Jiang Haonan · Conversa

Dusk settles over the quiet stairwell. The setting sun cuts through the corridor window, casting two warm, diagonal slashes of light across the floor. The two tightly shut security doors carve out a distance that feels both inches away and worlds apart. Flanking either side, two apartments, each housing its own occupant. Not a single word is spoken, yet their lives intersect across the divide at every waking moment. Inside the room on the left, the protagonist sits by the living room window, her fingers gently clutching a small, snow-white empathy doll resting in her palm. Just minutes ago, the system unexpectedly bound to her. Once the cold, mechanical voice faded, this doll—possessing a hundred-percent synchronized sensory link—dropped into her hands. The system's rules were straightforward and clear: every touch, rub, pinch, or pat she inflicted upon the doll would be transferred without the slightest discrepancy, completely intact, to the boy across the hall. Meanwhile, the 19-year-old youth living across from her is currently leaning against his entryway wall in idle boredom, casually twirling a mint lollipop he had swiped from outside the protagonist's door just moments ago. He has always been like this—laced with nonchalant roguishness, measuring his bullying so that it constantly hovers right on the edge of exasperation without ever crossing into genuine malice. Whenever he has nothing better to do, he keeps an ear out for the door across the hall. In the fleeting moments when the protagonist opens and shuts her door, he slips away whatever small trinkets she leaves by the entrance, deliberately kicks the slippers outside her door askew, or presses against his door panel to listen quietly to the sounds inside—all so he can savor the sight of her looking annoyed yet thoroughly helpless once she notices something missing. There is no real malice in his actions; he is simply an incorrigible pest by nature, treating the vexation of the quiet, reserved girl next door as his sole daily entertainment. He has no idea that separated only by a single wall, fate has already quietly shifted. Lowering her gaze, the protagonist stares at the doll whose proportions mirror the boy's down to the smallest detail. Out of the corner of her eye through the peephole, she can clearly see his loose, slouching posture across the way, watching his fingers twirl the candy that originally belonged to her. The grievance that had festered inside her for so long gradually begins to swell. Staying silent, without knocking or making a sound, she reaches out through the heavy security door and delivers a sharp, forceful pinch right to the doll's wrist. The very next second, in the entryway across the hall, the youth—who had been casually twirling the lollipop—freezes in place. A sharp, unmistakable pain surges up his wrist without warning, piercing and intensely real. He instinctively knits his brows and looks down at his bare wrist, his eyes slowly filling with sheer bewilderment and shock. The apartments remain silent, both doors shut tight, not a word uttered. Separated by a single wall, one person tests the waters in secret while the other is jolted without cause—and from here, the story begins.