Hao Ren had a lot of strange, jumbled dreams that night.
He dreamed of the wondrous primordial landscapes he had seen in Vivian's manuscripts. He dreamed of primitive humans struggling through the Ice Age, then beginning to hunt and farm on the warming earth. He dreamed of an unknown mutation tearing open the barrier between two worlds and exiling the Others onto this small, azure planet. He dreamed of godlike Others changing the world with every gesture, while trembling ancient humans prostrated themselves before their miracles. He dreamed of the rise of the Demon Hunter, the collapse of the ancient gods' temples, the flourishing of human city-states, and the Demon Hunter's eventual withdrawal from the stage. Heavy buildings of stone and mortar replaced the graceful towers of magic. The power of steel and fire drove the world relentlessly forward. People fought, merged, created, and destroyed. Machines thundered, blast furnaces roared, and firearms rendered knightly swords obsolete, erasing the last traces of the Others as well. This dim blue ball had been ruled by powerful creatures from another world for ten thousand years, but in the end it returned to the hands of its natives.
And in every scene, there was a solitary woman wandering about, passing through them like an uninvolved bystander. She swept across the beacon fires atop the Great Wall, past the gates of Troy, through Alexander the Great's coronation, and through the Great Fire of London in 1666—aimlessly marveling at the rapidly changing world.
Throughout it all, she continued her inexplicable, uncontrollable sleep and waking, as if she were reincarnating within eternal chaos.
The jumble of dreams left Hao Ren deeply unsettled. He woke unusually early and stared blankly at the ceiling.
"What the hell was with those crazy dreams all night..." Hao Ren rubbed the corners