The first time Fang Runing died, she felt nothing but an infinite lightness.
She lay in bed listening to the monitor flatten into one long tone, nurses' footsteps approach and fade, and her mother stifle her sobs in the corridor. She wanted to say something, but her lips no longer belonged to her.
Fang Runing. Female. Twenty-three. Terminal bone cancer.
The genius Go player on whom the academy had pinned its hopes had finally lost a game she could not resign.
Then she woke.
She was not in heaven or hell, nor in any afterlife promised by religion. She was standing in a long corridor lined with yellowing white tiles and tightly shut doors. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, casting a sickly pallor. The air stank of disinfectant, rust, or something worse.
Fang Runing looked down. She wore blue-and-white striped hospital pajamas and no shoes. A bruise marked the back of her hand where an IV had been removed. She made a fist. Her nails biting her palm felt real; her bones and joints responded; even the childhood scar on her knee remained.
Too real to be a hallucination.
At the end of the corridor, a dark-green sign above a door read: MATERNITY WARD.
She did not recognize the place, but her body reacted before her mind did—muscles tightening, breath slowing, center of gravity dropping. Years at the Go board had taught her this instinct: when you do not know where to play next, steady yourself, observe, and survive.
Then she noticed the mark around her wrist.
A red thread.
For a startled instant she thought someone had cut her wrist. Touch proved it was no wound, only a line drawn in cinnabar. It began over the pulse of her left wrist, ran across the back of her hand and over her fingertips, then floated through the air into the darkness beyond the lights.
Her fingers passed through it, yet warmth gathered at her wrist. She could feel another person's body heat traveling down the line.
No—not something like body heat. It was another person's body heat.
Anyone normal would have broken into a cold sweat. Fang Runing felt nothing.
Watching the red thread disappear into darkness, she realized she could not feel fear. It was not courage or reason, but the absence of an emotion that should have been there—like the empty point left when a stone was captured from a Go board.
A living person should fear death, but she had already died. A dead person should rest, yet here she stood.
So she clenched her fist and followed the thread.
The corridor was far longer than it appeared. Each time she passed a door, the small window in it lit up, as if something had been triggered and was peering out at her.
Inside one ward sat a figure with its back to the door, shoulders trembling. Fang Runing stopped. The trembling stopped too, as though it had sensed her gaze. She walked on. A faint sigh came from behind her.
She did not turn around.
Halfway down the corridor, she found a mirror. It was an ordinary full-length mirror fixed into the wall, probably once used by hospital staff. Dust blurred its surface.
Fang Runing stepped before it and glanced at her reflection.
The woman in the mirror looked back.
They shared the same height, the same pajamas, the same pale face and hollow eyes. Yet the other woman stood straighter, chin raised, a smile that was not quite a smile curving her lips.
Fang Runing knew her own expressions too well. Even after winning the most decisive match of her life, she had merely exhaled. Her teachers said what made her frightening was that victory brought her no joy and defeat no pain. She was a machine without emotion.
Now that machine watched its reflection smile.
She should have been afraid. Again, the feeling seemed pinned beneath something, unable to rise.
Fang Runing touched the mirror. Cold glass met her fingertips.
The reflection did not lift her hand. She merely tilted her head, studying Fang Runing like an intriguing specimen.
Then she spoke. Though glass separated them, her voice sounded close against Fang Runing's ear.
“Fang Runing.”
She knew her name.
“You don't want to die.”
Fang Runing regarded her without expression.
“I can help you. Clear the game, and you live.”
Fang Runing withdrew her hand. The small print on the glass slowly faded.
“What's the price?”
There were no free captures on a Go board. A living group never appeared from nowhere.
The reflection's smile deepened, less friendly than relieved—the look of someone whose gamble had paid off.
“The price is this: if you die, she dies too.”
“Who?” Fang Runing frowned.
The woman raised her left hand. A red thread emerged from the same spot on her wrist, passed through the mirror and Fang Runing's fingertips, and joined the thread on Fang Runing's arm. The two became one, one end with Fang Runing and the other with her reflection.
The reflected woman lowered her lashes. Her mocking ease softened into the voice one might use to coax a child.
“Don't you want to know who's at the other end?”
For a long moment, only the fluorescents and Fang Runing's slow, heavy heartbeat filled the corridor.
“I do,” she said.
Every light went out.
Darkness crashed down. Fang Runing did not move. Her eyes had no time to adjust, but the thread on her wrist grew hotter. The person at its far end was drawing closer.
Footsteps came from behind—from the deepest darkness of the corridor, not from the mirror. Light. Slow. Less like shoes than an animal's padded feet carefully touching tile.
Fang Runing turned.
Two eyes glowed green in the dark. Their faint light revealed a black cat crouched fewer than three steps away. It was painfully thin, its coat dull as though rain-soaked and dried by wind.
Its tail had been severed at the root, leaving only a short stump.
Fang Runing crouched and offered her hand. The cat neither approached nor retreated. It watched her with eyes that looked less feline than human—eyes full of words left unsaid.
The thread burned against her wrist.
“He Yuanqiu,” Fang Runing called.
The cat's ears twitched.
The lights flared back to life. The mirror remained, and so did the woman inside it, but the cat was gone. In its place, the door marked MATERNITY WARD slowly opened, spilling warm yellow light.
Warm. And deeply wrong.
Fang Runing rose, her knees a little weak.
“The instance has begun, my friend,” the mirror woman said. “Go forward. Stay alive.”
“And if I can't?”
Her expression changed. “Then you disappear with her.”
Fang Runing looked at her one last time. The smile had vanished from that identical face, leaving something between pity and envy.
“By the way,” the reflection said, “I'm Fang Ru'an—the other you. Try not to die too soon. I haven't seen enough yet.”
Fang Runing ignored her and walked toward the open door. She did not ask who Fang Ru'an was, why she existed, or what rule had created her. Those questions could wait until after she survived.
For now, only one thing mattered.
He Yuanqiu was at the end of the red thread.
He Yuanqiu was alive—or trapped in something worse than death.
Fang Runing entered.
The maternity room was ancient: concrete floor, three or four birthing beds against the wall, rusty instrument carts beside them. Wooden planks sealed the windows, admitting only slivers of yellowed moonlight.
An infant incubator stood in the center, plugged in and blinking, though it held nothing.
The moment she crossed the threshold, the door silently shut behind her. A yellowed duty roster was pasted to it. Someone had scratched out the final line with their nails and replaced it with a sentence:
“The first baby died at 12:15 a.m. Its mother held it and wept all night.”
Fang Runing studied the words for several seconds.
Then she heard a baby crying from the far end of the room.
Not the powerful wail of a newborn, but broken sobs—one after another, from behind the walls, beneath the floor, from every direction at once.
The incubator light went dark, then lit again.
Red.
Bare feet on cold concrete, Fang Runing stood amid the swelling cries.
The board was set.
Time to play.
She approached the nearest birthing bed and took a rusty pair of surgical scissors from the cart. They were poorly balanced, but better than empty hands.
The white sheet on the bed moved.
A hand slid out—pale, slender, unmistakably a woman's, dried blood packed beneath its nails. It groped until it found the metal rail and closed around it with a squeal of rust.
Fang Runing tightened her grip on the scissors and took a deep breath.
Come on, then.
Who here hasn't died once already?