Chapter 20: In the Water

The site’s entrance and exit were one and the same. Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo found themselves back in that initial East Ocean room.

They had discussed it while fleeing through the site: the government had gone to enormous lengths to trap them in Site S86, clearly intent on curtailing their freedom. Once they escaped, two possibilities loomed—one, imprisonment by the government; two, outright elimination.

Given Qian Duoduo’s strength and Zhao Meiyou’s glitchy status, finding suitable replacements wouldn’t be easy. The government probably wouldn’t wipe them out entirely. But one thing was certain: a brutal fight awaited them at the exit.

After hashing it out, Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo reached a simple conclusion—they had no intention of going down without a fight.

Sure enough, someone was waiting in the room. The man’s eyes flickered with surprise that they had escaped the site at all, though he quickly suppressed it. “Citizens Qian Duoduo and Zhao Meiyou, you are summoned by the government.”

He wore the uniform of a Metropolis Government agent. Qian Duoduo closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “What does the government want with us?”

“You must have experienced it firsthand,” the agent said with an official smile. “There were some issues inside Site S86. The government needs to gather details. This is standard procedure. Please, rest assured.”

Outside the room stretched a flowing courtyard garden, where a bamboo water spout clacked against a stone with a sharp thunk.

Qian Duoduo eyed the agent. “What kind of standard procedure involves an ambush of heavy forces outside?”

The agent’s expression froze, his eyes sharpening. In the instant his hand darted toward the inner pocket of his uniform, Zhao Meiyou lashed out with a kick, sending the man crashing into an alcove. The paper sliding door shattered, and alarms blared to life.

“Taking him hostage won’t work,” Qian Duoduo said, snapping his fingers. “Wind!”

A ferocious gale roared to life, nearly ripping the ceiling from its moorings. “I can’t hold it long! Weak defenses at eight o’clock—go!”

Long ago, Diao Chan had shared a memory with Zhao Meiyou: Liu Qijue had once successfully dragged a dragon from a site into the real world.

Zhao Meiyou relayed his hypothesis to Qian Duoduo, who pondered it briefly. “That should be possible.”

It was their plan—simple and brutal. With no other viable options, they banked on the unknowns they could bring out of the site. During the brief window when the entrance activated, quantum afterwaves lingered in reality for a few moments. They just needed to seize that interval and use Qian Duoduo’s abilities to carve a path through.

Qian Duoduo had used Scan when he closed his eyes earlier. As expected from the government, the East Ocean Tavern brimmed with killing intent.

The corridor was lined with goldfish lanterns, their paper shades adorned with vibrant woodblock prints of beauties in their final throes, blood spraying from severed necks. A waitress in a kimono lunged at them, her facial bones cracking open to reveal a gun barrel where her mouth should have been. This wasn’t a living person—it was one of the Metropolis Government’s Killing Machines, top-tier model. Zhao Meiyou had seen one only once before, in the Lower District, deployed to quash a riot across all three hundred and thirty layers.

But fortune favored them. It had been during that very riot that Zhao Meiyou learned how to counter the Tin Witch. “Brother Qian!” he bellowed. Qian Duoduo snapped his fingers. “Bronze!”

A weapon materialized in Zhao Meiyou’s hand—a sword, an ancient Eastern blade obsolete since the dawn of firearms, lost to the dust of history. Yet in that Lower District riot, a middle-aged woman had wielded one. It wasn’t even a proper sword, just a sharpened iron bar with edges, impossibly flexible and keen. It pierced the joints of humanoid machines like a serpent, shredding their cores.

The Metropolis’s elite Killing Machines shrugged off firearms—bullets couldn’t dent or penetrate their armored hides, which survived even explosions unscathed. Only archaic cold weapons worked: blades thin as cicada wings, supple as silver, soft swords that flowed like water into armor seams, then surged like a flood to slice through metal like mud.

Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo had war-gamed their escape from the tavern. The government deploying Killing Machines was no surprise, but their exorbitant cost limited numbers. “Ten,” Qian Duoduo concluded after repeated estimates. “At most ten machines.”

This was the hardest part: humans pitting themselves against machines. With his stamina, Zhao Meiyou could dismantle at most three. And Qian Duoduo’s site-weakened state left him unable to master the swordplay in time. Though obsolete for a millennium, it demanded peak physical conditioning, as unforgiving as the cold weapon era itself.

Zhao Meiyou had to roll the dice. Over ten months of site-bound body grafting, their physiques had partially merged. In the lingering quantum afterwaves, that fusion should hold—

He dismantled the fourth machine, teetering on the brink. Oxygen deprivation from exhaustion blanked his mind for an instant. Seizing that moment beyond rational control, instinct took over.

The Transformation ability activated.

It was indescribable—like a dream bleeding into reality, quantum strings plucked across spacetime, primal chaos birthing flame visions. For the first time, Zhao Meiyou wielded the archaeologist’s power in the real world. Unlike the site’s seamless shifts, this was agony, like bones wrenched from flesh. His brain marinated in poison, skin inflating then bulging. He vomited something unnameable—perhaps viscera—before numbness set in. He felt nothing but lightness and power.

It was a massive gamble, but only this could let him wreck ten Killing Machines in moments.

In the lantern-lit haze of the corridor, Qian Duoduo and Zhao Meiyou stood back-to-back amid killing intent. Qian Duoduo focused his Scan; the wind still raged—they had time. The next second, they sprang forward. Zhao Meiyou’s sword pierced the oncoming mechanical woman; Qian Duoduo dropped a distant sniper with a single shot.

Five Killing Machines left.

Lamp oil spilled, igniting paper doors. Flames spat like phlegm; goldfish lanterns revealed jagged bones. An alloy hand punched through Zhao Meiyou’s side, but the next instant, his soft sword pulverized the machine’s head. They reached the corridor’s end. Shattered porcelain littered the doorway, metal and blood charring in the blaze, mingling with spilled sake in a barbaric, bloody perfume.

Three left.

Sensory overload warped his perceptions. Zhao Meiyou’s eyeballs threatened to burst his skull, brains boiling in scalding brine where a colossal red sun rose. His head would explode, the sun erupting through. His body became a mountain pinned by stars, magma searing depths within. An army slumbered inside him, awakening—hooves thundering through veins. What did they seek? What lay sealed in dust?

One left.

Qian Duoduo blasted an agent’s head and sprinted toward Zhao Meiyou, who was roaring—scream or howl, it was unclear. He had pinned the final Killing Machine but couldn’t strike; his body teetered on dissolution. Using Transformation so hastily was beyond him. Qian Duoduo had seen archaeologists like this before—the prelude to melting.

Qian Duoduo shoved the sword hilt into the machine’s guts and slapped Zhao Meiyou’s head with crushing force. Pain snapped him awake.

They burst from the East Ocean Tavern onto a long bridge. The far shore was the main layer district, an eight-hundred-and-sixty-layer abyss yawning between. Qian Duoduo hurled explosives behind them and dragged Zhao Meiyou into the plunge.

The final quantum afterwaves faded. A massive heatwave roared up. Qian Duoduo lit a cigarette in the fire, gazing at the delirious Zhao Meiyou, then crushed their lips together.

Grafting activated.

Zhao Meiyou’s awareness snapped back. Qian Duoduo reeled, swallowed by chaotic sensations, vomiting a gush of blood. The afterwaves finally dissipated; the transformed limbs normalized. But the mental mire lingered with turmoil and pain. Amid plummeting weightlessness, Zhao Meiyou saw Qian Duoduo clutch his mouth, crimson seeping through fingers into his eyes.

When black mixes with sun and fire, the result is always red.

“…Zhao Meiyou… don’t pass out…!”

An overwhelming red devoured him. Zhao Meiyou lost consciousness.

Breakthrough.

Some unknowable time later, Zhao Meiyou heard a rustling, like wind through deep-mountain woods.

Am I dead? Or dreaming?

He opened his eyes to find himself on endless stone steps, ancient cypresses arching overhead into a slender sky.

The steps were crumbling, stones sunk deep in earth, barely passable. Zhao Meiyou rose unsteadily. Below stretched a sea of ancient trees; above, clouds roiled.

No end in sight.

Was this a mountain?

Puzzlement stirred in Zhao Meiyou. He had never seen a true mountain—only holograms in the Metropolis archives: untouched primitives or overdeveloped facsimiles. Nothing like this haunted relic of forgotten habitation.

He glanced at his attire: bamboo staff, straw sandals, evoking an ancient monk. But the robe—saffron like a cassock—was impossibly light and soft, unlike any cloth he knew.

Thought came instinctively, then shattered in migraine agony, vertigo spinning the world. Faintly, he heard a bell toll.

From the mountain above.

What lay atop the mountain?

A temple, surely.

And in the temple?

Monks.

Was he one of them?

Zhao Meiyou eyed his robes, adjusted the conical hat he somehow knew was a sedge hat. Though he had never seen its like.

If he was a monk, who rang the temple bell now?

Pain intensified. Zhao Meiyou abandoned thought and climbed. After an age, faint sandalwood drifted to him. How did he know this scent? What even was sandalwood?

The steps vanished. A deep pool lay ahead—a tarn cradled in mountains, shrouded by deep woods. Lake or pond, it mattered not.

The bell tolled from here. An ancient bell submerged in the water, currents humming resonance. Sensing him, new sounds rose—music.

Zhao Meiyou peered into the water. In the shallower areas, countless musical instruments lay submerged: guqins, stone chimes, zithers, flutes, drums, and even Western pianos and wind instruments. Petals of flowers he couldn’t name drifted past, carried toward the depths. The current tugged at the instruments, making them chime unbidden, though years of soaking had thrown their tuning irreparably off-pitch. He even spotted a pipe organ rising from the lake’s depths, water and petals gushing from its massive pipes—narrow yet vast.

A cacophony of tones emanated from the flow, so discordant now that no melody could be discerned. It was like the ruins of a world after humanity’s end, with only these ghostly strains left as proof of what had been.

So, what was this place?

What lay in the depths of the lake?

A bell tolled once more.

Zhao Meiyou’s eyes snapped open.

Agony hit first. He was no stranger to pain, but this was like being deep-fried and then rubbed raw with salt and lye. From his bones to his organs, every part of him felt rearranged. His eyelids weighed a thousand pounds each. With immense effort, he finally managed a faint sound.

“You’re awake?” Someone sat at the bedside, watching him. “Tough son of a bitch, aren’t you, Zhao Meiyou? I figured you’d already be shooting the breeze with the Grim Reaper over a game of mahjong.”

A cotton swab dabbed salt water on his lips. His sense of taste slowly returned. Zhao Meiyou rolled his eyes, struggling to speak, but the other man read his intent anyway. “Your little sidepiece showed up here on the run. Just so we’re clear, rent’s still due.”

It was The Lead Actor—Liu Qijue. The young man tapped a folding fan against his palm, one leg crossed casually over the other as he sat on the bed’s edge, grinning like he was watching a show. “Not bad, Zhao Meiyou. That night, Qian Duoduo hauled you in here like he was carrying a corpse. I thought you two had beef and he’d offed you… Who’d have guessed? How’d you rope him in?”

Zhao Meiyou let out a couple of weak groans, like a man on his deathbed. Liu Qijue raised an eyebrow. “No point hiding it now. You crawled out of Site S86 together—don’t tell me nothing happened.”

Zhao Meiyou thought, If I could get up, I’d kick this bastard’s ass.

“Don’t glare at me. You’ve been out for seven days. It’ll take at least a month to regain mobility.” Liu Qijue said, “This is me and the boss’s safehouse. He left behind plenty of medical gear after he split. Getting you back in one piece won’t be an issue. Just lie there and behave.”

The two of them bantered back and forth like this—one unable to speak, the other chattering away. If it’d been Diao Chan here instead, he’d probably be hiding in a corner crying his eyes out.

Liu Qijue prattled on like a chatty parrot, all trivial gossip: the playhouse’s latest production, Grandpa De’s latest meltdown, how the pork shop auntie missed her mahjong partner and kept asking after him.

The door burst open suddenly. Zhao Meiyou heard Qian Duoduo’s voice, along with a weird burnt smell. Liu Qijue stood, eyeing Qian Duoduo and smacking his lips. “You still at it? I’m here, so Zhao Meiyou’s not dying. Quit messing around.”

Qian Duoduo carried a bowl of fish soup—a bowl that embodied fish soup only in the abstract. Whatever was in there bore no resemblance to anything resembling soup.

The burnt stench was overpowering. Zhao Meiyou coughed, choking it out. “…Brother Qian.”

“Whoa, you can talk now?” Liu Qijue looked at him in surprise, then at Qian Duoduo. With perfect self-awareness, he nodded. “Alright, I’m out. You two enjoy your chat.”

The stench in the room was otherworldly. Qian Duoduo shoved the window open and grabbed Liu Qijue’s abandoned folding fan to fan the air. When he unfolded it, he saw ink writing on the white paper.

Front: “Dog Dudes.”

Back: “Calamities Linger a Thousand Years.”

Zhao Meiyou weakly raised a hand and gestured. Qian Duoduo replied, “I’m fine. Your body nearly dissolved during the transformation. There might be some lingering effects, but don’t worry too much—they’ll fade with time.”

Back at Site S86, Zhao Meiyou had already discussed their next steps with Qian Duoduo. Qian Duoduo had his own safehouse, but his medical supplies were limited—enough for his own injuries from high-risk ops, but Zhao Meiyou’s first forced real-world use of his ability was another story. Success was one thing; the severe backlash was guaranteed, and his setup couldn’t handle it.

The thirty-third-floor hospital was an option, but Lower District hospitals lacked the good channels anyway.

Zhao Meiyou had thought of The Lead Actor.

Qian Duoduo knew Liu Qijue. “I’ve teamed up with Young Master Liu a few times. He and his husband took me to dinner back in the day.”

And so the plan was set.

Zhao Meiyou gestured again: Brother Qian, I had a dream.

“A dream?” Qian Duoduo sat on the bed’s edge. “Archaeologists dream all the time. It’s one way to vent excess power.”

Zhao Meiyou paused, then continued: But I’ve never dreamed before.

Forest and lake deep in the mountains, lost music—that was the first dream of his life.

“What did you dream about?” Qian Duoduo watched him. “If you want, you can tell me.”

Zhao Meiyou fell silent for a moment, then flipped his hand in an extravagantly showy gesture, fingers spinning like mad. Qian Duoduo almost couldn’t parse it.

You, he said.

Qian Duoduo: “…Want some soup?”

Brother Qian, are you trying to murder your husband?

Qian Duoduo sighed. “Zhao Meiyou.”

Yeah, listening.

“My previous invitation to you still stands.” Qian Duoduo said, “But rationally and emotionally, our situation has changed drastically. Your body will need long-term recovery. If you don’t want permanent side effects…”

So what are you saying, Brother Qian?

“I can keep being your guide. If you’re willing, we could partner up long-term.” Qian Duoduo paused. “But given your condition, my advice is: wait until I get back from the site. Then we continue.”

The site Qian Duoduo meant was undoubtedly the high-risk one he’d been prepping to explore—the very one that had drawn the Metropolis Government’s kill order.

Zhao Meiyou asked: Brother Qian, which site are you going to?

By now, he had his suspicions.

Qian Duoduo replied: “…Site 000.”