This happens to people sometimes—for example, when they run into the hardest question while taking a test, they know perfectly well that they’ve seen it before, remember where and when and in what posture they saw it, but they’ve forgotten the contents of what they saw. 

Kou Tong sat on the cruise ship with the other two people of unknown origin beside him. No one spoke. The three of them sat around a small round table, one person to a chair. There was also a very curious little dog; its moist eyes were fixed on Kou Tong and seemed to hold some wariness. 

There was a bouquet of flowers on the table and a small teacup in front of each person. Kou Tong suddenly felt that he had entered Alice’s Wonderland, and the two people next to him were alternate versions of the March Hare and Mad Hatter. 

He took a glance. The “magician” had at some point exchanged the lilies in his hands for roses, and the roses embroidered on his clothes had changed to lilies. Kou Tong hadn’t noticed the mystical moment when this had occurred—it was as if it had always been like that. The flowers seemed to have grown on him, so natural that it made people take no notice of them. 

“What are they?” Kou Tong broke the silence. 

The magician explained, “These flowers are a philosophy. Roses are red, symbolizing fiery life. Lilies are white, symbolizing the other extreme—death. Or rather, they are all flowing, ice-cold things. Life and death are constantly trading places. They don’t stand still for a moment. They change at every moment. This symbolizes the innateness of death and new beginnings. They both happen in an instant.”

Kou Tong thought that philosophy was a very pretentious thing, but he didn’t laugh now, and he didn’t nod—because after hearing it, he thought that what this man said actually had some merit. 

The magician continued: “This is natural. Creation must be followed by destruction. They accompany and produce each other, unto infinity. Humans have a symbol to express this meaning—it is ‘∞’. Eternal exchange between the two ends—that’s infinity.” 

Kou Tong frowned, becoming increasingly unable to evaluable whether this man was after all a conscious subject or the product of some conscious subject’s projection. 

So he asked, “You mean that there’s nothing we can keep?” 

The magician said, “Even we ourselves are constantly dying and being reborn, walking on a never-ending timeline. How can we keep other things?” 

Something in Kou Tong’s heart moved faintly. He asked, “If you change yourself, are you still yourself?” 

The magician didn’t respond, but the person wearing the hat laughed and asked, “Why must you know this answer?” 

Before Kou Tong could speak, the person wearing the hat lowered their head, making their face appear under the hat, revealing a somewhat melancholy expression. 

“If you yourself acknowledge it, then you are yourself. If you don’t acknowledge it, then you aren’t yourself. That’s no bad thing. But whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s still your fate.” In a slightly callous tone, they said, “Look at us, for example. Each of us holds a portion of this world’s secrets, but we must implement our master’s orders to the letter. That’s fate.” 

Kou Tong noticed the word they had used. “‘Us’?” 

The person wearing the hat extended a finger and looked straight at Kou Tong with their always melancholy eyes. They said, “Shh—” 

Kou Tong was speechless, feeling that this scene was very familiar. It was a little like Old Man Ji mystifying to trick people out of their money. 

The atmosphere among the three of them once again became strangely silent. Kou Tong was examining the other two. He found that the two of them were like programs; when they were left untouched, they sat there unmoving; even the rate at which they drank tea was very fixed. 

It seemed that they had to be some conscious subject’s products, Kou Tong thought. Furthermore, they didn’t seem like projections of people in real life; they must correspond to some object in their own space. 

A cartoon? 

No… Kou Tong quickly rejected this idea. That wouldn’t be it. 

He often had adolescents in need of counseling, so for ease of communication, he had skimmed through their hobbies for understanding, full of sports stars, entertainment stars, and all kinds of cartoon characters, and he didn’t remember any cartoon with people like this in it. 

So what was it…? 

There was an inescapable sort of mysticism about them. Their clothes and ornaments were complex. Some of it was symbolism with very obvious semiotic meaning, while some was veiled hints. This wasn’t Kou Tong’s line of expertise, so he couldn’t understand it very clearly. 

Were they the props of occultism, or items related to some religion? 

The ship’s speed suddenly slackened. The little dog that had been staring at Kou Tong all along abruptly raised its front paws and said, “Woof!” 

The person wearing the hat let go, letting it jump out of their arms. Kou Tong turned his head and saw a little island already in front of him. The island was full of white mist, its vegetation and hills faintly discernible. Only when the wind blew did some traces appear. 

Amid the clouds and mist appeared a huge white stone. It overlooked the sea, like a steadfast guard. Behind it were two enormous pillars, one black and one white, like an unfinished arch. 

There was a woman standing there, wearing a robe and a strange tall hat. Her arms were open, but there was no expression on her face. Looking from far away, Kou Tong thought she was a statue. 

Only when he came close did he find that she was a living person. 

Whatever the woman’s ancestry was, the color of her eyes was extremely pale. In the light weirdly twisted by the mist, they actually seemed to be a little transparent. 

The magician and the person wearing the hat stood on the ship, watching Kou Tong disembark and walk towards the two stone pillars. They didn’t show any sign of accompanying him. 

Only when Kou Tong walked up to the woman did her eyes turn slowly, as though there was a program in her body that had been activated. She looked profoundly at Kou Tong and said, “Please come this way with me.” 

Hearing her voice made Dr. Kou with his unusually strong mind and unusually coarse nerves become lost in thought—if forced to describe it, this was a voice that came from Heaven; a mortal couldn’t explain the mystery and beauty contained in it. The woman in the robe was constantly surrounded by mist. No matter how close he was to her, he still couldn’t see her whole body. Even the mist seemed alive. 

Seven conscious subjects had been pulled into the unusual program’s space, but never mind Kou Tong and the other two, who had landed in the same place—even Manman and He Xiaozhi, who had been added later, hadn’t displayed any particular consciousness area. They had instead by some strange and harmonious means mixed in with the conscious projections of the others. 

But this person was different. He or she seemed to have occupied the whole nameless island, far from the mainland and entirely different. 

Kou Tong couldn’t resist remembering the description Manman had passed on—“intruders.” Only a person who thought they were the master of some place would use this term. 

He turned to look and found that the way he had come was invisible. Like surplus cotton, the mist snugly covered the whole island. In that moment, a thought suddenly crossed Kou Tong’s mind—how was Huang Jinchen going to follow? 

After following the woman for a long time, Kou Tong at last came to a castle—it was really a castle. For some reason, this thing gave him a very strange feeling. It seemed out of place among the air of mysticism covering the whole nameless island. It stood there toweringly, as if it had come from the profane world, like a banner to pay tribute to the theological domain. 

The castle doors opened before Kou Tong. The woman’s footsteps paused. She seemed ready to reenter her NPC state. Kou Tong quickly seized the opportunity to ask a question: “Should I keep going in?” 

The woman’s inorganic eyes turned and fell on his face. She nodded in silence. 

Kou Tong frowned. Improvising, he said, “Lovely lady, your special hat looks a little familiar to me. Have we met before?” 

Though the woman in the tall hat was an intelligent NPC, there were still things outside the scope of her programming. 

She only looked speechlessly at Kou Tong for a while, not reacting with any anger towards these words that were practically flirtatious. She stood there silently meeting Kou Tong’s eyes. 

Kou Tong sighed, thinking, She still won’t talk. It seems that this NPC isn’t as intelligent as the two before. Then he turned and went into the gloomy castle. 

Behind him, the castle doors slowly shut on their own. Just then, the woman, who was nearly cut off from him by the doors spoke. Still using that miraculous floating voice, she said, “Because we are everywhere.” 

Kou Tong quickly turned his head and saw a familiar melancholy on the woman’s face, like some god whose wings had been broken, imprisoned in some place. She was beautiful and mysterious, but she didn’t make you uneasy. There was a maternal warmth about her. Her fingers were clasped in front of her chest and her eyes lowered, as if she was speaking a blessing no one could hear. 

Like some sacred high priestess…

When this thought appeared, it was as if Kou Tong had been struck by lightning—a magician, a high priestess, a man with a tall hat who was like a wandering sage, the wheel of fortune symbolizing strange fates…signs full of symbolism, a strong tint of mysticism—these were tarot cards! 

These were playing cards that originated in 15th-century Renaissance Italy. Strictly speaking, they were a medium for conveying a certain type Western mystical philosophy; you could also say they were the product of the popularity of Neoplatonism. There were different editions, and the different editions had different images on the cards; and as for the interpretation of tarot, opinions could also be said to vary. 

Later they had been used as a kind of psychological guidance tool for enlightenment…and still later, they had somehow become a fortune-telling prop enjoyed by adolescents. 

They included the Major Arcana, composed of twenty-one numbered cards and one joker. 

There was the Magician, the High Priestess, the Hierophant, and so on—thinking about it now, the “Mad Hatter” with the dog perhaps represented the Major Arcana’s Fool. 

Each tarot card image had been projected. Each card had an intrinsic meaning. Supposedly they were also inextricably linked to Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. They embodied the philosophical viewpoint of some other culture’s ancient paganism. This viewpoint wasn’t the conscious subject’s own ideas; it was something they had passively accepted through “common sense.” 

Kou Tong quickly passed through the castle and at last stopped in front of a door. 

Before he could move, the door opened automatically. There was an enormous arch inside, with that super-motor-powered wheel of fortune like a perpetual motion machine carved on it. Beneath it were rolled up curtains. There was hardly any light. On a tall chair sat a short, thin figure wrapped in a black robe. 

Kou Tong saw that this was probably a girl. 

She raised her head and looked at Kou Tong with a bone-chilling gaze. Then she softly said, “Dr. Kou, it’s been a long time. Do you still remember?” 

This form of address made Kou Tong think that this was likely a patient he had handled before, or a patient’s relative. But at first, he couldn’t remember who she was. He looked her over and gestured. “Could you…move that thing covering your face?” 

She laughed, still staring at him with that almost scorching gaze. She slowly rolled up her veil and softly explained, “This is only for the purity of the divination. You’ve seen my servants?” 

Kou Tong’s eyes suddenly opened wide. He blurted out, “You’re…Qin Qin!” 

As soon as he said this, Kou Tong regretted it—because he saw the expression on Qin Qin’s face change to radiant delight as though lit up. 

This girl wasn’t a patient he had handled. When he had seen her, the Projector had been in its trial stage, and Kou Tong had gone to one of his professors to collect parameters. In that professor’s waiting room, he had seen this special patient. 

This had been…roughly five or six years ago. The person in front of him had been a little girl of fourteen or fifteen. Adolescent hormones had made her rapidly develop; her figure had appeared a little round and plump. When he saw her, she was sitting alone on the couch. There was also a veil covering her face. She was toying with a deck of tarot cards. 

Her mother was saying something to the professor outside. Kou Tong had come rushing back because of some materials he had left behind. He saw her there all on her own, playing with her stuff like a overaged sufferer of autism, so he had naturally said hello and poured a cup of water for her. 

Then he found his stuff and got ready to leave but turned his head to find the little girl looking straight at him. 

“Mom says I’m crazy,” Kou Tong remembered the little girl saying. 

Kou Tong’s footsteps paused. He leaned down and asked her in a soft voice, “Why?” 

The girl callously said, “Because she’s the one who’s crazy. She won’t believe what I say. No matter what I do, she screams and gets scared about everything.” 

This sort of parent wasn’t without precedent. Though Kou Tong didn’t especially believe it, he nodded understandingly and tentatively asked, “Is it because you’re always wearing a veil? Some grown-ups can’t deal with the fashionable ways you young people dress up.” 

The girl softly explained, “This is only for the purity of the divination.” 

Kou Tong hadn’t discussed anything much with her before the professor came rushing over. What had made an unusually strong impression on him was that after he had gone a few steps, he had unconsciously turned his head and met the girl’s eyes through the glass window. The look in the girl’s eyes was like a starving person staring at a steak. It was a little bone-chilling. 

Only long after, in a casual remark, did the professor tell him that this girl named Qin Qin had delusional disorder. 

And now, after all this time, she could still precisely recognize him, and that look of a hungry ghost staring at a steak hadn’t changed… 

Kou Tong suddenly had a bad feeling.