【You will die in three days. Please do your best to stay alive.】

Mo Bai stared at the bloody words floating in the air and fell into deep thought.

She didn't panic at the strange message, nor did she feel afraid of death. After all, she had already died once.

Five years ago, when she was only eighteen, Mo Bai went on a graduation trip after her college entrance examination. During the trip, a sudden natural disaster occurred.

No one had expected an earthquake to trigger a landslide, and Mo Bai was hit by the falling rocks. Though she narrowly survived, her spine and internal organs were severely damaged. For the next five years, she was bedridden and paralyzed, constantly tormented by organ failure and pain.

Mo Bai endured for five long years, but in the end, her body simply couldn't hold on, and modern medicine could no longer sustain her life.

After years of immobility, pain, and fear of death, Mo Bai finally let go of everything and calmly accepted her end.

But just after she closed her eyes and took her last breath, she opened them again only to see those blood-red words hovering before her.

Faced with a threat of death written in the color of blood, Mo Bai's first reaction was… awkwardness.

It wasn't easy to come to terms with dying. She had finally made peace with it, only to suddenly come back to life and be told she'd die again in three days... That was just too much.

But her confusion didn't last long, because she soon realized something incredible.

Her body felt… comfortable.

She took a deep breath, and her lungs expanded easily. She could breathe freely. No chest pain, no shortness of breath, no need for a ventilator. She could take deep, steady breaths on her own.

Her lungs were healthy!

And not just that! Her stomach didn't ache, her liver didn't stab with pain, her waist didn't throb, and her heart wasn't twisting in agony.

Everything in her body was working normally, as if she had gone back to before the accident. She felt a lightness she hadn't experienced in five years.

A thrill of joy rose in her chest. She tried to stand up, but her legs didn't respond.

She was still sitting in her wheelchair, unable to walk.

But that was fine! She was already so much healthier than before!

Now that she realized her body's condition had improved so drastically, Mo Bai began to take the bloody message more seriously.

At first, she thought dying again wouldn't matter. It would just be reliving something she'd already been through. But now her eyes kept returning to that "three days." She wanted that number to last as long as possible.

After all, she hadn't felt this "normal" in so long.

Being able to move without pain, breathe without help. It felt like another lifetime.

She looked again at the words "please do your best to stay alive."

Reading them carefully, she got the sense that if she could just survive whatever threat awaited her, she might get to live longer, and maybe stay healthy, too.

So, determined to "stay alive," Mo Bai's mind started racing.

She was certain she had truly died. Her five years of paralysis weren't a dream, nor was the doctor's final apology, nor the feeling of her consciousness slipping away.

Then what was this? A dream born from her unwillingness to die?

Mo Bai stared at her own vibrant hands. No... this wasn't a dream.

She had dreamed of suddenly recovering many times in the past five years, only to wake up to crushing disappointment. But this time, she could tell that it was real.

The words "stay alive" filled her once-empty soul with new strength.

She wanted to live.

She didn't bother overthinking what kind of miracle this was. Three days wasn't much time, so she could figure that out later. What mattered now was survival.

Why would she die? How? Accident or murder? And if it was an accident, how could there be such a specific time limit?

Questions tangled in her mind, but she stayed calm. She traced things back to the basic three core elements of any mystery: time, place, and people.

She looked around. The room was exactly like the one she'd lived in before. A clean one-person apartment.

There was a simple desk with a computer, an adjustable electric bed for patients, and a small stove with a rice cooker.

She rolled her wheelchair to the bathroom. It was large and equipped with a disabled-friendly toilet just like hers had been. Even the scratches on the armrest of her wheelchair were identical.

It was a perfect recreation of her life before death.

Except for one thing. Her vanity was missing the set of makeup she had bought before she died.

She purchased it after learning she didn't have much time left.

Before dying, she'd asked her best friend to do her makeup.

Her best friend was a beauty vlogger, young but skilled. Mo Bai had asked her to restore her face to how it looked when she was still healthy.

She didn't want to die looking frail and worn out.

Under her friend's skillful hands, Mo Bai looked as healthy as she was when she was eighteen years old. Radiant and full of life, even though her body was weak and hollow. It was a haunting kind of beauty, the kind that spoke of yearning for life even in the face of death.

If someone had painted her at that time, the artwork would have been filled with that desperate longing for life.

Afterward, she'd sent her tearful friend home, sat by the window, and quietly watched the sunset as her life faded away.

Now, remembering that moment, Mo Bai wheeled herself to the mirror.

The reflection staring back at her looked exactly the same as that final moment. The makeup was still there, as if it had fused with her skin and become a part of her face.

She washed her face, but the foundation didn't come off. Her skin stayed fair, and her cheeks remained naturally rosy.

Everything looked the same as when she was alive, and yet everything was disturbingly wrong.

If she hadn't already experienced the biggest fear in life, she might have been screaming and calling the police by now.

But she had nothing left to lose. Even if the future was uncertain, it was an "unknown gain," rather than another loss.

She couldn't help but wonder. If she managed to survive these three days, what would she gain? Could her legs possibly recover?

Her hands brushed over her withered legs, not in fear, but in hope.

She wheeled herself to the window. Outside, the sky looked exactly as it had before she died. The fading sunset with only a streak of blood-red cloud left at the horizon.

She checked her pockets and found that her phone was still there. The screen displayed 6:59 PM.

She must've been out of it for about half an hour since waking up, which meant she had roughly 71 hours and 30 minutes left. During that time, anything could happen, and death could strike anytime, from anywhere.

The thought made her throat tighten. She quickly unlocked her phone to search for clues.

It looked just like her phone, but the contents were completely different.

It was unnaturally clean, containing only the basic apps: Messages, Camera, Gallery, Contacts, Calls, and a chat app. Everything else had been deleted.

She opened her messages first. There were only spam texts: "Holiday Sale, 15% off!" "Dear member, congratulations! You’ve won a seven-day stay at XXX Villa!" "Your verification code is…" “...Kind reminder from XXX Home, you have received…” "Congratulations! You've received a fan bonus…"

Over a hundred of them, but none seemed useful.

Next, she checked her contacts list, which only had three entries: "Mom," "Dad," and "Unknown."

She tried calling each one, but none of them connected.

"If there are contacts, that means they can be contacted. Maybe some condition just hasn't been met yet," Mo Bai thought.

Having spent years bedridden, she had passed the time by studying college courses, reading motivational and mystery novels, and playing horror puzzle games. Her body had failed, but she didn't want her mind to rot too.

When her pain wasn't too bad, she'd play survival horror games to distract herself.

What she was experiencing now reminded her of those games. It felt like a timed death game, so she analyzed it with the same logic.

"Stay alive" was the main quest. The death threat was the obstacle. The contacts could either be the ones who would kill her or the ones who could help her.

These three contacts probably had limited uses and could only be reached under specific conditions or at certain times.

She put aside the calls for now and opened the chat app.

Aside from news updates and public messages, there were only chats from her parents with messages like "Have you eaten?" "How's your body?" "It's getting cold, wear more clothes."

Mo Bai's eyes stung as she read her mother's gentle, careful words.

She had moved out on her own.

After the accident, her parents had done everything they could. They poured all their time, money, and love into caring for her. She was deeply moved by their devotion, but she also pitied them.

On sleepless nights, she'd often hear quiet sobs coming from their room.

Her family was well-off enough to afford her treatment, but emotionally, it took a heavy toll. Every glance at her broken body must've hurt them deeply.

Mo Bai was strong-willed, but she couldn't bear to keep hurting them. Once she knew her condition was irreversible and that medicine could only prolong her life a little, she decided to move out and live alone.

She wanted to lessen their grief, to slowly let them detach. So when she finally died, they wouldn't collapse from sorrow.

She learned to adapt, using her arms to lift and move herself, building her own routines, and surviving on her own.

Her parents still visited often at first, but after she firmly pushed them away a few times and proved that she could manage, their visits became less frequent.

By now, they must've already heard about her death.

They would be heartbroken, but she believed they'd prepared themselves and would eventually move on.

Seeing their old messages again, Mo Bai felt her chest tighten.

She tapped on "Mom's" profile, curious for more information and instantly broke out in a cold sweat. Her hands trembled, almost dropping the phone.

It was a selfie of "Mom" holding a thermos. Her arm was covered in corpse-like blotches, half of her face was rotten, and one eyeball even hung loosely from its socket. She was clearly not a living person!

And worse, the parts that could still be recognized didn't even look like her real mother.

That wasn't her mom!

Mo Bai wiped the sweat from her forehead and looked at the caption under the photo:

"Bringing dinner to my daughter. I'm so happy! I miss her so much."

The post was timestamped at 6:30 PM, right around the time when Mo Bai had first seen the bloody message.

Mo Bai: "…"

"The 'daughter' she mentioned in the post... could it be me?"

That terrifying thought had barely formed when the doorbell suddenly rang.

Mo Bai glanced out the window. Seeing that the sky was already completely dark, a chill ran down her spine.