[Alliance] anomaly

Ren Yi sucked in a sharp breath, like a drowning man being hauled ashore.

His chest heaved, and the taste of dust and blood seemed to linger in his throat. He lay stunned for several seconds before realizing he was in a sleep pod. A soft indicator light blinked overhead.

The pod lid slowly rose.

[The major assignment test has concluded. Test results will be released together in seven days.]

[Please relax. Everything that just occurred was part of the test. Please take a deep breath, calm yourself, and leave the sleep pod as soon as possible.]

[Go out and eat something delicious, hug your loved ones, and have a pleasant day.]

Ren Yi lay quietly for a while before the hallucination faded. Only then did he process what he had heard.

What the fuck.

Ren Yi felt a stab in his heart and nearly cursed aloud.

So everything that had just happened was fake.

The Alliance with its perfect benefits, the most comprehensive education system—right now, Ren Yi just wanted to punch whoever had designed all of this.

Wait, so did my brother know what was going to happen?

He probably did. After all, the Alliance provided universal education, so whether someone had an intellectual disability or autism, they probably had to go through this.

The thought made Ren Yi even angrier.

He sprang out of the sleep pod, only to stumble, which made him notice the state his body was in.

He was dizzy, even dizzier than he had been in the hallucination. Fortunately, after taking two steps, he confirmed that the floor wasn't tilted, there was no purplish-red light outside the window, and no black waterfall was falling from the sky.

The air felt real and heavy, and the world was spinning gently. His limbs felt hollowed out and weak, and his temples tingled in waves.

"...Brother?"

He called out softly.

The answer was the sound of a spatula striking a pan in the kitchen.

Calm, familiar, and rhythmic.

Only then did Ren Yi's brain register that he was truly standing on solid ground.

Everything that had just happened slowly became shrouded in a haze, like a reflection in a mirror or the moon in water, as his brain categorized it as a "hallucination."

Ren Yi took in the world a little greedily.

The sleep pod beside him gave a soft hum, as though a breeze were blowing through his hair.

The floor felt exceedingly strange beneath his feet, like he was treading on a cloud.

Water sparkled as it danced in the pan of oil, the sunlight falling on the floor was a little noisy, white currents of air slowly swirled, and the lake outside the window was like tofu...

Speaking of tofu, it looked like fried tofu was on the menu for dinner tonight.

I have to tell my brother I'm awake, and then settle the score with him for joining the Federation in playing with my feelings!

Ren Yi slowly walked toward the living room.

A faint smell of cooking oil hung in the air. The kitchen's frosted glass door was closed, and all he could see was Ren Man's shadow bustling about inside.

Ren Yi reached out to pull the door open, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught what looked like his shadow wriggling on the wall.

He froze and turned to look at the wall.

His shadow was moving about with gusto, as though it had broken free of the constraints of flesh. Its edges wriggled ceaselessly, becoming almost wavy.

It was like a cloud with no fixed shape, trying to confine itself within a human outline. But a human form was a little too incompatible with a cloud's body structure, so it could only dance disco inside that skin.

Ren Yi: "..."

Was he still dreaming?

He felt his breathing quicken.

No, he suddenly realized he should be breathing, but had he even been breathing just now?

He slowly looked down and saw a tentacle made of thick white mist.

Great, he wasn't human anymore.

Ren Yi took a step back.

But just as a person couldn't go back once they became aware of their breathing, the human form his subconscious had held together collapsed. All the flesh of his body melted into a mass in an instant and crashed to the floor.

His five senses were in disarray. He seemed to have one ear pressed against the floor, one eye looking straight at the ceiling, while all the other eye could see was a hazy white, as though it were inside his stomach. His mouth seemed to have taken in something salty, and his nose bumped into the corner of a table as he moved.

A grating creak rang out. He had knocked over a chair as he backed away, and by the time he realized it, he had already crushed it to pieces.

The commotion alerted Ren Man in the kitchen. Immediately afterward, Ren Yi's ear pressed against the floor heard a muffled call.

"Xiao Yi?"

No, no, no. If my brother sees me like this, autism won't be the only problem. He'll probably be scared into developing a mental illness too.

Ren Yi panicked, but with his hands and feet no longer recognizable as such, he had no choice in that critical moment but to use the most primitive means of movement—he rolled under the dining table.

With a clatter, the kitchen door slid open.

Tap, tap.

Ren Man walked out of the kitchen and stopped.

He was probably stunned by the chair's pitiful remains.

As Ren Yi had rolled, his ears had successfully shifted from being pressed against the floor to facing sideways, which now meant they were pointing toward Ren Man.

The bad news was that his one eye outside his body had also made half a turn, going from facing the ceiling to facing the sofa, with Ren Man behind it.

The room fell quiet for a moment, then footsteps sounded again, followed by the opening and closing of a bedroom door. Ren Yi realized his brother had gone into his room to check.

Before Ren Man returned, Ren Yi lunged forward and slipped into the gap beneath the sofa.

Fortunately, his current body could be rounded or flattened at will, so he just managed to squeeze into the gap, which was less than ten centimeters high.

However, the space beneath the sofa was low and narrow, forcing him to flatten himself and completely fill the small patch of shadow underneath.

Fortunately, Ren Yi had finally gained a basic understanding of his current body, and this flattened shape further helped him locate his various organs.

So he began working hard to "fish out" his facial features.

By the time he had finally gathered one eye and two ears, he realized it seemed a little quiet around him.

By rights, his brother should already have discovered that he was no longer in the sleep pod, while the chair in the living room had been smashed to pieces.

In this situation, an ordinary person might either call out loudly or contact the police.

No, wait. An ordinary person might, but Ren Man might not.

He recalled some of the psychology he had studied in his previous life. In a situation like this, an autistic person might find it harder to make a sound the more anxious they became.

Ren Yi grew a little anxious. As he worked to fish out his mouth, he moved the eye he had found toward the outer edge of the sofa.

But his progress was rather slow. After moving it for some time, he could only see one corner of the gap out of the side of his eye.

Growing impatient, he began tugging at his eye. To his surprise, he found that his field of vision began to stretch and rise, gradually expanding from the ninety degrees directly in front of him to a hundred and twenty, then a hundred and eighty degrees.

At last, his field of vision encompassed the gap along the outward-facing side of the sofa.

It was pitch-dark outside. In this short time, the last glimmer of the setting sun seemed to have vanished.

Why aren't the lights on? Could my brother have passed out?

Only then did he realize that he could see perfectly clearly in the darkness. Even a splinter from the broken chair was visible in the finest detail.

Ren Yi wanted to grit his teeth, but unfortunately, he couldn't find them. In the end, he decided to roll over to his room in the literal sense and see what was going on.

Fortunately, he finally managed to fish out his other eye.

This eye appeared on the back of his current body. He copied what he had done before and stretched it out, gaining a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view.

But immediately afterward, he froze.

This eye faced away from the other one, toward the gap on the wall-facing side of the sofa. The gap was only two centimeters from the wall, so by rights, all this eye should have seen was the dark wall.

Yet at this very moment, a pair of eyes floated there, quietly staring at him. There was no telling how long they had been watching.