Iris 4

Mu Qin suddenly understood. Horrified, he said, "As far as I know, tarot cards are divided into upright and reversed positions. When a card is upright, it carries a positive meaning; when it is upside down, it carries a negative one. Foreign fortune-tellers like to use things like this to test people's fates and luck."

Han Li understood this time as well. She suddenly snatched the reversed Fool Card from Mu Qin's hand and threw it to the floor, her face full of disgust. "Anyway, just throw away this lousy card. I don't want it, okay?"

Qiu Zijia seemed to have found an opportunity to sneer at Han Li. He grinned maliciously. "A lot of item cards in games are bound. You can't just throw them away because you feel like it. If binding exists in this Death Game too, then even if you throw it away, the card will find its way back to you before you know it."

"Bullshit." Han Li glared at Qiu Zijia. She threw the reversed Fool Card beneath her feet and stomped on it hard several times.

After that, the four of them continued searching the orphanage with an optimistic, careless attitude. They concentrated on the apartment area where the children lived, checking every room on the first floor: the offices, infirmary, storeroom, laundry room, and so on.

But in the storeroom, the place most likely to hold the key, they found nothing. There were only rows of empty, rust-speckled lockers.

Since the building had been abandoned, there was little left in any of the rooms. Unneeded desks, chairs, and wooden boards were piled in the corners, rotten and moldy enough to snap underfoot. Children's clothes lay scattered across the floor beneath a thick layer of dust.

Large patches of plaster had peeled off the walls, and the ceiling was marked with black water stains from leaks and the like. Ruin and desolation surrounded them. Yet strangely, although the orphanage had been abandoned, its electrical system still worked, and Mu Qin's group could still turn on the lights in the rooms.

The lights were so dim that switching them on was almost no different from leaving them off. Some flickered constantly from years of disrepair, making the already desolate, ghostly place even more sinister, as though they had stepped into some terrifying horror movie.

Exploring somewhere so dark and frightening did not bother Mu Qin and the other men too much, but Han Li, as the only woman, was having a harder time with it. When the group reached the second floor to continue their search, she said to Qiu Zijia and Mu Qin, "You keep checking. How about I wait for you in the hallway?"

Qiu Zijia immediately objected. "We can't split up. We have to stay together."

"But those rooms are too oppressive." Han Li shook her head, holding firm. One hand pressed to her chest, she looked as though she could barely breathe. "I don't want to go inside. I feel like I can't breathe. At most, I'll follow you to the door of every room. You search inside, and I'll wait at the doorway. I can keep watch too... If anything comes over, I can warn you right away."

With Han Li putting it that way, the others thought it sounded reasonable. After some discussion, they agreed to her request. They then came to the second floor of the apartment area, which seemed to be where the children's activity rooms were. There was a small music room, a small recreation room, and a toy room--places for the orphans to play.

Qiu Zijia opened the door to the activity room first. He stepped inside, took a couple of looks around, then said to Mu Qin, "This orphanage was pretty well equipped. It had everything it should have had."

Mu Qin followed him in and looked around as well. This activity room was probably meant for the slightly older children. It had a ping-pong table and some athletic equipment, though most of it was nearly ruined too.

Han Li waited by the door as agreed. After searching the room and finding little of value, they came back out and continued on to the toy room next door.

The toy room had clearly been intended for very young children. The floor had been specially laid with wood, with colorful interlocking rugs over it, and it was filled with all kinds of toys. It must have been paradise for children.

But abandonment had left the toy room in a terrible state. The wooden floor creaked underfoot, and the interlocking rugs seemed to have been scorched by fire, with a large swath blackened. Every toy had been damaged... seemingly smashed apart by someone on purpose. Dolls and building blocks alike had been violently battered into grotesque fragments.

When the light came on, the mangled toys could all be seen piled in a corner. A teddy bear with only one eye left and great clumps of gray-black stuffing spilling from its belly sat upright atop the pile. Its angle positioned its head directly toward Mu Qin, Qiu Zijia, and the others as they entered, as if it were silently watching them with its remaining eye.

The little bear sitting silently atop the toy pile seemed to startle Qiu Zijia. His face immediately looked awful as he snapped angrily, "Which bastard piled the toys up like this? You scared the hell out of me!"

Mu Qin glanced at Qiu Zijia, unconcerned. "It's just a pile of toys..."

Qiu Zijia stressed, "You don't get it. It wasn't the toys that scared me. It was the atmosphere!"

Mu Qin still did not quite understand. He only felt that the heap of battered toys had stirred up a few faint memories.

Mu Qin had once been an orphan too, and he had lived in an orphanage. He had not stayed there long, but he had grown up there until he was around three, when his adoptive parents took him away.

Mu Qin could no longer remember what had happened when he was three. He only had scattered fragments, such as the little teddy bear in front of him... He remembered that whenever he cried at the orphanage, someone would bring a teddy bear similar to this one and set it in front of him to comfort him.

Thinking of that, Mu Qin could not help stepping forward, wanting to take the little bear down from the toy pile for a closer look. But someone beat him to it.

Cheng Guoxu, who had remained silent behind Mu Qin the whole time, suddenly reached out without warning and snatched the bear away first.

Mu Qin was startled by Cheng Guoxu's abrupt action. He was speechless for a moment, then turned to look at him and saw Cheng Guoxu carefully examining the little teddy bear in his hands.

After studying it for a while, Cheng Guoxu looked up and said to Mu Qin, "These... are toys made by the toy factory where I work."

Cheng Guoxu's words also brought the startled Qiu Zijia back to himself. He leaned in to look at the teddy bear in Cheng Guoxu's hands and asked, "You mean this bear? Your factory made it?"

"Not just this bear." Cheng Guoxu turned to look at the pile of toys. "Most of the others too. Our toy factory makes knockoff toys, so we make all kinds of things. But every toy we make has the factory's distinctive mark on it. I can recognize them at a glance."

Cheng Guoxu had rarely spoken such a long string of words. Qiu Zijia listened closely, then said thoughtfully, "Now that's interesting."

Mu Qin did not understand what Qiu Zijia meant and asked, "What's interesting?"

Qiu Zijia replied, "I was just thinking about something, Mu Qin... Do you remember the name of the orphanage you stayed at when you were little?"

"I don't remember... I left that orphanage when I was three. I have no impression of it at all. My adoptive parents never told me its name or address afterward, either. Of course, I never thought to investigate it."

Seeing that he would get no answer from Mu Qin, Qiu Zijia could only explain it himself. "I have an older brother."

Mu Qin could not understand why Qiu Zijia was dragging his brother into the conversation, so he said, "Get to the point."

"He's not my biological brother. My parents adopted him," Qiu Zijia said. "Before they had me, my parents were diagnosed with infertility, so they adopted my brother. But a few years after adopting him, my mother unexpectedly got pregnant with me."

"Of course, that's not the point. The point is... it seems my brother was adopted by my parents from an orphanage called Iris Orphanage. He died many years ago. A few years after I was born, he killed himself."

Mu Qin felt that he had already guessed what Qiu Zijia meant, but he still asked him directly to confirm it. "What are you trying to say?"

"Don't you think it's strange?" Qiu Zijia pointed at himself. "My brother came out of this orphanage."

Then Qiu Zijia pointed at Cheng Guoxu. "And this guy's factory supplied the orphanage with the toys the children needed."

Next, Qiu Zijia lowered his voice, apparently not wanting Han Li, who was waiting outside, to hear. He said softly, "And that female teacher outside. Didn't she say before that she had worked as a preschool teacher? Since we started searching these rooms, she's had a strange look on her face. I'd bet she remembers this orphanage. Maybe she even looked after these orphans here when she was a preschool teacher."

"And finally, you. Even though you say you don't remember it, you could very well have been an orphan who once lived here too... Hmm, it's quite likely." At the end, Qiu Zijia shifted the focus of the conversation to Mu Qin.

Mu Qin thought for a moment, then smiled at Qiu Zijia. "An impressive deduction. But what does it mean? Other than proving that all of us have some connection to this orphanage."

Qiu Zijia shook his head, troubled. "I can't think of what it means for the moment, but maybe it'll become some kind of clue. They must have put us in this godforsaken place for a reason."

Mu Qin praised him. "You're very smart. No wonder you study science."

Qiu Zijia was quite pleased by the praise. He modestly rubbed the back of his head. "Not really. As long as you know the basic information, anyone could make this deduction easily."

As they talked, they turned the toy room upside down as well. They even knocked over the toy pile in the corner and thoroughly inspected every toy.

But after searching for a long time, they still found no valuable clues. They decided to leave and move on to the next room. Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu went out one after the other, while Mu Qin was the last to leave.

Just as he was about to go out, he remembered something: that little teddy bear from earlier.

Some unknown force seemed to be urging Mu Qin to turn back and look into the room. He wanted to see the little teddy bear Cheng Guoxu had casually set on the table. But when Mu Qin turned his head, he saw an astonishing sight.

The toy room, which Mu Qin and the others had just thoroughly ransacked, had returned in the blink of an eye to exactly how it had looked when they first entered!

The battered toys were once again piled in their original corner, and the little teddy bear was once again sitting atop the pile, looking at Mu Qin with its one button eye.

The bizarre sight made Mu Qin jerk in fright. He opened his mouth, wanting to call Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu, who had just gone outside, back to see it. But before he could call out, Qiu Zijia outside began shouting first.

"Mu Qin, that female teacher is gone!" Qiu Zijia shouted anxiously from outside.

Qiu Zijia's words snapped Mu Qin back to his senses. He temporarily put the strange scene in the toy room out of his mind, hurried outside, and looked down the hallway. Only Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu were there. The female teacher named Han Li was nowhere to be seen.