A blade of grass, with three slender leaves and about a foot long, looked malnourished and terribly thin. Bai Yang had pulled it up by the roots and was holding it in his hand. Dirt still clung to the roots. It looked fresh—and utterly unappetizing...
Bai Yang stared at the grass in his hand for a full half hour, wearing the same vacant expression the entire time, as if someone had pressed pause on him.
Then, as though the grass had burned him with a red-hot iron, he flung it away.
"Ghosts..."!
With a shout, he bolted like a man chased by a dog, scrambling into his bedroom. He rummaged through everything, grabbed his wallet, and rushed out. The front door slammed shut behind him...
The weather was scorching, yet Bai Yang was drenched in cold sweat, goose bumps covering his skin. Bare-chested and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, one foot bare and the other in a flip-flop, he ran for his life without a care for the strange looks people on the street were giving him.
"What a disgrace..."
"Absolutely shameless..."
"What a terrible example for the kids..."
"Oh, wow, that big brother's got muscles!"
Bai Yang ran like a mad dog down one street after another, earning contemptuous looks from countless people...
Ten minutes later, at City People's Hospital, countless people suffering from all sorts of problems in the heat were waiting in line, growing more and more irritable. Bai Yang charged into the hospital in a panic. There was no time to get a number—he made a beeline for the Psychiatry Department.
Inside the Psychiatry Department's examination room, a white-haired veteran... ahem, an old doctor was leisurely sipping tea and reading the newspaper. Compared to other departments, Psychiatry was the most peaceful. These days, all kinds of nutcases were scattered across the world, but not many came to the hospital.
Bang...
The examination-room door was flung open from the outside. The sudden crash made the old doctor jolt, and with a rip, the newspaper in his hands tore in half.
"Doctor, help me! I don't feel right at all. I was at home just now when, for no reason, I suddenly ended up in a forest. There was a tiger trying to eat me, and then—whoosh—I was back home..."
Bai Yang rushed into the examination room and rattled off his terrifying story. He clutched the old doctor's arm with both hands, like a drowning man grabbing the last reed that could save him...
"Young man, calm down. Calm down. Stop shaking me—I'm getting dizzy..."
After finally calming Bai Yang down, the old doctor let out a deep breath of relief. Young hotheads were terrifying. He took a sip of tea to steady his nerves, then held out his hand to Bai Yang. "Young man, where's your medical record book?"
Bai Yang: "..."
An hour later, Bai Yang got a new number and explained what had happened. After a round of questions and examination, the old doctor concluded, "Young man, there's nothing wrong with you. It's too hot—get some rest and take precautions against heatstroke. And don't stay up all night playing games or watching movies. Mental fatigue can easily cause hallucinations. Go home, get some rest, and make yourself some mung bean porridge. You'll be fine."
"No, Doctor, you have to believe me. There really is something wrong with me, and it's serious. I've gone crazy, I'm telling you! Look, look—my shoulder, a giant mosquito bit me. The sole of my foot, I got stabbed by a thorn. It happened in a forest, but I was clearly at home. If I was at home, then how did this happen? Am I in the final stages of insanity? Or do I have split personalities? I somehow ran into the forest and came back, and I don't even know how..." Bai Yang was frantic, looking like he was saying, Doctor, don't lie to me—I really am sick.
"Are you the doctor, or am I? You're fine. Your thoughts are clear, you speak coherently, and you show none of the abnormal signs of a mental patient. You're fine. Listen to me, stop messing around..."
"No, Doctor, take another look. Or maybe you could prescribe me some medicine?"
"..."
After a long bout of haggling, the doctor finally gave in and, with great reluctance, prescribed Bai Yang some calming and brain-nourishing medicine. Only then did Bai Yang let him off and leave.
Standing at the hospital entrance, Bai Yang stared at the diagnosis with deep unease. No matter what, he couldn't put his mind at ease, so he went from one hospital to the next. Braving the blazing sun and countless strange looks, he went to five or six hospitals in a row. The result was the same every time: he wasn't mentally ill—he was in perfect health.
After all, you couldn't be mentally ill just because you thought you were. There was a clear difference between a genuine mental patient and a normal person. When Bai Yang told the doctors what he'd experienced, they all thought either he was making trouble, or he'd suffered heatstroke and hallucinated.
Dragging his exhausted body to the foot of his apartment building, Bai Yang paced back and forth for a long time before finally working up the courage to go home. He opened the door and cautiously looked around. Nothing seemed out of place. He poked every corner with a clothes-drying pole, and only after confirming there was no danger did he carefully sit down on the sofa, his mind in knots.
He was a university student with a higher education, and he'd watched plenty of programs investigating people crossing vast distances in the blink of an eye. But there was no way he could accept something like that happening to him. Other than thinking he'd gone crazy, he couldn't come up with any explanation.
That blade of grass was still lying on the coffee table, and some of the dirt had even fallen onto the floor. One of his flip-flops was missing, the instant noodles were gone, and the soup stains on his body proved the noodles had really been there...
So what in the world was going on? He'd been sitting at home, and the moment he plopped down, he'd ended up somewhere else...?
"That place didn't look like Earth. The sun on Earth is golden, but the sun there was white. It was clearly not Earth. But what's with going there and coming back for no reason? Is this some kind of one-minute time-travel tour?"
After the initial panic, and after confirming that he wasn't sick, Bai Yang finally calmed down enough to think seriously about the strange experience.
People who grew up eating all kinds of toxins were tough. As unbelievable as it was, Bai Yang quickly accepted that the strange experience had really happened.
"But then there's another question. Why was I able to come back after going there? Nothing unbelievable happened to me. How did I get to experience time travel—and come back?"
Bai Yang sat on the sofa, muttering to himself. Before he could finish, he vanished from the living room with a whoosh...
His vision blurred. In the blink of an eye, Bai Yang was back in that forest. Since he was still sitting, he landed right on his butt. He yelped and leaped up, something having poked him in the backside.
"I really can come back... Damn... A tiger... Go back..."
Back in the forest, Bai Yang saw the tiger lying not far away. His soul nearly leaped out of his body. He screamed in his mind, Go back! And sure enough, he vanished from the forest with a whoosh, reappearing in his living room...
Staring at his familiar home, Bai Yang was dumbfounded. Just a few seconds ago, he'd been in the living room, then he'd appeared in the forest, and now he was back again...
"Hiss..."
He reached back and pulled a thorn from his buttock. The pain told him it was all real!
Humans ruled the Earth because they were good at analyzing things and learning from experience. After two short and bizarre encounters, Bai Yang wasn't an idiot. He was a university student with a higher education, after all, and he'd more or less figured things out.
"I don't know what that place is, but it's dangerous. And going there..."
Whoosh... He disappeared from the living room, then reappeared a blink later. Looking annoyed, he continued, "...coming back is completely controlled by my own thoughts. If I want to go there..."
"...I go there..."
"...and if I want to come back, I come back."
After putting it all together, he 'flashed' over twice more. Staring at the ceiling, Bai Yang knew he'd struck it rich. He didn't know how it had happened, but what was done was done!
He scratched his head again, then found two bandages and hastily covered the thorn wounds on the sole of his foot and his butt. After staring into space for a while, he suddenly sprang to his feet, grabbed the blade of grass from the coffee table, and went to his computer. He opened Baidu and searched for information on grasses. After spending two hours browsing tens of thousands of pictures of different kinds of grass, he still couldn't find anything that matched the grass he'd brought back from the forest.
"Maybe there are plants humans haven't discovered yet, but the sun in the sky over there doesn't lie. Earth doesn't have a white sun the size of a wheel. That place shouldn't be Earth."
After all that effort, Bai Yang reached this conclusion.
Then he felt both excited and apprehensive. An unknown world lay before him—who could stay calm? His mind itched like a cat's claws were scratching at it.
"Whether I go there... or come back, I always show up where I was the last time I left. But that damn tiger is still lying over there. How am I supposed to go and explore?"
He really wanted to go over and see what kind of world it was, but every time he 'flashed' over, he saw that tiger lying there. He simply didn't dare go. He couldn't understand what kind of grudge the tiger had against him. Why was it 'guarding his corpse at the resurrection point'?
Bai Yang had no idea the tiger was already dead. He thought it was deliberately waiting for him.
Still, he wasn't blind. After a few trips, he noticed something was off about the tiger. The next time he went over, he carefully stayed for two seconds, ready to run at any moment. Then he saw it, and his eyes widened: an arrow had pierced both of the tiger's eyes. It was dead as dead could be!
"It's dead? What happened? Was it shot with an arrow? Is someone nearby...?"
At the thought, Bai Yang fled in a hurry, returning straight to his living room. Only then did he let out a breath. That was too dangerous. What if an arrow suddenly flew out of the forest and hit him? Just imagining the consequences was terrifying!
"That place is too dangerous. The tiger's bigger than a cow, and an arrow can pierce its head. What kind of bow could have that kind of power?"
Although Bai Yang knew very little about that place, he could sum it up in two words: dangerous!
But the more dangerous it seemed, the more curious he became. Curiosity killed the cat, as they say; humans had an incomparable desire to explore the unknown, and Bai Yang was no exception. His eyes darted around as he surveyed the whole house, hoping to find something that might help him explore the other side...
Before you continue