Long Nation, Deep Underground Command Center.
The air here held a dry, metallic tang. Buried deep beneath the earth, the inhabitants had lost all sense of day and night, relying entirely on cold white LED lights to maintain a facade of civilization.
The heavy alloy doors shut out the noise of the surface, but they also felt like a coffin lid, pressing down on the chests of those inside. The independent air filtration system hissed rhythmically, like a great beast breathing in the shadows.
Around the long table sat the decision-makers. They wore expensive suits and crisp uniforms, but their collars were yellowed with sweat, and every face bore a weariness that could no longer be hidden.
Forty-eight hours into the "Global Rectification", these men of power realized that their proud resumes and medals were as thin as scrap paper before that "Voice".
"Ladies and gentlemen, let's talk," the middle-aged man at the head of the table said, wiping his face. "If force cannot intervene, we must at least understand if 'She' has a criteria for selecting the condemned..."
His voice cut off.
Without warning, the lights vanished.
This wasn't a power failure; it was as if the light itself had been "extracted" from the dimension by a higher power.
Absolute darkness, thick as pitch, filled their senses. There were no screams, no chaos. Only consciousness sinking like a lead weight into a bottomless abyss.
Zhizhi opened its eyes and saw hands gripping a washbasin. They weren't belonged to "him", but the bony, overworked, and rough hands of a woman.
And these hands... they felt very familiar.
In the mirror, Tian Shuangxin's face was soaked with cold water, her messy hair sticking to her forehead. But the soul inside was Zhizhi.
Zhizhi leaned over the sink.
The faucet was still running, its roar piercing in the cramped bathroom.
"She" splashed cold water onto the face repeatedly, the palms slapping the skin with a sharp smack.
"She" looked up, water dripping from her brow. Her eyes were bloodshot, her pupils reflecting a hollow exhaustion.
Zhizhi could feel it: a resonance called "Sorrow". This body's owner was like a violin string stretched to its limit, ready to snap at any second.
Ding.
The phone vibrated violently on the cold quartz counter. "She" didn't even dry her hands, leaving a blurry water trail as her finger slid across the screen.
[Transfer Successful: 150,000.00 LMB]
A voice message from the attending physician followed: "The money is here. You're the first surgery tomorrow morning. Get ready."
"She" tried to pull her lips into a smile, even a ghost of one, but her facial muscles were as stiff as stone. "She" simply gripped the phone until her knuckles turned white.
Zhizhi captured the thought rising from deep within the shell—it wasn't the ecstasy of redemption, but the feeling of falling into a deeper mire.
Like a drowning person grabbing a thorny piece of driftwood; "she" was floating, but her hands were covered in blood. It hurt, but "she" couldn't let go.
The scene skipped like old film.
Outside a luxury compound, the streetlamps cast a cold yellow glow. "She" stood in the shadows of the greenery like a voyeur, gazing at the brightly lit villa.
That was the direction of Mrs. Zhu's home. The place where Zhizhi had been caged and taken away.
"She" looked down at the mud on her shoes, then at the meticulously manicured lawn where every blade of grass seemed to be the same height.
"She" didn't move closer. A bitter feeling surged from within. Zhizhi didn't understand the word "humble," but it felt that the lawn was thicker than a high wall, blocking out all warmth.
"That's my Zhizhi..."
"She" whispered in her heart.
Zhizhi heard it. A warmth it hadn't felt in a long time exploded in its chest—I hadn't been abandoned. The thought flickered like a tiny flame in its desolate heart. But a second later, a heavier tide of thought extinguished it.
—Zhizhi is no longer mine. He has become a stack of thick bills, the tumor removed from my mother's spine, and a string of cold medical transactions.
"She" crouched down, curling into the shadow of the streetlamp, burying her face in her cold palms. Silent tears fell onto the yellowed asphalt.
Hospital Corridor.
The cold white light made skin look sickly green. Zhizhi, inhabiting TianShuangxin's shell, sat on a plastic bench, nervously rubbing the hem of her cheap clothes.
"She" didn't pray to gods or Buddhas.
"She" stared fixedly at the Post-Operative Instructions on the wall, her lips moving slightly as "she" repeated self-deceiving words that no one could hear.
Zhizhi felt it—the self-punishment that followed a "Request for Equivalent Exchange".
"She" was praying for her mother to live, yet cursing her own "baseness" for selling what she loved to buy that life.
The door pushed open, bringing a sharp scent of disinfectant. The doctor removed his mask, his voice devoid of emotion. "The lesion has been removed."
Zhizhi tried to stand, but the knees of this body were as soft as mud.
"However," the doctor looked away, unable to meet her bloodshot eyes, "hemorrhaging during the surgery led to prolonged cerebral hypoxia. The patient... has entered a persistent vegetative state."
In that instant, the world lost its sound.
The light in Zhizhi's eyes vanished like ash blown by the wind. "She" was despairing, and Zhizhi sank into the abyss with her.
"She" didn't wail; "she" simply sat back down mechanically, her spine curved deep like a puppet whose soul had been extracted, reflecting a deathly silence under the cold white lights.
When the bed was finally pushed out, covered in monitors, "she" stood and followed the medical staff like a walking corpse. Through the cold, heavy glass of the ICU, Zhizhi looked at the elderly woman buried under layers of tubes.
It "remembered".
It remembered those old hands that smelled faintly of soap—its favorite scent. When it climbed into her palms, Mother Tian would scratch behind its ears with her rough fingertips.
That was the most peaceful moment of its life as a fancy rat; it would grind its teeth in contentment, its eyes vibrating slightly—the silent, deep attachment it had for this home.
It remembered how she would carefully peel sunflower seeds while it was eating, tucking the most fragrant kernels into its tiny paws.
It remembered her constant chattering about daily life while she smoothed the padding in its hammock.
To Zhizhi, this woman wasn't just its owner's mother; she was its "colony", its only other harbor in this cold world.
But now—this woman lay on a cold white sheet, motionless. No familiar scent, no soft murmurs to bring safety. Even though Zhizhi was in a human shell, it instinctively reached for that warmth, only to touch cold glass.
Through Sato's knowledge, Zhizhi understood what "vegetative state" meant.
But it understood even better that the person who saw it as a "little life" rather than "livestock" would never open her eyes again.
Time began to wash over them soundlessly. Zhizhi became a shadow.
Home, hospital, supermarket.
"She" stopped looking at stray animals; "she" stopped looking at the sky.
"She" lived numbly, like a machine running at full speed just to pay for the expensive equipment keeping her mother breathing.
Late at night, Zhizhi pushed open the door to the rented room. Dust had settled everywhere.
In the corner lay the small cloth ball it used to chew until it was pilled. "She" slowly knelt, her fingertips touching the lingering fuzz as if "she" could still feel a trace of warmth.
"Ugh..."
The first sob was squeezed from her lungs. "She" covered her mouth tightly, refusing to let the sound out, but her body shook like a leaf in the wind. Inside her, Zhizhi's soul curled up and trembled.
"This is karma," "she" whispered.
—I sold the only warmth I had for a shell that can no longer respond to me. This was the roar from the depths of Tian Shuangxin's heart, a pain that tore the soul.
—No, Master, Zhizhi is still here...
Zhizhi tried desperately to respond within her consciousness, to tell her it never felt resentment, but this heavy human shell could not utter a single sound that belonged to it.
BOOM—!
The dream began to shake violently. The walls distorted and peeled away like melting candles. The hospital corridors, the disinfectant, the cold glass—all vanished into fragments of shimmering light.
The sudden sensation of weightlessness made him snap his eyes open. He instinctively looked down.
In the center of his vision, the slender, tear-stained hands of a woman had vanished. In their place were hands with large knuckles, the skin still holding the clinical, icy residue of the laboratory.
Sato's hands.
A violent, physiological wave of nausea surged from his stomach.
Deep within the Divine Realm, Beast God watched Zhizhi's dream end and flicked Her fingertip. The water mirror flickered like a split-screen monitor, and the image jumped to another timeline.
Tian Shuangxin opened her eyes.
Immediately, she sensed something was wrong.
Height had vanished; her field of vision was now extremely low yet incredibly wide. Colors were dull and desaturated, but her sense of smell had become terrifyingly sharp.
At that moment, she looked down uncontrollably. What she saw was no longer human skin, but a pair of tiny, trembling paws covered in fine white fur.
"It" was instinctively grooming herself.
As her gaze drifted toward her belly, she saw a heart-shaped spot rising and falling with her frantic breaths. She froze, her soul reeling in disbelief. She had become—Zhizhi.
The world spun like a shattered kaleidoscope. A transparent enclosure, a blinding surgical lamp. Through the glass wall, Mrs. Zhu stood tall, looking down at her.
There was no love in that gaze, only a hair-raising coldness—the look one gives a "replacement".
The door opened. A young woman with a face strikingly similar to Mrs. Zhu's entered, looking like an unsharpened ice blade.
"Swapped it for another one already?" The woman's casual remark made the air freeze.
Mrs. Zhu's eyes darted away as she gave a dry cough. "The... technique you mentioned before. Is it reliable?"
"My boyfriend promised it could 'copy' perfectly." The young woman looked at her in the box, her lips curling into a cruel arc. "Besides, this female rat looks so much like the one that died before. The success rate will be higher."
Mrs. Zhu coughed again, avoiding eye contact. "If it weren't for the fact that this one isn't male, why would I need to..." She swallowed the rest of her words under the woman's icy stare.
A cold sweat—or rather, a rodent's shiver—rushed through her body. Tian Shuangxin felt it: the residual instinctive terror of Zhizhi. It was the premonition of being treated as "code" and "disposable material".
Before leaving that house, Mrs. Zhu picked "it" up one last time. The caress was no longer gentle; "it" was like an inventory check of a product's residual value.
Then, "it" was personally stuffed by Mrs. Zhu into a cramped wooden cage labeled "Live Animal - Keep Out of Light". Like a piece of expensive cargo, "it" was sent ten thousand meters into the sky.
It was an ultimate loneliness Tian Shuangxin had never experienced. "It" was being air-freighted.
In the dim, cold, and oxygen-deprived cargo hold, time lost its meaning. There was only the deafening, low-frequency roar of the jet engines.
A fancy rat's sensitive hearing became a cruel instrument of torture; every metallic bang caused by turbulence sounded like a thunderclap behind "its" head. The air was thick with the smell of aviation fuel and mixed foreign cargo, but there was no scent of "home".
After an unknown amount of time—long enough for her to curl into a ball at the bottom of the cage due to severe dehydration and fear—the air pressure shifted sharply.
A stabbing pain hit "its" eardrums, and "it" barely opened "its" eyes amidst the violent shaking of the cage.
"It" was loaded into a speeding car. The physical jolting intertwined with an inner void, lasting until "it" finally drifted into a deep, terrified sleep.
Finally, the car door was yanked open, and a man's scent invaded "its" narrow world. The man took the cage from the young woman.
After a brief, hollow display of affection with the woman, his gaze dropped impatiently onto the cage, staring directly into "its" trembling, fearful eyes.
Then, the man turned and carried the cage through a heavy metal door.
When the man walked into the laboratory and called out "Sensei" (Teacher in GreenPheasant dialect), Tian Shuangxin consciousness nearly shattered.
Sato.
The face she would recognize even if it were turned to ash was standing behind the cold dissection table. The loop of causality was now closed—to save her mother, she had sold Zhizhi into hell.
Time became distorted by pain. In the cage, including "it", there were five rats.
One vanished.
Two, three... the air became heavy with the smell of urea secreted by "its" kin before death and their desperate, high-pitched screams.
Finally, only "it" and a shivering little white mouse remained.
The white mouse was very dependent on her.
Perhaps because Zhizhi was slightly larger than it, the scrawny mouse would always curl up against Zhizhi's belly, even quietly pushing saved food scraps toward Zhizhi's paws.
When Sato's hand—covered in a latex glove and stained with blood—reached into the cage for the life even weaker than "it", TianShuangxin felt this tiny body move.
It wasn't her own will, but Zhizhi's instinct.
The tiny fancy rat stood firmly in front of the little white mouse. "It" propped up "its" trembling body and let out a faint yet resolute hiss.
Tian Shuangxin wailed in her heart. She wasn't grieving for the impending agony; she was grieving because she realized that this little creature she had sold away was trying to protect another life in a place she couldn't see.
When the toxic gas filled the chamber, she heard the high-frequency screams coming from her own throat—ultrasonic waves of "Despair" that humans can't detect.
Through the repetitive experiments and the torture of being unable to die, her body endured the destruction while her heart slowly crumbled into ash.
—So this was the pain Zhizhi felt?
It's hurt. This pain tore through the flesh and reached the deepest recesses of her soul.
In the Divine Realm, She watched the contorted figures in the water mirror, Her tone calm and steady.
"Lacking such a soul-deep exchange, 'empathy' is naught but a hollow word. Zhizhi, I wish that thou mayest find thy heart's desire and wash away the dust of thy long journey."
Almost at the same moment, fragmented consciousness began to reassemble in the void.
Within the darkness, Zhizhi, back in "his" own form, felt utterly helpless. He could only send a soulful plea into the endless silence: "My Great Goddess... please... help me..."
There was no verbal reply—only a sigh so faint it felt like an illusion.
The next moment, a blood-red thread ignited within Zhizhi's illusory palms. It flickered in and out of existence, yet felt incredibly resilient. He understood; if he followed this line to its end, his master would be waiting.
"Thank you, my Great Goddess."
With those words, he sprinted forward with all his might.
On the other side, at the edge of the dreamscape, Tian Shuangxin looked down. A very faint red thread had appeared on her tiny paws as well. She exerted every ounce of her strength and grabbed onto that light.
The dream shattered completely.