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8、The Ferry of Suffocation ...
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“Here are your diagnoses.”
The doctor’s voice was smooth, clinical, inhuman.
“Patient One, Gu Qingchen: suffocation.”
“Patient Two, Xiao Jingyan: cardiac arrest.”
At once, both of their tickets shifted, black letters etching across the slips: the way they would die.
The room dissolved.
Light snapped, sound split, and the floor vanished beneath them.
They were standing on a ferry, steel deck slick underfoot, the horizon nothing but an endless gray ocean. The sky was blank, neither day nor night, only the heavy pall of overcast eternity.
Then the deck tilted.
The ferry was gone.
Water slammed around them, cold, swallowing, infinite.
Xiao hit the sea with a soldier’s reflex, lungs clamping, muscles coiling. But above the crash of waves he heard Gu’s voice, raw and strangled:
“I can’t swim—!”
The words cut off as the water surged over their heads.
Through the blur of bubbles, Xiao saw him sinking—straight down. Gu’s body didn’t thrash, didn’t claw for the surface. His limbs hung loose, his eyes closed, his face pale and serene, as though unconscious. As though already dead.
“Gu!” Xiao’s shout tore from his throat, swallowed at once by the sea.
He dove. Years of military training took over—precise strokes, lungs steady, body streamlined against the current. He reached Gu, grabbed him under the arms.
And almost drowned from the weight.
Gu looked fragile on land, slim to the point of delicacy. But in the water his body was impossibly heavy, dragging Xiao down, as if every ounce of his existence had been turned into stone.
Still, Xiao gritted his teeth and fought upward. His chest burned, his heart thudded, his muscles ached from the effort of dragging dead weight. But he pulled. Again and again, upward through the dark water.
The ferry was gone. The sea was endless. The surface shimmered above like a sheet of distant glass.
Finally, Xiao broke through, dragging Gu with him. Both of them gasped into air, though Gu’s chest never rose.
“Die by suffocation,” Xiao remembered. The words from the ticket bit into his mind like hooks.
“Not you,” he hissed under his breath. “Not today.”
He spotted an island in the distance—a jagged heap of rock rising from the water, barren and sharp-edged, like the spine of a drowned beast. No trees. No shelter. No sign of life.
But it was something.
He swam, each stroke heavy, dragging Gu against the current. His arms screamed, his lungs seared, but his will locked iron-hard. He swam until his body went numb.
When at last they staggered onto the rocks, Gu was still limp.
The island offered no comfort. The soil was gray, the stones slick with salt. The air smelled of rust and rot. The silence of it pressed down, broken only by the distant slap of waves.
Xiao dropped to his knees and began emergency procedures—compressions, tilting the airway, forcing breath. Again and again. Sweat mixed with seawater stung his eyes.
Nothing.
He tried every technique he knew—pressing the chest, shifting positions, repeating cycles until his arms trembled. Still nothing.
There was no power here, no defibrillator, no equipment. Only his hands, his training, his desperation.
“Come on, damn you—breathe!” he snarled, voice cracking.
And then—Gu’s eyes snapped open.
No coughing. No water expelled. Just a quiet inhale, smooth, unnatural. His gaze cleared slowly, as if waking from sleep, not from drowning.
“I used a prop,” he said weakly. His voice rasped, but his eyes held focus. “Fake Death. D-level. One hour. Lets me avoid real suffocation.”
His lips curled into the faintest smile. “Thanks for the effort. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”
Xiao froze, his breath ragged, chest still pounding from exertion.
Gu looked at him with quiet sincerity, an expression too calm for someone who had just died.
“It’s fine,” Xiao said at last, embarrassed by the heat rising in his face. “You’ve… saved me more than once since this started.” He forced a grin, broad and warm, but it felt fragile in the silence of the island.
“So it’s already been an hour?” he asked.
Gu shook his head. “No. The timing stopped when we entered this… side scene. It’ll resume when we return to the main dungeon.”
Relief washed through Xiao, though unease coiled beneath it. “That’s… better.”
Gu pushed himself to sit, his damp hair clinging to his forehead. “What do we do here?”
The rocks around them stretched into lifeless emptiness. The waves slapped, tireless. The air smelled wrong—metallic, stale, as though even the ocean was rotting.
“Not sure.” Gu’s eyes glimmered faintly behind his glasses. “But we should explore.”
His tone was soft, almost eager.
And Xiao realized the island was no refuge.
It was the next stage.
