The bullet pierced her front, just below the ribs, and ripped its way clean through her back. She felt every burning sensation before her body fell backward. As she descended towards the ocean, she smiled painfully at finally ending her miserable life.
However, one regret surfaced, absurdly, in the fraction of a second in her mind.
It was about the beach!
The beach vacation she had tried to save money for, month after month, only for her miscellaneous expenses to devour the savings every time. To her misfortune, she never made it to that beach holiday.
And now it was already too late at that point. So, without much complaint, Cixi surrendered to death, closing her eyes. Her body splashed into the cold water, and the ocean mercifully swallowed her whole, granting her final wish.
The cold rushed in from every direction, dragging her deeper into water that tasted of salt. Her body sank into the dark, and the pressure of the ocean against her chest felt like a hand pushing her toward the ground, and then it stopped…
The coldness vanished. The pressure of the surrounding water evaporated, and in its place settled a heavy silence so complete that it felt louder than her own beating heart.
Cixi snapped open her eyes and was greeted by absolute darkness. Her legs rested on no solid ground. She was floating in a void of pitch-black twilight.
She looked down at her body and touched her clothes to feel that they were dry. Her skin was dry. There was no sign of dampness. It seemed she had fallen into the water and arrived somewhere else.
'Am I already dead?'
The question formed in her mind as her naked eyes scanned the void. She stretched her hands out to feel anything, perhaps a wall, and felt nothing but emptiness. She then called out hesitantly.
"Hello?" No reply came.
"Am I dead?" Again, nothing.
"Am I in hell?" Again, no answer came.
Cixi did not think of heaven because Marion had once told her in that matter-of-fact tone that people who commit suicide always stay stuck between life and the afterlife.
So she asked herself if she was stuck between two worlds?
'Will I meet other souls like me? Will I be stuck here for eternity with no walls, no ground, no sky, no sound, no light, nothing?'
Cixi's mind began to fracture with panic, but then she heard her own racing heartbeats. Pumping faster and alive.
'Did a dead person's heart still beat in the afterlife?' She wondered again, yet no response came.
Then her eyes dropped down to a flicker of light coming from her hand.
Her right hand was clenched into a fist, the fingers locked so tightly that the knuckles had gone white. She uncurled them slowly, one by one, and there it sat in her battered palm.
Cassian's coin shone brightly against the darkness.
'Had the coin travelled to the afterlife with me?' She pondered.
Her mind spiralled, pensively turning over where she was and what she was supposed to do in this void. Then something caught her attention once more.
Something gleamed. It was faint at first, like a distant star winking through fog. Then brightness expanded into an arc. Then came the object that the arc was attached to. A long staff made of metal. It was a scythe.
The handle stretched down and was held by a figure that came out of the darkness and started to walk. No, it was floating towards her, she realised.
Cixi's heart thumped. 'Who is that?' She muttered under her breath.
The figure was cloaked in black, and somehow Cixi could see the figure clearly, even though everything was pitch dark, even the cloak was black. The person's face was concealed by a deep hood. Cixi recognised the cloak immediately. She had seen one like it before. Below her apartment, on the night one of the druggies had died all of a sudden.
She had told herself it was a hallucination. Was it, though? Or was she hallucinating now? This was getting incredibly confusing.
Before she knew it, the cloaked person had stopped two steps away from Cixi, and when two eyes gleamed red beneath the hood, Cixi almost gasped. Her hands flew to her mouth in shock.
"W-who are you?" Flabbergasted, Cixi asked.
"What have you done?" Cixi was questioned in return by the cloaked figure. The voice echoed through the void; it was neither masculine nor feminine, neither old nor young, but definitive.
Cixi retreated a step in fear. "I-I was killed." The correction came immediately and instinctively out of dread. Then the silence followed, which lasted for a heartbeat before Cixi found herself throwing two more questions at the scary, cloaked figure whose eyes were red. "Where am I? And w-who are you?"
When the cloaked figure next spoke, it was not to address her question. "You are neither dead nor alive, Cixi." The person's voice reverberated once more. "You have disrespected the life given to you, not just once but twice. How could you even think of attempting to end your life twice in a single night? You disappointed me, Cixi!"
'What?'
"Disrespected the life?! Disappointed?! Who are you?! My mother?!" Cixi couldn't suppress a scoff at the cloaked figure who dared to blame her for her forsaken choice. Whose fault was it that she had resorted to such extremes? The way the person standing in front of her accused her made it sound as if she found a twisted sort of happiness in it.
The fear that had gripped Cixi's ribs was gone.
"If you are constantly abused by your manager, by your colleagues, and even by a gang, while you are simply trying to survive, why would I not be angry? And why would I not wish to end my sufferings?" Heat flooded her cheeks with anger. "If I had not been kidnapped by some terrifying people who were about to put me in a container only to add more misery to my already tormented life, why would I not want to end it?" This time, Cixi challenged the hooded figure standing before her. She lifted her chin in the belief that she had made the right choice.
The cloaked figure lifted the scythe and struck its base against the void. It sounded like colossal bell tolls that rang before the King's decree was read.
The vibration of sound jostled through Cixi's ribs and settled into the base of her skull.
"Your perspective on life was always negative from the beginning, and you did little to change it. Instead of fighting back, you took everything in. You had one good friend, and yet you did not share your true feelings with her. She would have guided you onto the right path. You simply chose to stand alone." The red eyes burned brighter than before. "You faced countless blows. Then why did you not hit back? Why did you not go to the higher authority and file a complaint? You did not try harder, Cixi. That was your problem. In fact, you found fault with yourself. You looked down on yourself first before anyone else did. And even when you were given a second chance, you still failed to see it through.
Why did you not shoot the man with the intention of saving those women, who were trapped inside the container, who had similar lives to yours, or worse? A single thought counts, Cixi!" The cloaked figure's question landed like a blow on Cixi's chest. "You only thought about yourself in that moment. You selfishly shot the man so that you could get a bullet to end your life. You chose the easy path."
"That was not easy." Cixi's voice broke through the lecture. "How could I think of others when my brain was simply trying to protect myself?"
"Not protect, Cixi." The cloaked figure's sharp whisper sliced through the void like the scythe itself. "But to kill yourself. Cowardly."
Cixi shook her head in denial. She would not accept the baseless accusation from a person who knew nothing about her, or how she felt, or lived. She would not let this unknown figure, this faceless judge, condemn her without a contest. "It is easy to tell others what they should and should not do when you have never stood in my shoes." She defiantly challenged the person to prove her wrong.
"I see, Cixi." The red eyes dimmed fractionally. "You have already closed your heart and your mind. Even if God descended before you and offered you the wisdom, you would deny it... So, to learn the valuable lesson, I, the Grim Reaper, invoke my one wish bestowed by the Lord of Diyu to condemn you, Cixi, to a life of immortality. You will feel pain! You will bleed! But you will never die as a human!"
The cloaked figure raised the scythe high above the void and brought it down with force.
And what followed was a sound of great intensity, one that ripped through the blackness itself, stirring the deepest parts of her soul, a sound that could rebuild a soul.
Cixi's head spun. Her balance collapsed. Her eyes closed involuntarily, dragged shut by a vertigo so violent that thought itself became impossible. The darkness swallowed her whole, and she fell through it, through the emptiness, through the silence, through everything she was about to become.
When her eyes opened, she was in her apartment under the blanket on the sofa bed. The morning light seeped through the thin curtains as it always did.