Chapter Text
For Lin Qiushi, this message was one among many he received on a daily basis on the internet forum. It wasn’t a shock to find it being addressed to him.
I [22 F] am about to pass my fifth door this month, and I have already obtained a hint for this door. I just need someone to accompany me through it. Under no circumstances can I be injured within this door. Payment is negotiable, i.e., I am willing to pay as per the agreement. Please get back to me as soon as possible.
Lin Qiushi had at first closed out of the chat window, since he often received messages on the forum and most of them, he ignored out of sheer habit. But the user persisted. A few days later, Lin Qiushi received another message from the same user.
Please don’t ignore this. I would not have made a request of you had I not been recommended to you by a friend, who I cannot name because of confidentiality reasons. I am willing to negotiate for a higher price and as a token of my sincerity, I shall share the hint with you in advance. Yours, etc.
It was a strange message, even stranger than the first one he had received from this user. The personal claim in the message was throwing him off, because Lin Qiushi had learned to value his anonymity online ever since Ruan Nanzhu had drilled it into him, that under no circumstances, could he reveal his real identity to another person inside or outside the doors. This was one of the major taboos in the business. Many newbies fell for this trap and revealed everything about themselves to other people inside a door; only to be either killed off, their identities stolen in the real world, or worse, having their doors stolen from them. The list was practically endless. Lin Qiushi still shivered every time he remembered blurting out his real name in the very first door he had encountered. It was a good thing that the one he had blurted it out to was Ruan Nanzhu, or else he wouldn’t have lived to see this day.
But the mention of a “friend” was significant.
Lin Qiushi racked his brains for the last assignment he had undertaken through the online forum and came up blank. He made it a point never to accept requests from the same user more than once. Often, people created multiple accounts and tried to approach him that way, but Lin Qiushi did not agree to take them on once he had met them. The only exception he had ever made was for Gu Longming.
That night, Lin Qiushi wrote to Gu Longming, asking him if he had recommended anybody to him recently. His phone chimed instantly.
Linlin-ge, it slipped my mind entirely. I was supposed to ask you in advance, but I got caught up in something. I was in the hospital. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. Anyway, this girl is all right. I know her. She won’t be a deadweight (I think). Get back to me if there is anything else you need me to confirm.
There was a row of hearts below the message which Lin Qiushi resolutely ignored. He still had flashes of what Gu Longming had looked like inside the door when he had first met him.
It was… not a good image.
Clearing his throat, Lin Qiushi stared at the message some more and then clicked on the message from the other user.
Confirming a meeting was easy; all Lin Qiushi had to do was meet the clients at a café somewhere preferably in the other side of the town, and not divulge any personal details during the conversation. Usually, he conducted these meetings alone, because Ruan Nanzhu had been busy with his own clients, and was frequenting more than three doors in a week.
Just as Lin Qiushi was about to head out, Ruan Nanzhu approached him.
“Are you going out?” There was a hint of a question and reprimand all at once in Ruan Nanzhu’s tone, and Lin Qiushi started.
“I’m… I’m meeting a client this afternoon,” Lin Qiushi stammered back, not knowing why it felt like he was being schooled for something he didn’t do.
“Then I’ll go with you,” Ruan Nanzhu remarked smoothly. And that was the end of the discussion. What Ruan Nanzhu wanted, Ruan Nanzhu got.
The café was well lit, and had the aroma of freshly brewed coffee hanging around it. Most of the seats were empty, and Lin Qiushi scanned the room for his potential client. All he saw was a middle-aged man sitting with a vacant stare, ignoring his plate of pancakes and fiddling with the strap of his watch.
Lin Qiushi had an established rule for meeting clients for the first time. He asked them to sit with a single red carnation in a coffee cup. It was odd enough where there were no chances of getting mixed up, but unassuming enough that it didn’t raise any eyebrows.
Looking at the man again, Lin Qiushi frowned. There was no red carnation on the table.
“Here,” Ruan Nanzhu whispered, leaning into his ear and making Lin Qiushi shiver from the proximity. “Your client is outside,” Ruan Nanzhu said, tugging Lin Qiushi’s elbow, and only then did Lin Qiushi look out through the doors.
There was extra seating on the patio, and a woman was sitting in one of the seats, her back turned towards them. On the right side of her plate was a single red carnation in a white coffee cup.
Lin Qiushi smiled. For once, someone wasn’t lying about their identity on the forum.
“Yu Linlin,” Lin Qiushi said, walking up to her, and saw the woman lift her eyes to watch him like a cat. She was very pretty, with wide, expressive eyes and a small, pronounced mouth. While she was nowhere near Tan Zaozao’s level of looks, she still caught the eye.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” the woman, who went by Bai Baihe, said. She stood up slowly and leaned towards him as if to shake his hand, but Ruan Nanzhu had already stepped in and enclosed her hand in his.
“Ruan Baijie. We are from the same organization,” Ruan Nanzhu said to the woman whose eyebrows had shot up at being so skillfully intercepted.
Lin Qiushi was no stranger to Ruan Nanzhu acting oddly around other people, especially new clients, so he paid it no heed.
“I think we have a deal to discuss,” Lin Qiushi told her pleasantly.
The meeting went smoothly; Ruan Nanzhu did not intervene more than necessary, which set Lin Qiushi at ease. Bai Baihe was also true to her word and produced the hint slip to Lin Qiushi to examine.
There were only two words on the hint slip.
Dyatlov Incident.
The moment Ruan Nanzhu saw the slip, his expression clouded. Lin Qiushi looked at the slip, and then at Ruan Nanzhu – trying to gauge from his reaction what it meant.
“I’m afraid we can’t help you,” Ruan Nanzhu said peremptorily, meeting Bai Baihe’s gaze.
“What?” Bai Baihe shot back, her eyes widening. Even Lin Qiushi was a little taken aback.
“This is not a fifth level door,” Ruan Nanzhu said calmly, setting down the slip on the table. “You lied to us.”
At that point, Bai Baihe leaned back, squaring her shoulders against the back of her seat.
“You could figure that out from just the hint alone?” Bai Baihe said, her tone cooler than before and somehow sharper. Lin Qiushi knew at that moment, that her docile personality was a cover from the start. “As expected from Obsidian,” she remarked, and then looked back at Ruan Nanzhu.
“Obsidian does not take anyone through the sixth level door. I’m afraid we will have to politely decline your offer, Ms. Li Na.”
Bai Baihe started at the sound of what was possibly her real name, and looked around her to see if anyone overheard. “You had me investigated?” she sneered.
“I investigate all our clients,” Ruan Nanzhu told her coolly. “Right now, it’s just a warning so that you don’t get it into your head that you can get back at us for not accepting your offer. Next time, I won’t be so polite.”
“If I remember correctly,” Li Na said, looking straight at Lin Qiushi and fixing him with a long look, “my deal was with Yu Linlin, and not you, Ruan Baijie.”
Lin Qiushi was expecting Ruan Nanzhu to shut her down with another scathing remark, but instead he turned towards Lin Qiushi with an expectant look.
“What does Linlin think?” Ruan Nanzhu asked, with a trace of sweetness in his tone which even Li Na recoiled from.
“Whether or not my deal was with you,” Lin Qiushi said, looking back at her. “The point remains that you lied to me about your door. And that is unforgivable,” he said calmly.
Beside him, Ruan Nanzhu beamed.
“Entering the door is entering a life-and-death situation. If you are not honest with us now, how can we expect you to be honest with us inside it?” Lin Qiushi said, holding the eye contact.
“Fine,” Li Na said, her shoulders slumping. “But first, I need a drink.”
Turned out, Li Na had already passed her sixth door and was trying to obtain a hint slip for the seventh one. The moment that particular cat was out of the bag, Ruan Nanzhu’s attitude softened considerably.
“How did you obtain the hint slip for this door?” Ruan Nanzhu asked her, taking a sip out of his coffee. The hint slip lay weighed down by the pepper shaker that Ruan Nanzhu had placed on it. Li Na had made no effort to take it back, which, Lin Qiushi supposed, was a mark of her sincerity towards them.
“By my own abilities, of course,” Li Na replied, wrapping her fingers around the handle of her cup. Lin Qiushi’s eyes caught onto the red of her fingernails which were shaped into elongated points, and which glinted under the overhead lights.
“So did you kill off all the other people in the door, or did you hang around for them to die first?” Ruan Nanzhu said coolly.
Li Na’s eyes flickered, as if she recalled something. Then they glazed over and she looked over at Lin Qiushi. “Do I look particularly bloodthirsty as a person?” She had clearly honed in on Lin Qiushi as the weaker link, and wasted no opportunity to appeal to him.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Ruan Nanzhu said, setting his cup down on the table. “As we all know, the world within the doors is anything but ordinary.”
“Why is it so important for you to know how I obtained the hint?” Li Na said, turning to look at Ruan Nanzhu.
“Because we need to make sure that you won’t do it to us,” Ruan Nanzhu remarked, his tone calm on the surface, but Lin Qiushi could hear the undercurrent of something dangerous in his voice.
Li Na noticed it too. She took a large gulp from her cup and dabbed her lips with the napkin.
“Isn’t that why I’m hiring you? I know you don’t sell hints. But if we get through a door together, maybe you can share them with me?”
Ruan Nanzhu didn’t respond immediately. Lin Qiushi looked at him, trying to read his face, but it might as well be a blank wall. All he could see was the smooth slope of Ruan Nanzhu’s cheekbones and where it met the corner of his eye, and the pinpricks of two dark spots underneath, which seemed to move as Ruan Nanzhu suddenly spoke.
“Do you know anything about the Dyatlov Incident?”
Li Na placed both of her hands on the table and leaned towards them. “I do, but I have no idea what the conditions for death are within this door, or how to obtain the key.”
Ruan Nanzhu’s lips vanished into a thin line. Lin Qiushi didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to know that there was something about this door that Ruan Nanzhu disapproved of. That, frankly, made him all the more curious about what it was.
“Baijie, is this door especially hard to clear?” Lin Qiushi asked, leaning his head on his hands to look at Ruan Nanzhu. The other man’s expression seemed to thaw perceptibly, and he looked at Lin Qiushi before answering.
“Have you heard of the Dyatlov Pass incident in Russia? A group of hikers went missing at the foot of the northern Ural mountains, and nobody knows what happened to them. When the military and rescue team arrived, their tent was empty, ripped from within, and none of the hikers could be found. Later, the corpses started turning up in the snow, some way from the camp – all dressed in their underwear and frozen stiff.”
Ruan Nanzhu paused, and looked at Li Na to see that she was nodding.
“So they froze to death?” Lin Qiushi asked, frowning.
“That was the first conclusion, however, later investigations showed that all of the hikers had received massive blunt force trauma – the kind you get in a car crash – and some of them were missing limbs and eyes,” Ruan Nanzhu said, as if reciting everything from memory. Even though Lin Qiushi never doubted his abilities, he was still surprised to find that Ruan Nanzhu already knew all the details.
“Scavengers? Maybe they fought among themselves?” Lin Qiushi offered, refusing to believe that the answer to their deaths was simply unresolved.
Ruan Nanzhu smiled suddenly, making the corner of his eyes crinkle, and Lin Qiushi stared at them for a while before he realized what he was doing.
“A woman on that team had a missing tongue, two of the men had missing eyes, and a third had half their face missing, as if something ate it. None of the injuries are consistent with animal attacks, and the hikers had no weapons on them. It’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries,” Ruan Nanzhu remarked.
“But it won’t serve us to think that it was unsolved,” Li Na finally said, the corner of her lips curling up. “We have to solve it, because our lives depend on it.”
“Only your life depends on it,” Ruan Nanzhu corrected. “We haven’t accepted your deal yet.”
Li Na didn’t quite bare her teeth at Ruan Nanzhu, but it was close.
“What do you need from me?” Li Na said, seeing that she could not win against Ruan Nanzhu.
“If you clear this door, you have to join Obsidian,” Ruan Nanzhu replied.
Li Na visibly started, and Lin Qiushi also turned to look at Ruan Nanzhu, because that wasn’t what he was expecting!
“I thought that joining Obsidian was a privilege, not a ransom attempt,” Li Na said, once she had regained her composure.
“Like you pointed out, we don’t sell hint slips, nor do we share them with strangers. The only way you can obtain a hint slip is by joining us,” Ruan Nanzhu told her, his face impassive. It was as if he had already predicted what Li Na would say and was just waiting for her to swallow the bait.
Li Na’s face went through a riot of emotions, and her eyes bulged, but she didn’t speak at once.
“Fine,” Li Na said, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Fine. You win. It’s either your conditions or nothing at all, isn’t it? It was like that from the very beginning,” Li Na said, smiling bitterly. “I had no chance at all,” she blurted out, taking out a tissue from out of her purse and dabbing her temples.
“On the contrary,” Ruan Nanzhu said, leaning forward on the table. “If you didn’t have a chance, you wouldn’t be meeting us at all.”
Lin Qiushi shot him a betrayed look, which Ruan Nanzhu resolutely ignored.
Li Na had almost collapsed in her seat. She was starting to look unwell.
“We still have to discuss payment,” Ruan Nanzhu stated, the shameless bastard!
“Do you take payment from him, too?” Li Na said weakly, gesturing towards Lin Qiushi. “He’s a member, right? So does he pay you for taking him through the doors?”
Ruan Nanzhu suddenly smiled, and it seemed like clouds parting after the rain.
“That’s between me and him,” Ruan Nanzhu said, lowering his voice, and giving Li Na a significant look. Lin Qiushi nearly choked on his drink. Before he could respond, however, Ruan Nanzhu added, “You won’t become a member until you clear this door, so the help you receive from us still costs money.”
Li Na rolled her eyes, too tired to come up with something sarcastic.
“Bill me, do your worst,” she said, and then picked up her purse. “We’ll see each other inside the door, then.”
The week before the door was about to appear, Ruan Nanzhu suddenly disappeared. He left a message with Chen Fei that he had something important to take care of, and that he would be back soon. Lin Qiushi hardly had any communication with him, so he spent that time looking up the Dyatlov Pass incident on the internet.
On one of these occasions, he was sprawled in the living room with his laptop, resting his hand on top of Toast’s fluffy behind, and with Cheng Qianli breathing down his neck. Even though it was air-conditioned inside the house, Lin Qiushi still felt like he ought to lose some layers. Or maybe a person or two, he wasn’t very picky.
“Linlin-ge, do you know how to hike?” Cheng Qianli asked him, with his nose practically in Lin Qiushi’s neck.
Lin Qiushi nodded. He had hiked once, when he was in high school, but that was about it. Ever since he had graduated and landed a job with the web designing firm, Lin Qiushi had stopped exercising entirely. All that had changed with him joining Obsidian. Being on the brink of death does that to people, Lin Qiushi had heard.
“I heard from Fei-ge that the victims of the incident were all mauled to death. Do you know how to go up against a monster like that? I can’t even imagine how scary that’d be!”
Lin Qiushi listlessly nodded, as none of it was news to him at this point. He was still going over the details of the incident, in particular the state in which the bodies of the victims were found – since there was scarcely anything else to go on. One of them was the fact that some of the bodies were found wearing the clothes of the other team members – members who had already been dead at that time – and it seemed like none of the victims had time to put on their winter clothes before heading out into the wilderness. Lin Qiushi frowned, listing that away in his mind as a possible clue, but he would have to first confirm it with Ruan Nanzhu. The other was that two of the bodies were found near a pine tree, and the branches of that tree had snapped, suggesting that those two people had tried to climb it. The pine tree was near the camp, but it was to the south east side – so no one would be able to hear or see them even if they called for help. That was considering that there was anyone left alive at the camp in the first place.
“Ruan-ge, you’re back!” Lin Qiushi heard Cheng Qianli remark and he immediately looked up, accidentally shutting his laptop closed.
Ruan Nanzhu was walking into the living area, dressed in an immaculate grey suit with notched lapels, and his usual white shirt which was buttoned up like he had just returned from a client meeting. Lin Qiushi was about to call out to him when the words died in his throat. Because as he was walking, Ruan Nanzhu had pulled out his phone, and all Lin Qiushi could see was the bright red of his nails as he typed something on the screen.
Even Cheng Qianli had noticed.
“Ruan-ge, your nails…”
Ruan Nanzhu looked up, and finding Lin Qiushi’s eyes, he smiled, and something seemed to settle inside Lin Qiushi at that look. Only then did Ruan Nanzhu slowly look down at his hands, and then lifted his fingers, as if seeing them for the first time.
“What about them?” Ruan Nanzhu replied, and even Cheng Qianli was tongue-tied at the response. Sure, everyone at Obsidian was by now used to Ruan Nanzhu in drag, but there was a first time for everything, Lin Qiushi supposed. And right now, the sight of Ruan Nanzhu in an expensive suit which would put China’s biggest business tycoons to shame, and with bright red nails… that was enough to render anyone speechless.
“Nothing, they are just… very eye-catching,” Cheng Qianli muttered, and Lin Qiushi was about to elbow him in the ribs so that he didn’t blurt out anything else. Like –
“Ruan-ge, why did you suddenly get them?”
Lin Qiushi groaned, pulling his hands over his eyes. History was about to repeat itself.
Ruan Nanzhu stepped closer to the sofa, looking like the cat that got the cream. In fact, Chestnut got a similar look in his eyes when he was stalking one of his toys.
“I will make an appointment tomorrow. You should get them done, too.”
And there, Lin Qiushi could no longer bear to watch. Fortunately, Cheng Yixie appeared near the kitchen and walked over to them. He said a few words of greeting to Ruan Nanzhu and then dragged away his brother for something that Lin Qiushi thought suspiciously sounded like “hiding.”
But which meant that now Ruan Nanzhu’s attention was solely on Lin Qiushi.
“Do you like the color?” Ruan Nanzhu said abruptly, sitting down next to Lin Qiushi on the sofa. Lin Qiushi was scared to even breathe. He would absolutely not walk into this trap, he wouldn’t.
“It looks good,” Lin Qiushi remarked, trying to sound uninterested.
“Does it look better than Li Na’s?”
Lin Qiushi turned his head very slowly to look at Ruan Nanzhu. Seeing that he wasn’t about to respond, Ruan Nanzhu spread his fingers out on the seat, where the blood red color was even more prominent against the beige upholstery.
“I thought you liked it,” Ruan Nanzhu murmured, almost to himself. “You like red. The red carnation, does it mean anything to you?”
Lin Qiushi started, not realizing that Ruan Nanzhu had been observing him this closely.
“The carnation flower has a very distinct shape,” Lin Qiushi found himself saying. It was almost as if whenever Ruan Nanzhu asked him a question, he was bound to answer. “I used it in one of my web graphics, and it kind of stuck, I suppose? And it’s not very common in this city, so I didn’t think anyone would trace it back to me.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Ruan Nanzhu softly responded.
Lin Qiushi stared at him and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“What does it mean to you? Not what you think it should mean,” Ruan Nanzhu told him. “Where did you first see it?”
Lin Qiushi frowned, because something niggled at the back of his mind, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Then it suddenly came back to him. “There was a dried carnation in a photo album at my grandparents’ place. I think it was red, but it had faded to a sort of brown shade, so I don’t really know. My grandmother said that it was from my mother,” Lin Qiushi said, almost bewildered that he had never made the association before. “I don’t remember her at all,” he added, to Ruan Nanzhu’s unvoiced question.
Ruan Nanzhu’s eyes gleamed, but he said nothing.
“We should prepare for Li Na’s door. It’s going to appear in a few days.”
Lin Qiushi nodded, still uneasy at having said so much to Ruan Nanzhu.