True Darkness

When Huang Si woke up, everything before him was pitch-black. He couldn't see a thing.

He felt around himself. He was lying on the floor.

Then he reached out to his left and felt something shaped like a stick. He traced it upward. Yep, it was one of the wooden chairs in his house.

Huang Si pulled himself up using the chair. After all, he couldn't see a thing, and that made it feel like he could easily fall.

Had the power gone out? Huang Si wondered.

But it shouldn't have been this dark, even if the power was out. Not a single bit of light came in through the windows.

Huang Si looked toward where he remembered the window being, but still couldn't see anything. That didn't fit with the light pollution that was common in the city.

Was it already nighttime? Had a massive blackout hit the whole city?

Never mind. He'd find his phone and use it for light first.

Huang Si remembered that before he'd passed out, his phone had been charging on the table.

He took a few steps, following his memory of where things were.

At least he was in his own home, where everything was familiar. It didn't take long for Huang Si to feel his way into the bedroom and find his phone on the table.

Huang Si placed his finger on the fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone. It clicked, and the screen lit up.

The faint glow fell across Huang Si's face and illuminated the small space around him. Holding up the phone, he swept it around the room. The bedroom was just as it had always been, with nothing out of place.

He aimed the phone toward the window, too. It was closed, but there still wasn't any light outside.

"Just my luck. The power goes out in the middle of the night, and I'm not even sleepy."

Huang Si checked the phone's battery: 97%.

He hadn't bought it long ago, and the battery still held up well. At that rate, it could probably last a few more hours of gaming.

But it seemed there was no network signal at all.

Huang Si switched his phone to airplane mode, then turned it off again, but there was still no signal.

"Did the cell towers lose power too?" Huang Si thought. It was the only explanation he could come up with.

Could the whole city really have suffered a massive blackout? That hardly ever happened. Huang Si was already twenty-five, and he'd only experienced a citywide blackout once when he was very little. He hadn't seen one since.

"Why couldn't the power have gone out while I was at work?" Huang Si muttered, lying down on the bed. "If this really is a citywide blackout, I hope it's still out when I have to go to work tomorrow. Then I won't have to go in."

Huang Si had graduated with a degree in computer science. Afterward, his parents had helped him get a permanent job at a public institution, where he worked in the network department doing technical maintenance. If the power stayed out for a whole day, he'd have a nice, easy time of it.

Without the internet, his phone wasn't much fun. The games he played all needed to be online. With no connection, he couldn't use up energy or collect crops, and his phone had lost most of its appeal.

After lying on the bed and thinking it over, Huang Si decided to go out for a walk.

"Mom's always saying I don't get enough exercise. Maybe I should take a walk while the power's out."

Guided by the glow of his phone, he headed for the front door and found his casual shoes there. After putting them on, Huang Si slipped his keys into his pocket, opened the door, and started to step outside.

But the moment Huang Si had taken barely half a step, the faint light from his phone screen revealed something horrifying.

"Ah!!!!!"

With a scream, Huang Si stumbled backward. His movement was so sudden that he lost his balance and fell hard onto the floor.

Sitting there, Huang Si gasped for breath. The first thing he did when he came to his senses was look at his left foot.

It was fine, still wearing its casual shoe, with nothing wrong.

Huang Si glanced at the pitch-black doorway. There was still no light outside.

Had he just imagined it?

Was it an illusion caused by the phone's weak light?

He'd clearly seen it—his left foot had vanished right at the doorway!

It had been as if the darkness outside had swallowed it...

But after he'd jerked backward, his foot looked completely normal. And through the whole thing, he hadn't felt any pain at all.

Had he really just imagined it?

Huang Si got up and tested his left foot. It felt solid beneath him. Nothing was wrong.

He slowly approached the doorway. Then, as if suddenly remembering something, he picked up an umbrella from the shoe rack.

Huang Si was still afraid and didn't dare test it with his own body again. He extended the handle of the folding umbrella, raised it, and cautiously pushed it toward the darkness outside the door.

To Huang Si's horror, the tip of the umbrella vanished as cleanly as if it had been sliced off with a knife.

No, it hadn't vanished so much as disappeared completely into the darkness beyond the door, as though it had been swallowed.

Huang Si quickly pulled the umbrella back.

Like something rising from underwater, the missing tip returned to the umbrella.

In the end, an undamaged umbrella appeared before Huang Si.

The umbrella slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.

"What's outside the door...?" Huang Si stared at the doorway, his heart pounding. He was afraid, but also felt a strange, inexplicable sense of anticipation.

All his life, as a science student, Huang Si had understood the reality of the world.

Science could explain anything. And if it couldn't, then science wasn't complete yet, and its theories needed to be revised.

But what he was seeing before him was impossible to explain with ordinary science.

Huang Si closed the front door and went back inside.

By the light of his phone, he soon found his way to the balcony. It was enclosed; new apartment complexes almost never had open balconies anymore. But outside the balcony windows, it was black too.

On the balcony, Huang Si found the laundry pole.

He carried it to the front door and opened it again. Then he lifted the pole and cautiously poked it outside.

Huang Si angled the pole downward and jabbed.

He felt nothing. Even when only the bottom end remained in his hand, he still hadn't felt it hit anything.

Huang Si lived on the fifth floor, but... where had the "floor of the hallway" gone?

There was nothing beneath the door.

Then he pulled the pole back and extended it forward again.

If Huang Si remembered right, he should have been able to hit the railing in the stairwell from here.

He swung the pole a few times, but still didn't hit anything.

There was nothing outside the door.

Huang Si pulled the pole back and closed the door.

The inside of his home was still normal, except for the lack of light and electricity. But the outside seemed to have been completely cut off, leaving nothing but endless darkness.

Huang Si had tested the front door rather than the window because he knew that if there was anything outside, he should at least be able to touch it, even if he couldn't see it.

But now it seemed that the stairwell and the ground outside had vanished as well.

Could it be that the laundry pole melted as soon as it entered the darkness, which was why it couldn't touch anything?

But he'd accidentally stuck his left foot into the darkness earlier. He hadn't been able to see the part that entered it, but he hadn't felt anything unusual.

Normally, if part of your foot disappeared, it should hurt like hell, at the very least, right?

After thinking it over, Huang Si opened the door again. He tested with the laundry pole first, then carefully ran his fingers along it, feeling his way outward.

His fingers gradually followed the pole into the darkness. Part of his fingertip disappeared into it, out of sight.

But he could feel it.

In the unseen darkness, Huang Si's index finger touched the laundry pole, which he couldn't see either. His finger and the pole must both have been out there in the darkness, just invisible.

Huang Si pulled back his hand and closed the door.

So had everything outside the door simply disappeared?

Or... had he, along with his home, vanished from the original world?

This terrifying, science-fiction-like scene had appeared right before Huang Si's eyes.

It felt unreal.

Huang Si pinched himself. It hurt. He wasn't dreaming.

He turned off his phone screen and sat down on the sofa beside the door.

Huang Si rubbed his temples, trying to calm down and figure out what was going on.

Everything before him had an unreal, otherworldly quality.

Still, the fact that there was nothing outside the door made Huang Si feel a little less threatened.

If there was nothing out there, then there couldn't be anything scary, either. At least he was safe at home with the door closed.

Sitting on the sofa, he tried to remember. Right—what had happened before he'd fallen into this darkness?

Only then did Huang Si recall that something abnormal really had happened before. It was what had caused him to lose consciousness. And when he woke up, he'd found his home engulfed in darkness.

It was July 17. Since Huang Si worked at a public institution, he got off at five. And because he lived nearby, he usually walked home.

He'd eaten dinner in the staff cafeteria, so he didn't need to worry about anyone but himself.

Huang Si had made his way home at a leisurely pace, thinking about the game he'd been playing lately.

Huang Si wasn't much of a talker. Every day, all he thought about was getting off work early and going home. Once home, he'd play games, read books, and watch videos. You could call him a homebody, to put it kindly. Less kindly, he was out of touch with society.

When he walked, he didn't pay much attention to whether he knew anyone nearby. For one thing, he wasn't the sort to greet people. For another, his mind was usually occupied with other things, and he didn't have the time to notice anyone.

But halfway down the road that day, Huang Si suddenly heard someone call his name.

The voice was unfamiliar, and quite faint.

Huang Si looked back, then glanced around. He didn't see anyone looking at him.

Had he heard wrong? Huang Si kept walking.

But the voice calling him grew louder with each call, as if it were trying to summon his soul and wouldn't let him go.

Huang Si looked around again but still couldn't find anyone. Listening carefully to the direction of the sound, he soon made his way toward a river beside the road.

The voice seemed to be coming from there. Was someone hiding in the bushes by this little ditch, playing a prank on him?

Huang Si pushed aside the bushes and looked toward the source of the sound. There was no one there.

How strange. But Huang Si did notice a book lying on the ground.

Huang Si loved reading and couldn't stand to see books mistreated. He glanced at the cover. It seemed to be leather, and it wasn't dirty, so he reached down and picked it up.

Next, Huang Si opened the book.

"Is this a notebook?"

Huang Si flipped through it. Every page was blank.

There was no writing on the cover, and every page inside was blank. Was it one of those trendy journals?

The paper was smooth and white to the touch, and the leather cover looked very high-end. It even felt like real leather.

Huang Si thought, Lucky me. A free notebook.

Then he picked it up and took it home.

Huang Si wasn't short on money, and he didn't make a habit of picking things up off the street. But when he saw that notebook, he felt an inexplicable joy, as if it were familiar to him. Without even thinking about it, he brought it home.

After he got home, Huang Si put the notebook on the living-room table. Then he went to the kitchen to make a cup of hot tea, which he planned to take to his bedroom and drink while gaming all night.

But just as he turned around, a sudden, excruciating pain shot through his head, as if something had stabbed him hard.

Then he passed out from the pain.

When he woke up, he was already in this completely dark house.

Huang Si had been so shocked by the strange state of his home when he woke that he hadn't remembered what had happened to him before until now.