Daomu Biji: Restart

Poker-Face walked towards me with Liu Sang on his back. He didn't have any candles on him and his footsteps were light as he came out of the darkness.

The leather figurine woman stood between me and him, and I narrowed my eyes as I suddenly came up with a strange idea. If he couldn't see the leather figurine woman, would he pass right through it?

That would definitely be an amazing sight, because this leather figurine woman was real to me and I could even touch it. But he couldn’t see it at all. If it really was a ghost, then that meant the two of them would overlap when they came into contact with each other.

If that was the case, then I was probably crazy and the dinglan ruler in my hand was definitely a hallucination. Maybe even the Poker-Face summoned by the dinglan ruler was also a figment of my imagination. If so, that meant Liu Sang was also fake and I could kill the bastard myself.

Or maybe Poker-Face just couldn’t see this leather figurine woman and would end up bumping into it when he came over. If he really couldn’t see these things, then that meant there was a difference between our eyes.

In fact, there was a more profound explanation. Some people would selectively ignore certain information when encountering severe trauma. When reading newspapers and chatting with others, that person’s brain wouldn’t recognize and process the traumatizing information.

I remembered that there was an overseas case where a mentally ill patient never believed that she had a daughter. Although her daughter was always by her side, she never saw her. She couldn't even see anything that was related to her daughter. There was a documentary that recorded this process in detail and I remembered it was called "The Disappearing Apple" (1). The daughter conducted a very simple experiment where she would touch the apple her mother was eating. As a result of this, the apple disappeared from her mother’s perception.

The mother panicked all day, thinking that there was another person in the house. Since all kinds of things suddenly disappeared, she thought she was being haunted. But it was actually her brain blocking a specific message.

But that kind of situation was often due to a traumatic fear of a specific concept in the subconscious, which caused the brain to take protective measures.

Later, it was revealed that she had a trauma revolving around a liver transplant when her daughter fell ill. She had been too afraid to give her liver to her daughter at the time. Although her daughter was able to get another liver, the immense guilt caused her to suffer a mental illness where her brain blocked all information related to her daughter.

I didn’t believe Poker-Face couldn’t see these leather figurines because of guilt. If anything, I thought it was a problem that stemmed from poisoning.

I was trapped in my own vicious circle of logic and couldn’t seem to figure it out when I noticed Poker-Face suddenly stop right in front of the leather figurine woman and reach out. He then quickly went around it and came up to me before putting Liu Sang down by the tomb passage wall opposite Fatty.

Fuck me, I said to myself. Didn't you say you couldn't see it? Are you two messing with me?

"What's there?" He immediately asked me.

"Why are you avoiding it if you can't even see what's there?" I asked as I looked at Liu Sang. His fingernails were all torn. I didn’t know where he had been trapped, but he must have been suffering a breakdown for a long time and had been scratching the stone wall with his hands.

Poker-Face didn't look at me, but went over to check Fatty's pulse. "I can't see it. I can only feel it," he said faintly.

I was just about to ask him what was going on when I suddenly saw his eyes. They were completely clouded and there was something covering the corneas.

"What’s that?" I asked in horror. I wanted to tear it off, but he immediately avoided my outstretched hand.

He usually reacted very fast, but the slowness just now immediately had me coming to my senses. Just as I was about to start asking questions, I saw him approach Liu Sang's ear with the rhinoceros horn candle. As the flame got close, those little hands fell off one by one.

Just like Fatty, Liu Sang didn't respond. "It's still deep in his ears,” I said to him. “You have to suck it out…" Poker-Face glanced at me.

When I looked at him carefully, I found that the things covering his corneas were really a bunch of insects the size of sesame seeds.

****

TN Notes:

(1) I think this is a fake documentary the author made up (or he remembered the name wrong lol). I wasn’t finding anything.