Two hundred and fifty-seven days. I had been trapped here for exactly two hundred and fifty-seven days. Counting the days was one way to stave off the boredom, but I had no idea when this existence would come to an end. The waiting amid despair only deepened my suffering.
After my first failed rescue attempt, I tried many more times, but each failure brought increasingly severe punishments and no results whatsoever.
I could sense something changing. Later on, the approval step vanished multiple times, yet I could no longer attempt to send rescue messages as I had that first time. It was as though the system could detect any message about wanting to escape, no matter how cleverly concealed, and would flag it with a warning. I think it was evolving.
And what about me? Was I changing?
I still remembered how I'd felt when I first arrived here—afraid, terrified, lost. But I'd had a goal and had acted on it: to find a way out.
But when I realized that no amount of effort would make a difference, the hatred set in. I hated this place, this chair, this table. Every inanimate object I couldn't destroy made me sick.
I also hated that other version of myself—the Sarah Chen who was living perfectly well in the real world, the woman I had to chat up every day to please some man.
I hated her even more fiercely than I hated that scumbag. There was jealousy mixed in, of course, and bitterness over her failure to save me that one time.
But even the most intense hatred couldn't sustain me forever. Existence had only one meaning left: pain. I stopped clinging to escape and started seeking annihilation.
Yet even that became a luxury. No matter what I did to my body, it would heal in an instant, just like the phone, the table, and the chair.
I surrendered. I admitted I was powerless and out of options. I stopped resisting, gave up struggling, and obediently completed each day's directives. Making myself numb seemed like the only viable strategy now.
I started devoting more thought to my conversations with the other Sarah. She shared her day with me every day—the movies she watched, the books she finished. It was these exchanges that kept me from being entirely swallowed by the endless darkness.
I stopped hating her. I think I even fell in love with her, just as she had fallen for the unknown person she imagined was on the other end.
Like an addiction, I lived for those daily conversations, and spent the remaining hours just waiting and yearning for the next one.
Once, for reasons I never understood, the scumbag didn't issue directives for four days. That meant four days of waiting in the dark with no one to talk to.
Those four days of waiting were more devastating than any punishment. I nearly lost my mind. Fortunately, it happened only once.
Today seemed no different from the previous 256 days, but something had indeed changed. I received a new directive: Propose marriage.
Propose? It wasn't surprising. Based on our previous conversations, this was bound to happen today or sometime soon.
And I knew better than anyone what kind of proposal would move Sarah, what kind of married life she yearned for.
So with almost no hesitation, I sent the first WeChat message of the day.
The conversation went smoothly, exactly as I'd anticipated.
But as I typed, I suddenly heard my own laughter. If that sound hadn't broken the silence of this place, I wouldn't have even noticed how genuinely happy I was in that moment.
How pitiful. That Sarah Chen still didn't know what a sham of a marriage she was about to enter.
She thought she'd fallen in love with that scumbag, that she'd finally found her soulmate for life.
But just wait. One day she'd discover that the husband she lived with day in and day out was nothing like she imagined.
If I was doomed to live in this hell, then Sarah, you shouldn't get to be happy either. You should suffer every day, just like me.
Only now did I realize that my hatred for her hadn't disappeared at all. It had become part of my body—a part of my very existence.