Iris 3

The bespectacled man introduced himself as Qiu Zijia, twenty-eight years old, a computer engineering graduate from some university of science and technology. He said he was just a code monkey. Years of hunching over a computer had left him in poor health, nearsighted, and with a gloomy air. In common parlance, a shut-in nerd.

Mu Qin felt that Qiu Zijia had become a little more humorous as he introduced himself. He was no longer as confrontational as he had been while talking to Xu Fu.

That version of Qiu Zijia immediately made a good impression on the female teacher. Teachers seemed to like students like him, and she promptly smiled. "A college graduate? Not bad, not bad!"

Then it was the female teacher's turn. Her name was Han Li, thirty-nine years old, and she too had graduated at the top of her class from a teachers' college. After graduating, she had first become a kindergarten teacher through a relative's introduction, supposedly because kindergarten teachers were well paid in those days. But after five or six years, she had inexplicably gone on to teach at a middle school.

As for why, Han Li did not say.

Cheng Guoxu remained silent at the side, so Mu Qin stepped forward and introduced himself. "My name is Mu Qin."

Mu Qin was an orphan, apparently abandoned. When he was still an infant, he had been left in a trash can beneath an overpass, then discovered and sent to a nearby orphanage.

But Mu Qin had not stayed at the orphanage long. At around three or four years old, he was adopted by an older couple who had lost their son late in life. The couple had once had a son, but he died in an accidental fire. Devastated by grief, they went to the orphanage and took Mu Qin home.

The couple had already been in their fifties when they adopted him. By the time Mu Qin was about twelve, both had died of illness, leaving him a considerable inheritance.

The old couple had only one relative: an uncle of poor character, already well along in years himself. He took Mu Qin away under the guise of becoming his guardian, then squandered the money that should have belonged to Mu Qin. Aside from tuition and a little monthly allowance, he did not care about him at all. Later, after Mu Qin finished high school and was admitted to college, his uncle claimed he had spent all the money. Mu Qin had no choice but to give up college and enlist in the military.

He had heard that joining the army cost nothing, came with an allowance, and even paid a discharge benefit afterward.

Mu Qin served for five years. After leaving the military, he began looking for work. At first, he did all kinds of jobs, mostly security work because of his service record, but the pay was too low, so he taught himself how to work in sales.

Mu Qin's life had been quite ordinary, or so he thought. Yet the tech nerd Qiu Zijia and the female teacher both seemed to look at him differently. "You were in the military, so you must be pretty good in a fight, right?" they asked.

Mu Qin smiled. "It depends on the branch. I handled logistics in the military. I stayed longer because I was a good cook. I don't have much in the way of fighting skills."

Qiu Zijia and Han Li, who had just begun to view him differently, were instantly much more disappointed. Finally, they looked at Cheng Guoxu, and when they heard that he was an ordinary factory worker, they immediately lost interest.

Mu Qin then followed Qiu Zijia and the others as they began searching this so-called game map.

This seemed to be a fairly large orphanage, with a courtyard, a church, an apartment area where the children lived, and an adjoining office area.

The office where the five of them had first gathered contained quite a few old file folders. According to the information inside, this orphanage was called Iris Orphanage.

Iris Orphanage had been sponsored by several Western companies around 1982. As a result, its buildings had leaned toward a Western style when it was first constructed, which was why there was a Little Church in the courtyard and even several nuns on staff.

At first, it had indeed taken in many orphans. It should have been a great charitable organization that benefited society. But that era had been terribly underdeveloped. Industries were in a slump, and domestic adoption procedures were immature. Sponsoring the orphanage became a burden for the Western companies, and over the next dozen years, they withdrew their support one after another. In the end, Iris Orphanage was abandoned and became what it was today.

The children living in the orphanage were also gradually transferred away afterward, sent to other welfare organizations and social shelters.

On the surface, there seemed to be nothing unusual about any of this. Most charitable organizations faced unavoidable decline due to a lack of funding. Yet Mu Qin discovered that a strange truth lay behind it all.

That was because Mu Qin found quite a few newspapers on the office bookshelves, all kinds of papers from the 1980s and 1990s. They contained scattered negative reports about Iris Orphanage.

For example, there were suspicions that staff at the orphanage abused children. There were also suspicions that the orphanage director embezzled sponsorship funds.

Those negative reports had shaped public opinion against Iris Orphanage at the time. Mu Qin guessed that this was probably one reason the orphanage had ultimately been abandoned.

But by now, why the orphanage had been abandoned was no longer important. Mu Qin and the others' main objective was to find a way to leave it.

"Why not just climb over the wall?" The female teacher still did not seem to take this so-called Death Game very seriously. She opened the door and peered into the courtyard. "Find a ladder and climb over it. Why do we need to look for a key to the main gate?"

Mu Qin said, "There are spikes and barbed wire on the wall, and it looks four or five meters high. One misstep, and instead of climbing out, you'll be climbing to your death."

The female teacher rolled her eyes. "Is that so hard? Find a pair of bolt cutters and cut the wire. As for the spikes, lay a plank over them and climb across... We had middle-school students do that all the time."

Qiu Zijia said, "It's a good idea, but where are we supposed to find a ladder, bolt cutters, and a plank? This place is so desolate. A lot of the equipment has either been abandoned or taken away. Finding all that would take time and effort. We'd be better off finding the key to the main gate."

Mu Qin agreed. "And there's a killer out there hunting us, whether that's real or not. We simply don't have time to take the risk of climbing the wall. It would be like courting death."

Seeing her suggestion rejected, the female teacher looked displeased. She snorted. "You're good with words. Then you come up with something!"

Qiu Zijia seemed to feel that he did not get along with this woman called Han Li, and he could not help moving a little closer to Mu Qin. He said to him, "Brother, even if you did logistics in the military, you still had basic training, right? If you really ran into some killer, would you stand a chance?"

Mu Qin stroked his chin and considered it. "I've been discharged for many years. I'm not in the shape I used to be. So it would depend. Their build, reflexes, explosive power... If they have a weapon, I might be able to think of something against a knife. But if it's a gun..."

Qiu Zijia did not find that reassuring. He began to regret it. "We shouldn't have let that guy Xu Fu leave."

Mu Qin felt the same way. "We really shouldn't have. He seemed to know a lot. At the very least, we should have gotten more information out of him."

"And there's something I never got the chance to ask him." As Mu Qin spoke, he pulled out the Fool Card from his pocket. "Do any of you have one of these?"

At his words, Qiu Zijia, Han Li, and Cheng Guoxu all looked at the card in Mu Qin's hand and answered at once, "Yes!"

Then each of them took out their own tarot card. Curiously, all four of them held Fool Cards. The four Fool Cards gathered together, and the group looked at one another in confusion.

"What does this card even mean?" Han Li turned the tarot card over and over in her hands.

As a seasoned computer nerd, Qiu Zijia guessed, "I think it might be an item in the game. Have you ever played a card game? Maybe it works something like that."

"A card game?" Han Li apparently had not played one before. Her face showed some disdain. "You young people do nothing but play games all day."

Qiu Zijia was already getting fed up with Han Li. Doing his best to ignore her, he said, "I think these tarot cards are like item cards in a game. Every card has a different effect. The back of the Fool Card says it can increase our luck value, so that's probably this item card's effect."

"Wait!" Just as Qiu Zijia said this, Han Li suddenly let out a shriek. Her raised voice was sharp and piercing, making Qiu Zijia and Mu Qin shudder all over. Only the quiet Cheng Guoxu beside them did not react at all.

"What is it?" Qiu Zijia rubbed his ears and looked at Han Li, only to find her holding her tarot card with a horrified, twisted expression.

"You just said this card increases luck value?" Han Li held her tarot card up in front of Qiu Zijia.

Qiu Zijia looked at her card without understanding what was going on and said casually, "Yeah. Doesn't it say so on the back of the card...?"

Halfway through, Qiu Zijia suddenly broke off. He stared oddly at the tarot card Han Li was holding up and said in confusion, "That's strange. The image on your tarot card is upside down."

Hearing this, Mu Qin suddenly stepped around in front of Qiu Zijia and said to Han Li, "Can I take a look at your card?"

Though he asked politely enough, Mu Qin was not polite in the slightest. He reached out and took Han Li's tarot card directly from her. Looking down at it carefully, he found that the image on it really was upside down...

The lettering marking it as The Fool and the decorative pattern on the card's border were both upright, just like the cards held by Mu Qin, Qiu Zijia, and Cheng Guoxu. But the image of The Fool at the center of the card was inverted.

Mu Qin studied the inverted Fool for a moment, then turned the card over and saw that the lines of text on the back were upside down as well. He flipped the card top to bottom to make the writing upright, then read:

The journey of adventure has ended. You are surrounded by an omnipresent abyss.

Are you ready to embrace despair and pain?

P.S.: Curse Card. This card will lower your luck value.