Zhao Cheng jolted awake from a dream. The instant he woke, his whole body shuddered. He opened his eyes, but could no longer remember what exactly he had dreamed about.
He was not someone who liked dwelling on illusions and dreams—at least, not anymore.
Had it been two or three days earlier, he might have wondered whether waking from a nightmare meant that some version of himself in a parallel spacetime had died. Perhaps, through some quantum effect, spacetime had collapsed and his subconscious had received the cluster of information scattered at the very instant his parallel self died, scaring him awake.
Of course, it was also possible that his subconscious had connected with a parallel world and briefly merged with the subconscious of his parallel self. So if that other him had died too horribly, he would feel it as though it had happened to him.
From that, one could infer the reverse as well: if, during such a subconscious merging, his parallel self happened to be living an exceptionally wonderful life, then it would be a beautiful dream...
But those had been Zhao Cheng's views from a few days ago.
The origins of those ideas could be traced further back, to something he had read when he was eight—a piece of groundless speculation with no scientific basis whatsoever.
Naturally, Zhao Cheng could no longer remember the exact contents of that piece. After all, he was no genius with a photographic memory.
But perhaps because the ideas conveyed in it had seemed so novel to him at the time, they had influenced his thinking for quite a while.
Until he grew older and older—especially now. He, Zhao Cheng, was already sixteen, though not yet quite sixteen by full age, and he no longer believed in immortals, Buddhas, demons, ghosts,