Chapter 31: Doppelganger

Qi Xin lay motionless in the pitch-black wooden coffin, where she couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face.

She kept her eyes closed, her hands placed at her sides, her legs pressed together perfectly straight. Lian Hui said her sleeping posture looked as strange as a corpse, but this was her mother’s requirement, because sleeping this way wouldn’t harm the spine. She still had some impressions of it—her mother probably started making this demand when she was around six years old, taking it so seriously that late at night, she would come to her room every so often to check if her sleeping posture was correct.

Qi Xin didn’t know exactly how long she had been trapped in this wooden coffin. Perhaps a day had passed, perhaps a week. In this completely dark and silent environment, she couldn’t feel the passage of time at all. It was like solitary confinement in a prison, only worse, because no prison’s solitary confinement cell would be darker than inside a coffin, nor would any such cell fail to even provide a seat.

Normally, a person in such an environment would begin to despair before long. After receiving no feedback whatsoever, they would start to shout madly and hysterically. In more severe cases, they might mutter to themselves or begin self-harming. But Qi Xin did nothing. She just lay down quietly. Since she couldn’t see anything anyway, she simply closed her eyes as well.

In the beginning, her mind would force itself to think about things to daydream or zone out, using that to ignore the passage of time. The first person she thought of was Lian Hui. She had been missing for so long; she figured the school already knew about her absence. Perhaps the school would say she was on leave, but with Lian Hui’s personality, she would definitely go straight to the family’s house and quickly learn the truth was that she had disappeared.

Would she cry? Very likely. Lian Hui had always been a sentimental person. She still remembered when they were watching that disaster film, Lian Hui had cried almost the entire time. The whole pack of tissues she had brought was practically emptied. The subsequent plan to go shopping and buy some things naturally turned into foam on the water. Because Lian Hui hadn’t yet emerged from that emotional atmosphere, her eyes were red and swollen. Even when Qi Xin bought a bottle of ice water for her to apply to her eyes, it was useless. She looked pitiful and funny at the same time. When Lian Hui walked into the washroom, stood before the mirror, and saw her own eyelids swollen like a frog’s, she howled even more miserably.

To be honest, that movie was actually quite good. Its online ratings were very high, it told a great story about familial love, and the atmosphere in the cinema was built up perfectly. But Qi Xin just couldn’t cry. It was a strange feeling. Sitting there in the cinema hall chair, her good friend to her left sobbing her heart out, the young couple in the row ahead—the girl constantly wiping tears, the boy carefully wiping them for her… Everyone seemed rather sad. She knew why these audience members were sad, knew which parts of the movie were tear-jerkers, but she just couldn’t cry.

Perhaps she really was a terrible person, Qi Xin thought. Empathy is such a wonderful virtue. It’s precisely because empathy exists that people promote things like morality and conscience. And it’s precisely because of empathy that humans are human, distinct from animals and beasts. So, in order to possess this virtue, she had put in effort, forcing herself to shed a few polite tears, ensuring that others could see she was crying too.

Besides Lian Hui, who else would cry for her? Qi Xin didn’t know. Mother might cry, but she wasn’t sure if Mother’s tears would be genuine.

Father? She felt that was quite unlikely.

As for someone like Lu Changya, an ordinary classmate with whom relations weren’t particularly close… She didn’t understand the other girl’s true personality, so she couldn’t make a judgment either. She could only put a question mark there for now.

Well then, what about Qi Ran?

She suddenly thought of that younger sister who shared her similar features.

Would Qi Ran cry for her? Definitely not. Perhaps for Qi Ran, her own disappearance was a good thing. After all, even a person with the best temper and the best personality wouldn’t be able to tolerate this double standard from their own biological mother—being twin sisters, yet suffering such a massive disparity in treatment and fairness.

Thinking of this, she moved closer to the wall, no longer lying rigidly straight, but curling up as much as possible.

Truth be told, the estrangement between her and Qi Ran wasn’t entirely their mother’s doing. Even without their mother, she wouldn’t be able to look directly at that face so identical to her own. That feeling was too strange. She still remembered one time, probably back in middle school, during a New Year’s Eve dinner, she and Qi Ran went to their maternal grandfather’s house together. Their maternal grandmother had knitted two sweaters for them. When they were both in the room putting on those sweaters, and she saw Qi Ran take off the hair tie that held her hair up, that sense of terror reached its peak. It was exactly like seeing her own doppelganger.

What was even more unbearable to her was that Qi Ran, despite having a face perfectly identical to her own, was always doing things that were untimely, or rather, incorrect. It was like this at every moment. That immense sense of terror and embarrassment gnawed at every single one of her nerves without a moment’s pause. It was like a magician stepping onto a stage to perform a magic trick, only to find someone dressed exactly like her in the audience, exposing every single clever design in her performance. Every minute and every second of being together was excruciating torment.

Sometimes she couldn’t endure that torment. She would try to imagine ways to vent the pressure in her mind—grab Qi Ran by the collar, shout vile curses at her. But of course, she could also imagine that if she really did that, that face so similar to her own wouldn’t show any of the expressions she anticipated. No fear, no disgust, no other emotion. Qi Ran would simply show that same detestably placid face. It was a suffocating silence of emotion.

Truly terrifying.

She raised her hand and placed it on her cheek, suddenly realizing it was wet. Some liquid was flowing from the area around her tightly shut eyelids, strange like the dew on branches and leaves in the early morning.

Suddenly, there was some movement from the wooden wall of the coffin beside her, as if it were vibrating.

(——————)

“Well then, this is the last wooden coffin.”

Jiang Zhique looked at the final unopened coffin before her, rubbed her sore arm, and sighed.

Beside her, the shop’s main door was wide open. Those two ordinary people who had been rescued had, after bouts of bitter weeping, left from there with countless expressions of thanks. Thinking of this, she felt speechless. Who could have imagined that in such a terrifying scene, the Gate of Life would turn out to be the very front door they had entered through? It was the perfect blind spot hidden in plain sight, seamless enough to suddenly turn a horror film into a comedy.

“Barring any accidents, your sister should be inside here… What are you doing?”

Jiang Zhique stared, dumbfounded, at Qi Ran beside her, who was covering her head with her loose school uniform jacket. After hesitating, she asked, “Do you really, really not want her to see your face? Is it that serious? Are you twin sisters or sworn mortal enemies?”

“It’s a bit complicated, hard to explain in a short time,” Under the school uniform jacket, Qi Ran’s voice sounded somewhat muffled. “Or maybe I’ll go find a place to stay, and then just like before, let her leave. Remember not to tell her what happened?”

“Let her leave? Are you serious? Have you forgotten what we actually came here for?” Jiang Zhique covered her face and sighed. She discovered that Qi Ran, usually so calm, seemed to lose clarity in her thinking whenever matters related to Qi Xin came up. “We came to find her to help solve the puzzle of Qi Jianguo. Compared to a stranger like me, wouldn’t you, as her biological younger sister, make her trust us a bit more?”

Qi Ran sighed, took off the school uniform jacket covering her face, and rubbed her temple.

“Open the coffin.”