“Zhang Hai was telling me he thought all the animals are getting bigger, and some are getting smarter,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Then I asked him about the crystals, and he said they were too valuable to trade. He gets them, the dog eats them. But surely somebody’s willing to trade them.”
“There are people who will sell their last scrap of bread for something they want more,” Zan Xinyi says absentmindedly. “Maybe if we swing back around for the big crew meetup you can find someone with less foresight-- or more desperation-- than him.”
“No thanks,” Wei Shengyuan says.
The green mist is slowly creeping towards the river, expanding. By the time they dock and Zan Xinyi has to jump out and kill a few zombies just to clear the way up to the street, visibility is almost entirely gone.
“He also said that our neighborhood was looking pretty desirable for other crews,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Since we were evacuated first, our zombie density is actually relatively low, and the mutations weren’t considered a dealbreaker.” He grimaces. “Even though we’ve been considered a high risk pollution area in the city for well over a year. Did you know there was a lawsuit gearing up over that? Parents whose children were born already mutated.”
“Not any more,” Zan Xinyi says.
“No.”
“Well, there is a positive to the mist if it truly is that bad,” Zan Xinyi says.
“What?”
“We’re no longer a desirable location.”
Wei Shengyuan has one of the sacks on his lap, and the other drags behind Zan Xinyi as she struggles to push both the merman and his new burden up the street.
“It might still be,” Wei Shengyuan says. “The zombies are actually easier to herd now that they’re both blinded and frenzied. Though it’s more dangerous to live here, it might be an even better hunting ground-- watch out!”
Without a hand available to swing her broom, all of the defense has fallen solely onto Wei Shengyuan’s shoulders. Zan Xinyi just keeps moving forward, hearing a body collapse behind her.
“Don’t yell,” she says irritably. “It just draws more of them, and I can’t dodge when I’m holding onto the wheelchair. This area is on a slight slope, you know.”
Wei Shengyuan’s shoulders rise up even further.
“Sorry.”
“It’s nothing. If I’d known Jiang Jin could have projected her voice at a distance, we could’ve had her distracting monsters on the way here, and things could have gone much faster.”
“Sorry,” Wei Shengyuan’s voice echoes again.
“No, I said it’s not--” Ah, that was Jiang Jin. “We have got to work on this system. After the music for the level is finished.”
It’s funny. Once you walk into it, the mist seems barely green at all, always giving the impression that you are in the one sanctuary of purity while it’s everywhere around you that glows with the unnatural light.
Just a delusion.
“Our building’s the next one up,” Wei Shengyuan says finally, sighing in relief.
“How can you tell?” Zan Xinyi asks.
“How can I-- Zan Xinyi, if you can’t tell where we are, shouldn’t you have brought that up earlier?”
“Why? You’re good with directions.”
“We could have been doing circles in the mist until we died.”
“And yet obviously, we are back at the right building,” Zan Xinyi says. Idiot. “So how could you tell?”
“Well, I did memorize the route,” Wei Shengyuan says, squeezing his sack of items tighter as he’s unable to cross his arms. “But...the water is different in our building. It’s distinctive.”
“Ah, because it’s pure.”
The window is still smashed on the ground floor of the building. She really swears she’s going to fix that tomorrow. Anyway. She punches in her code, the door fails to unlock, and then she has to pull out her tag and stick it on the stupid thing so the door will actually open.
“Well, yes, the purity is distinct when it comes to the apartment, but the air itself is cleaner on our entire floor.”
“That’s weird,” Zan Xinyi says. She doesn’t have any tags on anything that would affect the air.
“I thought it was something you were doing.”
“No,” Zan Xinyi says, looking between him and the two sacks and the stairs. “Nothing to do with me. Alright, we’re going to try a fireman’s carry this time.”
“Maybe you should just carry the sacks, and then I’ll--”
“Let’s bring the most valuable things up first, yes?” Zan Xinyi then immediately regrets her decision when the long fish tail slaps against her legs as she starts up the stairs.
“Zan Xinyi!”
“Stop slapping your tail around, you’ve still got gross river water on that.” Actually, the texture of his scales is fascinating, and she never gets to look so closely at them because he’s weird about it. They have a green-black shimmer to them, darker around the transition between scale and skin.
“Put me down!”
“Wow, I didn’t know your voice could go that high.”
That shuts him up.
Jiang Jin meets them at the fourth floor staircase, broken arm tied in a haphazard sling as she looks between them, her feathers puffed up in every direction, hair frizzy. It’s like she’s seeing ghosts.
No, it’s like she’s seeing a miracle.
“You came back,” she says. “I tried really hard to keep the building safe, Yiyi! I really did. I scared away anything that came too close, I made really loud noises, I--”
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“You’re more talented than I thought,” Zan Xinyi says, staggering now that Jiang Jin’s presence has stalled the oxen mentality she’d been using to charge up the stairs. Serves her right for identifying with a beast of burden instead of something smarter. “Can you go draw the bathwater for Wei Shengyuan? I need somewhere to dump him.”
“Oh! Of course.”
“Hot water,” Zan Xinyi says.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s hot,” Wei Shengyuan says. “I worry about straining the spell that keeps the water running.”
“It’s not a spell.”
He doesn’t say anything to that.
“It’s not. And even if it were, there’s no difference between hot and cold water when the pipes shouldn’t work. Unless, since you’re half fish, hot water can boil you more easily? Like poaching a crab.”
She misses eating seafood.
“It’s nothing like poaching a crab. Crustaceans don’t even-- Never mind. You don’t know anything about fish or about cooking.”
“Is it cannibalism if we go fishing? It should be fine since fish eat each other.”
“I love sushi,” Jiang Jin says, plastering herself to the sink as three people become way too many people in one bathroom. “And I don’t think it’s cannibalism for me to have chicken, right? So it’s fine.”
“Sushi when the game level is finished,” Zan Xinyi says. “I need to go pick up the bags from downstairs, and then help set up your room, but after that it’s time to focus on the game.”
Wait.
“But also, Jiang Jin, I need to talk to you about how good your hearing is. You can walk up the stairs a few times with me.”
“I can even carry a few things,” Jiang Jin suggests hopefully.
With a broken arm? The goal is more productivity.
“Just walk. Wei Shengyuan, we’ll bring the wheelchair up first.”
Wei Shengyuan looks up from the bathtub, his hand already holding his tablet pen. “Hm?”
“Nothing. Go back to that.”
Zan Xinyi pulls Jiang Jin out of the room and into the corridor, but waits until they’re a few flights of stairs down before she starts the next part of the interrogation.
“So, how far can you hear?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were hearing us all the way at the trading post. Can you hear even further than that?”
Jiang Jin shakes her head.
“That was because I knew where you guys were going,” Jiang Jin says. “Yiyi, I really can’t hear that far normally! But that dog is really easy to locate. Once I heard it barking, I managed to hear you around the same area!”
“So you couldn’t hear us until we got to Wet Dog Post.”
“Yes!”
Zan Xinyi decides to believe her.
“Why did you then go silent as we got further from the trading post?”
“It’s hard to track sounds like that...especially when you’re moving.” Jiang Jin breathes out a sigh of relief as Zan Xinyi takes a break at one of the stairs. Now that she’s not at risk of dropping Wei Shengyuan, the rest of this can go much more slowly.
“I also didn’t realize you could mimic human voices.”
“It’s difficult. I couldn’t do it all until very recently. You know, months ago I could only mimic bells. That was it. I couldn’t even do bird calls.”
“That’s weird, since you’re a bird.”
“But I’m a lyrebird.”
“Do liar birds not make bird calls?”
“I think you’re saying it wrong, Yiyi! It’s lyre-bird. Like the instrument. And yes they do, but lyrebirds learn their own songs from mimicking other lyrebirds, you know. But I live in a big city, and the closest zoo doesn’t even have any!”
Jiang Jin puffs out her cheeks in what would be a pout if she were younger. Instead, Zan Xinyi is going to call it an overdone complaint.
“So you’ve been mutated for a while.”
“I was quite early, the feathers started growing almost eight months ago. It cost me a few jobs with people who thought the mutation might be catching, but I also got a few from people excited to learn music from a real bird. And when that faded, I still had one reliable gig. It’s like how I got onto my previous crew, and then ended up rescued by you. Win some, lose some!”
Zan Xinyi bats Jiang Jin’s hand away from the sacks as she rummages through one of them, looking for the plywood and the nails.
“We’re not going anywhere yet. I’m tackling the whole chore list.”
Pulling a hammer out of her apron, Zan Xinyi heads over to board up that stupid window, glaring out into a green fog so thick that even the wails of its zombified residents are muffled in it.
“You also said you’re defending this place. Are you still doing that?”
“Yeah!”
It’s like pulling teeth. Do birds have teeth?
“How are you doing that?”
“Whenever I hear something scary get too close to the building, I make sounds farther away so they go somewhere else. A lot of big things have been roaming around recently....but they can’t see anything, so they respond really well to sound.”
Jiang Jin reproduces the sound of human footsteps, and then a frightened human scream for help.
“Like that!”
“It’s good to take initiative,” Zan Xinyi decides, almost missing her next swing of the hammer as it glances off the nail head.
“Speaking of initiative,” Jiang Jin says hopefully, “I wanted to talk to you about the game.”
Even though it should be good to have her subordinates bring the game up, all Zan Xinyi feels is a deep sense of foreboding.
“Yes?”
“I looked through Wei Shengyuan’s design notes, and I thought about the playthrough that you showed me of what was worked out so far, and...I know being endless is part of the design, but I can’t help but notice there’s no way to end the level? Like you proceed, you fight, you win, and then...there’s just more trees. Shouldn’t there be a goal point, or at least like a symbol? Click here to win! Except there’s no prize.”
That reminds Zan Xinyi of a completely different problem with the game, e.g that she needs to design a platform where the actual gacha summoning mechanics will work from. Currently, there’s no way to gamble. In her gambling game.
So she needs to transition to that somehow, anyway.
Distracted, she misses the next nail completely.
“Do you need me to help hold the board, Yiyi?”
“No.”
She just needs to focus.
But--
Zan Xinyi stares at the shitty door with its broken window that keeps letting green mist in.
“We can put in a doorway at the end of the zone,” she says. Her fingers are itching for her design notes. This is going to be more work for Wei Shengyuan. “It’ll be completely empty, no door. White fog beyond it. This is the Unknown Door. It will always lead to the next level.”
“Piano and cello,” Jiang Jin mutters excitedly. “Maybe a single piccolo...oh, but I don’t have access to a piccolo so I can’t mimic it properly. Maybe a sharp flute note.”
“At the beginning of the zone, there will be a different door,” Zan Xinyi says, and slams the last nail into place. “It will be closed.” Since she doesn’t have to make her gacha system under the current deadline. “It will be the Door to Night.”
“Is Night a place? Oh, it must be where the characters have come from. I don’t even know enough to start composing anything. Is it a country? A direction?”
Zan Xinyi’s mind goes blank.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s up to Wei Shengyuan. He’s drawing it.”
“You two must have put a lot of thought into this when you were away,” Jiang Jin says admiringly. The joyous thrum of a zither vibrates through the room in place of applause.
“Absolutely,” says Zan Xinyi.
The soundproofing cannot arrive fast enough.
patreon. It's ten chapters ahead of where we are now, and will occasionally have some art that I draw of the series. It's my first time setting one up, so please let me know if there are any issues.
Jiang Jin is...
