The Stopped World

The Stopped World

Zhang Heng pushed open the dormitory door. The corridor was deathly quiet, somewhat like a hospital morgue, with only the sound of his own footsteps.

The door to the dorm opposite was open, light spilling out from inside. Zhang Heng poked his head in and saw four people completely engrossed in their computers.

On their screens, their characters were chasing a low-health Annie beneath a tower. The skills they had unleashed hung suspended in midair, while the excited expressions on their faces were frozen in that instant, like four lifelike statues.

Zhang Heng noticed the alarm clock on one of their desks. It, too, read 00:00.

After that, he checked out several other dorm rooms on the floor.

Some had been locked from the inside before their occupants went to sleep, so he could not enter. But every room he could enter, without exception, had stopped at the final moment of the day.

Someone in the washroom was secretly smoking behind the dorm supervisor's back. The glowing ember at the tip of the cigarette was clearly visible, yet it would not burn any farther down, and the smoke he had exhaled was frozen before his lips.

Zhang Heng could not resist pulling out his phone and taking a picture of the incredible scene.

As he pressed the shutter, he discovered something else interesting.

In this time-stopped world, it was not only people who had been paused. Objects, too, remained in the state they had been in during that final second.

Like the skill that had been halfway across the screen earlier, the motionless electric fan, and now this cigarette that would never finish burning.

But there were exceptions.

To test his suspicion, Zhang Heng pulled the cigarette from between the smoker's fingers.

The moment it reached his hand, it actually began burning again.

So that was how it worked.

In this time where only he could move, anything that came into his possession returned to normal. Like this cigarette, as well as the phone, computer, and MP3 player that had worked normally earlier. Only the time displayed on them still would not change.

And his apparent ability to make anything normal by touching it did not seem to work on people. He had pushed Chen Huadong around in the dorm for so long earlier, yet the latter had shown no reaction.

Then what about other living creatures besides humans?

Interested, Zhang Heng turned and returned to his dorm. He switched his phone to flashlight mode and held it close to his roommates. Two minutes later, using its twenty-megapixel dual soft-light cameras, he successfully found his target in the darkness.

It was the most common and most annoying creature around people in summer—mosquitoes.

As long as one got into the room, basically no one could expect a peaceful night's sleep.

Zhang Heng's dorm was on the third floor, relatively low down. At this height, mosquitoes did not even need to take the elevator; they could simply move right in. Everyone had all kinds of anti-mosquito measures: mosquito coils, mosquito-repellent floral water, mosquito nets. Yet there were still often stragglers that slipped through.

This mosquito was currently lurking beside dorm leader Wei Jiangyang's pillow, waiting for an opportunity to feast.

Unfortunately, its sweet dream was destined to fall through tonight.

Zhang Heng reached out, gently pinched one of the mosquito's wings, plucked it out of the air, and placed it in his palm.

Yet it remained in its wing-flapping pose, like the most dedicated actor, completely ignoring the fresh prey brought right to its mouth.

"Looks like animals don't work either."

With the experiment over, Zhang Heng casually crushed it, earning himself the achievement of ridding the people of a pest.

Well, he had explored pretty much the entire dorm building. Next, it was time to go outside and take a look.

After using the washroom faucet to dispose of the body, Zhang Heng went down to the first floor.

The dorm supervisor on duty stood by the entrance holding a large U-shaped lock, apparently preparing to lock the doors.

This sort of thing was practically a hallmark of university life, though different colleges had vastly different dormitory management policies.

Zhang Heng's school had a rule that the dorms were locked at midnight, but if someone genuinely had business and returned late, they could knock on the window to wake the supervisor, register their name, and go back inside. Of course, doing it frequently would earn them punishment and criticism.

Zhang Heng calmly walked past the dorm supervisor. Under normal circumstances, she would certainly have stopped him and asked, "Student, where are you going at such a late hour?"

But now, it was as if she had suddenly gained X-ray vision. Her gaze passed right through Zhang Heng's body and focused on the door handle, as though she had not noticed a living person walking right past her.

And so Zhang Heng strolled out of the dorm building, looked up at the night sky overhead, crossed the empty campus, and finally arrived at the school gate.

This area was much livelier.

Zhang Heng's school was not large, but it was in a good location, right beside the Third Ring Road. Across from it was a street, and nights in a big city were always especially long.

The pancake stall on the overpass was doing brisk business. Many young office workers had only just left their office buildings at this hour, starving and badly in need of a late-night snack to replenish their energy on the way home. Not far away, sanitation workers silently swept the sidewalk with their brooms. Beneath the bus stop, two bald middle-aged men in suits held their phones while waiting for a night bus that stubbornly refused to arrive. Behind them, a girl wearing a bear hair clip let out a long yawn at the register of the twenty-four-hour convenience store...

And at 00:00, all of them were frozen by time at once.

Like a movie scene after the pause button had been pressed.

The cars speeding along the road also came to a complete stop in that instant.

Zhang Heng had once gone to the station to pick up a friend, and he had seen what the city looked like late at night.

But this was the first time he had observed it from so close.

He could see the chopped scallions falling from the pancake vendor's hand, the calluses on the sanitation workers' hands and their dark faces, the greasy bridge of a bald man's nose and the photo of his full-moon-old daughter on his phone screen, the celebrity stickers the girl with the bear hair clip had secretly hidden beneath the register...

All the details overlooked in everyday life were now laid out before Zhang Heng exactly as they were.

It was as though he had come to know this city all over again.

Zhang Heng used WeChat to unlock a Mobike bicycle, then rode through the city with great interest, sightseeing as he went.

He also continued testing his hypothesis.

When the hour hand on Starfish was nearly done making its second round, he hurried back into the dorm before the supervisor could lock the door.

It was 00:00 again, but this time Zhang Heng was not wearing headphones.

The next second, every sound flooded into his ears like a tide.

"Nice! That kill is mine!!! I can finally buy Blade of the Ruined King!"

"Push the tower fast! They don't dare come up."

"No, I need to go back and heal first!"

The fan on the door creaked as it swung its head from side to side. Outside the window came the mating cries of stray cats. Someone shuffled down the corridor in slippers. Zhang Heng, who had been awake for more than a full day, was finally overcome by exhaustion. After plugging in his dead phone, he threw himself onto the bed as quickly as possible and fell into a deep sleep.