"I'm sorry to tell you, but you have lung cancer. With prompt treatment, there's still a chance of recovery. Does your family know? We recommend that you be admitted to the hospital and cooperate fully with treatment!"
"How long do I have?"
"This probably hasn't just started recently, but still, there's..."
Lu Zhiyu left the hospital in a daze, feeling as though none of it was real, like he'd just woken from a dream. The crowds rushing past him seemed to belong to another world, as if an invisible boundary had separated him from it.
Lu Zhiyu had no intention of seeking treatment. Cancer—there was no point wasting money. Even if he was going to die, he didn't want to do it in agony, hooked up to tubes in a hospital bed.
Lu Zhiyu's lungs had been weak since childhood, and he often coughed. He'd been working in the capital for several years, and whenever the air was polluted, his cough grew worse. He'd long thought about leaving, but his career was at its peak, so he kept putting it off. Recently, his condition had worsened, but he'd assumed it was just the same old problem and hadn't thought much of it. He never expected the diagnosis to be this.
He quit his job, bought a plane ticket, and set off for home with a suitcase in tow. Lu Zhiyu had been born in Jiangcheng. His old home was a detached house that had been renovated and looked fairly modern. But with no one living there, the courtyard was rundown and lifeless.
Lu Zhiyu's parents had passed away long ago, and he had no close relatives. He'd gradually lost touch with the classmates he'd once been close to after they entered the working world. When they met again, the old warmth was gone; self-interest and distance were written all over their faces. Better to cherish the memories than meet again. His coworkers joked and laughed together, but it was hard to open up to them the way he had as a boy.
When he thought about it, his life really did seem dull. It was as if he'd been forced into a life template used by millions of people. Apart from this bout of cancer, he'd been like a puppet, pulled along by other people, society as a whole, and the momentum of fate.
No one had lived in the house for a long time, and dust coated everything. Lu Zhiyu pulled off the covers and started cleaning and tidying up. As he rummaged through every nook and cranny, he uncovered all sorts of old things from his childhood: toys, textbooks, doodles—each one filled with memories.
"Eh, what's this?"
By chance, Lu Zhiyu spotted an old redwood chest on a cabinet in the storage room. When he opened it, he found a jumble of odds and ends inside: badges bearing a farmer's portrait, an inkstone, a red-covered book, and, most eye-catching of all, a white scroll painting.
The scroll was so white it looked completely unblemished. Its surface seemed almost silky, as if coated with a thin layer of oil. Paper naturally discolored over time, so this thing must have been quite old. It was strange that it had been tossed into a box and yet remained in such good condition.
These things must have been left behind by his grandfather. Curious about what the painting depicted, Lu Zhiyu carried it to the living room table and slowly unrolled it. His eager anticipation instantly gave way to disappointment.
"What? It's just a blank painting!"
Just as Lu Zhiyu was about to put it away, he noticed a black speck on the painting. Leaning in for a closer look, he saw that it was a tiny grasshopper. He laughed in disbelief. "A whole huge scroll, and all it has is a little grasshopper you can barely see? What a waste!"
Lu Zhiyu examined it closely. Then, on a sudden impulse, he reached out and touched the painting. A shocking scene unfolded: his hand seemed to pass through a gap and touch something on the other side.
Lu Zhiyu jolted in fright and pulled his hand back. He saw a grasshopper clutched in his fingers and nearly jumped out of his skin. "What the heck is this?!"
The moment he let go, the grasshopper leaped away and began hopping around the living-room floor. Lu Zhiyu stared at it in disbelief, then scrambled to his feet and looked at the painting. The grasshopper on it had vanished.
"I took it out? And it's alive?"
Lu Zhiyu looked from the painting to the grasshopper hopping across the floor, his mouth hanging open. He felt as if he'd discovered something incredible.
Lu Zhiyu was also an avid webnovel reader. He read for an hour before bed every night, so this sort of thing wasn't unfamiliar to him.
"Could it be a personal-space ability? A pocket dimension? Some kind of treasure for a farming story?"
Although he was nearing death, Lu Zhiyu wasn't the sort to resent fate or give up on himself. Life still had to go on. With so little time left, he had to make it count. Discovering something this interesting was an unexpected delight.
Over the next few days, Lu Zhiyu ran a series of experiments on the painting. There really was a space inside it, but it wasn't like the space he'd imagined. He called it the Painting Space.
It was flat. Scientifically speaking, the space wasn't three-dimensional but two-dimensional. Anything that entered was automatically sealed into a two-dimensional existence and subjected to a dimensional reduction. Once taken back out, however, it returned to its three-dimensional form. Lu Zhiyu couldn't understand how such a bizarre phenomenon was possible.
That was his first discovery, based on putting all kinds of things into the Painting Space. His second discovery was that there was no time in its two-dimensional world. Entering it was like stepping into a river frozen for eternity. No matter how long anything remained sealed inside, it came out exactly as it had gone in.
His third discovery was that the Painting Space seemed to strongly repel living things. Lu Zhiyu tried to put living creatures inside, but found that the space couldn't yet withstand anything too large. Chickens and ducks were torn apart and vanished the moment they entered. Lu Zhiyu guessed that the entrance couldn't bear the strain, causing them to fall into the gap between dimensions.
So Lu Zhiyu caught a few ants and put them into the Painting Space. This time, nothing like that happened. The ants' images rested quietly on the scroll, completely motionless, as if frozen in time.
Lu Zhiyu was very curious about why there was no time in the two-dimensional world. If time existed there, it would be a genuine world, which would make the Painting Space far more significant. As things stood, it was nothing more than a storage space.
Einstein's theory of general relativity explained time as a separate dimension. From that perspective, the world humans lived in should be four-dimensional. But because humans couldn't directly observe the fourth dimension of time, they were only three-dimensional beings.
The same should be true of a two-dimensional world. Even if time couldn't be observed, it ought to exist; it shouldn't simply disappear. Lu Zhiyu decided to look at the problem from a different angle and find a way to confirm it.
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