Daomu Biji: A Thousand Faces

Ah Tou was looking at Liang Yanyan lying on the hospital bed. There were a lot of patients around them and doctors were walking around. It was very noisy. This kind of noise used to irritate her, but now it made her feel very safe.

The weather outside was very nice. It was only late afternoon, so the sun was still very high in the sky. It had seemed like they had experienced an entire night of horror, but in fact, it had only been a few hours.

Liang Yanyan's hospital fee used up half of the payment Xie Yuchen had given Ah Tou for her services. She thought about it and felt that it was worth it. Even though the whole situation had originated from his house, she no longer wanted to demand reimbursement from him. She just hoped to repay Liang Yanyan for her help earlier.

She sat down and tried to understand what had happened. But even after running the whole story through her head again, she still didn’t have any clues (especially with whatever happened with Liang Yanyan's final explosion on the second floor).

Was it an airburst?

She found it funny that she was imagining such things, but she really couldn't figure it out.

After she came back to her senses, she realized that her body was full of wounds, although she didn’t know when she had gotten them. She put on a lot of bandaids and looked at Liang Yanyan again. She figured the doctor would wake the other woman up for a checkup soon, so she went to the bathroom and fixed herself up a bit. She wanted to put on red lipstick to brighten up her skin tone a little bit, but didn’t end up doing it because she was afraid that Liang Yanyan would feel that she had been overthinking things. 

There was also another thing that she was deeply concerned about. Right before Liang Yanyan had headed up to the second floor, Ah Tou felt as if the other woman was very familiar, like she had seen her before.

This feeling had her very worried. She kept trying to recall where she might have seen the Liang Yanyan before, but couldn’t remember anything. Moreover, there was the strange incident when she heard the nurse who was changing Liang Yanyan clothes cry out in alarm. But when Ah Tou asked the nurse what had happened, she didn’t get an answer.

Could it be that her breasts were too big?

Liang Yanyan was very weak when the doctor woke her up, but the dextrose in the IV drip seemed to help bring her back to consciousness. After the doctor was finished with the checkup, Liang Yanyan grabbed her clothes from the bedside table, wanting to go out on the balcony and smoke.

"That's not a good idea," Ah Tou said.

"Come on, if you were in my shoes, do you really think you could hold out?" Liang Yanyan asked while reaching out to her.

Ah Tou thought for a bit. Indeed, living a healthy life was easier said than done. There were some occasions you just couldn’t overcome without cigarettes. 

So, she took out her cigarettes and helped Liang Yanyan to the balcony.

Once there, the two of them each lit one up. Two girls smoking in a hospital was really a scene to look down upon, so all the other patients in the ward were looking at them askance. But there were a lot of girls who smoked nowadays, so they quickly returned to normal. 

Liang Yanyan didn’t even bother worrying about what the other patients thought and asked her, “What was the last thing I told you?”

"You don't remember?

"My memory gets all jumbled up in that state," Liang Yanyan said.

Ah Tou repeated those two phrases again, but Liang Yayan was silent. In the end, Ah Tou asked her what those words were supposed to mean.

“I have to understand it slowly myself. It should be the true thoughts in my heart, but how many people in the world really understand their own true thoughts?" Liang Yanyan said.

She finished off her cigarette with a few more puffs and then took out her lipstick. After putting it on, she passed it to Ah Tou, who checked the color. Seeing that the shade also matched her own skin tone, she quickly put it on. 

"You said it's not over yet."

"Right. We need to go to Guangdong, to that village. I only dispelled that thing temporarily, but if we don't know what it is, then we won’t know when it's going to reappear."

“We?”

"The person he’s targeting is you."

Ah Tou went silent and then heaved a big sigh. My next few jobs are lost now. What the hell is this? Is my fate really this bad?

"You don't like dealing with spontaneous situations?"

"Who in the world does?”

"There are obviously a few out there," Liang Yanyan said. "You sound a bit ignorant.”

Ah Tou froze for a moment, but when she thought it over, she realized that she actually did have a problem with being too subjective. Liang Yanyan took out her phone and saw that it had returned to normal, so she dialed Xie Yuchen’s number.

Xie Yuchen still didn’t pick up.

**

When Xie Yuchen woke up, the first sentence out of his mouth was a license plate number.

He found that he couldn’t fully open his eyes yet.

“What?" The doctor next to him asked. 

“That’s the license plate of the truck involved in the accident. He was in the wrong lane when we crashed, so he hit me head-on. I assume he didn’t stay at the scene. You can call the traffic police."

“Oh,” the doctor was dumbfounded. 

"Any bad news for me?”

"Not really. It’s just that your car is so expensive. It’s a military vehicle that can be used to cut through mountains during an air raid, but even with that, the whole vehicle was scrapped.”

Xie Yuchen sighed as the doctor continued, "A person came to see you. They left you a note."

"Read it to me, please."

"Sorry that I couldn’t save the cat. Ah Tou and Liang Yanyan are safe." The doctor read the note and then mumbled, "Why? Have you been raising a cat for a long time? Cats need special safety precautions when put in a car.”

"It's a street cat," Xie Yuchen said.

"Why did you have a street cat in your car?"

"It doesn’t matter now." Xie Yuchen felt his body begin to respond, so he started counting. When he reached thirty, he could finally feel his whole body again.

He tried to sit up, but his whole body ached with pain. At this time, he heard a vibrating sound.

"Put my phone on speaker."

"Sorry, your phone is too deformed."

Xie Yuchen opened his eyes and found that he wasn't in the hospital. Or, he should say, he was in the hospital, but there was something lying beside him.

He collected himself and glanced over.

As it turned out, the thing lying next to him was the long-shaped man. A doctor was taking the man’s body temperature, but Xie Yuchen noticed that this doctor had the face of the dead doctor from the old photo. 

The long man was sleeping with his back facing him. His body was so long that he had to curl up on the bed, but his legs were still hanging off of the mattress.

Even if he was Xie Yuchen, he still froze for a few minutes. He wanted to immediately jump up, but it was like he had no control over his body. He couldn't move at all.

As he calmed himself down, he found that he really couldn’t move. He looked around and heard the sound of the sea and people speaking in Cantonese.

He saw several more doctors walking by, all of them the same doctors from the old photo. They were even wearing the same clothes they wore in the photo.

This was all happening on his left. 

On his right, he heard the doctor ask him again, "It’s a call from someone named Liang Yanyan."

He tried to turn his head to look to the right but found that he couldn't move. All he could do was roll his eyes in that direction, where he saw a familiar doctor from modern times out of the corner of his eye. 

With his bed in the center, it was like everything was divided into two different spaces.

"Tu Dian," Xie Yuchen said. "What have you done to me?"