Chapter Four: Death Rattle

  Then this huge shock wave came. The Conductors strike did not hit me it hit the the glass beneath me. My feet felt heavy a glimpse of exhausted fear but the ground it was not just breaking. The strike made the ground burst open. Glass came out of ground like flower petals. The world, around me started shaking. I stumbled backward. It made everything feel crazy. I slammed into a wall of trees the impact shook my teeth. The rain of glasses was coming down now.

  As it stopped, I looked into the big hole. I did not see the ground at the bottom but instead I saw a dark black liquid that was moving. It was certainly not water. The movements were slow. It didn't reflect any light. I thought to myself.

  "this must be the well's blood." It was a thought but it seemed right. The silence around me seemed loud. I tried to stand up. Suddenly a fragment of glass embedded in my eye. A sharp pain shot through my eye. It felt like everything stopped. The whole world seemed to shrink down to the pain. I wanted to scream, but I could not. All that came out was a noise from my weakened lungs.

  My hand went up to my face. I felt something warm and wet. My fingers also felt something rough that should not have been there. The pain, in my eye was terrible. I looked at the Conductor with my one eye and it was full of tears from the shock. The Conductor was not in a hurry. It was fixing itself. The Conductor had arms now, and it was moving them around taking the bad noise from the broken plaza.

  The Conductor was not just going to kill me. It would break my legs and my other arm. I would be left screaming in pain stuck in a place with a lot of broken glass. I would be there forever feeling a lot of pain and he would keep using that pain to make its sound stronger. A thought glued in my brain.

  What if the wound would not kill me. What if it makes me a permanent part of this place. A new kind of suffering like what that other person went. That feeling of terror it was even worse than being afraid of dying. This fuled my survivel instinct.

  My body moved before I could even think. I scrambled around I was half blind I had one hand over my eye trying to stop the pain and the other hand was trying to grab onto something anything to stop myself from falling on the sharp petals. I did not try to get. I ran towards the tree it was the only thing that I could see that might help me.

  Every step I took hurt much. I had glass in my eye. It was moving around which made me feel sick and hurt even more with each step. The hollow tree was my hope. The black liquid in the crater was moving, like it wanted me to fall into it. This was the thing World 3 was going to teach me.

  World 3 did not give me a way out; it did not give me death. The only way to get out was to find the trigger before I became a part of the soundtrack forever.

  "The clue... It must be in a place that is surrounded by annoying silence"

  I looked behind me. There was nothing. The Conductor was gone. It had vanished into the disturbing noise of its own broken world.

  I let out a breath that tasted like blood and ozone. I stumbled through the archway. It was not a house. A hollow space in the big stone. The inside of this space was smooth and shiny like silver. I leaned against the wall. My breathing was loud and uneven. It was, like a machine that was broken. Every time I breathed in it felt like something was catching on the space in my chest. This was an tight feeling that reminded me of past.

  My lungs felt like they were on fire because of Ji Tang's attack. The feeling was still there inside my lungs. I finally understood what was going on.

  “This was the problem. It was not what happened to me at first, but what happened after. If you die but do not really die, you just suffer forever.” I looked around the room. The walls were like mirrors; they showed me a picture of myself.

  It was not a pretty comfortable sight. My eye saw an ugly version of myself. My sleeve was all torn from what happened in World 2, and it was flapping around like a flag that signified I had given up. The fragment in my eye was glowing with a weird light that resembled a tiny heartbeat. World felt collapsing. I had to keep moving. If I stopped I would be stuck in this place forever. I bit down hard on my teeth from the sharp pain and I looked outside again. And there it was. The Ji Tang.

  “There he is. Same as before, completely still”

  It was still standing in the place a reminder that it was always watching and waiting.. Something about it was different now. The empty stare that used to be fixed on something away was now directly focused on the entrance of my hiding place.

  The stone finger that used to point at me was slightly tilted downwards towards the ground at its feet, where I saw a new crack in the glass in addition, to the old ones. It was not coming after me. The monument was waiting for me. It was counting down.

  My expression changed from fear to an cold feeling. This was not about something trying to catch something. This was about something that had to happen. I was like a note in the music of World 3 and the Ji Tang were like the way the system fixes things slowly and steadily taking the wrong note to the only place that could deal with it: the hollow tree.

  The Ji Tang and World 3 were going to make me become something. I was going to become art or fuel, for World 3 and the Ji Tang. The tree was the way out. And the cost of the ticket to get out I was worried would be my suffering. The tree was the exit and I had to go through it.

  Killing myself again was no longer safe. It was like a risk, where I was putting my soul on the line. And what was bothering me was what if I die. What if I do not die, but wish I had. I was not sure if this would work. I was too afraid to try it now.

  My body was telling to get out: I had to move. I took a piece of cloth from my shirt, which was already torn. The rough cloth hurt the skin around my eye when I tied it.

  This made my eye throb more because of the sharp fragment. I looked around the room with my eye. I saw a stick made of old wood. It was, against the wall. I picked it up.

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  It was light and felt like it was vibrating a little bit. I could use it to defend myself or to help me walk. At this point it did not matter how I use it, I had the stick. That was all that mattered.

  “atleast better than nothing.” I thought, I was looking for the tree...My eyes got stuck on something that should not be there. A river. It was not there before. The river cut the glass a flow of water moving quickly. The color of the river wasn't clear nor black like well, it was crimson like a substance. Before I could even think about what I was seeing, I saw.

  The tree.

  This thing was not really a plant. It was like a loud scream that had grown roots. The bark was slippery like it was sweating all the time. The leaves were not like leaves at all. They were like tight crying tubes of flesh....

  The fruit of this plant was disgusting. There were lots of faces all clustered together. Each face was small and ugly frozen in a look of terror or pain. The big roots of this plant were partly underground. You could still see them. A red liquid flowed out of these roots like a sticky blood. The whole thing was, like a dream, a nightmare garden.

  The hollow tree was not a place. It was a living organism. The hollow tree was the place where all these bad feelings came together. I felt sick to my stomach colder than the glass that I had in my eye... Deep down I knew something for sure. I thought about Lins clue. The silence wasn't just absence of sound but also feelings. It was a place of all the fear.

  My figure came out of the silver room. The Ji Tang did not look at me... I saw something. A tiny movement in its hard hand a finger getting tighter, just a little bit. It was, like a gun trigger being pressed down.

  “It is going to do that again.”

  I did not wait. I put every bit of strength, every bit of fight into my legs. I sprinted towards the bleeding tree, not away from the Ji Tang. The wind that hit my face smelled like the metal and sweetness of the crimson river.

  The crazy thing was not how the world looked. It was where I was going. The way out was the wound in the tree itself. When I got closed to the bleeding tree. The air got really thick all of a sudden. It felt like something was pushing against my back. I didn't looked back I felt the pressure in air.

  The Ji Tang was upon me.

  With courage, I turned back. The wood came up in weak defense. The attack was not a stab this time; it was a push, with an open hand meant to push me, not stab me, to send me into the red river. The wood let out a scream as it blocked the attack and started to break apart.

  And as expected it broke into pieces but what could we say that stick was certainly a true hero It changed the direction of the force and pushed me backward. It saved me from going into the red river. My foot hit something soft. It was a hand. The hand was cut off. Rotting. The fingers were curled up like they were trying to grab something. I did not stop moving.

  My hand hit the tree trunk. It was cold. A thorn went into my palm. It stung me from the thorn, which was nothing compared to all the other pain I was feeling. “What now? you told me where to go, but you did not tell me what to do when I get to the destination.”

  Then I saw something move. It was a beetle. The beetle was red like the river. It went behind it. I peeked behind the tree, and there was a large heart. It was made of roots and a yellow light that was moving, stuck in a cage with thorns. Its beating got smaller and bigger slowly. It was like a machine. Each time it moved, it pushed out more of the stuff into the river while the beetle was crawling. I was watching the heart. It was the center of the refinery. I looked back; the Ji Tang was not there. It had completely disappeared. The Conductor was nowhere to be seen. The silence was profound.

  It did not feel safe it felt like we were being watched. It was, like a show was about to happen.

  “This thing is letting this happen? This thing wants me to choose this.” My hand closed around the wood.

  "Should I destroy it?" my voice questioning hesitating to act recklessly. My arm went up. Then it just stopped. Being reckless was definitely a bad idea here. I was deep in thought when suddenly someone grabbed my shoulder. It was not hard like stone nor like a root, but like bone. It was humming, covered in a slow and sad melody.

  The Conductor.

  My muscles got all tight. My eye started hurting badly it was like a sharp pain. The tree did not want to kill me. It wanted to keep me near it. The tree wanted me to stay close so that its strong beating sound could slowly break me down into pieces that it could use.

  In that moment, everything felt frozen in pain. My instincts just took over. I did not think about what I was doing. This was not something I decided to do; it was a reaction.

  I pushed myself forward with all my might pulling my shoulder out of the Conductors grip. When it let go, I did not think about what I was doing; I just did it. I was really committed to get away from the Conductor.

  I used all my strength to push the point of wood into the heart. It didn't just break apart but also stumbled. I heard a weird thud that did not really echo through the air, but it was as if the whole concept of sound was affected.

  It let out aloud chilling scream, the sound was out of capacity for a human to hear, it could make anyone deaf and rip apart

  The sound was not noise. It felt like what happened when everything fell apart; it was like a thousand memories getting torn to pieces. The frequency was like a song that was tearing itself apart.

  The scream that came with the frequency really got to me. The scream did not hurt my body, but it shook my mind. It made me think of the hole in my chest and the pain in my eye. It reminded me of something.

  I felt something being torn out of me. It was not my breath. It was my story that was being ripped away. My memories and my voice, the center of who Mo Fei "is", were being pulled out. I saw it happen. It looked like a loud screaming ribbon of light. This ribbon was being sucked into a heart that was dying. The heart was taking my story, my memories and my voice, the core of Mo Fei away, from me.

  Payment that is what it was.

  My body did not bleed. It just fell apart coming undone at the edges into a mess and it started with my hurt eye then my badly damaged chest. This is how I came undone from the spots where World 3 had taken control of me. It had a hold on me. Bit by bit from the places where I was hurt the most.

  The Conductor did not attack, it watched it's body started to dissolve like a sandcastle when a big wave comes. His lips curled up in a long grin same as before... Waiting a smile waiting for the next "thief"

  The world was a place. Everything was being pulled in. Glass and stone and even the river of blood were all being sucked in. It was, like an empty space that was hungry and wanted to get rid of everything.

  My ribbon, 叁 (3), did not just go dark. It actually shattered into pieces. Now, the character 肆 (4) started glowing slowly..

  I did not get pulled. I got ripped apart I "died" once again.

  A final pulse, an very strong jerk shook the ground that was falling apart and what was left of my body. I felt every bit of my pain all by itself very clearly and it went on forever.

  The last thing that went away was not something I felt. A name. The name my mother used to call me when I was scared that comforting word, with two parts disappeared into the noise. The tree took that name as its payment. Then I felt a relief that was really deep felt like I was dying or something. My vision started to get all weird and fuzzy.

  Meanwhile.

  In the Town of Collected Bones of World 2, a young man, twenty years old, was standing in the street. The wind made a soft sound like someone sighing. The man's eyes were dark brown and serious with a softness deep inside it.

  He looked down. Saw a piece of cloth caught on a sharp root. It was a sleeve. He picked it up carefully with his fingers. “This year another seven people fell into the architect's trap,” the young man said quietly. His voice was low. The quietness around him made it hard to hear. A sad feeling flashed across his face. His dark hair moved a little in the wind as he walked. He looked like a shadow among all the still things. He went into the house of madness. The circle of skin and bone was still hanging on the door. It was dripping slowly.

  “Two,” he said then. He walked quietly on the stones and went to the alley where Mo Fei had run away. That is where he found the marker. There was a body without a head lying in a pool of blood. This was not something the Collector would do; it was a messy and violent thing. The Yan Gu did this. The Collector liked things neat, while the Yan Gu just liked to hurt people.

  "Three". A deep sadness filled his brown eyes. He was not sad for the people who had died. Their suffering was over. He was sad, for the way things were. The system was a never ending cycle. Seven people were chosen again one was killed away one was used to make something beautiful and one was cut up to be used as food.

  “And four have made it through,” he whispered to himself. “They had to push through a lot of fear and pain.” He thought about the sleeve. “This person had a lot of spirit.” His hand went to his side. He slowly took out his blade. This thing was not made of metal; it was actually made of bone that had been darkened. The edge was sharp in a way that seemed impossible. The surface of the blade had some shiny symbols that looked like the same symbols on the bones of the Yan Gu. This was a weapon made from the prison where the Yan Gu were kept. The blade was a part of the prison, and now it was being used as a weapon.

  “The clock is ticking away. I need to ascend now. My own ribbon is getting heavy. I can't stay. Lin and others are waiting for me too.”

  “They had died by the hands of entities... Rest well my friends you are free from suffering.”

  He came here to help people not just stand around and watch. He was already running behind schedule. And one of the four ascended. The one who is very stubborn and caused a lot of trouble. Might just be the thing that would change everything the thing he had been waiting for. "Which world will break you first?" he asked the silence, watching tbe town. "Or will you be the one to break a world?" A final glance was thrown around him, and he whispered, "Survive till we meet."