Xu Zhiyi, brimming with joy, nearly drowned.
She lunged at the dark figure, but instead of finding the familiar chest, she plunged into it like sinking into a vast swamp.
There was no oxygen. She flailed desperately, but couldn't find any way out. A few seconds of panic stretched as long as ten-odd minutes.
The dark figure pinched the back of her neck and lifted her out of his body.
Xu Zhiyi coughed violently as she breathed air again, her eyes reddening as she looked at the dark figure between coughs.
There was still some black liquid clinging to the top of her head—slippery and cool. The dark figure—now Lin Yan—steadied her, one hand stroking her head, absorbing the liquid back while also smoothing her disheveled hair.
His voice was also hissy.
It sounded similar to the one lying on the floor in the library, but noticeably more pleasant to the ear.
Her brother had turned into a Non-Newtonian Fluid.
Xu Zhiyi finally finished coughing, her head tilting against Lin Yan's palm as he patted her gently.
As expected of her brother.
Xu Zhiyi very smoothly chose to selectively forget that just minutes ago, she'd had complaints about the dark figure's existence.
How beautiful her brother's shadow was!
He was tall and straight, and even at over two meters, his build was just as proportionate as before—a world apart from those malformed, skeletal creatures.
"Brother!" She called Lin Yan several times in a row, as if making up for the six days she hadn't seen him. "Brother, brother, brother, brother, brother—"
Lin Yan was still combing her hair.
Because his knuckles had grown larger, it felt both similar and different, but still familiar.
Xu Zhiyi's frequency of calling "brother" gradually slowed. Her nose and heart ached, and more words she wanted to say got stuck in her throat, finally condensing into just one sentence: "Alright, let's go home together."
"Don't come to such faraway places alone in the future…"
When she was little, her biological father had taken her to the park to play, and she'd gotten lost, crouching alone in the bushes until the sky turned dim and lightless—just as gray as the school track was now.
Back then, when Lin Yan found her, he'd admonished her the same way.
Now the tables had turned.
The one who couldn't find his way home had become Lin Yan.
After she finished speaking, Xu Zhiyi tilted her face up and waited expectantly for Lin Yan to nod. The person across from her tilted his head, clearly expressing a "?"
"…" Xu Zhiyi, with good patience, repeated herself.
Lin Yan tilted his head again.
After three rounds of this fully obstructed communication between the one human and one ghost, Xu Zhiyi finally slapped her thigh and realized: they were now communicating across species, and language wasn't getting through.
She quickly pulled out the two copies of Burning Incense, spread them open for him to see, indicating they could communicate by looking up characters.
The shadow version of Lin Yan's hands weren't convenient, so Xu Zhiyi weighed the books down with the axe and the kerosene lamp, watching curiously as the dark figure crouched down, reading and recognizing characters with his blurry face.
When she caught sight of the palm on the kerosene lamp turning blood-red in her peripheral vision, she maintained her relaxed mood, not even doing the turning-the-lamp-away motion she'd done before to plug her ears while stealing the bell.
It was simply an adorable little palm.
Lin Yan left long black brushstrokes on the ground, looking like an elderly morning exerciser carrying a bucket of water to practice calligraphy. He wrote down a Ghostly Talisman Script, and Xu Zhiyi translated each character beside it.
"I… miss…"
You.
After cracking the password, Xu Zhiyi pressed her lips together, tears instantly flooding her eyes as she lunged toward Lin Yan, ready to wail.
A few seconds later, Lin Yan fished Xu Zhiyi out of where she was trying to swim in his chest.
Xu Zhiyi: "…"
Can't a person even grieve in peace anymore?!
Though her clothes hadn't actually gotten wet, the sensation was about the same as a winter swim. Xu Zhiyi finally settled down, obediently crouching beside Lin Yan as he continued writing.
"Shi… wu?"
Xu Zhiyi mulled over Lin Yan's meaning, translating it to "food," then immediately shook her head in frantic alarm: "I'm not eating a corpse!"
White mice were off the table too.
Lin Yan was silent for two seconds, then nodded.
As he began writing a new sentence, Xu Zhiyi also thought through what she wanted to say and wrote on the ground with a marker:
Will you (always) be like this?
Lin Yan visibly froze, but quickly, he shook his head.
"Morning."
Oh oh oh!
It was nighttime now, so morning would come soon!
Xu Zhiyi smiled with sparkling eyes as she reached for Lin Yan's hand, cleverly stopping just a few centimeters from his fingers. Sure enough, Lin Yan moved first and successfully grasped hers.
His knuckles were longer than before. Xu Zhiyi's hand was completely enveloped in his palm, looking as if it had been swallowed whole. The cold seeping through the skin of her hand shot straight to her heart, but she refused to let go. She frowned and endured for dozens of seconds until that panicked urge to shake him off and run slowly faded.
Because of this desensitization struggle, a thin layer of cold sweat broke out on Xu Zhiyi's back. But Lin Yan couldn't see it, so she wouldn't mention it.
She simply curved her lips at him and gave their intertwined hands a little swing.
Honestly, it was super reassuring.
Lin Yan's face drew close to her forehead, stopping one knuckle's distance away, and affectionately nuzzled her through the air. He didn't touch her, but Xu Zhiyi still felt as if she were being gently embraced, her limbs and heart growing warm and cozy.
The two held hands quietly, not pausing their conversation built from simple sentences formed with homophones. Xu Zhiyi truly experienced the hardship and greatness of translators, and inwardly regretted that if either of them had known sign language, they wouldn't have had to frantically scribble back and forth.
But she did know the simplest sign language.
Xu Zhiyi extended her free right hand and made a small heart for her brother, who was busy forming sentences.
A huge black heart also drew close to her fingertips.
The burning kerosene lamp flickered in the wind, casting long, wavering shadows of the two hearts about to converge.
Let's go home together.
"Has she been doing a good job driving them away?"
In the dormitory building, faces pressed against the glass all spoke at once.
"She's on our side…"
On the playground, countless dark shadows began to stir. The people in the dormitory building watched from afar, repeating "kill them," their faces wearing the most standard smiles.
It's fine.
Xu Zhiyi had already chosen to become one of them.
Even if she was timid, even if she was despondent, once she realized that only by killing all the shadows could she leave this place, she would find the will to act.
It had always been this way—they wanted to stay, outsiders wanted to leave, and all they had to do was help them kill those people.
This was everyone's vision.
And of course, it would be Xu Zhiyi's too.
Xu Zhiyi shivered for no reason.
She shuddered, but quickly pretended it was just an unsteady stumble on flat ground, stubbornly gripping Lin Yan's fingers to prevent him from pulling his hand away.
Otherwise, this man would definitely release her with the excuse that "holding hands is bad for her health."
She wouldn't allow that to happen.
The shadow version of Lin Yan really did have large hands, cool to the touch.
If she were to proactively poke at his hand, even though there was no physical sensation, it still gave her a sense of closeness, as if she and her brother were seamlessly pressed together.
In the few short minutes since their reunion, Xu Zhiyi had seriously considered whether there was any way to live inside Lin Yan's body, like a kangaroo, carried around with him wherever he went.
They were standing in front of a teacher's storage locker. Because they couldn't find a lock, Lin Yan had simply torn the locked cabinet door off with his bare hands and had been rummaging noisily inside for quite a while.
Because this contradicted the image of her brother's good moral character in her mind, before tearing the door off, Lin Yan had turned her body around, making her face a patch of empty air like she was being punished to stand.
It was practically a textbook case of trying too hard to cover something up!
Xu Zhiyi cooperatively looked at the sky and the ground, inwardly convinced that becoming a shadow had also affected his brain, but she didn't dare voice that opinion—otherwise, she'd probably get a "hiss" of a lecture from him.
Just as she was thinking this, the shadow beside her suddenly let out an actual hissing sound.
Xu Zhiyi instantly felt guilty, turned around, tilted her head, and began performing the role of an innocent, dazed passerby with a terrible expression—absolutely not thinking about anything messy—"What's wrong, brother?"
He placed something in her palm.
Xu Zhiyi opened her hand and found a palm-sized piece of chocolate, the sweeter strawberry flavor.
Still the same Lin Yan, with that typical Chinese parent demeanor, concerned about whether she was hungry or had eaten well, even in a godforsaken place like this.
Through the plastic wrapper, Xu Zhiyi lowered her head and traced the indented segments of the chocolate, her vision beginning to blur again.
She wanted so badly to talk to her brother.
She hadn't moved for too long, and Lin Yan thought she hadn't recognized it as chocolate. After a brief moment of consideration, he raised his hand and gently touched the corner of her lips.