Chapter 193: After the Horror of Death Settles
Translator: Pluto Editor: Vermillion
Her corpse quickly turned rigid and cold. It slipped down the chair slowly and fell to the ground with a thud beside the train doors. The reflection of her lifeless face in the train window moved in tune with the movements of the train. Lin Sanjiu would never have guessed that she would end up in this situation today.
"Are you stupid?"
Mrs. Manas voice sounded from some uknown location. It was so sharp that it could almost pierce through the roof of the train. The sound of the train rumbling along the tracks had been totally overpowered by her furious yelling. "I took the extra precaution to shut myself away just so you could use your Defence Forcefield for a longer time... Yet, you ended up like this. What are you going to do?! What are you going to do?!"
Lin Sanjiu, with her current tranlucent form, 'squatted' beside her own corpse and watched as it grew stiffer and stiffer. Lin Sanjiu had no idea how she should answer Mrs. Manas. But, another puzzling question which bothered her was how she could 'see' the scene in front of her.
Lin Sanjiu could remember the moment the second before she died. Her whole body felt extremely cold and she couldn't move a single muscle. As her consciousness faded, her will to survive erupted within her. Her higher consciousness rushed out like flood water flowing through sluices and enveloped her... brain. As she had used up quite a lot of her higher consciousness before this happened, there was only sufficient amount to protect a small part of her.
When her corpse lost all support and slipped off the train seat, the only part of her body protected by her higher consciousness, now in a translucent form, remained in the same spot. In other words, Lin Sanjiu had turned into a translucent, floating, brain... spirit.
"It's weird. How can I still see and hear?" Lin Sanjiu asked the irate Mrs. Manas.
A grayish-white translucent brain hanging mid-air shook once—right now there was no way anyone could identify Lin Sanjiu. "And, since I'm dead, why are you still here?"
Mrs. Manas remained quiet for some time, as if she was trying to control her anger. After a few minutes, trying her best to remember her responsibility as an educator, she finally replied with a strained voice, clearly holding back her anger, "Right now, your... spirit, is created by your concentrated, condensed higher consciousness. Did you forget that your high consciousnes can be used for detection? If it didn't provide such detection, I wonder how you would have developed your observational skills in the past?"
"Oh!" the grayish-white brain nodded, showing that she understood. The brain spun in the air, seeming to survey the surroundings. All the things she couldn't see when she was alive, now lay bare in front of her.
It was the same scene she saw before her death. Every seat was occupied by a person with a dead, ashen face; their chests rose once only after a very long time, during which two streams of white gas would escape from their noses. It was quite creepy.
"No wonder Kisaragi Station World is so cold!"
The Teru Teru Bozu was also different from her memory: a girl with a lifeless, gray face was holding on to the Teru Teru Bozu tightly with both her hands. She was dangling from it, while her white flowing dress hung down over her body. From the height that the girl was hanging, the girl's dress was right at Lin Sanjiu's neck when she sat on the train seat.
When she saw the very thing which strangled her to death, Lin Sanjiu couldn't describe her feelings.
Without a body, she was no longer cold and since she could see everything, she was no longer afraid.
However, considering her current form, she didn't even know if she could continue existing in this manner tomorrow, let alone take revenge for herself.
"So... I'm dead?" The grayish-white brain floated down to her own corpse. "Does this mean I can only continue living as a brain-shaped spirit?"
This wasn't an easy question for Mrs. Manas. "Wait," she replied before disappearing for some time. Lin Sanjiu waited anxiously until Mrs. Manas spoke again.
"I already had some suspicions about this." The opening words to her explanation already caught Lin Sanjiu's attention. She continued, "No matter how powerful higher consciousness is, it can't defy true death. Your current state is perhaps a condition related to this world."
The grayish-white brain drifted a bit, "I have the same thoughts. This world is connected to urban legends and the supernatural after all, so spirits do exist here... But, I think I'm a little different from them."
The grayish-white brain floated to the side of the old lady while communicating. If the brain had a finger, Lin Sanjiu would definitely stick her finger on the old lady's nose.
The expression of the gloomy-looking old lady did not change one bit. Her saggy half-opened eyes, hidden under the layers of wrinkles, showed almost no awareness of Lin Sanjiu's presence. The old lady just tilted her head a bit, and did not treat Lin Sanjiu as a target.
"Well, they retained their human forms, but you are just a brain," Mrs. Manas pointed out.
"No, that's not what I meant. Erm, how should I word this? Right now, I still have my own thoughts and can somewhat act according to my own will. This is probably because of my higher consciousness, right? If I didn't have my higher consciousness, what would happen?"
Mrs. Manas wanted to reply, "then, you'd definitely die", but she suddenly thought of Douglas and immediate found herself speechless. She knew how valuable higher consciousness was to a user who could utilize it, but she had never mentioned this specifically to Lin Sanjiu. Besides, this ability was extremely rare, so it wasn't possible that Douglas was also using higher consciousness to continue existing and moving around after he died.
"Therefore, my guess is that... after this world had been invaded by dark matter, everyone was killed by or assimilated with dark matter. Anyway, they all became part of this creepy supernatural world, or a unique type of duoluozhong that only exists here at Kisaragi Station. They are not alive. That's why Douglas could hear the sound of my higher consciousness."
Lin Sanjiu was astonished by her own calmness. It was rather incredible that she could rationally think through all these while being in this awkward, strange state. Her objective of saying that wasn't really about explaining herself to Mrs. Manas, but rather to reorganize her thoughts.
"I constantly felt very cold, and this might be an indication that I was being 'corroded' by dark matter. After I've been more or less 'consumed' by dark matter, these unique duoluozhongs easily killed me." Lin Sanjiu floated down and looked at her pair of widened dead eyes. The brain shivered in midair. "But, they can't even imagine that I could exist in this form... I didn't survive their attack, but also didn't turn into a duoluozhong."
"That's right... Considering your current condition, who knows what will happen to you after 14 months?" Mrs. Manas sighed. The grayish white brain did not give a reply. It simply floated down and stopped above the corpse.
"At the end of 14 months, will you be sent to another world? If you are sent to a world without dark matter, would you die immediate? Hun? HOLY F*CK! Where is your body?!"