Cough-cough-cough-cough… These were Dr. Kou and Master Huang, dismally climbing out of the car. 

Dr. Kou said, “I feel like I’ve crawled out of a crematorium.” 

Huang Jinchen’s face was covered in ash, but he didn’t even try to wipe it. He clearly no longer wanted to show his face. He said adoringly to his temporary superior, “Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been entwined in the same funerary casket?” 

Kou Tong said, “You fucking…” 

Huang Jinchen showed two teeth in a crass, monkey-like grin. 

Kou Tong continued, “In life, the real estate market has forced me to live in an apartment like a little chicken coop. Am I supposed to sleep in a bunk bed when I’m dead, too?” 

Huang Jinchen’s face, which had been gloomy at home, now showed a smile as the haze dispersed. Kou Tong turned his head and looked in anguish at the wrecked car. He thought that it had to be fully insured, or else how would he dare to go home having done this to the car? Wouldn’t he have to sleep out in the street from then on?

These crows made of paper seemed to be of a mind to speed the flames. Though the two people they had launched a sneak attack on were standing not far away, they took no notice of them, throwing themselves screaming into the towering flames and turning into pile after pile of ash, fluttering like black butterflies. Not far away, fire alarms sounded. Kou Tong frowned and pulled Huang Jinchen into the broken-down car. 

The car started. Huang Jinchen, finally remembering, said, “Oh, right, what did you just call me?” 

Kou Tong answered candidly: “Huang Er-Pang.” 

Huang Jinchen frowned, pinched his own firmly-muscled arm, and said with a sigh, “That’s the first time anyone’s called me that—why am I Huang Er-Pang?” 

Kou Tong turned his head, gaze making a circle of his waist, and commented: “Your waist is too thick. A hand estimate exceeds thirty inches.” 

“It’s muscle!” Huang Jinchen protested. “You can’t ask a man with an eight-pack to have a tiny waist! What have you been fucking?” 

Kou Tong said, “I like slender beautiful boys and big-chested, long-legged ladies—stop squabbling, your style doesn’t suit the era’s aesthetic tastes. If you’re really so jealous, hurry up and lose weight.” 

“I’m not fat! I’m solid!” 

“All right, all right. I know you’re not fat, you’re just big-boned…” 

They quickly left this troubled place. Huang Jinchen said, “So if what we see are crows, and what other people see are clouds, how do you explain that scene just now? Do you think that person the little girl said is putting on a show is nearby?” 

Kou Tong thought about it, drove the car into an alley, stopped it by the roadside, took two moist towelettes from the car’s CD storage compartment, and gave one to Huang Jinchen. “Wipe the ash off your face. We’ll think of a way to go back and check.” 

Huang Jinchen frowned, sniffing. “It’s perfumed, too? It really is a woman’s car.” 

“Enough, be happy with what you have. Stop making trouble.” Kou Tong swiped at his face, took his glasses out of his pocket, and put them on, taking on his beast in human clothing look. “I didn’t get this treatment when I was little.” 

Huang Jinchen looked at him curiously. Kou Tong mimed spitting at the wrinkled towelette in his hand. “Then she’d grip me by my youthful neck and use the tissue dripping with saliva to rub my face. For two weeks afterwards, I’d get flashbacks whenever I saw a towel while washing my face.” 

This time, it wasn’t a haze dispersing; Huang Jinchen rocked back and forth. 

Kou Tong shook his head and got out of the car. His bitter expression quickly vanished. The eyes hidden behind his glasses curved slightly, a not very visible smile appearing. 

This is how it should be, Dr. Kou thought. Whose benefit am I looking gloomy for? What will I do if I scare the kids? 

The two of them quickly went down the alley and passed through a row of houses. Kou Tong grabbed the roof of an old-fashioned garage and nimbly flipped up, but Huang Jinchen hesitated, only clinging to the wall to follow in his footsteps—Kou Tong was deliberately standing in a place where he was exposed, the better to lure that “person” out, while all Huang Jinchen had to do was stand hidden in the shadows. 

They didn’t exchange a single surplus sentence, but they were unusually well-coordinated.

Huang Jinchen calmed down and glanced at Kou Tong’s figure out of the corner of his eye. He suddenly thought, Was he deliberately cheering me up just now? 

When this thought flew by, Huang Jinchen’s eyes flashed. He turned his head away somewhat unnaturally, not looking at Kou Tong again. He suddenly thought, a little helplessly, This person… How can he be like this? 

A man like this, calmly evaluated, was like an antique from a distant era, serene and significant, costly in a low-key way, but he didn’t have that kind of superior coldness. Even in the darkest places, he could still calmly survive, letting off a light that cheered others. 

This was a man who, even facing the abyss, would still go barefoot, cross one leg over the other, and make some weird joke. 

It wasn’t that suffering couldn’t touch him; it was just that he could always handle heavy matters with ease. 

Huang Jinchen thought, Isn’t he afraid…that people will become infatuated with him? 

The firefighting team had come, but the expanse of crows was gone. They were circling in the air, still blotting out the sky, moving from time to time. The ground was covered in black ashes where the fire had been, blackening half the wall nearby. With no more kindling, the intensity of the fire was quickly controlled by the firefighters. 

But Kou Tong’s footsteps suddenly stopped—he raised his head and saw a man standing on a nearby rooftop. 

Having seen this person, Kou Tong at last understood what Manman had meant by “looks like he came out of a piece of paper.” This person seemed to have traveled from a two-dimensional world. He was completely at odds with his surroundings. Though his feet weren’t floating over the ground, you could still see it at a glance. 

The man was wearing a very complicated robe. The hem, like Manman had said, had big flowers embroidered on it—though they weren’t homely China roses; they were big, flaming red roses, and he was holding a bouquet of lilies in his hands. There was also a playing card in his collar. 

He really seemed like…he had escape from a mental asylum. 

Huang Jinchen’s voice came from Kou Tong’s feet. He asked, “What did the little girl say he does? Magic tricks?” 

Kou Tong’s eyes were fixed on the man unblinkingly. He gave an affirmative. Huang Jinchen thought about it. “Why does he seem like a shaman to me?” 

Black mist rose from beneath the shaman’s feet. Crows gradually flew out of the black mist, slowly winding around him. This made him look like a walking smoke bomb. The crows flew higher and higher, until finally they rose over his neck, leaving only his face revealed. 

The man’s lips nervily turned up, squeezing out a smile, signaling to Kou Tong from afar as if inviting him to follow. 

Kou Tong hesitated for three seconds, then decisively followed. 

At the foot of the wall beneath his feet, there wasn’t a trace of Huang Jinchen. 

Kou Tong followed the strange man, neither fast nor slow. He found that the man must have intended to invite him—as soon as his footsteps slowed, the man would correspondingly wait for him. He has heading precisely in the direction of the “nameless island” Manman had spoken of. 

What did this person actually represent? 

Was this the appearance some person had fantasized for himself, or was “he” himself the product of a fantasy? 

The ordinary person, under ordinary circumstances, has a fairly accurate self-image. In everyday terms, they recognize the person in the mirror. Even if they don’t like their appearance all that much, they still psychologically accept indicators like male or female, tall or short, fat or thin. 

Consequently, though Manman was still a child and He Xiaozhi, in his confusion, had had attention to spare for nothing but despair and hadn’t even noticed that the world he was in had changed to another dimension, both of them had still maintained their original appearances. 

But in terms of common sense, the ordinary person wouldn’t believe that rats could talk, that paper crows could become a type of biological weapon. So apart from Manman, the others who were grown up didn’t accept these absurd facts due to their unconscious minds, so unlike the child, they had been unable to detect the rats’ observation, and it was hard for them to “hear” what they were discussing. 

In summary, the people and things that appeared in this space were connected to the conscious subjects and must be “assigning the ideal living conditions, within the scope of acceptability” to a conscious subject. 

If there really was another conscious subject on the nameless island, then how unusual must this person’s “common sense” be to make these products from the 2.5th dimension? 

Or perhaps…the conscious subject had some kind of cognitive impairment? 

Kou Tong’s heart sank. 

After walking this way for a long time, they reached the pier. The “magician” suspended in the air like a big kite at last found his airport and landed. Another character from the 2.5th dimension followed him. It was unclear if this was a man or a woman. They wore a very exaggerated headdress on their head, like a citizen of some remote ethnic minority on the mainland, carrying a walking stick over their shoulder, holding a little stray dog of no distinguishable breed. 

The little dog said, “Woof!” 

Kou Tong’s footsteps paused. He frowned as he looked at the cruise ship behind the two of them—this thing really was dazzling. This cruise ship didn’t have an ordinary rubber life buoy hanging from it like ordinary ships. Instead, it had a wheel made of unknown metal with all kinds of complicated things drawn on them—animals and plants, as well as people and imps. 

The person holding the dog and the “magician” stood one on each side, making inviting gestures towards Kou Tong like greeters—if they had had lines now, they probably would have been “Welcome, welcome, our warmest welcome.” 

Kou Tong tentatively asked, “Where does this ship go?” 

He hadn’t expected that the person holding the dog really would answer—Kou Tong had thought that neither of them could speak at all. This person said, “It goes to our country of dreams.” 

When they spoke, there was a strange cadence in their voice like singing. 

“It takes visitors from far away in time and space for an audience with our master,” the “magician” said. Wave after wave of fragrance came from the lilies he was holding—Kou Tong took a deliberate glance at these flowers and found that they didn’t need to be watered; they were still extremely fresh. 

The little dog added: “Woof!” 

Huang Jinchen had long ago gone off somewhere. They currently didn’t have communication tools to be used in the course of carrying out an assignment, but Kou Tong wasn’t especially worried about him—if even 11235 couldn’t be depended upon, then there was no one dependable on earth. 

He decided to go himself and have a look at what problem this “conscious subject” had. So he cheerfully walked onto that huge and mysterious cruise ship. 

The wheel on it began to turn strangely, making Kou Tong remember an incomprehensible cartoon he had seen when he was very little. There was a bizarre teenage girl in it who was always harping on about how “the wheel of fortune has started to turn”—from beginning to end, she had said it countless times, as though the wheel of fortune were a ferris wheel that sold tickets twenty-four hours a day; therefore, his impression of it was especially deep. 

He quickly raised his head, feeling that he seemed to have seen these two people from the 2.5th dimension somewhere before.