With his meeting with the two curious sisters over, Wuzhi moved his attention toward the most important matter at hand; his injury.
‘I cannot put it aside any longer. I have to look into the problem and come up with a solution here and now.’ Wuzhi decided to forget about everything else and solely focus on this matter.
He closed his eyes and formed a hand sign with his fingers. He then entered a breathing rhythm and slowly placed a hypnosis cue upon himself. Minutes later, his mind, body, and spirit synched together and the young scholar entered an unprecedented state of meditation.
He called this state ‘Viewing the World Within.’
---
Wuzhi opened his eyes and found himself inside a dimly lit basement. His eyes immediately peered down to find his legs straight and functional.
“Thank Heavens! I’m not crippled in here!” he cried joyously.
He then proceeded to jump, skip, and hop; making full use of his regained ability to walk. After wasting a few minutes in such frivolous endeavours, he snapped his fingers causing an antique-looking oil lantern to appear in his hand.
Holding the lantern tall, Wuzhi used his left hand to light the instrument. He worked with a practised hand and quickly lighted the instrument. A dense orange glow fell within the basement, illuminating his dim surroundings.
The basement was dilapidated and dirty. Broken rubble, strewn trash, and stains of unknown origins covered every inch of the basement. The walls were covered in childish drawings and scribbling, along with white scratch marks that seemed to have been etched with fingernails.
On the wall directly behind him was a locked iron door, boarded up with wooden planks. A small vent hole was present at the bottom of the door, revealing dense darkness and infinitely repugnant odour. A preliminary glimpse through the vent hole revealed stairs behind the door that led further down into the earth.
As he waited a few moments to allow the warmth of the oil lantern to drive away the coldness seeping into his bones, Wuzhi heard faint cries and whispers coming from the other side of the boarded-up door.
“…he…lp… me… pl…ea… se…” A voice ominously begged. Wuzhi acted like he hadn’t heard anything and even started to whistle a melody to drown out the faint pleas.
He waited for a full minute before taking a step forward. At his movement, the wall in front of him collapsed into a heap of rubble, revealing a flight of stairs that led upward. He climbed the staircase familiarly, leaving behind the faint pleas and ominous basement.
The ascent was short. Wuzhi soon came upon a vacant room. He eyed his surroundings and quickly supposed that it was the living room given its layout and furniture dotting its surface. The living room was mostly dark, except for the slim rays of sunlight filtering through the closed blinds on the windows.
Wuzhi walked towards the nearest furniture –a dresser cabinet- and swiped a finger on its surface; a thick layer of dust appeared on his fingertip. He looked around and noticed that the rest of the furniture was also caked in similar layers of dust.
Shaking his head, he then walked over to one of the shuttered windows. Kneeling atop of the dusty sofa, Wuzhi peered through the gaps of the blinds and viewed the world outside.
At first, it was blindingly bright. It took Wuzhi a few moments before his eyes could adjust to the sudden brightness. Once he had recovered his vision, he saw an abandoned and broken road snaking into the distance. Garbage-strewn pavements extended on both sides of the abandoned road, also in a similar state of disrepair.
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Houses -similar to the one that he was currently in- filled the space on both sides of the road. The gates of these houses were tightly shut and locked with iron padlocks and their compound walls stretched tall to disallow any entry into their grounds.
Wuzhi squinted with his eyes and noticed a peculiar detail. He noted that the grass behind the padlocked gates had grown to an almost human height. This observation revealed that nobody visited these houses for at least years on end.
The young scholar moved his gaze away from the houses and roads and turned to gaze toward the skies above. The instant his eyes landed on the heavens, he froze.
The sky was broken and fractured pieces of heaven were falling toward the ground.
It took a long time for Wuzhi to recover from his shocked daze. An extremely frenetic and grim expression overtook his features as he quietly whispered.
“This is extremely, extremely, extremely bad!”
The mental world that housed his psyche had suffered immense damage and had already begun to collapse. Judging by the rate at which those shards of sky were falling, he estimated that he had less than two weeks to live.
Time was extremely pressing. And death was right around the corner.
---
Outside the crystal room within which Wuzhi was lodged, Collette nervously paced around, practising her lines with an awkward voice. “H-hey, Wuzhi! I’m really sorry about before. My sister is a little, you know… empty in the head. A-Also! What she meant before was that I was the one that laid you in this bed! L-like I was responsible for bringing you to this room. Nothing else!”
“So, anyways, again, my name is Collette Rosemark. I am a Legacy Disciple of the Sacred Snow Heart Sect and have been instructed by my teacher, your aunt, to act as your guide and show you around the sect. S-so, if you’re feeling up for it, would you like me to show you around? I can also treat you to lunch!!”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, right?” She stopped her practice and nervously muttered. “It’s totally not awkward or weird at all.”
“Though, perhaps asking him out for lunch is a little too much?” Collette bit the corners of her lips and folded her arms. She pondered intensely for a minute before deciding, “I’ll hold off on the lunch request for now. Later, depending on how things are progressing, I’ll casually ask him out. Yes. That would be better. I can totally do this!”
She clenched her fist and pumped into the air. “You’ve got this, Collette! There’s nobody around to ruin the mood! You’ve totally got this in the bag! Now, just enter the room and act just like you’ve practised. It’ll be fine.”
She breathed meditatively to calm herself. “It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll be… fine.”
Her hands fell upon the closed doors. “It’ll be fine,” she hypnotically mumbled. The nervousness that she had suppressed within her heart suddenly started to run amok as she slowly pushed open the door.
Just the space on the other side of the door came into view, her nervousness suddenly exploded. “Will it be fine? What if he thinks that I’m weird? Oh, Heavens! He’s totally going to think that I’m a weirdo! Arrhh, this is so embarrassing!”
She loosened her strength and considered running away to avoid the shame. However, just as she was about to turn around, her nose twitched as the metallic smell of blood wafted from within the room.
“Wuzhi!” She screamed, blasting apart the doors and rushing into the room. Her teacher, the Everfrost Fairy, had informed her of his peculiar condition and repeatedly reminded her to always stay by his side.
Unfortunately, in her desperate attempt to cover her embarrassment and punish her twin sister, Collette had forgotten her instructions and forgone her responsibility. Now that she smelled the thick scent of blood, she feared for the worst.
Collette covered the long distance from the door to the bed in under an instant. There, she found Wuzhi convulsing with crimson blood pouring out of his orifices. His skin looked withered and deathly pale.
Panic filled her heart; however, it wasn’t enough to cloud her thoughts. She immediately used her nails to cut a gnash across her right palm, forcing out her blood. Curiously, her blood wasn’t the usual deep red in colour but was instead an icy blue!
She then pressed this wounded right palm across Wuzhi’s forehead and started to chant a mantra that her teacher had imparted to her in these last few days. Her voice and words quickly stirred the natural energies of the world and formed a tripartite resonance between her blood, the World Energy, and the young convulsing scholar.
At a rate that was visible to the onlookers, the convulsions of Wuzhi’s body slowly came to a pause as did the blood flowing out of his body. His body suddenly lost strength, falling upon Collette.
The buxom young woman carefully caught him and gently cradled his head within her arms. She waited and a few minutes later, Wuzhi tiredly opened his eyes. His gaze was hollow and absent of any strength.
Staring expressionlessly at the crystal ceiling, he hoarsely whispered, “Eight days.”
His condition was infinitely worse than he had expected. The young scholar now only possessed eight days to live.