As Bai Liu stood lost in thought, clutching the doll fashioned in his own likeness, the teacher had already gone to summon the remaining five children.
The last five children of the orphanage stood in a line, awkward and expressionless, not one daring to lift their gaze to meet Mu Ke's. Their eyes seemed fixed on their own toes. Some limped, some had twisted spines and hunched backs; all bore the marks of disability, huddling together like fledgling creatures not yet ready to leave the nest.
They resembled goods on display, aware of their own meager worth, shrinking into themselves with a silent, abject humility.
As Bai Liu approached, he frowned—the fungal odor clinging to these children was even stronger than what he'd smelled on the corpses in the hospital.
Mu Ke, unable to bear it, waved a hand in front of his nose. "Do you eat mushrooms at every meal here? Why does it reek of mushrooms so much?"
The teacher, embarrassed, wrapped her arms around the five children. "Actually, we don't eat them that often…"
Bai Liu's gaze swept over the teacher and the children. "Did you eat a lot of mushrooms that day?"
The teacher hesitated. "We all ate them, including these five. Quite a lot, actually."
"Were there any poisoned children who ate only a little? For example, just a sip of mushroom soup?" Bai Liu pressed.
The teacher thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yes. Some children liked the taste, some didn't. A few only ate a tiny bit, but they were still poisoned."
Bai Liu withdrew his gaze. Some who ate much were unharmed, some who ate little were poisoned—so the poisoning was not dose-dependent.
But why mushrooms? Why was it always mushrooms whenever something happened at this orphanage? And what, exactly, was the true condition for this deadly mushroom poisoning?
Lu Yizhan had said that the surviving children's bloodwork and other results were unremarkable—just mild anemia, like Liu Jiayi.
The only apparent commonality between these five survivors and Liu Jiayi was this: all had congenital defects. Liu Jiayi was blind; these five bore various disabilities.
Bai Liu fell into deep thought.
The teacher continued the tour, leading them into a room filled with photographs, trophies, and children's drawings.
"This is our exhibition hall," she explained.
It was clear no one had visited in a long time. Dust coated the trophies and certificates, relics of a time when the orphanage had flourished. The walls were adorned with children's paintings and annual group photos from the Children's Day performances. In the last photo, over forty children smiled obediently, yet only five had survived—those same five now trailing the teacher, faces blank.
Everything on display seemed to come from the dead, casting a pall of melancholy over the room.
Bai Liu surveyed the room, then turned to the teacher. "May I take down some of the photos and drawings?"
Normally, such things would be off-limits, but the orphanage's decline had eroded such formalities. The teacher nodded her assent.
Mu Ke watched curiously as Bai Liu removed several drawings and laid them on the floor for closer inspection. He sidled up and whispered, "Bai Liu, did you find something?"
"Mm," Bai Liu murmured, not looking up, his hands busy sorting the artwork.
Mu Ke's gaze followed Bai Liu's hands. The drawings were skillful, clearly the work of a child with some training. There were portraits, still lifes, colored pencil and crayon, stark black-and-white sketches—styles varied wildly, most rendered in colors so vivid and saturated they bordered on garish, the subjects themselves illogical and surreal.
A frail girl with her eyes bandaged, sitting on a hospital bed; a beautiful silver-blue fish in a jar; a shattered wooden mirror atop a scorched, melted toy train.
All depicted things found in the orphanage.
After a while, Mu Ke noticed something. "Were these all drawn by the same person? They're all signed 'W.'"
Though the styles differed, each bore the same ornate, curling "W" in the corner.
At last, Bai Liu looked at Mu Ke, his voice low and soft, almost a whisper. "That's my signature."
Mu Ke started. "Yours? Why is your signature here?"
Bai Liu offered no further explanation. Mu Ke, seeing he would get no answer, fell silent.
The initial "W" for "White" was Bai Liu's customary signature.
He recognized his own work at a glance—though these pieces were far more naive than his current style, they were unmistakably his.
The blindfolded girl was clearly Liu Jiayi, her hospital gown matching the one Bai Liu had seen that morning. The silver-blue fish in a jar must be the Siren King from his first game, "Siren Town." The shattered mirror on the melted toy train was from his second game, "Explosive Last Bus."
Yet all these drawings were dated ten years ago, when Bai Liu could not possibly have been at this orphanage, nor known any of these things.
There was only one explanation: at some point in the future, Bai Liu would return to ten years ago, and leave these drawings behind in the orphanage.
Such an impossible scenario would terrify most, but for Bai Liu, it only confirmed his suspicion that this orphanage was a "formal game instance" deployed in the real world.
The only reasonable explanation for these temporal anomalies was that the official plot of this game instance was set ten years in the past. Judging by the signatures, the timeline was not now, but a decade ago.
Bai Liu's fingers traced the signatures, his gaze darkening.
It was highly likely that, in the future, he would enter this game and leave some mark within the "orphanage game instance" of ten years past. When the "official version" of the game was loaded into reality, his traces would be imported into the present-day orphanage.
This was no good omen.
A player's mark, left forever in a game instance, usually meant a failed run—like Zhang Kui, who died and was transformed into a charred monster, forever haunting "Explosive Last Bus." Such deaths and failures became part of the game, carried into reality with the instance.
Yet this foreordained doom did not frighten Bai Liu; he pondered it with icy calm.
Two questions still troubled him. His gaze drifted to the corner of the 200X group photo, to the face of a boy.
The boy's face was utterly emotionless, his sidelong glance radiating a contemptuous "you foolish mortals" air, a misfit's isolation. It was himself at fourteen. Bai Liu glanced at the bold, exaggerated colors of the paintings.
The pose in the photo, the style of the paintings—these were exactly what he'd favored at fourteen.
He had long since abandoned such flamboyant colors, having been criticized by his superiors for "spiritual pollution" and poor marketability. He'd decisively dropped the style, never to return.
These works, and the "Bai Liu" in the photo, were unmistakably his fourteen-year-old self's. Yet the information in the paintings was knowledge only his twenty-four-year-old self could possess. The problem was: if his twenty-four-year-old self entered the game, he would never paint like this. But if the game reset his memory and body to age fourteen, he could not know what he now knows.
This was a Bai Liu with the memories of twenty-four, but the style and temperament of fourteen. Logically, this was impossible—memory shapes style and character. With ten more years of experience, he could never be the person he was a decade ago.
The coexistence of fourteen- and twenty-four-year-old Bai Liu in the "orphanage game instance" of ten years past was his first puzzle.
The second was this: Bai Liu studied a black-and-white portrait—a girl, blindfolded, clutching a doll on a hospital bed, knees drawn to her chest. It was exquisitely rendered.
But Bai Liu remembered clearly that, at fourteen, he had loathed sketching. He preferred bold colors, and rarely drew portraits, only still lifes for practice.
Why, then, had he drawn a portrait of Liu Jiayi, who hadn't even been born at the time? There should have been no trace of her.
Could it be that Liu Jiayi, too, would enter this instance?
But even if she did, as a newcomer, her first game should be a solo instance. This was clearly a multiplayer game—unless she cleared her first game and immediately joined Bai Liu's, she shouldn't appear in the painting.
And Liu Huai, an experienced player, would never let his sister take such a risk.
So why was this child here?
Bai Liu's gaze swept the drawing, finally settling on the doll in Liu Jiayi's hands.
The doll wore a white shirt and black trousers, held by the little girl, its face turned outward in a smile. At first glance, nothing seemed amiss, but the longer Bai Liu stared, the more wrong it felt.
The doll's head was twisted too far, not merely turned, but rotated a full one hundred eighty degrees.
Bai Liu gazed at the drawing, absently fingering the coin that hung at his chest, his eyes narrowing in thought.