Ch. 009| Ticked

October 26, 06:42.

Ren Yi woke. The sixth time.

The instant she woke, her heart was beating faster than usual, as if she'd just been running somewhere in a dream—but she didn't remember any dream. She sat up, took two deep breaths, didn't lie there checking anything else, got straight out of bed, and rushed to the desk.

The little muji booklet was on the desktop, in the same position she'd left it at 17:30 the night before. The cover was facing the same way too.

She opened it, turned to the sixth entry, "The fact that 'I am being watched'"—that pale gray pencil line was still there. She hadn't erased it, and the other party hadn't added anything else.

She turned to the eighth entry—the passage she'd written last night: "Below the sixth muji entry, a pencil line has appeared... source unidentifiable."

Below the eighth entry—in the blank space beneath the line "3. Me, myself"—there was now a pale gray pencil line.

Just like the one from yesterday—pencil, faint, deliberately light.

The other party had responded.

---

She sat at the desk for about a minute, working out the timing.

She'd written the eighth entry at 17:30 the night before and closed the muji. At 22:50, after her shower, getting ready for bed, she'd flipped through it one last time to confirm the line below the sixth entry was still there (she remembered clearly—at that point the space below the eighth entry was still blank). At 23:00 she lay down, fell asleep around 23:30, woke at 06:42 in the morning.

The new line could only have appeared between 22:50 and 06:42—mostly during the stretch she'd been asleep. While she slept, the other party came in, used a pencil from the cup on her desk, drew a line in the muji, and left. She'd slept until she woke naturally at 06:42—not interrupted by any sound or draft.

She got up and went to the entryway, bent down to look at the gap under the door. The hair was at the spot 30 centimeters off the floor—where she'd placed it before bed the night before. Hadn't moved, hadn't fallen.

She went back inside and checked every window, the balcony, the small bathroom window. All locked from the inside, no signs of having been opened.

She returned to the desk. The line below the eighth entry was genuinely new. But this time the other party hadn't come through the entryway, hadn't opened a window.

---

She had two possibilities.

The first: the other party had some way around the entryway—a spare key to her place, say, and deliberately didn't disturb the hair when coming in (her habit of placing the hair was something she thought only she knew, but the other party had known all along, and maybe what they'd put back wasn't the same strand—maybe they'd placed a new one in the original spot).

The second: the other party didn't need to physically enter at all. The line could be drawn without physical contact.

The first one Ren Yi could accept. The second she couldn't. The second meant the other party had an ability of the same kind as the ring she'd drawn that rotated on its own.

---

She realized something—from yesterday afternoon until now, she and the other party had completed two cycles of "draw a line / see it / don't erase it." The rhythm was established.

She picked up the convenience-store ballpoint from the office—not the fountain pen that made the ring rotate. From the very first entry in that little muji booklet she'd deliberately kept that fountain pen from touching the muji, so the muji would stay a "clean control," to keep the pen's anomalous condition out of the dialogue experiment.

Since the other party was talking with her, she could try asking questions.

Ask what? "Who are you" was probably too big; the other party wouldn't answer. "Is the old woman you," tying back to that time at the Greek vase gallery, was also a big question.

The most concrete, the easiest to verify, was that stretch of white paint at Wankou—the thing she'd personally confirmed just yesterday afternoon, with a time, a place, a specific object. The other party could choose to answer yes or no.

---

In the muji, below the eighth entry, skipping past the line the other party had drawn, she wrote the ninth entry:

Nine: Other party drew a second line (between 10/25 22:50 - 10/26 06:42). Entryway hair undisturbed, windows locked from inside, no signs of physical entry.
Status: other party is actively responding, high frequency, method is designed.

Done, she turned to the next page and wrote the tenth entry—not a record, a question:

Ten: Did you paint that stretch of white paint at Wankou.

She put the ballpoint back in the cup, closed the muji, set it back in its original spot on the desk. She didn't erase either of the other party's two lines.

She was going out.

---

08:00, she went out for coffee.

She needed a plausible window when she was "not home," but couldn't go too far. She decided on the most natural option: the convenience store at the mouth of the alley, a medium Americano, 85 yuan—her fixed order for the past two years. She got the cup, went out, looped around to the street opposite, walked into a park—about 200 meters long, one bend—came back to the other-side entrance of her apartment building, and went up. The whole route took about 35 minutes.

08:35, she got home.

The gap under the entryway door—she hadn't placed the hair before going out, deliberately. She wanted to see whether the other party would leave a physical trace while she was away.

She went in, set down the coffee, rushed to the desk, opened the muji, turned to the tenth entry.

Below the tenth entry—there was a pale gray diagonal stroke, from lower left to upper right, the pencil thickness consistent with the two previous lines, the pressure consistent too.

The other party had answered.

---

Ren Yi sat back in the chair, looking at the diagonal stroke.

From lower left to upper right. A diagonal could mean two things: ✓ (yes), ✗ (no, if it were the reverse diagonal).

But this one ran from lower left to upper right, not upper left to lower right, and it wasn't a cross. It was a single diagonal, not a cross.

By ordinary symbol convention, a single diagonal looked like the opening stroke of a check mark ✓. But the other party hadn't drawn the second stroke (that hooking curve at the bottom).

She couldn't confirm whether the other party meant "yes" or "no"—it could also mean "I saw it, but I won't tell you."

She needed to ask again.

---

Below the tenth entry in the muji she wrote the eleventh—a single line:

Eleven: yes / no.

She wrote it with the ballpoint, the letters the same size as the other entries. The word "yes," a diagonal stroke, the word "no"—three positions, clearly separated.

She closed the muji and went out again.

Out at 08:50, she bought two sandwiches for lunch that afternoon, looped around, and came back. 09:25, home, checked the gap under the door. She hadn't placed the hair when going out, looking at the floor instead—no footprints. Nothing else off about the entryway either.

She walked to the desk, opened the muji, turned to the eleventh entry.

Above the word "yes"—there was a tiny pencil circle, pale gray, deliberately light, enclosing exactly the word "yes," not enclosing the word "no."

Beside the diagonal mark, below the word "no"—no marking of any kind.

The other party's answer: yes.

---

Ren Yi sat down.

She'd already thought of what it meant. The white paint was applied by the other party. The other party was the one erasing the ring trace from 2060.

The ring in the background of the 2060 group photo wasn't left by the other party—it was left by someone else. The other party was erasing someone else's trace.

If that was the case—then the other party was actively blocking a signal left by some third party, keeping Ren Yi from finding it in the background of the photo from the year she was fourteen. And yet the other party was allowing Ren Yi to talk with them now, through the lines in the muji.

Or, a subtler reading—the other party was the one who'd left it back then, but had now changed strategy, wanting to cover the trace, keeping Ren Yi from seeing it.

Both readings were possible. She needed to ask again.

---

Below the eleventh entry in the muji, she wrote the twelfth:

Twelve: Who left that ring in the background of the 2060 group photo.

She wrote it with the same ballpoint, the letters the same size. Done, she closed it, set it back in its original spot on the desk, and sat back against the chair.

She wasn't going out. She decided to wait all day.

---

She sat on the living room sofa, facing the desk, and waited.

At some point in the afternoon she went to the kitchen to make coffee, ate a sandwich, and came back to her spot. In the evening she went to the bathroom, five minutes, came back—below the twelfth entry, no line, no circle.

After dark, the tofu-pudding cart passed the mouth of the alley, a mother pushing a stroller walked by, the convenience store's automatic door chimed three times. About once an hour she flipped through the muji; below the twelfth entry it stayed blank the whole time.

She walked to the window and glanced at the third-floor kitchen of the building opposite. The woman she didn't know wasn't doing dishes, the kitchen light was off. She withdrew back into the living room.

02:00, she was still sitting on the sofa. Below the twelfth entry—still blank.

The other party wouldn't answer this question.

---

02:00, she sat in the chair, looking at that twelfth entry with no line, no circle.

Something occurred to her.

The other party was willing to answer "did you apply the white paint"—that was about the other party's own actions. The other party wouldn't answer "who left the ring"—that was about someone else's identity.

The other party had a choice. The other party knew what could be told to her and what couldn't.

The other party wasn't some phenomenon responding at random. The other party was a subject—conscious, with decisions, withholding information.

That subject shared the same pencil with her, the same muji, the same 10/25–10/26 timeline.

But she still didn't know who the other party was, didn't know whether the other party had a name.

She sat until 02:30, then finally went to bed and lay down.

She didn't fall asleep. The other party was somewhere she didn't know—maybe across from the apartment, maybe farther, maybe not in physical space—the other party was waiting for her next question, maybe also calculating whether to answer.

The other party knew she wanted to know. The other party was deliberately not telling her.

【Ch. 009 End · Ren Yi's apartment】