Chapter 85: The Diary

Qi Ran reached out, placing her hand on the surface of the wooden coffin closest to her. After wiping it, she saw a thick layer of dust on her finger pad. Unlike the coffins in the shop from their memory, these coffins looked much older. Their mottled surfaces bore the heavy marks of time’s passage. It wasn’t just the coffins; the floor was also covered in a thick layer of dark dust. No—Qi Ran paused slightly. That wasn’t dust. It was mycelium. The dead mycelium had changed from red to a dull, grayish-black and now looked like accumulated dust.

“I’m… confused,” Jiang Zhique said in a low voice. “Is this place imitating the shop? But why is it inside this church? And guarded by a monster like that…”

“No, it’s not an imitation,” Qi Ran said quietly, holding her flashlight beam steady on the coffins at the very back. “Look. There are traces we left behind.”

Jiang Zhique looked toward the beam of Qi Ran’s flashlight. At the deepest part of the room were coffins placed side-by-side, where the original neat formation had been broken. There were three unsealed coffins. Two of them were completely empty. The last one was filled with dull, grayish-black mycelium—long dead—entwined around a skeleton. Dust and the vestiges of time were woven together upon the pale bones, permeating the air with a foul, damp, decaying smell.

“The Executor… didn’t bury her,” Jiang Zhique said, her voice very soft.

“I think it’s worse. Maybe from the Executor’s perspective, we never filed a report at all,” Qi Ran said quietly. “After all, this is a skeleton from the year 2004.”

Jiang Zhique was stunned for a moment. “Are you saying… that when we entered the shop that time, it really was 2004? But how is that… possible? How was it done?”

“I think the answer might be on the second floor,” Qi Ran said softly.

She walked forward. The thick mycelium was a bit like a carpet; walking on it made no sound at all. Sure enough, at the far end, there were stairs leading up. They, too, were covered in the dull, lifeless mycelium. It looked as if it had flowed down the stairs from the second floor. Qi Ran walked up the stairs, Jiang Zhique following behind her. The flashlight beam illuminated the dead mycelium on the steps.

“Do you think… it’s all dead?” Jiang Zhique asked quietly. “I mean, the person on the second floor.”

Qi Ran nodded. The deathly air of this shop was so thick it was almost overflowing. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t see any possibility of something still being alive there. The Young Man from the second floor must have long since become one with this mycelium.

Stepping onto the second floor, Qi Ran’s flashlight beam illuminated the vast space. The scene was far more miserable than the first floor. What Miss Ah Qiao had said back then was correct—the second floor truly looked like a spider’s lair. As far as the eye could see, there was only faded, decayed, grayish-black mycelium, like a giant web spun by a spider. Most of it was broken. Qi Ran crouched down, her fingers pulling at one of the fine strands. Perhaps because too much time had passed, the mycelium had no resilience left. It was incredibly brittle and crumbled into powder at the slightest touch.

Something had happened here. Someone had invaded this place. Qi Ran frowned slightly. The invader was either very fast, or truly powerful—so powerful that the Spider monster couldn’t even put up a fight. Because nearly half of the giant web on the second floor was still intact. The broken strands hadn’t been torn apart, but rather had snapped naturally due to the passage of time.

“Is that… a cocoon?”

She heard Jiang Zhique’s questioning voice, stood up, and looked in the direction Jiang Zhique was gazing. In the far corner of the second floor, there was indeed a large cocoon. The cocoon looked over a meter high, but its center had been hollowed out. The mycelium had clearly been torn apart by external force. Besides the torn mycelium on the ground, there was also a withered, desiccated corpse.

The corpse was wearing a suit shirt on his upper body and light gray, wide-legged suit trousers on his lower body, along with dark brown, low-heeled, pointed leather shoes. A broken mahogany cane lay nearby. He was kneeling before the hollowed-out cocoon. It was apparent that in his last moments, he had tried to shield the cocoon with his body—but had failed.

Jiang Zhique stood there, and upon recognizing the clothes, she was slightly stunned.

To be honest, she hadn’t had a good impression of that Senior of unknown age who loved to talk nonsense and deceive them. But seeing this still stirred complex feelings. Someone she had spoken to less than a month ago was now a skeleton, who knew how long dead. The passage of time had taken on a physical, visible form in this moment.

She shook her head, casting aside the complicated emotions in her mind lake, and said quietly, “He was protecting the cocoon. What was inside it? Did the person who caused all this come for what was in the cocoon?”

Qi Ran nodded. “It seems that way.”

As if thinking of something, she reached out toward the kneeling corpse, muttering a brief “Pardon me, pardon me,” and slipped her fingers into the clothes pockets. Sure enough, in the pocket of the outer jacket, her fingertips touched something hard. She pulled the item out. It was a small notebook. Its outer cover was made of tough cowhide. The paper inside was stiff, with some pages stuck together, but carefully separating them wasn’t too difficult.

“What is that?” Jiang Zhique asked, curious.

“It looks like a diary,” Qi Ran said. “It should be his diary. Perhaps we can find out what happened from it.”

Her guess was based on the first page of the notebook, which had a man’s name written on it: Xie Liang. So the Young Man hadn’t been lying to her—he really was surnamed Xie. He belonged to the Xie Family, the one that Li Siwen had mentioned, which had once flourished in Zhongnan.

Qi Ran was momentarily stunned. If so, the Young Man had indeed seen Qi Xin. But how had he seen Qi Xin? He was on the second floor of the shop; from where could he see Qi Xin? Could it be that the mirror he mentioned was also real? Had he truly seen Qi Xin through a mirror?

Furthermore, why did this young man named Xie Liang call Qi Xin “Young Miss Xie,” and claim he couldn’t fail to recognize the Xie family bloodline? Did her elder sister harbor some secret she didn’t know? Or was it simply because, like the Ship of Theseus, she had been pieced back together and revived by Miss Ah Qiao, and could no longer truly be considered as carrying the Xie family blood?

Qi Ran’s thoughts were a mess. She didn’t even know where to start sorting them out.

Her mind troubled, she opened the notebook, illuminating it with the flashlight.

Only three sentences were written on the first page:

“Today is October 23, 1961.”

“Author: Xie Liang.”

“From this day forward, we shall become gods.”

After reading the three sentences, Jiang Zhique frowned slightly. “This date…”

“What is it?” Qi Ran asked.

“1961… isn’t that the era when the Ghost Birth Infant was born?” Jiang Zhique said in a low voice. “Was this man… one of the participants in the Ghost Birth Infant incident?”

“We’ll continue reading this after we leave. For now, let’s get ready to get out of here,” Qi Ran forcefully gathered her scattered thoughts and put away the notebook. She said to Jiang Zhique, “Look around some more. See if there’s anything else we can take, and then we’ll leave.”

“‘Anything else we can take’… like what?” Jiang Zhique asked for confirmation. “Don’t worry about the coffins?”

Qi Ran shook her head. “I have a feeling… we’ll return here again, through a new route. So this time, don’t bother with the coffins. Just look for things like this notebook—things that are easy to carry. Or rather, look for things that might contain information.”

She pointed to the stairs leading down to the first floor. “After we finish checking the second floor, we’ll go down and see if we can take that mirror from the first floor off the wall entirely and bring it with us.”

“Take the whole thing?” Jiang Zhique paused, thinking that if anyone saw them this time, they really would be caught red-handed with the stolen goods.