The little girl’s laughter was like countless cold steel needles stabbing into Lu Yueqi’s brain. It was filled with an eerie strangeness that made one’s hair stand on end.
“Ah!”
A short, irrepressible scream burst from Lu Yueqi’s throat. Her body trembled violently from sheer terror. Instinctively, she backed away, her back slamming hard into the cold wall with a muffled thud.
“Quiet! Stand still!”
Bai Yu’s voice struck her chaotic nerves through the tactical earpiece like an electric current, forcibly dragging her back from the edge of the abyss where fear was about to drown her.
Lu Yueqi bit down hard on her lower lip, tasting a trace of blood.
Leaning against the wall, she gulped in rough breaths, forcing her eyes wide open as she looked toward the source of that horror.
Bai Yu took half a step forward, completely shielding Lu Yueqi behind him.
The beam of the flashlight in his hand remained steadily locked on the eyeless doll. His entire body was like a statue poised to strike.
After the doll turned its face fully toward them, it made no further movement. It simply stood there in silence, staring at them with those two pitch-black eye sockets.
The atmosphere in the office seemed to solidify into something tangible. The air was cold and viscous; every breath was like inhaling shards of glass, stinging the lungs.
Time stretched infinitely in that moment.
One second, two seconds, ten seconds…
Nothing happened.
The doll did not move, and neither did Bai Yu. This eerie standoff was filled with tension.
“Bai… Bai Yu… What… what does it want to do?” Lu Yueqi’s voice shook uncontrollably, but in the end, she remembered Bai Yu’s instructions and did not scream again. Instead, she asked through the earpiece in the lowest volume she could manage.
“Observe,” Bai Yu replied with only two words.
His brain was operating at an extremely high speed. This was not a rule-distorting nightmare he had handled before. There were no clear written rules, but its behavioral pattern itself was a kind of rule.
It appeared after the laughter, paused after Lu Yueqi screamed, and then fell into stillness. This meant that it reacted to external “sound” and “emotion.”
Lu Yueqi’s fear seemed to be the food it craved. Yet his own calm had thrown it into a kind of “programmatic” confusion.
Just then, another abnormal change occurred.
“Clack.”
A soft sound came from the corner of the room.
The two looked toward the sound and saw a building block fall out of a toy box in the corner all by itself.
Immediately afterward, as if receiving some silent command—
“Clack, clack, clack…”
The blocks in the box jumped out one after another on their own. On the floor, they seemed to be manipulated by an invisible pair of hands, beginning to stack themselves. They built strange towers that looked as though they might collapse at any moment.
On the office desk, a bobblehead doll whose head was connected to its body by a spring began shaking left and right without any rhythm, letting out an ear-piercing creak, creak.
On top of the filing cabinet, a teddy bear covered in thick dust stared with eyes made of black glass beads. Under the flashlight’s beam, they reflected two points of crimson light. Its cotton arm slowly rose, pointing in Lu Yueqi’s direction.
The entire office had become a toy house that had come alive.
These toys did not launch a direct attack, but their presence and behavior brought an undeniable mental pressure. In this way, they were declaring: this is our “playground,” and you are the “new toys” who have stumbled inside.
Lu Yueqi’s face had turned as pale as paper. She felt her sanity being gnawed away bit by bit by these bizarre sights.
She even had the illusion that the walls and ceiling were slowly pressing in on her, about to trap her to death in this narrow space.
“Lu Yueqi.” Bai Yu’s voice sounded again. This time, there was a little less severity in his tone and a trace more guidance. “Look at me. Don’t look at those things. Tell me, aside from fear, what else can you feel right now?”
“I… I don’t know…” Lu Yueqi’s voice was filled with confusion and despair. “I feel… so cold… so lonely… as if… as if I’m the only one left in the whole world…”
“That’s right.” A trace of affirmation appeared in Bai Yu’s voice. “That’s the feeling. It isn’t hating us. It’s just… too lonely. It doesn’t want to kill us. It just wants us to… stay and play with it.”
“Play?” Lu Yueqi could not understand.
“Yes. Play a game… that will never end.”
As soon as Bai Yu finished speaking, the eyeless doll that had been motionless the entire time suddenly moved.
It stretched out its stiff ceramic arm and pointed toward the only window in the room.
“Giggle, giggle, giggle…”
That eerie laughter rang out again.
Immediately afterward, with a snap, the lights in the office went out without warning.
The flashlight beams in Bai Yu’s and Lu Yueqi’s hands also went dark at the same instant, as if forcibly snuffed out by some power.
Absolute darkness instantly swallowed the entire room.
“Hide-and-seek… begins now…”
A child’s voice mixed with countless echoes rang directly in their minds.
“Whoever gets found… has to be the ‘ghost’…”
“No! No!” Lu Yueqi’s psychological defenses completely collapsed in that moment. She could no longer suppress her fear and screamed in panic.
“Rustle, rustle…”
“Creak… creak…”
In the endless darkness, the sounds of those toys moving were magnified countless times. They seemed to be surrounding the two from every direction, the noises growing closer and denser.
Lu Yueqi could even feel something cold lightly brush against her ankle.
“Bai Yu! Bai Yu, where are you?” she cried out in despair.
A cold but powerful hand suddenly grabbed her wrist.
It was Bai Yu.
“Calm down!” Bai Yu’s voice was right beside her ear, so close she could almost feel his breath. “Listen to my instructions now. This is your only chance. That power inside you—do you remember what I taught you? Don’t resist it. Guide it!”
“I… I can’t! It won’t listen to me!” Lu Yueqi cried.
“Then command it!” Bai Yu’s voice took on a trace of forcefulness. “You are not its slave. You are its master! Now, pass your emotions to it! Don’t you feel lonely too? Don’t you feel afraid too? Tell it! Tell the ‘other’ you in this room! Tell it that you understand how it feels!”
Bai Yu’s words were like a bolt of lightning cleaving through Lu Yueqi’s fear-occupied, chaotic mind.
That’s right… loneliness…
Ever since she had been dragged into this terrifying world, hadn’t she been lonely all along too?
Afraid that her friends would see her as a monster, afraid of causing trouble for the Investigation Bureau, afraid of that “thing” inside her body.
How similar this feeling was to the bone-deep loneliness permeating the room.
“Rustle…”
Something with the texture of ceramic had already touched her knee.
The threat of death and Bai Yu’s deafening words became catalysts in that moment.
Lu Yueqi closed her eyes and gave up struggling. She no longer thought about those terrifying toys drawing close, nor about whether she would die. She sank all of her will into the depths of her own body.
She “saw” the chaotic energy entrenched within her soul. It was like a caged beast, filled with brutality and unease.
This time, Lu Yueqi did not try to suppress it again, nor did she fear it anymore.
She tried to use her will to touch it gently.
“I’m so scared…”
“I’m so lonely…”
“Are… you the same?”
She passed over her truest and most fragile emotions without reservation.
Buzz—
After receiving this “resonance,” the nightmare power known as “Deep Cold” no longer vented itself violently. Instead, it flowed out of Lu Yueqi’s body gently and obediently, like a stream that had found its channel.
A chill carrying tranquility and sorrow gradually spread outward from her as the center, silently diffusing through the entire room.
This chill was not bone-piercing. It was like a thin layer of gentle frost, softly covering every object in the room.
The “rustle, rustle” stopped.
The “creak, creak” vanished.
The cold ceramic arm that had already touched Lu Yueqi’s knee also froze in place.
The entire world seemed to have been frozen by this gentle chill.
The lights in the room slowly came back on, giving off a soft, warm yellow glow.
All the toys had returned to their original positions, quietly remaining there, as if the terrifying scene just now had never happened.
Only the eyeless doll was still standing before them.
But the unsettling malice on it had vanished without a trace, replaced by an inextricable sadness.
Just then, broken scenes flooded into Bai Yu’s and Lu Yueqi’s minds like a tide.
They saw a little girl.
A cute little girl wearing a white dress, with her hair tied into twin pigtails.
Her parents were the owners of this toy factory. Busy with business, they always came home very late. And so, the empty factory at night became her only “paradise.”
Her favorite toy was a doll whose eyes had not yet been installed. Every day, she talked to it and played games with it.
Until one day, while playing hide-and-seek with the doll, she locked herself inside this quality inspection office. The door was shut from the outside, and no matter what she did, she could not open it. She cried, she shouted for help, but in the huge, noisy factory, no one heard her voice.
In endless loneliness, fear, and despair, she slowly stopped breathing.
Her final lingering obsession was, “I really want someone… to play with me.” That obsession fused with the equally “lonely” eyeless doll in her arms, ultimately forming this pitiful nightmare governed by the rule of “games.”
The illusion faded.
Two lines of clear tears had unknowingly slid down from the corners of Lu Yueqi’s eyes. She looked at the doll before her, and there was no more fear in her heart—only sympathy and compassion.
Bai Yu released her hand and slowly walked to the office desk. He crouched down and picked up several ceramic fragments of a broken ballerina music box from beneath the desk.
That was the little girl’s most beloved treasure.
Lu Yueqi also walked over. She stretched out a slightly trembling hand and gently stroked the doll’s cold ceramic cheek.
“Rest in peace,” she said softly, her voice choked with tears.
Bai Yu carefully placed the fragments in his hand into the doll’s stiff hands.
The instant the fragments touched the doll, its body began to emit a soft, warm white light.
A translucent phantom of a little girl in a white dress emerged from the doll’s body. In her arms, she held the now-restored music box. She smiled at Bai Yu and Lu Yueqi with a pure, liberated smile.
“Thank you…”
After that gentle word of thanks, the girl’s phantom and the eyeless doll together turned into countless points of light, slowly dissipating into the air.
“Ding.”
With a clear, crisp sound, a transparent ice-blue crystal shaped like a tear fell from the points of light and dropped onto the floor.
The mission was over.
……
In the off-road vehicle returning to headquarters, Lu Yueqi leaned against the passenger seat. She had already fallen into a deep sleep from mental exhaustion.
There were still tear stains on her face, but her sleeping expression looked incomparably peaceful.
Bai Yu drove the car, his face still pale, but his gaze was much gentler than when they had come.
He glanced at the sleeping girl beside him and said something in a low voice so faint that even he himself could barely hear it.
He turned his gaze back to the road ahead illuminated by the headlights, his left hand unconsciously resting on the steering wheel.
Just then, from the nearly invisible “Eye of the Vortex” mark on the back of his hand, there suddenly came an icy fluctuation like static electricity.
It felt as if some lofty audience member, after watching a moderately interesting play, had carelessly clapped once.
Bai Yu’s pupils contracted sharply.
“Heh…” Hei Yan’s laugh, tinged with mockery and pleasure, sounded in his mind right on time.
“See? The audience has shown the most basic courtesy toward this immature prelude. They’re beginning to look forward to it a little… looking forward to what kind of… magnificent yet despairing elegy you and this fledgling that has just learned to cry out will one day perform together on that great stage for them.”