass, glowering at the two people outside. It was a bit scary, but Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu had already watched an entire evening of such strange sights—they were completely unmoved, and even wanted to laugh a little.

“The school building counts as a box?” Lin Qiushi said. “Then let’s just go then. It’s not forcing us to open the chests anyways.”

“Let’s bounce,” Ruan Nanzhu said.

The two left just like that, with absolutely no lingering sentiments. After that, the sound of Lin Qiushi’s own voice came from behind them, and Lin Qiushi thought it was a good thing he was right beside Ruan Nanzhu, or they’d be entangled in that for another while yet.

Later that night, Lin Qiushi met some more familiar faces—for example, Xiao Mei, who’d sacrificed herself in the Hako Onna door, and her lover.

Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu had come up against a bit of a bind by the school pond. It was Xiao Mei and her lover who saved them both.

The four stood in the pavilion taking in each other. Xiao Mei pointed at Ruan Nanzhu, eyes big and jaw dropping.

“Zhu Meng, you’re a man? And a kid?”

Ruan Nanzhu, angry, “who’s a kid? I just turned small!”

“Oh.” Xiao Mei’s tone was perfunctory, like she didn’t really believe what Ruan Nanzhu was saying.

Ruan Nanzhu had more to retort, but Lin Qiushi was already chuckling at his expense beside him, saying, “Nanzhu, it looks like your drag is very effective. Maybe the ghosts won’t even recognize you?”

“What’s there to not recognize?” Ruan Nanzhu huffed. “There’s only you and me alive in here. Whether or not they recognize me, don’t they all just want us dead?”

Lin Qiushi, “…” What you said is truly too reasonable; I cannot refute.

Lin Qiushi asked Xiao Mei if they were living well here, and Xiao Mei grinned, wrapping herself around her boyfriend and saying they were doing great. They were already married, and were prepping for a child. They’d be a family of three soon…

When Ruan Nanzhu heard this he cast a considering glance toward Lin Qiushi.

Lin Qiushi jumped. “What are you looking at me for? I can’t get pregnant?!”

Ruan Nanzhu, “no, the problem’s not yours. I must be the one who’s not working hard enough.”

Xiao Mei listened to the two bantering and said the exact thing Lin Qiushi said earlier: “Wow, Lin Qiushi, you’re romancing a kid like this, it feels like you’re committing a felony.”

Lin Qiushi, “…” Why was he the criminal here? Clearly, he was the victim of harassment.

Bumping into Xiao Mei was only an interlude; the main symphony of the night remained the run for their lives. Running, running. Just endless running.

Though they had the help of old friends today, the frequency by which the monsters appeared increased a lot. Lin Qiushi was unlucky and got hacked by a sword, while Ruan Nanzhu fell from somewhere high up and hobbled himself. Though their injuries were a bit serious, all the wounds would disappear come daylight.

By the time dawn neared, even the two with their extraordinary physical fitness felt somewhat overwhelmed; they were slumped on the floor, barely able to move their legs.

“I think dawn’s a little early today.” Ruan Nanzhu leaned against Lin Qiushi’s shoulder, looking at his watch.

“Is it?” Lin Qiushi hadn’t noticed. He was lightly combing through Ruan Nanzhu’s misaligned hairs, and replied unimportantly.

“It is,” Ruan Nanzhu said. “I fell asleep at 6:34 yesterday…and then it was day.”

Lin Qiushi, “what about now?”

“It’s 6:21 now,” Ruan Nanzhu replied as he lifted his head to watch the sky. They watched as up above, that gloomy black gradually faded, and at the end where the horizon was, soft light began to emanate. Light slowly dispersed above the cloud layer, dyeing the white clouds into a brilliant red dawn.

Ruan Nanzhu was still talking, but his voice got softer and softer. Leaning against Lin Qiushi’s shoulder, he once again fell asleep. Lin Qiushi watched his face until he too fell into a deep slumber.

They passed many nights like this. Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu got quickly used to the high-frequency tempo of evening time.

Only, they still had no leads on the key to the eleventh door, because practically every night, they were faced with a different scenario. The ghosts and monsters still swarmed them and did everything possible to take their lives.

There was a fortunate sign though, which was that daybreak came earlier and earlier.

From six-thirty to six, then to five-thirty. The time they had to run for their lives was getting shorter and shorter. At the same time, the time when they could meet was also getting shorter.

“What if I can’t come in here one day?” Half a month in, this was the question that Lin Qiushi suddenly asked at their moment of parting.

Ruan Nanzhu watched him.

“Can’t come in?”

Lin Qiushi, “yeah. Night-time is getting shorter, right? Is this door about to end?” He pressed his voice low. “What if by the time the trial ends, we still haven’t found the key? Then do we just stay in those worlds?”

Ruan Nanzhu was silent. He couldn’t give Lin Qiushi any promises, because he too didn’t know the answer to the question.

“What do we do then?” Lin Qiushi said.

Ruan Nanzhu, “don’t worry. I’ll definitely come find you.”

Lin Qiushi watched him, melancholic.

Ruan Nanzhu, “nothing’s going to separate us.”

In the following nights, they saw some old friends again, including Li Dongyuan and a few of Ruan Nanzhu’s seniors from Obsidian.

When Li Dongyuan saw the young Ruan Nanzhu, he couldn’t help but poke fun, and the two nearly started brawling right then and there. In the end it took Lin Qiushi begging them to snap out of it, don’t do the monsters’ jobs for them.

“Goddamn crossdressing pervert!” Li Dongyuan yelled.

“Hah, then isn’t the one who likes the crossdressing pervert even more of a pervert?” Ruan Nanzhu shot back with no reservations at all.

Lin Qiushi, “…” These two children.

As for the Obsidian seniors, they basically treated Lin Qiushi like their in-law, asking him was Ruan Nanzhu treating you well? If not you simply must say so, they’d school Ruan Nanzhu for him. One of them even gushed about how Ruan Nanzhu was all grown up now, and finally knew to find a partner, oh how nostalgic it was to remember how green he’d been when he first joined Obsidian.

Lin Qiushi asked secretively, “just how green was Ruan Nanzhu?”

The female senior who watched Ruan Nanzhu with such gentle eyes answered just as secretively, “he was so scared in his second door that he almost cried. He came out all teary-eyed, just like a little kitten.”

Lin Qiushi snuck a glance at Ruan Nanzhu, who stood so impassively beside him, and thought the little kitten was nowhere to be seen, there was only a grown tiger here—sigh, oh the turning years, what have you done.

When Ruan Nanzhu saw Lin Qiushi’s expression, he could immediately guess what the two were chattering about. He said, “Zhou-jie, what were you telling him?”

The woman that Ruan Nanzhu called Zhou-jie covered her mouth and chortled, “well I had to reminisce about your youth a bit with him, hadn’t I?”

Ruan Nanzhu, “reminisce if you’d like, but can you take a look at our current situation?”

Due to another ghoul earlier, Zhou-jie had brought them into the bathroom, so now, two people and one ghost were stuffed inside a single stall, and the squeeze was tight as hell. Honestly Zhou-jie ought to get credit for having the leisure to reminisce about Ruan Nanzhu’s glorious youth with Lin Qiushi.

“It’s not like we have anything to do, right? She’s not here yet—oh wait, she’s here, she’s here. Don’t say anything now. Remember to lift your feet as well, that thing just loves to cut off feet.”

Then she was crawling onto the wall to wait.

Seeing such an odd sight, Lin Qiushi didn’t know what to say for a moment. But he didn’t have time to think either, before he heard strange sounds coming from the bathroom door. Thanks to Zhou-jie’s reminder, he sat on top of the toilet and lifted his feet. Then he had Ruan Nanzhu sit on top of him.

The ghoul outside got closer and closer, inspecting the bathroom stalls one by one. By the time she got to where they were, Lin Qiushi saw a gleaming scythe slice in from outside the door and start hacking at the space beneath his feet. Undoubtedly, had they been standing, their feet would be gone by now.

The ghoul inspected the entire bathroom, failing to find them. Only then did Lin Qiushi let out a breath and pull his attention back in.

He’d been too on edge to notice it before, but now, Lin Qiushi realized how close he and Ruan Nanzhu were to each other. If he lowered his head just a little, the tips of their noses could knock together.

As the ghoul’s footsteps faded, Zhou-jie began to laugh. She said, “oh you two, don’t be feeding me that dog food now!”

Lin Qiushi startled, grinning abashedly. But an unhappy Ruan Nanzhu pinched Lin Qiushi’s chin in place and moved in for a kiss. Then, he looked up at Zhou-jie, all provocation: “Zhou-jie, do you have a lover yet?”

Zhou-jie, “that’s enough out of you!”

Ruan Nanzhu, “you’re not still single, are you?”

Zhou-jie, “…”

Ruan Nanzhu, “I saw Yu-ge just a couple of days ago, and he asked me if you had a partner. Said the one person in Obsidian he worried most about was you…”

Zhou-jie, “I’m busy I have to go.”

And just like that she left, crawling up the walls and out of the bathroom.

What should have been a creepy sight was oddly hilarious when it was somebody they knew. Ruan Nanzhu took it further, calling, “don’t go, if you leave like this what am I supposed to tell Yu-ge when I see him in a couple of days? It’s been how many years now? Zhou-jie…Zhou-jie…Are you really gone?”

Watching the two of them interact, Lin Qiushi couldn’t help a hearty laugh. What followed the laughter was an odd pinch in his heart.

This was probably Ruan Nanzhu’s true personality then. Lin Qiushi used to wonder why there was such a big disparity between Ruan Nanzhu’s personalities inside and outside the doors, but now that he was thinking about it, Ruan Nanzhu had probably ground down that perky personality of his bit by painstaking bit.

As Obsidian’s leader, he had to be solid and steady. And so Ruan Nanzhu changed himself. He used to be an upbeat kid, but now, all his corners and edges had been weathered down, and he’d become that intractable Ruan Nanzhu.

Watching him, Lin Qiushi couldn’t help but kiss the little swirl of hair at the back of his head. He called out, “Nanzhu.”

Ruan Nanzhu was still grinning, and the little crooks of his mouth were simply too adorable.

“Yeah?”

Lin Qiushi, “I don’t think this will work.”

“What won’t work?” Ruan Nanzhu was bewildered.

Lin Qiushi embraced him, and said, “I think I like you way too much. This won’t work at all.”

Ruan Nanzhu froze.

Lin Qiushi, “what should I do? Can you help me out here? Can you figure out a way for me to not like you so much?”

Ruan Nanzhu actually appeared to think this through for a good while, before proclaiming, “I don’t think there’s anything to do about it. I’m great. It’s only natural for you to like me this much.”

“Oh yeah?” Lin Qiushi said.

“Oh yeah.” Ruan Nanzhu looked out the window, and there was a new touch of loneliness in his tone. “Too bad it’s about to be morning.”

When morning came, they had to part.

Lin Qiushi thought, that’s right, it’s about to be morning. But he still couldn’t bear to let go of the person in his arms, even to the point of wanting this terrifying night to continue.