Published at 7th of November 2024 4:16 am

Chapter 1613: Once in a Lifetime

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Thirty-two months later, Wu Yiliu set foot again in the Twelve Worlds Centrum, where the Driver’s pocket dimension was located.

Before the teleportation, he knew that everything was normal in that world: he easily obtained a visa to that world, and throughout the whole process, there wasn’t a hint of rumors, concerns, or whispers that appeared with the visa.

In the first six months after teleporting, he lived in a secluded and quiet place, silently observing this world—but this caution seemed unnecessary. No one had heard of anyone transforming, nor was anyone looking for him. The pocket dimension detection activity from thirty-two months ago had completely vanished amid the bustling and ceaseless human world, just like any other ordinary task in the past.

When Wu Yiliu started moving again, he was very careful. If the driver’s pocket dimension didn’t end as he envisioned, even a slight mishap might cause a reaction to his appearance—though no abnormalities were detected, he realized that the driver’s pocket dimension seemed to have had a minor accident.

He had not seen Abby for a very long time.

“When she comes back to this world, I’m usually here too,” said the female hairdresser with heavy eyeliner and lip ring. “We take turns going back and forth between worlds, so she often comes here to get her hair done. Yes, she likes to dye her hair blond.”

She was sitting on a tin-roofed house, the sun flashing on the roof, looking warm. Wu Yiliu always felt that his attitude towards these posthumans born and raised within the Twelve Worlds Centrum might be like the older generation looking at the next one in the old world: longing yet mixed with some incomprehension.

Post-apocalyptic native posthumans, in a world system as unstable as quicksand, have adapted, found a new balance, and even developed many needs of old-world humanity: appearance hygiene, hobbies, dating, entertainment, etc. Like long-legged insects walking on water, even without solid ground beneath their feet, their lives could still glide forward.

“Once before like this, our teleportation worlds got mismatched, and we didn’t see each other for several years.” The hairdresser, like a warming cat, showed no intention of getting off the roof. “But this is normal. No one can guarantee to only go back and forth between two worlds in a lifetime; that’s too lucky. I think she’ll be back soon.”

“Are you friends?” Wu Yiliu asked, looking up.

As soon as the question left his mouth, he knew he had asked wrong.

The female hairdresser laughed. “Friends? Why don’t you ask me if I have a clone? Are you evolved from the old world?”

Wu Yiliu thanked her and left.

For the native posthumans of the new world, many things that humanity had carried on for nearly ten thousand years had been fundamentally overturned and disappeared. Humans are social animals, needing meaningful emotional relationships to survive; yet in a world system where eternal farewells may occur every fourteen months, native posthumans seem to have dissolved and discarded this part of the need.

Instead, they developed a brand-new pattern of human relations, a pattern that Wu Yiliu found hard to understand. Interpersonal relationships no longer depend on the time span or depth of interaction but become something momentary—at this moment, the connection between us arises and is sensed, enough to satisfy; the next moment, we can scatter to the four winds and never see each other again.

All the desires and needs for one’s kind were poured into these fleeting moments, each farewell leading to a rebirth.

He found it hard to grasp what kind of mindset this was; but it was precisely the native posthumans’ way of interacting that made his search for Abby even more difficult. After sporadically searching for three or four months, Wu Yiliu had to admit that something had happened to Abby.

In a deep and indescribable rage, he searched for a long time in the direction of the forest in his memory but ultimately never found the camping cabin. Of course, the cabin was merely a venue created by the pocket dimension, and after everyone starved to death, the venue should have disappeared along with the end of the pocket dimension. As for the bodies of the human guinea pigs, after thirty-two months in the vast forest, naturally, no trace of them would remain.

Apart from himself, the last traceable clue was the Zhai Hospital.

Logically speaking, the most rational approach would be to continue to lie low and avoid catching the attention of Zhai Hospital: the other party might think that everyone had died in the pocket dimension, and he didn’t need to take the risk and make them aware that there was a survivor in the pocket dimension. But where in the world is there a rational person?

So, although Wu Yiliu didn’t know what he was looking to do with Zhai Hospital, he still followed the lead of the intermediary who introduced him to the task, tracing down the vine, and located a possible posthuman member of Zhai Hospital.

It only took a few words, but to find this unknown posthuman, Wu Yiliu had to exert a tremendous amount of effort. When he finally found this person, it was in an open-air stone theater designed like an ancient Roman Colosseum.

At that time, Wu Yiliu sat on the terraced audience seats built into the hillside, looking down at the open-air theater. In the middle of the stage made of stone slabs, a woman dressed all in red was holding her lover whom she had killed, sitting in a pool of blood, mourning softly.

The audience around him was almost boiling over, some standing and applauding, some shouting praise, and others cursing angrily—because they had lost bets, having placed their money on the dead lover. Wu Yiliu sat in the midst of the red-faced crowd, momentarily dazed.

The man he was looking for was the one playing the lover, now dead in the arms of the red-robed woman.

The clue was severed.

Because that man was truly dead.

“This twist is really nice,” said someone who seemed to be a regular, analyzing with his companion. “That woman’s pretty good. Not only did she come up with a reasonable twist, but after eliminating a target, she didn’t forget to continue performing. Look how passionately she’s crying! Very professional.”

Wu Yiliu silently stood up and walked through the loud crowd towards the theater’s exit. If not for tracking down the Zhai Hospital member, he might never have discovered that such a place existed in the Twelve Worlds Centrum: around ten posthumans, whether willingly or forcibly, were recruited into this theater as actors; no script, no lines, only a story background, premises, and role assignments. They had to improvise and survive this play—out of a dozen actors, only two were allowed to live. They not only had to eliminate others but also had to do so within an appropriate and improvised storyline.

Undoubtedly, the audience gained immense pleasure.

Such entertainment would not have been strange to Wu Yiliu if it had occurred in some remote and wicked post-apocalyptic world. What he couldn’t understand was how this theater existed in the Twelve Worlds Centrum—regardless of the type of human society, there must be some baseline standards for it to operate normally. By all accounts, this open-air theater had violated the already not-so-high standards of the Twelve Worlds Centrum.

The Zhai Hospital, of which he had never heard, once used the newly emerged pocket dimension to attract “human cockpits” for its members. Now when he inquired about it, he found that few people knew about Zhai Hospital, and nobody had seen a Pilot’s pocket dimension—and the only person who might have been a member of Zhai Hospital happened to die in another open-air theater he had never heard of before.

“You can tell at a glance that you don’t pay much attention to what’s going on outside,” said the old man who sold him the information, puffing on a cigarette. “These small organizations have become quite common in recent years, rising and falling, coming and going… No one knows where they come from, and after a while, they vanish.”

“Is there anything else?” Wu Yiliu asked as he opened his silver ring to take out money.

“Yes, there is.” The old man waved his hand, signaling that Wu Yiliu didn’t need to pay, as he counted on his fingers. “I’ve heard of at least four or five. I’ve known about the open-air theater for a long time. You told me about the Fasting Hospital. Someone once told me about a motorcycle sale event, can you believe it? Several years ago, there was a war slave camp, and someone even asked me to buy a war slave… uh, recently the thirteenth incubator has been quite hot, but who knows when it will disappear.”

Wu Yiliu, who considered himself quite capable, had never heard of any of these names before.

“If you can’t find it, I advise you not to keep looking,” the old man said. “If it’s not doing well, it’ll disappear on its own, and there’s no point in looking. If it’s doing well, it’ll be there even if you don’t look for it.”

Thinking back, this didn’t seem strange at all. He remembered a few years ago there was a Progressor Alliance that was very prominent, covering the Twelve Worlds Centrum, but it slowly faded away for some unknown reason. No feast lasts forever, especially if it’s man-made.

“Oh no, no,” the old man said, suddenly waving his hand. “The Progressor Alliance fell because it offended someone, but its formation and operation were clear and public, unlike these small organizations. You can still find former members of the Progressor Alliance, but these small groups leave no trace once they disappear – that’s why I advise you not to bother.”

Wu Yiliu left with even more doubts than when he arrived. Still, he left a little thank-you money for the old man and exited the subway car. Each car on this subway line could be rented for business, with various strange and unique activities, and the information-selling car was one of the quietest – as it allowed no more than one person in at a time.

He stepped across the car’s threshold and onto the platform, instinctively looking left and right. To his left were the stairs to the ground floor. As Wu Yiliu turned to walk toward the stairs, it was as if a force suddenly struck him head-on, instantly pushing Lin Sanjiu out of him – but in the last instant before she left Wu Yiliu, she saw.

Not far from Wu Yiliu, standing on the subway station platform amidst the bustling crowd, was a slender woman.

Wrapped in a long trench coat, with curly, shining hair and exquisite makeup, she looked young but had a faint line etched between her nose and lips. That line was only on the left side of her face, as though she always smiled with only one side of her mouth. Her features were not perfectly symmetrical, but it was that slight skew that gave her beauty an irresistible pull.

In the time before the memory of the siblings had faded, Lin Sanjiu had often wondered what the grown-up Reno and Rena would look like. Now, she had finally seen them with her own eyes.

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