Xie Yili died on the way to meet his parents.
Kidnapped at four, rescued at seven, he grew up in an orphanage for seventeen years. He didn’t know his name was Zhang Hao, or that his birth parents had spent twenty-three years looking for him. All he knew were the repeated, fruitless phone calls about reuniting with his family, and the address he had memorized from his phone.
The fog was thick that night. A truck driving the wrong way came straight at him. After the white flash, he opened his eyes and found himself standing in a gray-white world.
The System said, “Complete the trials to leave.”
He believed it. He did the tasks and followed those meaningless instructions. From time to time, the System sent him “rewards”: paper money, paper clothes, paper shoes. The paper clothes had crooked stitches around the collars, and the paper money bore the blurry image of a bridge. Slowly, he realized these weren’t rewards generated by the System. They had been burned by the living. Someone in the world of the living was burning them for him, one sheet at a time, one stitch at a time.
Who was that person?
He asked the System. It said, “Information not unlocked.”
He could only keep going. He walked through the fog, crossed stone bridges, and pushed open door after door that didn’t belong to him. He saw himself at the police station. He saw the child in the orphanage crouching in a corner, arranging stones. He saw the piano keys forever out of reach behind that dark wooden door. He heard someone calling from far away, “Haohao! Come eat!”
He couldn’t say that name. It was too far away, so far he couldn’t hold on to it.
At last, he finally stood before them. His father smoked on the balcony, gazing at the empty corner downstairs. His mother cooked noodles in the kitchen, while four bowls sat on the table.
