Depressed Chapter 6

Shen Lian gazed at Feng Xuan’s corpse.

He bowed to her, silently reciting, “May the departed rest in peace.”

Then he walked around to the back of the chair and sat down, glancing at his watch.

Four o’clock in the morning.

There was still an hour left until the survival time was up.

There might be another random teleportation; he had to prepare for the worst.

He closed his eyes and emptied his mind.

His head throbbed in waves of pain.

It was an unavoidable side effect of the antidepressants, though he had already vomited once today.

Fortunately, he had endured this pain many times before; after a while, he had grown used to it.

His thoughts began to drift aimlessly once more.

If his friend came home from work and found him missing, what kind of expression would he have?

If his friend searched everywhere for him and still found nothing, what kind of expression would he have then?

He would probably think Shen Lian had gone off to some corner to die, that he was no longer in this world.

Would he be sad?

But Shen Lian thought, perhaps his friend would finally breathe a long sigh of relief, grateful to have finally shaken off this troublesome burden.

Shen Lian was very fond of the world he now inhabited, because he knew that everything here was fake.

He no longer needed to ponder the philosophical question, “If I close my eyes, does the world cease to exist?” in the real world, nor did he need to struggle with whether the world was real or false.

This terrifying world suited his worldview of nihilism and subjective idealism perfectly.

It was even beautiful in its own way, for here, he could die at any time and in any place.

“Beep—System is generating the program again: random time, random location, random transfer.”

Four thirty in the morning.

A sense of foreboding crept over Shen Lian, for in the new place he had been teleported to, he saw three corpses.

The burly, murderous man with the axe, the female office worker who had taken off her high heels, and another man—all lay sprawled on the blood-red ground.

The two men were in a passable state, but the beautiful woman’s body was a sight too tragic to behold, as if she had suffered inhuman torment.

Her clothes were torn, her abdomen split open, her womb pulled out, her lower body a bloody mess…

Her eyes were wide open, her twisted face frozen in terror and despair.

Shen Lian took off his coat and covered her with it, then closed her eyes.

His grip on the chainsaw tightened as he warily surveyed his surroundings.

“Waa… waa…” The cry of an infant echoed, growing fainter and fainter.

The obstetrics ward…

“It… it hurts…”

“It… it hurts…”

The sound of someone crying out in pain suddenly echoed in Shen Lian’s mind, a sound like when he had dragged his fingernails across the blackboard while cleaning it in middle school—an unbearable screech that made his already aching head throb even more.

He felt as though he were inside a womb, transformed into a fetus utterly dependent on its mother, yet at the same time, he hovered above it all, seeing everything from a god’s-eye view.

He seemed to become a fertilized egg, a lump of flesh, not yet possessing thoughts of his own, stealing nutrients from his mother’s body by the sheer instinct of life.

The uterine wall was warm.

Then something like a small spoon reached in, scraping the wall thinner and thinner.

And then he died.

He seemed to become a formed fetus, with a faint, blurry sense of awareness, connected to his mother by the same umbilical cord.

Then a pair of forceps reached in and crushed him.

And then he died.

Someone in a white coat pulled out his tiny foot, then his hand, then his blood-soaked head.

He seemed to become a fetus again, this time strong and robust, with his own consciousness and senses. The small spoon could do nothing to him, nor could the forceps.

He was induced, squeezed out through a narrow passage.

The person in the white coat, to prevent his cries, pinched his trachea.

A needle was plunged in, and a cold liquid was injected into his brain.

And then he died.

He never uttered a single cry, never had a chance to open his eyes and see the outside world.

All that remained were a few insignificant, almost negligible, ant-like struggles against the inevitable.

Perhaps he would even be preserved in formalin.

“It hurts…”

“It hurts…”

“It hurts…”

The sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard rang out in Shen Lian’s mind once more, jolting him awake.

Then he saw, ahead of him, a tiny infant.

He truly was very small, eyes closed, its skin wrinkled and ugly.

It simply stood there.

Shen Lian saw, from those closed eyes, a single line of bloody tears trickling down.