"I gaze into the distance..."
The music swelled higher and higher. Gao Xian slowly opened his eyes, casually pressed the power button on his phone, and the music came to an abrupt stop.
Gao Xian turned off the alarm, yet he still felt that something was off. He picked up his phone and glanced at it. The darkened screen clearly displayed the time: exactly eight o'clock.
Below it was the date: Wednesday, August 9th. The seventh day of the seventh month in the Yuan Calendar.
Everything was perfectly normal. Nothing was wrong.
Yet for some reason, Gao Xian felt as though everything before his eyes had happened before.
As if it had all occurred once already, except he could not remember what came next.
This sense of déjà vu had appeared several times in Gao Xian's life, but it had always vanished in a flash.
He could never grasp hold of anything. In the end, he could only let those strange sensations fade into the back of his mind, leaving him with a sense of loss.
Sometimes, Gao Xian thought that if this happened while he was buying lottery tickets, it might change his life.
Otherwise, the feeling was utterly meaningless. It only made him doubt the reality of life, wonder whether he was living inside some vast virtual game as an insignificant NPC.
One could let one's imagination run wild over the origins of the world, but one still had to submit to its most tangible material law: if you did not eat, you got hungry.
The real pressures of survival were enough to crush every romantic, beautiful fantasy, along with every dream and hope.
Gao Xian was nearly forty. He had long since given up such messy thoughts. Based on materialist dialectics, he had found an explanation for