Zha felt that he had had a short dream. Just like those moments when he was locked in the box, his mind regressed back to the confused and confused childhood. his sisters and parents. There were countless things that could not be done at that time, and countless things that might be done in the future. The high ground blocked the view beyond like a wall, and he wondered if there was something different from what was near his home. A wonderland. Perhaps there, insects can understand gestures, and houses are made of sheets of paper as white as snow.
The doctor's single house was at the foot of the frost-covered mountain wall, like the only gateway to the highlands. After he knocked on the door, the doctor's face emerged from the door opening, his eyes covered with white shadows like a dead person. His ears seemed to have been cut off, completely covered by black hair that had grown to his back at some point.
How strange that is. But in the dream, he was not afraid at all, but ran into the single house with the innocence and joy of a child. He passed the table in the doctor's house and came to the completely white hive-like city of sheets of paper. In that city, the whole world was bright, sky and ground alike.
Paper cities are soft. He can lift any wall and walk into any room. The people living inside are also completely made of white paper, light and soft, without any appearance of worry. They entertained him and played with him. While playing around, he accidentally tore off a paper resident. It immediately fell down and turned into a lifeless thin piece of paper, blending into the frosty ground paved with paper.
He regretted his mistake terribly. That would be tantamount to accidentally killing a friend. But then the paper figures started cutting out from the ground. They compared each other's appearance and used their thin palms to cut out similar shapes.
Another paper man jumped up from the ground. It was no different from the one that Zha tore up, and just as light and soft. I felt extremely happy. He burst out laughing and waved his hands violently.
It was this movement that stirred him from his sleep. He opened his eyes and found himself lying in the doctor's private room. He was not fully awake yet, so he failed to realize that this room was very strange - every crack in the wall looked so flat, and it was also incredibly quiet.
At this time, Zha was still immersed in the childlike innocence and pure happiness of the dream. Until he noticed the man sitting in the corner. The freak in red robe was sitting where the doctor used to sit, looking at him calmly. Zha reached out to his chest in surprise, trying to grab something for self-defense. He immediately saw a pair of intact fleshy palms connected to the end of his arms, even the skin color was exactly the same.
He finally remembered everything that happened before he fell into coma due to excessive fatigue and shock. His hands, the dead man sitting in the room, and the doctor. He couldn't understand the weirdness of it all.
The freak in red robe walked towards him. Zha immediately recoiled in fear. It was not that he didn't remember that he had regarded the other person as a doctor before he fell into coma, but now it all became extremely unreal. When the doctor died, he held the funeral himself. Could it be that the ghosts in the dark sky will turn into something completely different? How could he have returned to the doctor's cabin?
Perhaps because of his reaction, the other party stopped beside the bed. The hands hidden in the red sleeves came out to check if there was anything strange about them. Zha denied it blankly, but then remembered what happened before he fell asleep. His hands were gone long ago, just two touchless iron supports. His legs should also be gone, but now they are still on his body. He took a closer look at his palms and finally found that they were different from his real hands. Although the skin color and texture were so similar, the permanent scars from his past labors were gone.
The freak in red robe waited at the bedside for a while, allowing Zha to examine his body carefully. During this time, he seemed to be looking at the letter, but his attitude could not be seen from his cold eyes. After a while, when Zha looked at him again, he made a gesture of greeting.
You've grown up. He told Zha so.
It took Za a long time to connect the young and terrifying deformed man in front of him with the doctor. When he was finally able to verify this through some subtle expressions and movements, his fear and doubts gradually moved away from the other party. He called him doctor again, as he had done in those days. Then he thought of the Gatherer, and his family. When he first had this idea, the doctor seemed to already know what he was thinking and assured him that his family was safe.
You have many questions. The doctor told him while sitting on the bedside. I can give you the answer.
After Zha's condition improved, the doctor asked Zha to go for a walk with him. He opened the door to the room and was surprised to see that the outside was not the high ground he was familiar with, but a long corridor exuding colorful mist. He was still where the collectors had brought him, and the scenery of the single house in the room was all fake - those walls were actually just a layer of painting, a layer of extremely realistic light and shadow colors. The whole room was but one of a dozen doors in the corridor.
The doctor led him forward. At the corner they encountered several collectors, making Zha nervously want to hide. But the doctor just turned a blind eye and walked past them, and the collectors seemed not to see the two of them at all, and could not hear their heartbeats and breathing at all.
The sight puzzled Zha at first, making him wonder whether the doctor had some kind of close relationship with Krishna. Later, doctors revealed the answer to him, but he didn't really know how. He could hardly find a suitable adjective in his mind for everything a physician could do. It's all weird and scary, but not devastating.
The Collectors are not human beings. Later the doctor seemed to explain it this way. At least they are not complete human beings, just relatively failed transformation products. This failure is primarily reflected in weak defenses against electronic intrusion, as well as its own ephemerality. The collectors who go to them every time are never the same ones, always the latest ones. That is the loophole that doctors can take advantage of. In the past few times, every time the Collectors opened the door to the single room, the doctor hacked into their control system, transferred their consciousness into a more harmless container, and then deleted everything from the original body. The remaining unconscious bodies retained some basic functions, and the doctor asked them to drive over the mountains and crash into the outside world - he found that according to the original design of the collectors, this was a system error that would occur with a certain probability. The creators probably included it in the normal failure rate, so he continued to live an ordinary life in a single house.
He did the same thing when he met Zha in the leader's room, but this time instead of transferring, he entered false information. When the collectors took Zha into the leader's house, they never saw a doctor or a corpse. Their leader was sitting upright on his chair listening to them, asking questions or giving orders from time to time. However, the leader is actually dead. The doctor killed the collector as soon as he came out. There was no particularly profound reason, because everything he wanted to know was obtained from the other party, and the other party's survival had no obvious value. He left the body where it was, simply to see the speed of decay and other possible hidden defense mechanisms.
These explanations all came after a period of time. During the time when Zha just woke up, the doctor did not explain this. The first thing he did was take Zha outside - not just outside the room, but outside the entire building that Zha could not see clearly when he came. He saw that it was a very strange, disc-shaped building with a pointed head and a flat bottom, lying on the ground like a hill. The surrounding ground is surprisingly flat, like a clay slab cut out with a knife, not even a stone wrinkle can be seen.
This is a ship. The doctor told him. The collectors came on this ship. But not from Black Sky, but from another land that doesn’t shine. Before the doctor returned here with the ship, he had been conducting surveys in that land. He also visited other lands. They are also all managed by collector masters.
These are all things that Zha has never heard of. He didn't know whether to believe it or not, and even if it was true, it seemed to have nothing to do with him.
- It has everything to do with it. The doctor corrected him. This is closely related to their past and future.
