“Lately, that guy Bai Six has been getting stranger and stranger...” the children whispered fearfully, huddling together.
After the Dean announced that Tawil had run away from the welfare home, they transferred the fear that had once belonged to Tawil onto Bai Six.
The other children looked with both dread and curiosity at the boy sitting at the far end of the long table, separated from everyone else, silently eating his meal.
That had once been Tawil’s seat.
“New kid, your name is Lu Yizhan, right?” A boy winked at the upright-looking, slightly older newcomer, then pointed at Bai Six. “That kid sitting at the very end is called Bai Six. Remember to stay far away from him.”
The young Lu Yizhan looked back in confusion. “Why? Did he do something?”
“Because he’s a monster!” The boy gestured wildly, making strange growling sounds with his mouth. “He ate his only friend! Of course, his friend was a monster too—a freak covered in needles who bled all the time. If you become friends with him, he’ll eat you too!”
The boy threatened Lu Yizhan with absolute seriousness.
Lu Yizhan frowned and looked again toward the end of the long table.
On the surface, Bai Six did not seem abnormal. He only looked excessively thin.
He looked as though he had never once eaten his fill. His cheeks were sunken, and he seemed truly hungry, eating very quickly.
But—
Lu Yizhan’s gaze fell on Bai Six’s tray.
There was a piece of staple bread left untouched, and from the look of it, Bai Six had no intention of eating it.
After quietly and quickly finishing his meal, Bai Six raised his head and silently met Lu Yizhan’s deep, observant gaze.
Lu Yizhan was the first to look away.
Expressionless, Bai Six hopped down from the bench. With his head lowered, he carried the untouched bread and took a detour behind the church, heading toward the lake.
Lu Yizhan’s expression paused for a moment.
He followed Bai Six to the church, then stopped.
Bai Six had vanished in an instant.
...What exactly was he doing?
—
Night.
The newcomer Lu Yizhan had been assigned the bed Tawil used to sleep in.
When he was preparing to sleep and had just lain down, he turned his head and saw Bai Six standing expressionlessly at the head of his bed, clutching his bedding.
Lu Yizhan, who had seemed deep in thought, was startled by Bai Six’s sudden appearance. He sat up in a panic, clutching his blanket to his chest as he looked at Bai Six warily.
“Bai Six, what are you doing?!”
The other children in the dormitory were also terrified by Bai Six’s sudden appearance. They cried out and fled in every direction.
“Bai Six is here to eat people!”
“He’s going to eat us!”
Lu Yizhan managed to keep his composure.
He looked at Bai Six, who stood motionless beside his bed while holding a large bundle of bedding. Trying to guess Bai Six’s intention, Lu Yizhan pointed first to his own bed, then to the bedding in Bai Six’s arms.
“Are you... trying to switch beds with ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) me?”
Bai Six looked at Lu Yizhan quietly.
He seemed to be in poor condition. His gaze was unfocused, and heavy dark circles hung beneath his eyes. Hearing Lu Yizhan’s question, Bai Six slowly nodded.
Lu Yizhan breathed a sigh of relief.
So he really had only come to switch beds.
Lu Yizhan did not care which bed he slept in. He gave his bed to Bai Six, then paused and reminded him that they had to switch back tomorrow morning.
The teachers here identified children by their beds. While the children could secretly switch among themselves, it would be bad if they were caught, since it was against the rules.
After agreeing with Bai Six on when to switch back the next morning, Lu Yizhan picked up his own bedding and went to sleep in Bai Six’s bed.
Before leaving his original bed, Lu Yizhan glanced back at Bai Six.
He saw Bai Six silently making the bed.
Bai Six held a very strange, long, faceless doll and quietly lay down on the bed, closing his eyes.
Bai Six did not look like the kind of child who would still sleep with a doll at his age, but he clearly treasured it.
Not only did he give most of the bed to the doll, he even tucked it in, leaving half of his own body exposed.
The night was obviously cold, yet Bai Six acted as though he could not feel either hunger or cold. Holding the doll, he soon fell deeply asleep.
But by ordinary standards, that doll did not seem worthy of such care.
It was covered in patches, crudely made, frayed at the edges, and had no face. It looked like a half-finished product.
Bai Six curled into a small ball beside the doll’s hand. He had arranged the doll’s body to curl around him, the two of them pressed tightly together.
It was as though—
as though two people were embracing while sleeping inside a very narrow, oval-shaped bathtub.
It was an extremely peculiar sleeping posture.
That strange posture of clinging to a rag doll made Lu Yizhan look a second time.
He stood quietly beside Bai Six’s bed for a while before finally withdrawing his gaze and walking toward Bai Six’s original bed.
This Bai Six really was a strange child.
But he did not seem as difficult to get along with as the other children claimed.
He was quite reasonable.
Bai Six vaguely sensed that Lu Yizhan, this newcomer, was observing him more and more often in secret.
Observing him—the “monster” child everyone said not to approach.
On the seventh day after Lu Yizhan arrived, Bai Six nearly fainted at the dining table.
Lu Yizhan was the first to notice something was wrong. He gave Bai Six a piece of candy and forced him to eat half of his own meal.
Bai Six clearly had low blood sugar.
This person had not been eating properly at all.
Every day, he secretly took away most of his food. No one knew what he was doing with it. Every night when he returned, his mental state was worse than before.
Lu Yizhan began intentionally, and sometimes unintentionally, sharing his food with Bai Six.
But most of the time, Bai Six would reject him coldly.
“I don’t need it.”
At the same time, a strange and eerie atmosphere began to spread through the Love Welfare Home.
More and more children were running away.
Some truly escaped, while others were “forced” to escape.
Lu Yizhan sharply sensed that something was wrong with this place.
This welfare home was not as bright and safe as it appeared.
As the number of missing children increased, Lu Yizhan noticed that Bai Six’s body had also begun to carry that bloody smell—
the smell that came after blood had been drawn.
Only then did Lu Yizhan finally begin approaching Bai Six.
One night before bed, when Bai Six came to Lu Yizhan to switch beds again, Lu Yizhan reached out and grabbed Bai Six’s arm before he could leave.
He leaned closer and whispered the discovery he had made, warning Bai Six that this welfare home was unsafe and asking whether he wanted to run away with him.
“I know a public welfare home that’s safer than this place,” Lu Yizhan said softly. “We can go there. It’s near a police station. Someone will protect us.”
Bai Six replied very coldly, “Not going.”
“Why?” Lu Yizhan looked anxious. “Something is really wrong here!”
Bai Six looked down at him.
His pupils had no focus at all, and his tone was very slow.
“I’m waiting for someone to wake up.”
“When he wakes up, I’ll take him with me.”
Perhaps out of curiosity, or perhaps because Bai Six’s increasing weakness gave Lu Yizhan an opening to follow him, Lu Yizhan finally found his chance after another baptism.
He followed Bai Six into the area behind the church, the place Bai Six secretly went every afternoon.
The area behind the church had always been a forbidden zone within the welfare home.
The Dean strictly forbade any child from going there, saying it was unsafe. There were unprotected woods, overgrown shrubs, and a small lake that had not yet been developed or renovated. Children could easily drown or become trapped in the mud.
Because of this, the church was usually locked tightly to prevent them from going behind it.
But Bai Six seemed to have found a hidden path that led straight to the back of the church.
Lu Yizhan followed Bai Six.
He watched Bai Six skillfully and nimbly crawl through a broken window behind the side door of the church, cross through the building, and leave through the back door.
Then Bai Six plunged without hesitation into the lush grass behind the church, tall enough to swallow him instantly.
Bai Six expertly avoided the shrubs sharp enough to cut his feet and the stone obstacles hidden under the growth.
At last, he stopped beside a small lake—or rather, a pond—covered in duckweed.
Lu Yizhan hid behind the vegetation, full of confusion.
What was Bai Six doing at this pond?
Swimming?
Under normal circumstances, Bai Six would definitely have noticed Lu Yizhan following him.
But long-term hunger had severely weakened him, and his concentration was badly depleted. As a result, he did not realize someone was following not far behind.
With his back to Lu Yizhan and without the slightest guard, Bai Six took off his clothes, revealing a starkly white back where every rib was clearly visible.
He bent down and placed the bread he had brought on top of his clean clothes.
Then he turned and dove into the pond.
Lu Yizhan hid in the grass, watching solemnly.
He had a feeling he was about to find out exactly what Bai Six had been doing all these days.
But Lu Yizhan waited and waited.
After about ten minutes, Bai Six still had not surfaced.
Lu Yizhan realized something was wrong.
Without even taking off his clothes, he plunged straight into the lake. Searching through the dark water below, he finally saw Bai Six.
His feet had been swallowed by mud and sand, his hands floating loosely in the water. He was clearly showing signs of drowning.
Lu Yizhan held his breath and quickly swam over, grabbing Bai Six by the shoulders to pull him upward.
Bai Six seemed to be dragging something.
But he was too weak.
With Lu Yizhan’s help, Bai Six finally managed to pull it free.
In the end, Lu Yizhan dragged both Bai Six and the thing he had been trying to pull out onto the shore.
Lu Yizhan lay on the bank, gasping for air.
Bai Six’s body was convulsing from instinct. He coughed up several mouthfuls of lake water and rested for a long while before finally rolling over and climbing up from the ground.
Just now, Bai Six had nearly drowned at the bottom of the lake.
Because of his low blood sugar and weakness, this amount of physical exertion was already far beyond what his current body could endure.
“What were you thinking?!” Lu Yizhan cursed at Bai Six while panting. “If you couldn’t pull it out in one go, didn’t you know to come up for air before going back down?! Did you have to drown yourself down there?!”
After speaking, Lu Yizhan turned to look at the thing he and Bai Six had dragged out.
At once, Lu Yizhan instinctively stood up, his expression turning grim.
Lying beside Bai Six was a corpse with a smooth face and a rope tied around its ankles, apparently to keep it from sinking deeper into the mud.
“You hid a corpse in this lake?!” Lu Yizhan was truly about to lose his mind. “You’ve got some nerve! No one really would find it here. Whose corpse is this?! Why do you drag it out every day?!”
Bai Six silently knelt beside Tawil.
As if he had not heard Lu Yizhan at all, he crumbled the bread he had left on his clothes. Then, like someone feeding a fish, he pinched the crumbs between his fingers and rubbed them against Tawil’s icy lips.
Through his actions, he showed Lu Yizhan what he had been doing.
He had been coming here to feed the corpse at the bottom of the water.
Lu Yizhan fell into a silence that made his scalp prickle.
He stared blankly as Bai Six calmly finished feeding the bread.
Bai Six patted the crumbs off his hands.
Only then did he raise his head and give Lu Yizhan a faint explanation.
“He’s a monster, not a corpse.”
“He isn’t dead.”
“He’ll wake up, so I can’t let him go hungry.”
“Do you know something, Bai Six?” Lu Yizhan’s face and voice were indescribably complicated. “Right now, you’re the one who looks like a monster.”
As he spoke, Lu Yizhan’s gaze fell on Tawil’s corpse.
The corpse’s right hand had already begun to rot.
One could imagine how long Bai Six had been “feeding” him.
“Whether he’s a corpse or a monster, you have to let him go.”
Lu Yizhan felt as though his brain was about to explode.
He crouched down, held Bai Six by the shoulders, and looked him in the eyes, trying to explain the current situation in a way Bai Six could understand.
“When you grow up, you can avenge him. You can find the person who killed him. But right now, you can’t bury yourself at the bottom of the water with him.”
“He has no breathing, no heartbeat, and no one knows when he’ll wake up.”
Lu Yizhan sighed.
“Bai Six, you can’t sleep beside him forever.”
Tawil lay quietly on the ground.
The needle holes on the back of his hand had not healed.
But in a daze, Bai Six seemed to see Tawil open his eyes and speak to him.
Leave this place, Bai Six.
One day, we will meet again.
We will meet again inside the endless horror games and stories we once watched, played, and possessed together.
So now, let me leave.
And let yourself leave too.
Only after farewell can there be reunion, Bai Six.
Bai Six murmured to himself, “Do you swear we’ll meet again?”
Tawil smiled very faintly.
He used his right hand, already rotted enough to reveal white bone, to hold Bai Six’s hand.
“I swear.”
Lu Yizhan turned his head in confusion, feeling a chill crawl over him as he looked at Tawil’s motionless corpse.
“Bai Six, who are you talking to?”
Bai Six slowly let go of the hand he was holding.
He lowered his eyes, water continuously dripping from his body to his feet.
Then Bai Six took a small knife from his pocket and cut the rope tied around Tawil’s ankles.
With great effort and difficulty, Bai Six picked up Tawil’s corpse and walked step by step toward the pond.
Then he calmly placed Tawil into the water.
Tawil’s hair drifted as he sank downward.
Bai Six watched without blinking.
Lu Yizhan had just breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Bai Six blink twice.
Two drops of water seemed to fall from his eyelashes.
Then Bai Six took a deep breath and suddenly jumped into the pond again.
“Bai Six!”
Lu Yizhan shouted, his heart pounding, and immediately jumped in after him.
Bai Six paddled his limbs with all his strength, reaching out to grasp Tawil as he sank to the bottom.
He watched as mud and sand, like an irresistible night, swiftly swallowed Tawil’s face.
The black silt climbed over Tawil’s nose and lips like vines, then over his chest, his arms, until finally only one startlingly white hand remained loosely exposed outside the mud.
Bai Six struggled to grab that hand.
The touch was cold yet smooth.
He felt Tawil’s hand grip his once before letting go, finally disappearing completely into the lakebed.
Bai Six thrust both hands into the mud, stubbornly trying to dig through the silt so he could see those eyes one more time.
But Lu Yizhan gripped his shoulders tightly and gritted his teeth as he began pulling him upward.
Bai Six’s lungs were running out of oxygen.
It felt as though the air was being sucked away, rapidly vanishing at the bottom of the water. Bubbles surged from Bai Six’s mouth and nose, but he seemed unable to feel the suffocation.
He only stared with dilated pupils, mechanically clawing at the mud underwater, searching for the person who had been completely swallowed by the darkness of his life.
The book torn to shreds and then pieced back together.
The patched-up doll costume.
The promise that had never been fulfilled.
The face forever hidden beneath hair.
What Tawil left behind for him had always been fragmented, incomplete things.
Those imperfections seemed to remind Bai Six that Tawil was not real.
Would this person really come back?
Did this person really exist?
Had this person... ever truly appeared?
Or was it only Bai Six, a child judged by everyone to have something wrong with his mind, creating a self-deceiving illusion of a monster willing to hold his hand, merely to fill his own loneliness?
There was no God in this world.
So why would there be a monster who always waited for him in the church to read together?
A monster who played the horror games no one else liked?
A monster who made dolls for him?
A monster who embraced him?
[Bai Six, why are you willing to believe in the existence of monsters, but not in the existence of God?]
[Because God has never been kind to me.]
Bai Six stared with open eyes at the pitch-black bottom of the water.
He unconsciously opened his mouth, and bubbles poured out.
He said, “Xie Ta, I’m leaving.”
“Goodbye.”
Bai Six felt that before Tawil left, he had never properly said goodbye.
Without farewell, there could be no reunion.
That was what Tawil had just said.
So Bai Six had jumped in.
He wanted to say goodbye to him properly.
The water rushing into Bai Six’s mouth and nose began to suffocate him.
Snowflake-like bubbles rose from both sides of his lips.
Bai Six slowly let his eyelids droop.
His limbs lost their strength and drifted backward.
He floated in the water like a dead piece of duckweed.
He sank into a dizzying white light.
Inside that pale dizziness, Bai Six saw countless fragments of memory flash past.
At the end of that dazzling white light, someone sat tall and quiet in the first row of the church, wearing that old, shabby Slender Man doll costume.
He held the tattered, pieced-together picture book of The Slender Man Killer’s Records, turning the pages very slowly as he read.
That person seemed to notice Bai Six sitting diagonally behind him.
He lifted the book, appearing as though he wanted to ask Bai Six nearby whether he wanted to read together.
But in fact, before that person even turned his head, Bai Six had already prepared himself to accept the invitation.
Because Bai Six liked that book very much.
Although the book looked somewhat ragged, Bai Six did not care.
He had already been sitting behind that person, accompanying him, secretly reading it page by page for a very, very long time.
But the moment that person turned his head, the white light vanished.
Lu Yizhan’s worried face appeared before him.
He was patting Bai Six’s face while calling his name.
“Hey! Hey! Bai Six!”
Bai Six coughed and spat out a great deal of water.
He woke groggily, lying on the ground, his gaze scattered and his chest rising and falling silently.
Beside him, Lu Yizhan stood soaked from head to toe, hands on his knees, panting from exhaustion.
“Bai Six, if we want to leave this place, we have to change your name,” Lu Yizhan said. “That way, the teachers from this welfare home won’t be able to find you again. What happened to you before caused too much trouble. If another welfare home recognizes you, and the teachers here interfere, it’ll be very hard for them to take you in.”
Bai Six was silent for two seconds before saying, “I won’t accept a name that’s changed too much.”
Lu Yizhan was startled. “Why?”
Bai Six rolled onto his side.
His hollow, dazed eyes looked toward the pond, and his voice was hoarse.
“...I don’t know.”
“I just feel like maybe someone...”
“will use my original name to find me.”
