I miscalculated.

  The junk food and ice cream didn’t wreck Alice’s stomach—they wrecked mine. That very night I came down with diarrhea.

  Maybe sleeping on the sofa without properly covering myself and letting my stomach catch a chill had something to do with it too. Alice slept soundly and sweetly through the entire night, while I had to stumble to the bathroom in the middle of it. Every time I glanced back at her innocent, unaffected sleeping face, I felt like I’d lifted a rock only to drop it on my own foot.

  That wasn’t the only miscalculation. While trapped underground in the cave, I’d wondered whether time flowed at a different rate between the real world and the alternate space. I’d planned to check my phone right after returning to confirm any discrepancy, but then one thing after another kept happening. By the time I finally remembered to look, the phone had apparently synced to the network and corrected the displayed time automatically.

  The cave was something I could tell Zhu Shi about, but not Alice. As for the black jade I’d picked up down there, I’d briefly considered handing it to Alice for appraisal. Unlike me, she should have some knowledge of the supernatural—maybe she could identify what it was.

  But on second thought: if she couldn’t figure it out, fine. If she did identify it as something supernatural, it might damage the relationship we had. So I shelved the idea for now.

  The next morning I bought breakfast downstairs, came back, and called Alice out of bed. When she realized she’d slept in the bedroom, she stared at me in utter confusion, still unable to accept my “kindness.”

  I naturally didn’t explain my ulterior motives. Instead I gave her the most reasonable-sounding excuse: “How could I possibly let a delicate girl like you sleep on the sofa while I comfortably take the bed?”

  She sat on the edge of the mattress and listened, squirming uncomfortably. Her tone was dissatisfied: “Why do you keep saying things like that… The apocalypse doesn’t care about gender or age, and I’m not some delicate girl.”

  “But this isn’t the apocalypse, and I’m not from that era.” I answered seriously. “Besides, in my eyes, you are a delicate girl.”

  “I’m not delicate.”

  “Who was the one passing out and tripping over nothing yesterday?”

  “…Me,” she admitted grudgingly.

  “Good answer.” I handed her the plastic bag of breakfast. “Here’s your reward.”

  She immediately forgot all her unhappiness and looked at the food with eager anticipation.

  Breakfast was just the opening act. I hadn’t forgotten my promise yesterday to cook her something even better. Tonight I planned to make her a full-on Sichuan feast—heavy on the numbing peppercorns, blazing chili, loaded with fish and meat, an absolute assault on the senses. I’d deliver a devastating blow to her fragile digestive system.

  This time I definitely wouldn’t drop the rock on my own foot—probably.

  Still, I couldn’t keep relying on the “she takes the bed, I take the sofa” method to prevent her from slipping away while I slept. I’d already been thinking of new solutions. One involved modifying the “fireflies.”

  The fireflies are fragments of my mind—extensions of myself, in a way. They can’t think independently like my main body, but they should have some degree of adaptability.

  For example, I could try embedding preset commands into them. If a firefly detected certain environmental changes, it could react accordingly. Take Alice as an example: if she made any move suggesting she intended to leave me, a firefly observing that change could send an alert through our mental link and wake me from sleep.

  I’m still in the practice and testing phase. In theory it’s doable; the real-world results remain to be seen.

  After breakfast, I told Alice I had to head out for a bit.

  “Where to?” she asked, sounding like a suspicious wife checking on a cheating husband.

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  The comparison wasn’t entirely self-flattery. Living together with a beautiful girl, brushing teeth, washing up, eating meals side by side—then one of us says they’re going out and the other immediately gets alert. In such an easily misinterpreted scenario, most people would make the same association.

  Even if the suspicious one was five or six years younger than me, and we’d only officially known each other for a single day.

  I answered with the calm composure of a seasoned cheater: “School.”

  “School… school?” She repeated the word like it tasted strange in her mouth, then realization dawned. “Right—this era has schools.”

  Of course the apocalypse had none.

  I lied to her again. I wasn’t going to school—I was going to the fifteenth-floor room.

  Not to explore the cave this time, but to watch how Zhu Shi planned to handle the ritual circle. Part of me also wanted to keep trying to build a connection with Luoshan.

  I’d already resolved to distance myself from normal social relationships—including my friendship with Chang’an.

  Zhu Shi was a demon hunter from the supernatural world. She didn’t belong to “normal society,” and she had the ability to protect herself. Maintaining contact with her didn’t carry the same danger as staying close to Chang’an. Still, she was my friend’s little sister. If possible, I didn’t want to drag her into any peril caused by me. Once I formally connected with Luoshan, I’d need to distance myself from her too.

  Thinking about it, a wave of loneliness washed over me.

  Unless something unexpected happened, my bond with Chang’an—my friendship with him—was coming to an end.

  From childhood to now, the number of people willing to be my friend could be counted on one hand. In university, he was the only one. Scenes of how we met and grew close flickered through my mind, then vanished one after another like candle flames snuffed out by the wind.

  Honestly, I should have done this long before Alice ever appeared. Even without any “jinx aura,” someone chasing after the supernatural was bound to bring disaster to those around them sooner or later. Casually staying close to people was the irresponsible choice.

  The experience underground had been a quest for me—but for the people in my life, it was nothing but calamity.

  Now was the perfect moment to kill off my weaker self. I was the kind of villain who valued personal desire over friendship. If I truly believed my bond with Chang’an mattered more than the door to the supernatural world that Alice had opened for me, I wouldn’t have chosen this path in the first place.

  After a brief goodbye to Alice, I left a firefly hidden to monitor her, then headed toward the neighborhood with the fifteenth-floor room.

  The fight between me and the fallen demon hunter in that complex had surely been caught on surveillance cameras, yet no official authorities had come knocking. Probably Zhu Shi and Luoshan had already smoothed things over. Last night’s autopsy on the fallen demon hunter’s body had apparently turned up something strange too—that was another thing I wanted to ask about.

  This incident might not be over yet.

  Zhu Shi had said as much.

  I found it hard to believe the fallen demon hunter could come back from the dead, but there might still be other unknown threats lurking in the shadows.

  Could that danger reach Alice through me? The thought had crossed my mind. But unlike my attitude toward Chang’an and Zhu Shi, I never saw Alice as a fragile girl caught up in the storm. In my eyes she was the mysterious figure at the center of it all, the one pulling everything into chaos. I was also curious how someone who constantly talked about the apocalypse and catastrophe would actually react when faced with genuine supernatural phenomena.

  When I arrived at the fifteenth-floor room, Zhu Shi was already there.

  To my disappointment, she wasn’t wearing last night’s straw cape and hat. Instead she had on a white women’s blouse and a black knee-length skirt, with a large black guitar case slung over her back—like she’d just slipped out of some karaoke bar band practice.

  She must have arrived just before me. Right now she was circling the ritual circle on the floor. The wooden lid and the cave itself were gone—nowhere to be seen. On my way here I hadn’t encountered the agent she’d said would be keeping watch; he’d probably left after she arrived. The way she looked at the ritual circle suggested she was deciding where to start erasing it.

  The door was unlocked—actually, the lock cylinder had been melted by me last night—so I walked right in. She heard the noise, looked up alertly, then relaxed slightly when she saw it was me. Even so, her expression remained serious and professional.

  Looked like she wasn’t in gentle “Junior Zhu” mode right now, but in “demon hunter Zhu Shi” mode—the one that called me straight by name. A little disappointing.

  “Z, why are you here?” she asked. “And did you destroy the door lock?”

  “I did.” I admitted. “I just came to watch.”

  “Just watch? Not planning to go into the cave?” She sounded skeptical.

  “I promised I wouldn’t go in.” I answered earnestly.

  She muttered under her breath, “Very suspicious…”

  “By the way… why did the cave disappear?” I was more interested in that now, and I pulled out my phone.

  “You really are trying to get in there, aren’t you?” She tensed.

  “No, no—just pure curiosity.”

  From what I could see, the rug still lay rolled up in the corner exactly as I’d left it last night—no one had covered the ritual circle with it. Yet the cave had vanished on its own. To rule out memory error, I specifically checked the photos I’d taken before leaving.

  That blew apart my earlier conclusion that “the cave only changed state after the rug covered the ritual circle.”

  Of course, it was possible the cave had its own rule—disappearing automatically after being visible for a certain time, like a phone screen turning off after inactivity. That would also explain why the entrance vanished on its own after I entered last night.

  Just then, footsteps sounded behind me. Someone else had entered the fifteenth-floor room.