"Name?"
"Huai Shi."
"Gender?"
"Male."
"Age?"
"Twenty."
The calm exchange continued for the sixth time, accompanied by microphone static, breathing, electrical hum, faint ticking, and some frequency that neither flesh nor soul could clearly distinguish, reverberating through the air.
Within Huai Shi's pupils, even intangible sound became clearly visible.
Reflected beneath that gorgeous, jewel-like eye.
Waves.
Countless waves echoed through the void-like darkness, intertwining and vaguely taking the shape of more than a dozen blurred faces. As if looking down upon him, their "gaze" had never left Huai Shi.
Perhaps this was how some deeper truth appeared to the eye?
Perhaps there was even more in the darkness around him.
But some instinct told Huai Shi not to look any farther.
If possible, not to look at all.
The Continuance Institute.
This unknown laboratory had already been wrapped, covered, and encompassed by something that could not be understood—and was best left unrecognized.
Something like an "organ," like a sense of touch extending here from somewhere deeper.
Just observing such a shallow surface had already made Huai Shi feel as though his head were splitting apart. When those blurred faces, closer to hallucinations than anything else, noticed the faint twitch at the corner of his eye, they silently dissipated.
Everything returned to normal.
Amid the dark, silent, bottomless abyss with no visible end, there was a solitary massive pillar and a chair.
This was the only space Huai Shi had been allowed to move about in for the past four days.
The moment he left the pillar that sustained his existence, there would be nothing outside but void.
What followed was a long wait.
Until the sound of the microphone turning on rang out again. It seemed to tap once, as though testing the audio, before a familiar voice spoke. "Curtain