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墨書 Inktalez
The phone screen glowed with a cold white light in the darkness, and Zhou Hang's thumb hovered over the blood-red icon of the "Judgment" app. He counted the tiny serrations along the edge of the icon, and after taking his thirty-seventh deep breath, he pressed down.
Seven crimson names leapt out from the list like unhealed wounds, each name floating above a Countdown.
"Chen Rui: 23:59:47"
"Lin Xiaotang: 23:59:32"
...
When he saw the name "Su Yuqing," the cup he had knocked over exploded on the floor, water streaming towards the corner of the table where an old newspaper lay, moldy and yellowed — a report on the rooftop death incident at Qingteng Middle School seven years ago. The old air conditioner suddenly emitted a wheezing hum.
Zhou Hang grabbed his phone and rushed into the bathroom. The mirror was fogged up like frosted glass, but he clearly saw dark red marks appearing on his neck in the reflection. These were the imprints from being crushed by a chandelier during the seventh cycle; scars that should have vanished with each reset now felt like evidence seared into his skin.
"Ding—" A new message popped up in the pinned anonymous chat room. A user with the ID "Carousel" was live-streaming: in the footage, a girl wearing a rabbit mask hummed a nursery rhyme as she slowly pushed a fruit knife into her chest.
Zhou Hang's temples throbbed; he recognized the butterfly birthmark on her inner wrist — it was Chen Lili, the instigator who had poured cockroaches onto Su Yuqing's desk back then.
At three in the morning, Zhou Hang squatted beneath an electronic screen at People's Square. As the Countdown hit zero, seven split screens lit up simultaneously: a boy in a baseball jersey repeated the moment of Brain Matter exploding beneath a basketball hoop; a woman with dyed blonde hair had her ankle crushed by a subway train every forty-two seconds; and there was that figure who always lingered on the top floor, clearly the transfer student who filmed bullying videos back then...
"Can you hear me?" Zhou Hang shouted into the chat room, but all he received in response was a cacophony of electrical static.
Suddenly, he noticed that in one of the live streams, faintly echoing through the background sound, was the same doorbell chime of "To Alice" that rang in his apartment. When he rushed back home and kicked open the long-sealed Room 301 next door, all he saw were walls smeared with blood spelling out "I'm sorry," while in the live stream, the protagonist was hanging inside that very room.
On that stormy night of his twentieth cycle, Zhou Hang lay soaked and limp on the rooftop where Su Yuqing had fallen. His phone vibrated suddenly; an old post from three years ago popped up on an anonymous forum: "Qingteng Middle School witnesses claimed that before her death, the victim received a handmade Qian Paper Crane."
The IP address of the poster overlapped with that of a certain live stream — it was Lin Xiaotang, one of those who had locked Su Yuqing in the equipment room back then.
The neon sign blurred into a blood-red glow amidst the rain curtain. Zhou Hang pulled out a rusty utility knife from the drawer and carved the seventh scar into his palm. As blood dripped onto a photo of Su Yuqing in her school uniform, the live broadcast suddenly froze—Chen Lili's blade hovered just half a centimeter from the heart, while the transfer student's toes grazed the wild grass at the edge of the railing.
"So we are the puppets," Zhou Hang whispered to the void. He grabbed the stack of blood-soaked old newspapers and dashed into the rainy night, the sound of shattering glass echoing behind him.
As the clock struck midnight, he found himself kneeling in front of the Oden stall run by Su Yuqing's mother, his Qian Paper Crane soaked in the steam of Radish Soup. At the moment when the countdown reset to 24:00:00, Zhou Hang heard the clearest gasp of his life, coming from other Reincarnators.
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