The whole family circled around Qiao Lian with a joy no one else could understand. After brushing past life and death and sheer helplessness in that drafty prefab shed, the baby actually came out safe and sound. The air in the room, previously thick with the scent of blood and sweat, seemed to lighten as the tension broke.
"It's a girl, a little princess!" Grandma Jing cried out, her voice cracking with relief as she reached toward the newborn.
"Yikes, all wrinkly and not cute at all," someone whispered, though their eyes were shining.
"Let me see. She is pretty already. Takes after her mom, real fine features."
Wu You'ai didn't get it. The kid looked ugly to her, a tiny, red-faced creature with squashed features and damp hair. Yet the doctor and the grandmother were both calling her beautiful with genuine wonder. Wait, where is Jing Shu? If the baby arrived safely, the one they should thank most was Jing Shu. She was the one who had been at the bedside when the final push came.
"Grandma, where is Jing Shu?" Wu You'ai asked, looking around the crowded, dim space.
The doctor held the baby upside down and tapped her soles with a firm hand until she let out a sharp cry, then handed her over to the waiting family. Grandma Jing and Jing Pan beamed at the little face, their exhaustion momentarily forgotten. Only when they heard the question did they realize she was gone.
Qiao Lian's mother murmured from the corner, her voice low as she watched the baby, "I saw her run outside."
"This went smoothly thanks to Jing Shu. I told you my granddaughter would find a way. Maybe she went to the restroom," Grandma Jing said, her gaze lingering on her daughter-in-law.
"I will go look." Wu You'ai ran off, her boots thudding on the floor. While she searched, Jing Pan began telling the doctor what had just happened during those critical moments.
"She massaged and guided the breathing while talking Qiao Lian through it. My niece works with the Medicinal Herb Association in Wu City. She knows a lot about these things. we're all proud of her."
Outside, Jing Shu clutched her exploding head, her fingers digging into her scalp. A constant rumble pounded her skull, like twin helicopters chopping the air right by her ears. It felt like her eardrums were going to burst from the internal pressure. The vibration seemed to travel down her jaw and into her neck, making every muscle corded and tight.
Guiding the baby with suggestion while also cueing Qiao Lian's breathing had already triggered the roar. It had started as a faint hum and built into a crescendo of static. She had held out until the delivery was certain, then she had bolted into the open.
She gulped the cold air and thumped her temples with the heels of her hands, but nothing helped. In the pitch-black rain that fell in icy sheets, the ruined street and the makeshift clinic seemed to sway as if the earth were liquid beneath her feet.
"It's got to be backlash from overusing the Cube Space," she told herself, the thought flickering through the noise. Life came first. She drank a whole drop of Spirit Spring, the cool liquid sliding down her throat. The so-called cure-all did nothing to quiet the storm in her head.
Panic nibbled at her. She had never expected overusing an ability to feel this awful, this physical. She had only added one more target to her illusion, right? She could control plenty of animals without issue, but one adult and one baby pushed her past the limit. Was it because humans were higher lifeforms with more complex neural structures, or was there some hidden rule she didn't know?
So much for dreaming of using illusion to control a crowd in America. If she tried that, she would probably die on the spot from the mental backlash.
It was like how any animal could enter the space, but living humans couldn't. There was a barrier she had just slammed into at full speed.
Cold rain hammered her face, soaking through her hair and clothes. The roaring in her ears made her want to scream just to hear her own voice over the thrumming. Just when she felt herself cracking under the sensory load, a pair of hands grabbed her shoulders. She turned her head and saw Wu You'ai's worried face illuminated by a distant flashlight.
"Jing Shu, Shu, Shu, Shu…"
She could clearly see her cousin's lips moving, forming her name, but in her ears there was only a distorted echo and the sound of thunder.
"Am I going deaf?" she wondered, the fear cold in her gut.
She shook her head hard, stuck a finger in each ear and pulled it out again, then guessed Wu You'ai was asking something like what was wrong by reading her lips.
"I'm feeling a little unwell. let's go back to the RV and get some sleep."
Wu You'ai spoke again, but Jing Shu couldn't read the words and didn't care to try. Veins began to pop out of her skin on her forehead and neck, the price of squeezing herself under control to remain standing. She didn't know how long she could keep from snapping. So this was what constant, high-frequency noise felt like.
She staggered back, her legs heavy. Wu You'ai held her up, providing a steady anchor in the dark. Thankfully the RV wasn't far, its silhouette a dark, solid shape in the rain. Ten minutes later, they reached the door. Jing Shu waved her away as they stepped onto the platform. Wu You'ai had been talking the whole way, and when she realized there was no response, she pointed at the phone in her pocket, then at herself. Call me if you need anything.
Jing Shu gave a crooked smile and nodded. Before the other girl left, Wu You'ai heard her say, "Tell Grandma I have caught a cold. I will sleep it off in two days. I have medicine."
Wu You'ai nodded and slipped out into the night.
At last the giant RV held only Jing Shu. She stripped off the sodden rain gear and everything else, her skin pale and shivering. She slid into the warm tub and switched the Cube to its first and second forms. A full check of her mental map showed nothing wrong inside the storage areas. She exhaled a little. The Cube Space was still packed with supplies, its contents orderly. She feared the day it vanished, so she never kept every single item inside.
By the third drop of Spirit Spring, her stomach growled with a sudden, fierce hunger, but the buzzing in her ears didn't fade. She started demolishing food she pulled from the space, eating with a desperate intensity.
Spirit Spring worked on illnesses and wounds. If she was just getting hungry, that meant the spring wasn't working on the noise, which meant this really was a matter of mental overuse. She would just have to wait it out and let her mind settle.
After a bath, she lay on the bed, her body twitchy and raw while the harsh droning chewed at her eardrums. She felt like she would go crazy if she didn't distract herself with something complex. Fine; she would practice the cube.
She pulled out the multicolored cube and started the movements. Her fingers clicked the plastic sections around with mechanical speed. Without noticing, hours slid by in the quiet of the RV. Then she jolted. Wait; she wasn't forgetting to practice anymore. She had not truly trained in months, always spacing out and losing focus even when she wrote reminders on her palm. Every time she tried, some little thing interrupted her and she dropped the task.
Now that mental fog was gone. She was back to how she used to be before the plateau. Under the grinding pressure of the noise, she focused even harder to drown out the sound, and a few hours sharpened her technique.
Then she noticed something else. The roaring had eased, becoming a duller thrum. She checked her phone. It was already after six in the evening.
"As the ringing eases, my mind is drifting. Maybe this is the real way to level up this tier of the Cube Space." A hunch took shape in her mind. She wrote the observation down and set an alarm.
That night, Grandma Jing brought over a pot of old hen soup and a spread of dishes, the containers warm against the cold air. When she heard about the "cold," she added a thermos of red date ginger tea. Jing Pan sent along some of Jing Shu's favorites: stir-fried intestines and pork trotter soup. Jing Shu ate like a queen in her luxury cabin, then felt like she had forgotten something, right up until the alarm buzzed on her nightstand.
"Knew it, I forgot again. It looks like I will have to switch on self-torture mode if I want to level the Cube faster. Is the Cube training my illusion like this on purpose?"
This time she didn't push it too far. She kept a light suggestion on the newborn and on the mother for only a few dozen seconds, testing the boundaries. Sure enough, the skull-splitting pain returned fast, blooming behind her eyes. She hurried back to the center of the RV and grabbed the cube to practice again, using the motion to ground herself.
Curiosity gnawed at her as she worked the cube. After she leveled up through this grueling process, what new ability would the Cube reveal?