Chapter 16: No Response

Chapter 16: No Answer

When the elevator doors opened, Roland encountered Li Hai inside. They looked at each other silently, neither speaking a word.

After a long moment, Li Hai reached out to block the closing elevator doors. He looked into Roland’s eyes, trying to confirm something that words could not convey.

Roland’s thoughts mirrored his almost exactly, the only difference being that she confirmed it much faster. While Li Hai still harbored a faint hope deep in his heart that she was his daughter calling him “Dad,” Roland had already turned and dashed swiftly into the stairwell. His gaze made her realize that Li Hai had begun to suspect she was not Li Mengli.

Roland ran down the stairs at full speed. She no longer wished to keep up the act; the day’s events were absurd beyond belief. She had been so frightened in the bar that her soul seemed to leave her body, and Li Mengli’s spirit had seized the chance to take control. What was stranger still was that Li Hai was clearly an ordinary man—why would he suspect his own daughter? And how had he found this place? Perhaps through phone tracking?

Seeing his daughter escape, Li Hai’s bold suspicion was confirmed. He immediately pressed the button for the first floor. As the elevator doors closed, he felt his understanding of the world collapse. Memories from long ago blurred his mind; a despairing gaze seemed to come from the other side of the door, crossing time from a hospital room ten years prior. Back then, he had stood trembling just like this, unable to resist his sister’s desperate pleas.

“Brother, I’m not schizophrenic. There really is a ghost possessing me. Please believe me!”

“Mr. Li, the patient is currently very agitated and not suitable for visits. Please come back another day.”

When Li Hai left the mental hospital, he walked slowly, as if slowing down might give him a chance to convince himself that there were still things in this world he did not understand. But he never succeeded. Until his phone rang with the news of his sister’s suicide.

“I’m sorry, Xiaoyu. If I could do it all over, I would choose to believe my family.” Li Hai knew these words were meaningless, yet he didn’t know what else to say. He just didn’t want to remain silent. These words at least let him breathe through the suffocating guilt.

But that breath didn’t last long. When he stepped out of the elevator and saw Li Mengli’s shattered phone on the floor, he knew he would once again pay the price of flawed perception: running down thirty-two floors was somehow faster than taking the elevator.

He wanted to chase after her outside, hoping she hadn’t gone far. But after only a few steps, the dread for his daughter’s future caught up with him. Accompanied by a sharp ringing in his ears, that fear engulfed his consciousness and mercilessly erased it.

Bang!

At the sound of Li Hai collapsing, Roland slowly emerged from the shadows in the stairwell. Without even glancing at the body lying on the floor, she headed straight for the door. Just as she was about to step outside, she suddenly stopped.

“Why…” she whispered to herself, then turned back to check Li Hai’s breath—weak but steady.

When she had lived as Li Er, she too had checked the breath of the boy who had fainted on the mountain. She always asked herself why—why she carried a baby on her back to find food, why she shared the food with the boy after finding it, why even after surviving the famine, every time she cooked firewood meals for the siblings, she asked herself why. Always asking.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a mental shock. He’ll wake up,” Roland said, hoisting Li Hai’s body, which was twice her size. This time, she didn’t ask why. Because Roland understood that the soul’s departure in the bar was already the answer. From the moment she crossed into this world, she owed them.

Just a few steps from the bar, a man with a camera caught up from behind. “Is he drunk? Who is he to you?”

“None of your business. Don’t block the way.” Roland planned to leave the motorcycle here temporarily and walk to the intersection to hail a taxi. The weight of Li Hai’s sixty kilograms was nothing to her.

Though the man stepped aside, he didn’t leave. Backing away while raising his camera, he said, “Can I take a photo? Couples with such an age gap are rare, and you’re so small—yet you’re carrying your boyfriend. Usually it’s the other way around…”

Before he could finish, Roland kicked him hard into a nearby utility pole. Passersby were drawn to the scene, turning their heads in shock though they didn’t stop walking. Much like in the bar, some took out phones to record and whispered among themselves.

Roland sighed softly, ignoring the onlookers. She hailed a taxi by the roadside, loaded Li Hai into the back seat, then got into the front passenger seat. As she buckled her seatbelt, she said, “Building 8, Xianlu South Bean Residential Complex, please.”

Leaning back against the seat, she looked out the window at the night sky framed by towering buildings. The moon slipped out from behind a patch of black clouds and, over time, slowly slid into another shadow. She asked the moon silently, “Where are you really going?”

The moon’s voice seemed to sound in her heart: “I’m not going anywhere. You are the one traveling far.”

Roland slowly closed her eyes, but tears streamed down despite her eyelids. In her heart, she whispered, “I’m so tired. Really tired… Moon, I don’t want to travel anymore. I just want to stay forever in the world that belongs to me. I want to go home. Please tell me, when will this curse end? Please… end it forever.”

No answer came.

Having lived through countless lifetimes, Roland had delved deep into her innermost self but still found no answer to this question.

As the taxi approached the next intersection, a truck suddenly sped down the road from the right. Judging by their speeds, a violent collision was inevitable. Yet the taxi driver’s vacant gaze never shifted, and he made no move to slow down. The truck was large enough to crush the taxi.

Roland reacted quickly, whipping the steering wheel hard to the left. The car spun in a circle on the asphalt, narrowly brushing the side of the truck, and smashed into the front of a red sedan traveling in the left lane.

The violent impact tightened Roland’s seatbelt, but her head still struck the windshield, cracking it like shattered snow. Blood trickled down from her forehead to her nose. As she was about to scold the taxi driver, she noticed his expression remained vacant, as if none of this concerned him.

Sensing something was terribly wrong, Roland saw the truck stop. A burly man with a cigar jumped out, the streetlight gleaming off his black rifle. Flames flickered from the barrel as Roland ducked down. Bullets shattered the glass; the taxi driver died instantly.

Sitting still meant a dead end. In the brief pause between gunfire, Roland pushed open the door and crawled around to the other side of the taxi. The street had descended into chaos—countless cars smashed into barriers and each other. After the shots rang out, screams erupted from the wreckage.

The red sedan she’d just struck began smoking. A woman crawled out, screaming for help. Roland gestured urgently for her to crouch, but before the woman could react, she was struck down with deadly precision.

The woman lay on the ground, blood crawling like snakes from her head toward Roland’s feet.

“I don’t care who you are! Since you’re coming at me, it’s got nothing to do with anyone else!” Roland’s words barely escaped her lips before the gunfire resumed.

Roland was momentarily at a loss for how to fight back. The smooth asphalt held no stones or objects she could use. As she searched desperately for a way to survive, a hand grenade rolled toward her, striking the lifeless woman’s face. The grenade, hindered by the woman’s head and the road’s slope, rolled back a short distance—stopping just half a meter from Roland.

(End of chapter)