For the first few seconds, Jin Xueli stared across the room at her own back — the other her, crouched over a flame — while her mind detonated like a nuclear warhead, leaving nothing behind but fallout. Her thoughts broke apart like shrapnel, drifting and scattered, too fragmented to take any shape.
Why did she have two separate lines of memory?
In the first, the night she'd run into her stalker Anthony, there had been no car crash behind the bar. She'd never mentioned owning a Hunting Knife, so Anthony had never had the chance to "borrow" it.
She had entered the Nest intending to retrieve something she could use to deal with Anthony — only for things to go sideways. At the chalk-drawn house, a resident had copied her appearance entirely.
That resident believed, with absolute conviction, that it was the real Jin Xueli.
Even the absence of her backpack, phone, and Hunting Knife had an explanation ready-made in its mind: a scuffle before they boarded the cab had thrown it into such a rush that it had simply forgotten to grab them.
What made the situation truly maddening was this: if the resident was so certain it was the real Jin Xueli, then she had no way of ruling out the possibility that she was the resident. She had assumed that having the phone and the Hunting Knife on her meant she must be the original — but what if she had simply forgotten how she'd taken those things? What if the memory of wresting them away from the real Jin Xueli had been wiped clean?
After all, hadn't a stretch of memory been taken from her the moment she'd gotten into the cab? What if that missing chunk was precisely the memory of her seizing those belongings after becoming Jin Xueli? Then she'd have not a single scrap of evidence to comfort herself with.
Between the Jin Xueli lying on the ground and the one sitting before the candle — which one was the resident?
No… that question was a bottomless rabbit hole. Fall in and you'd never climb out. She could set it aside for now. Better to assume she was the real Jin Xueli and trace the timeline from there.
After the resident left, she'd called a second cab. Following the taxi rules to the letter, she had tracked the resident all the way to the Museum of Modern Art. In the basement, Jin Xueli had waited for her moment and driven her Hunting Knife into the resident's throat.
None of what she'd hoped for had happened.
The resident stood there, both hands pressed over the wound. She had glanced at it — too briefly to see whether it bled — and then she'd lost any chance to look more carefully. Because the resident had turned to face her and smiled, baring a set of teeth she knew all too well.
"Since you copied my body, your throat should split open too."
The first memory line ended with her neck tearing open, blood spraying in every direction, her body crumpling to the floor like a smashed stone statue.
Jin Xueli knew she had died.
Yet death was not her ending. After dying, she had found herself inside a second memory line.
That same night she'd encountered Anthony, a black SUV had come barreling straight at her; she barely dodged it before it slammed into the back door. They had started talking about the driver being a bodyguard, and somewhere in that conversation she'd mentioned she had a Hunting Knife — which Anthony had soon talked her into handing over.
When she'd entered the Nest, Jin Xueli had muttered a quiet curse to herself. One less weapon. It left her feeling exposed.
From there, the second memory line ran parallel to the first: she heard the broadcast, stepped onto the chalk-drawn house, called the cab, got copied by the resident — the only difference came at the very end. When the second memory line closed, she was lying on the floor, eyes open.
Staring at the figure silhouetted against the candle, Jin Xueli eased herself off the floor as silently as she could. The tiles were smooth and cold beneath her, unmarked by a single drop of blood.
The second memory line had overwritten the first, becoming the true, most recent version of what had happened. Which meant she had never stabbed the resident, and no one-liner had ever slit her throat.
She didn't dare straighten up fully for fear of being spotted. Instead she moved on all fours, retreating behind a pillar, clamping down on her breath so hard that her chest began to ache with a deep, hollow throb. She had to hold it in — she was genuinely afraid she might start sobbing without meaning to.
…How does a single sentence slit someone's throat?
Compared to having a mouth open across her neck, she honestly couldn't decide which terrified her more: being killed again out of nowhere — or discovering that she wasn't a real human being at all and was condemned to haunt the Nest as a resident forever.
If she wasn't a resident, then why had her throat so obediently mirrored the other one's wound?
Not one of these questions had an answer she could reach.
Back pressed flat against the pillar, she shut her eyes and covered her mouth, willing herself to curl inward until she became something too small for the Nest to ever notice.
No. Stop. Think this through calmly…
There were several pieces of circumstantial evidence pointing to the other one being the resident. First: it had no phone, no Hunting Knife, no backpack. Second: based on what she knew from the first memory line, it had broken the taxi rules after getting in — and yet it had gotten out just fine.
Third — and this was the most damning piece of all — the throat is a thin sheath of skin wrapped around arteries, nerves, blood vessels, a windpipe, and a voicebox. If a living person got stabbed there, could they really treat the wound themselves and walk away as though nothing had happened?
Jin Xueli steadied herself a fraction and peered out from behind the pillar.
The resident was still seated in front of the candle, fiddling impatiently with the flame controls, clearly frustrated by how slowly the wax was melting. The candle was softening and drooping in the heat, forming a pool of nearly transparent wax suspended in the air — Candle Tears. From this distance, Jin Xueli could just barely make out a voice from within them, someone calling out "Mr. Westley."
The candle had to be the key. It was why she'd come back from the dead, why two separate memory lines even existed.
The broadcast had described it as an Illusion of extraordinary power. That had turned out to be an understatement — something capable of pulling a person back from death had power that was nothing short of staggering.
But why was the resident so fixated on it?
Jin Xueli scanned the room and noticed that the far wall of the gallery was covered in a large block of exhibition text. Illusions in the Nest were almost always accompanied by some form of description nearby — that had to be it.
The problem was that the text was on the opposite side of the gallery, and to reach it she'd have to pass directly behind the resident.
No matter how she looked at it, she had to deal with the resident first.
Regardless of whether she was actually the real Jin Xueli — once the "Jin Xueli" beside that candle was dead, she would naturally become the real one by default. Right?
When survival was on the line, it turned out that even certain fundamental, principled things could be quietly glossed over. Jin Xueli had never expected to find herself thinking this way — not until today.
Still. The resident could kill her with a single sentence. How exactly was she supposed to kill it?
Her eyes swept the floor and landed on her hiking backpack, slumped nearby, its opening sagging loosely to one side and revealing a rolled-up hand towel and various odds and ends inside.
"Where did it go,"
The resident was still fixed on the Candle Tears, murmuring to itself with an edge of irritation. "He said something important just now, I'm sure of it… Where was it…"
While its attention was entirely on the candle, Jin Xueli slipped off her shoes and padded toward the backpack in her socked feet, not making a sound.
As she passed the bag, she reached in and hooked out a long hand towel, then retreated quickly to the far end of the hall. She didn't dare stand out in the open beneath the exhibition text — instead she ducked behind another piece on display at the far end of the room; it was far enough from the candle, and it was made of long wooden rods bundled together and radiating outward in a spiral, which was admittedly striking to look at even if it was hard to say what exactly it was supposed to be. It was just barely enough to conceal a woman crouching behind it.
Sooner or later the resident was going to notice she had vanished from the floor.
Even if it was absorbed in the candle for now, it wouldn't be long before it realized that the wound on its throat was gone — that the damage had been erased. This was the only window she had to strike first. The question was how to use it.
Should she take this chance to read the candle's description, or move on the resident right now?
If she struck first, could the candle somehow become the resident's trump card to turn the tables on her? Had the one-line throat-slash from before had anything to do with the candle?
The frustrating thing was that in the first timeline, when she'd followed the resident down here, she'd never had a chance to actually read the candle's description.
No one, standing at a fork in the road, could ever see the full chain of dominoes their choice would set falling. Jin Xueli certainly hadn't anticipated that going into the Nest to deal with Anthony would lead to hearing about an Illusion — or that searching for that Illusion would get her copied by a resident.
So which path did she take?
After a moment's hesitation, driven by some instinct she couldn't quite name, Jin Xueli pulled out her phone, silenced the shutter, aimed it at the exhibition text on the far wall, zoomed in, and took several shots in quick succession.
Before she could enlarge the photos to read the description properly, the resident suddenly stood up. Her whole body seized, shrinking in on itself, as she peered through the gaps between the wooden rods and fixed her eyes on its back.
It hadn't noticed anything yet. It seemed dissatisfied with the candle, placed its hand near the flame, moved a few steps as though searching for something, then crouched back down and snapped the flame control open with a click.
The fire swayed like underwater grass caught in a current, lighting up a pair of eyes and a face that were her own.
Jin Xueli let out a slow, quiet breath and enlarged the first photo, reading quickly.
The first photo showed the text closest to her position — the writing was blurry, but legible enough to get the gist. By the time she finished reading it, her mouth had gone dry: no wonder she'd been pulled back from death at the end of the first timeline. The resident had inadvertently rewritten history. She had never once imagined that something like this could exist inside the Nest.
If she could bring it back to Blackmoor City…
She tapped to the second photo, but the angle and distance were worse than the first, and the text was nearly impossible to make out.
It didn't matter. The most important thing was already clear: the candle was powerful enough to reverse history itself, but it couldn't be weaponized.
Then she would go with the original plan.
Jin Xueli made her decision. Two fingers pressed down, and the screen went dark.
In the sudden black of the locked screen, a second face looked back at her.