Food Supplements - Chapter 4

The fact that Qin Cheng had made such a discovery was mostly due to luck.

Like most young people, she was not entirely unfamiliar with things like Taiji and the Bagua, but she was far from knowledgeable about them.

Especially when standing within the arrangement itself, surrounded by a lake, stone paths, and bare soil, it was difficult to connect the physical landscape to a symbolic diagram. Had a series of coincidences not sparked a sudden flash of insight, she might have remained trapped for who knew how long before noticing even the slightest clue.

Even so, this sudden realization—this glimpse of the hidden pattern—seemed to have little practical use.

During her working years, Qin Cheng had once been involved in a design project centered on feng shui, so she knew a little about its basic principles.

Only a little.

Anything beyond that was completely outside her knowledge.

Thus, even though she had been lucky enough to discover the special nature of her surroundings, there was no question of her breaking the formation or solving the array. As for how to escape her predicament, she had been lost before, and she remained just as lost now.

The only real benefit was that the string of impossible phenomena she had encountered finally had something resembling an explanation.

Even if the explanation itself was hardly scientific.

Yes, Qin Cheng had now truly realized that this place probably did not obey science at all.

It was something mysterious, perhaps even supernatural.

She had vaguely sensed this before, but as an adult, she had long since outgrown the age of innocent fantasies. Years of suffering from illness had made her especially practical. She had always scoffed at words like “miracle,” and naturally, she was slow to accept bizarre encounters that defied common sense.

So she had kept trying to analyze everything from other angles.

But Qin Cheng was not an ostrich. She would not bury her head in the sand, refuse to look or listen, and keep avoiding the obvious.

Now that the evidence was laid out before her, she remained doubtful, but she began adjusting the way she thought about it.

If she could not leave by any scientific or logical method, then what was she supposed to do?

A Bagua formation and the like fell squarely into the blind spot of modern education.

Having reached the limits of her knowledge, Qin Cheng rested where she was for a while before wandering around again, hoping her luck would continue and she might discover something else.

She walked every branch road she had not yet tried, experimenting with them in both directions. She even circled the patches of black soil several times.

Nothing new came of it.

After finally giving up on the land, her searching gaze inevitably returned to the center of the entire layout: the circular lake representing yin, yang, and Taiji.

Of all the places she could reach, the only area she had not yet explored was the pale green section of water and the other stone island within it.

Yin and yang were supposed to complement and correspond to each other, two sides of the same whole.

Could there really be some hidden mechanism there?

With that thought, Qin Cheng did not immediately enter the water.

She first walked to the boundary between the two sections, crouched down, and placed one hand into each color of water at the same time. She felt them carefully for a moment, then stirred them together at random.

The distance between her hands was barely a centimeter, yet the sensations were completely different.

The two colors of water truly had entirely different temperatures.

When she disturbed the surface, the invisible boundary wavered briefly. Dark blue and pale green ripples crossed and overlapped.

But the moment she stopped stirring, each color returned to its own side.

From beginning to end, they did not blend in the slightest.

The more she thought about it, the stranger it became.

The cold side was one thing, but the water on this side was so warm, yet the lake’s surface showed no sign of it. There was no steam rising into the air and no sense of heat radiating from the water.

One had to actually enter it to know.

Qin Cheng shook her head and abandoned the attempt to understand it.

Pushing aside her distracting thoughts, she dipped a finger into the shallow section and tasted the water. After confirming that it had no unusual flavor, she slowly lowered herself into the pale green waves.

This time, there was no need to race against time or force herself through in one desperate burst.

The warmth wrapped around her from every direction, leaving her body relaxed and comfortable. It felt so pleasant that she wanted to sigh and remain there forever.

Of course, that was only a passing thought.

Qin Cheng had no leisure to soak in a hot spring.

Once she entered the water, she tried to find stable footing on the bottom, then slowly made her way toward the round stone island at the center of the green section.

The journey was far easier than her desperate swim out of the deep-water side, though she moved even more slowly.

Walking upright through water created more resistance than swimming, and only her shoulders and head barely remained above the surface. There was no way she could move quickly.

Still, it conserved strength, so she had little choice.

Qin Cheng shuffled forward for a long while, half wading and half swimming, before she finally crossed the water and hauled herself onto the enormous black stone.

Now that she understood the structure of the yin-yang fish, its color did not surprise her.

The moment she climbed onto it, she began touching, tapping, and carefully inspecting the black “bald monk’s head.”

Other than being the exact opposite in color, however, it seemed no different from the white stone that had trapped her earlier.

It was bare, smooth, and completely lifeless.

After searching for a long time and finding nothing, Qin Cheng had no choice but to pause and deal with her soaked clothes again.

Having waded through the water, her pajamas were drenched beyond saving.

Because she had emerged from comfortably warm water this time, she did not feel cold at first. But as the minutes passed, her body gradually cooled and became uncomfortable.

She understood how little strain her body could endure.

No matter how impatient she felt, she had to stop and patiently wring the excess water from the fabric.

She had just finished with her pants and begun working on her dripping pajama top when, without warning, her vision went black.

A wave of dizziness swept through her mind, and her body suddenly became weightless.

Qin Cheng was not unfamiliar with such abrupt episodes. Dizziness and the sensation of losing gravity were old companions.

In that instant, she assumed she had simply fainted again.

But this time was different from every previous attack.

Unusually… brief.

It seemed to last only a few seconds before her senses, vision, and awareness all returned.

Qin Cheng was still sitting cross-legged in the same position, wringing out her clothes.

The moment feeling returned, she noticed something hard and uncomfortable beneath her.

When her vision cleared, she discovered that she was sitting on a heap of scattered objects.

There was no stone.

No lake.

No roads.

No breeze blowing from nowhere.

Not even light.

Inside the pitch-dark little room, the most distinct sound was the steady ticking of the alarm clock.

The only window reflected a few streetlights from outside.

Everything looked familiar.

Qin Cheng sat there in a daze for a long while before slowly pushing herself upright.

Only then did she notice that her pajamas were completely dry.

The soft fabric held not the slightest trace of moisture, nothing like the miserable state it had been in moments earlier, when water had poured from it with every twist.

…Had it all been a dream?

The doubt was inevitable.

She hesitantly pressed a hand to her forehead and slowly looked around, using the faint light from the window to examine the room and herself.

The two envelopes beside the alarm clock remained in place.

The glass on the table held only a little water.

Several empty medicine bottles lay scattered around it.

Her backpack, previously upright, had toppled beside the cabinet. Its contents had spilled across the floor and were now beneath her feet.

The small items blended together in the darkness, making them hard to distinguish, but a dark, winding trail flowing out from among them was still faintly visible.

Qin Cheng hesitated.

In the end, she bent down and touched the sticky liquid that smelled of blood.

To her surprise, it was still wet beneath her fingertips.

It had not coagulated at all.

These signs more or less proved that something had indeed happened.

Yet Qin Cheng’s confusion only deepened.

She smelled the blood and thought for a moment, then seemed to remember something.

Her head snapped up as she looked again at the digital alarm clock on the cabinet.

The dim light had kept her from noticing the details before.

Now, when she focused, the display clearly read 11:22 p.m.

Unless she remembered incorrectly, she had finished showering and returned upstairs at around ten-thirty.

After that, she poured water and swallowed all the medicine.

The alarm had not yet rung, and the blood had not dried.

Which meant…

Less than an hour had passed since she collapsed.

Another impossible phenomenon.

Scientific and unscientific explanations flooded her mind all at once, leaving her already confused head aching. Irritation even began to rise inside her.

When she had been trapped in that incomprehensible place, her emotions had remained relatively stable because caution and curiosity toward the unfamiliar environment had temporarily overwhelmed everything else.

Her desire to escape had also kept her focused, consciously or otherwise, on something constructive.

But now she had successfully returned to familiar surroundings.

There was no longer any goal to pursue or problem to solve.

Looking at the familiar furniture and breathing the familiar air, all the familiar negative emotions quickly wrapped around her heart again.

She had only wanted release.

Why could she not even have that?

Why had something so unreasonable happened to her?

Why should she have to waste energy guessing and analyzing it?

So what if it had been a dream?

So what if it had not?

For someone already terminally ill, did any of this truly matter?

The moment she thought that, an enormous wave of exhaustion surged over her, as though hollowing her out completely.

Qin Cheng fell stiffly onto the bed and lay there without moving.

The countless tangled thoughts churning in her mind abruptly stopped, as if someone had pressed a button.

Everything went silent.

Even breathing felt tiring.

After lying motionless for a long time, the utterly exhausted woman moved again.

Dragging her weak body upright, she slowly made her way toward the dark heap of bloodstained belongings on the floor and bent down to search through them patiently.

Even if her mind no longer wanted to think…

Or perhaps precisely because she had stopped thinking, the obsession buried deepest in her heart rose clearly to the surface, impossible to ignore.

What Qin Cheng patiently searched for among the scattered objects was her phone.

Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, the old device had survived the fall, the impact, the weight pressing down on it, and even the blood staining its surface.

It remained intact.

A light touch made the screen glow, displaying a missed-call notification.

Out of a childish desire to deceive herself, Qin Cheng had once deleted every note and identifier associated with that number.

Now, only a string of digits appeared on the screen.

But even without a name attached, she would never forget what that number meant.

Earlier, when she had believed she was taking her final breath, she had used every last bit of strength trying to answer the call.

Even hearing one second of it would have been enough.

But now, having somehow survived for the moment, she stared at the missed-call notification and could not bring herself to move.

At last, Qin Cheng sighed.

Her finger shifted slightly, dismissing the notification.

Then she opened her contacts and called someone else.

The phone rang for a long time.

The woman sat unmoving in the darkness, waiting until a soft click finally came from the other end, followed by a lazy, “Hello?”

“You’re with her, aren’t you?” Qin Cheng said with certainty, getting straight to the point. “What happened to her tonight? Is she all right?”

“Well, well. Long time no hear. You vanished for so long that I thought you’d already died somewhere.”

The man’s slightly husky voice was rich with emotion. His words sounded like teasing, yet also like something he genuinely meant.

Whatever the intention, Qin Cheng clearly did not care.

“When I die is my business. You don’t need to concern yourself with it.” Her expression remained blank, her voice calm. “Tell me what happened to her tonight.”

If nothing had happened—if she had not been upset or shaken by something—then a phone that had remained silent for more than three years would never have rung again.

Qin Cheng understood that much about herself.

The answer she received was a burst of hearty laughter, as though the situation were deeply amusing.

“Why don’t you just ask her directly why she called you?”

After laughing, the man said frankly, “I was there when she made the call. I saw everything.”

There was something in his voice as he spoke those last few words.

It sounded like bragging, perhaps teasing.

Then the final note curled into something almost mocking.

Qin Cheng paused.

Her grip tightened around the phone, but in the end, she still spoke evenly.

“Then why did she call me?”

If someone else had been present when the call was made, at least she could be certain there had been no immediate danger or emergency.

The thought left her faintly disappointed, but it was also good news.

Another burst of laughter came from the other end.

“What’s that line again…? Right. Since you asked so sincerely, I’ll be merciful and tell you.”

The man joked around and deliberately paused before continuing.

“She called during her private birthday party. As for why—I have no idea! Hahaha!”

Most people might have found his laugh deep, open, and charming.

Qin Cheng had always found it irritating.

Now, it sounded especially grating.

She moved the phone away from her ear and, expressionless, prepared to end the call.

“Wait!”

As though he could sense what she was doing, the man suddenly shouted. His voice was deep enough to remain clear even from a distance.

“I don’t know why, but I happened to record it. If you want to know, watch it yourself.”

With that, he ended the call first.

Not long afterward, a video file arrived.

Then there was no further message.

After that, in the dark room, one screen continued to cast a faint glow.

The woman holding it sat motionless at the edge of the bed.

Her shadowed eyes reflected the screen, plainly revealing unease, struggle, and longing.

Qin Cheng remained like that, sitting and staring.

Yet even after the phone’s battery ran out, even after the pain returned, she still could not bring herself to play the downloaded video.

The unplayed footage remained frozen on a close-up of a smiling face.

That single blurry smile was enough to make Qin Cheng afraid to press the button.

It turned out that after all these years apart, she was afraid to see her cry.

But she was also afraid to see her… smile.

She was afraid to see her suffering.

Yet she was equally afraid to see that she no longer suffered.

How despicable.