A Dream?

Once again, it was the blue shallows stretching as far as the eye could see.

There was no boundary or land at the edge of his vision, no shifting winds or clouds. Only a few ruined high-rises, reduced to crumbling walls, could be seen standing here and there across the land.

All that remained of the world was a pure, pale blue, so clean it was almost unreal, spreading into the infinite distance.

It felt like a scene in the aftermath of some apocalypse.

Wuling could no longer remember how long he had been walking. He did not know when it had begun, but whenever he fell into a deep sleep, he would come to this place.

At first, he had taken it for a long dream.

But as he came here more often and walked farther, the doubts in his heart grew heavier.

Normally, once a person became aware that they were dreaming, the dream would shatter and they would wake up.

But the shallows never did that. Even when he knew it was all an illusion, he could not break free or leave. He could only let his feet carry him across the silent blue, time and again.

But if it was not a dream, how was he supposed to explain it?

No one answered. No one responded.

There was no alternation of morning and evening here, no rising or setting of the sun and moon. The whole world lay immersed in the serene, boundless indigo of deep space.

White mist, thin as gauze, drifted slowly, rising and falling in billowing waves. Like a frozen evening breeze, it spread in layers between heaven and earth, softening every sharp edge, every clamor and disturbance.

The air was so clean it was almost transparent, without a speck of dust or even the restless sound of wind. All that remained was a long, steady silence, almost eternal.

Beneath his feet was no solid ground, but a translucent crystalline platform formed from countless interwoven strands of fine, pale blue soundwave light. Its patterns flowed like a silent tide, giving off a faint, gentle, cold glow.

When Wuling had first entered this place, the water beneath his feet had been black.

But as he walked through the uncounted years, the black, murky current beneath him had gradually receded and faded, turning from pitch-black to deep blue, then from deep blue to a clear, pale ice blue, until it finally settled into the clean, transparent, gently limpid color of the shallows before him.

Wuling did not know what it meant. Was it getting better or worse? Or was there no difference at all? He did not know.

What had carried him through those endless years, across the deathly silent shallows, had never been a sense of direction, but a thread of music.

A faint sound of piano music drifting from the deepest reaches of the illusory realm, ethereal and gentle, crossing endless space and time.

From the moment he first set foot here, he had followed that distant piano music.

For many years he had walked without rest. The seawater beneath his feet grew clearer, the mist ahead thinner, and the piano music that had lingered by his ears for ten thousand years slowly grew clear, warm and complete, from a faint, fragmented, barely audible echo.

The music was gentle and steady, like the only point of reference in the darkness, the only guide home on a wandering journey.

Wuling could feel that he was very close to the end.

His long, seemingly endless journey alone was finally drawing to a close. After countless years of blind trudging, he could finally see a faint glimmer of dawn.

Just then, at the farthest edge of his vision, at the end of a vast expanse of pure white shallows, a tiny black dot suddenly appeared.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

Wuling quickened his pace and hurried toward it.

After an unknown amount of time had passed, Wuling could finally make out what the little black dot was, though only barely.

It seemed to be an island.

A solitary island suspended at the end of the void, standing apart amid the blue shallows.

There also seemed to be something on the island, but it was too far away for Wuling to see clearly.

Just as he intended to keep walking, the scene before his eyes suddenly blurred, and a familiar dizziness swept over his consciousness.

Wuling understood and did not resist. In the past, when this happened, it usually meant he was about to wake up.

In the final instant before his vision failed completely and everything returned to nothingness, he fixed his gaze on the distant floating island.

For an instant, the mist parted, and a slender, slight, indistinct figure seemed to be standing quietly on the island.

The figure stood still and silent, as though it had been waiting for endless ages.

But before he could look closely, before he could make out the figure's outline, all light and shadow before him abruptly went out.

"Young master, time to get up! Young master, time to get up!"

The crisp, rhythmic alarm pierced the sluggish darkness, forcibly pulling back his wandering consciousness.

Wuling's eyelashes fluttered as he slowly emerged from his long, deep sleep, his muddled awareness returning bit by bit.

He raised a hand and pressed the alarm clock beside the bed with unerring precision. The crisp alert stopped abruptly, and the bedroom returned at once to the quiet of early morning.

His back rested against the soft bedding. The clean scent of the dormitory reached his nose, and before him were the familiar white ceiling and the gauze-covered window letting in the light.

Real and warm.

It was a world completely different from the boundless blue illusory realm he had just left.

Wuling slowly sat up. A trace of the dream's unreal coolness still lingered on his forehead, and the cool, moist sheen of the soundwave shallows seemed to remain on his fingertips.

That dream again.

The endless blue shallows again, another solitary journey so long that time lost all meaning.

Only this time, it had been different from every time before.

For the first time, he had seen the end.

For the first time, in that eternally unchanging, empty illusory realm, he had glimpsed an island and a figure standing in the distance.

The figure had been far too indistinct, shrouded by layers of white mist and the gulf of space and time. He could not see its face or make out its shape, much less tell whether it was a man or a woman.

Yet for some reason, the instant his gaze passed over that slight figure, his long-quiet heart had given a faint, inexplicable tremor.

Strange, yet carrying a sense of familiarity, as if ordained by fate.

It was as though they had gazed at each other across countless years, as though the destination he had been making for, guided by unseen forces through ten thousand miles of wandering and an endless illusory realm, had never been the piano music, but the person waiting quietly on the island.

Wuling lowered his eyes and gently pressed his fingertips to the space between his brows, his heart full of heavy doubts.

What exactly were those shallows?

What did the black water beneath his feet turning blue year by year foretell?

And who, exactly, were behind the piano music that crossed endless space and time and the figure waiting on the island?

Countless questions circled in his heart, unanswered.

The dream had shattered, and the clues had come to an abrupt end, leaving him with a head full of fog and a faint sense of loss in his heart that he could not shake.

Outside the window, daylight had already filled the sky. The soft morning sun shone through the gauze screen and fell on the edge of the bed, dispelling the chill left behind by the dream.

The dormitory was quiet. Calcharo and Lingyang had yet to get up, and the bedroom held only the stillness and ease unique to early morning.

Wuling looked out the window at the tree-lined campus gradually waking up and the clear blue sky in the distance.

The sky in reality was bright and warm, but what kept echoing in his mind were still the eternally silent indigo shallows and that last, half-seen figure.

He had a vague yet powerful premonition.

That was no ordinary dream.

The blue shallows, the island at their end, the figure waiting for someone unknown, and the piano music that had gradually grown clearer as he crossed the distance...

One day, he would reach the very end of the dream and see the whole truth.

At that thought, Wuling slowly raised a hand and rubbed beneath his eyes, suppressing the thoughts churning in his heart.

Since things had come to this, he would eat first.

Wuling threw back the covers and prepared to get out of bed. Morning light fell across his handsome profile, yet a faint, deep and distant glimmer from the endless deep-blue illusory realm still lingered in his eyes.

"Ding."