Music

Concert

That was such a deep, dizzying sleep...

It felt so heavy, so muddled...

Fan Ning slowly woke up in the audience seating, his head tilted sideways and hanging down, almost parallel to his shoulders.

--A classic bad posture from falling asleep sitting upright.

The surroundings were exceptionally quiet, his heartbeat slightly faster than usual, and he could hear the sound of it himself.

His neck felt like it was filled with poured cement, and every fraction of a millimeter he tried to straighten it hurt like hell.

It took him a good deal of time to raise his head with difficulty and slowly open his eyes.

His vision was dim and blurry.

He could barely make out the stage directly ahead by relying on a few faint green light sources in the distance.

There were also a row of potted flowers in the front of the stage, a few chairs and music stands further in, and a grand piano in the middle.

The black outlines of the objects were shrouded in a layer of dim, eerie green.

Fan Ning finally came back to his senses.

No way? The performance ended and nobody woke me up?

The concert hall just emptied out and turned off the lights like this?

Don't the staff here clear the venue and check?

Fan Ning was a recently graduated science and engineering corporate drone, as well as a deep classical music enthusiast.

Since childhood, he had loved playing the piano, listening to records or concerts, and researching various composers and music theories.

With traits like these, as long as one's appearance wasn't bad and emotional intelligence was online, it was very easy to attract a group of kindred spirits and female fan-girls during his school days, experiencing a relatively rich emotional life.

Various titles like "master" bestowed upon him, along with highlight moments in clubs or cultural activities, had once made him feel that he wasn't an ordinary person.

Until he started getting beaten down by society.

A suburban-urban fringe chemical enterprise, brick-moving in the laboratory, an awkward salary, workplace nonsense, and tearing into it with the landlord.

Not even a few months in, all the elements were present, and everything was inevitably heading toward vulgarity.

Fortunately, he had this spiritual solace.

--For instance, tonight, amidst the intervals of 996 work, a two-hour drive to the city center, and a chamber music concert of Bach's works.

Fan Ning's memories from the very last second were of blacking out while listening to the performance in progress.

Inside the dim concert hall, his vision gradually adapted, and his bodily fatigue eased slightly.

I definitely wasn't sleepy before. Fall asleep during a concert? Out of the question.

Doubts aside, he propped himself up to a standing position and prepared to fish out his phone to check the time.

Sigh, I still have to keep moving bricks tomorrow...

Fumbling around his body, the texture of his clothes seemed a bit unfamiliar, but he still managed to touch his phone.

No signal, 1% battery, time 23:30, long past the concert's dispersal time at ten o'clock.

A bunch of DingTalk work messages showed that the boss still didn't forget to wildly gank employees on the single day off of 996.

Yet the top one was--

A text message?

[To the listeners of this world, recreate the music within your memory.]

[As quickly as possible, as much as possible.]

[If you want to stay alive.]

[0/100]

The time was 21:30, and the number was a string of garbled characters.

Wha, what's going on? What does this mean?

This received time was precisely during the second half of the concert, perhaps even around the time he had blacked out.

Fan Ning looked around the concert hall in confusion, feeling more and more that something was deeply wrong.

Although he couldn't clearly see the distant walls, this concert hall was truly far too small compared to his impression, and the seats accommodating the audience couldn't possibly exceed a hundred spots.

The dim green light sources weren't exit signs either, but rather emanated from a few unclear lamps high up on the walls.

Fan Ning swiped down his phone's control panel and turned on the flashlight.

Most naturally, he shined it toward the stage first.

With this single beam, he was so startled that his entire heart felt as though it had been fiercely battered by a heavy mallet!

Two white figures jumped out under the flashlight!

No,

To be precise, it was just two humanoid outlines on the stage floor, their distorted heads, torsos, and limbs sketched by indescribable light-colored smoky traces before dissolving outward in a radial pattern.

It was as if they had been dissolved, burned away, or vaporized by something unknown.

His phone battery was low and had shut down automatically, plunging his field of vision back into gloom.

A cold sweat instantly drenched Fan Ning's back.

Are these... the musicians from the stage earlier?

He felt as though he had instinctively shouted out and retreated a few steps with heavy, stumping strides.

Yet in reality, his voice was hoarse and he hadn't moved an inch from his spot.

Only when he could barely feel the presence of his body anymore did he muster the courage to move his legs.

He didn't dare turn around, let alone run, but instead backed up step by step, retreating off the stage, to the base of the wall, and toward a corridor-like connecting point before spinning around and plunging headfirst into the darkness.

At the end of the darkness, after a frantic round of fumbling, he finally touched something resembling a door latch and shoved it open.

Bright light shone into his eyes.

It wasn't external sunlight, but the beams from several flashlights held by people outside.

"Police, stop, stay calm!"

Amid the glaring discomfort, Fan Ning's vision was intermittent and blurry.

He first saw three-buttoned black uniforms, then khaki tasseled shoulder boards and sleeve insignia, and finally the red-and-white checkered wide-brimmed hats on their heads, and the solemn expressions beneath them.

"..." Fan Ning froze, not only because of their attire and appearance, but also because of what they had said.

He had never heard this language before, yet now he was growing familiar with it at a bizarre speed.

The sentence acted like a giant spoon, stirring fiercely through his mind, shattering something and bringing forth a massive heap of chaotic memory fragments:

This was Ufransel in the New Calendar year 912, the second-largest industrial city of the Theolan Empire.

Caloin Van Ning, a fourth-year student at Saint Leniya University, majoring in musicology.

His father had once been a moderately well-known folk artist in this city and the director of the Turner Museum, but had lost contact three years ago and remained completely unaccounted for; his mother had passed away from illness many years prior.

This era no longer possessed feudal-style rigid hierarchies, but social classes still differed in honor and lowliness, with upper-tier resources belonging to nobles, academic factions, major factory owners, and... the extraordinary group with an aloof status in mystical rumors—the "Knower".

Given his middle-class background, it should have been quite difficult for him to reach the threshold of this imperial aristocratic public school.

Yet his father's status as an artist seemed to carry a massive bonus in this world.

Naturally, once his father went missing, his own standing at school swiftly plummeted from passerby-tier to sewer-tier.

If it hadn't been for paying the hefty four-year tuition in full upon enrollment, he might have been driven out by now.

The operation of the museum naturally became unsustainable as well.

At first, he sold off some of his father's paintings to settle debts, maintain equipment, and pay staff wages.

Later on, he had no choice but to dismiss the staff, close the museum, tighten his belt, and live alone in a small apartment.

He had time-traveled? He actually time-traveled?

Fan Ning felt wave after wave of throbbing pain in his head as chaotic, tangled memory fragments shoved and crowded against one another, gradually turning into annoying, buzzing roars and gibberish by his ears. He went from standing to squatting, and from squatting to lying down, the figures of the police officers in his sight growing increasingly blurry.

Opening his eyes once more, Fan Ning was greeted by the ceiling.

And...

Why was this thing still in front of his eyes?

The final line of the text: [0/100]

The faint pale gold made Fan Ning suspect that his eyes were playing tricks on him.

It seemed that only when he harbored this thought would it become slightly clearer, fading back to near transparency whenever his attention shifted.

"Awoken? Mr. Caloin Van Ning? If your spirit is holding up, please get up first."

A voice very close by interrupted his thoughts.

This was the Hoffman language, the official language of the Theolan Empire and the tongue used by the Hoffmans, who made up the largest population proportion.

Fan Ning got up, propping himself up to sit on the edge of the hard plank bed.

It was a small room with four gray walls and two mahogany desks.

The pale light of a carbonization lamp struck the only pen and paper on the desk alongside a ribbed glass cup.

The water inside the cup reflected a cold light.

Seated opposite him were two police officers, dressed in crisp uniforms with robust builds and solemn expressions.

One of them unscrewed his fountain pen cap: "Let me introduce myself, Newman Ellens, Senior Inspector of the Ufransel Public Security Office, in charge of security work in the Inelania District."

"I slept the whole night? Also, are you going to interrogate me?"

Fan Ning, who had just time-traveled, felt a trace of inner panic.

He neither knew whether the humanoid outlines on the stage were a prank or the abnormal death of living people, nor was he certain whether he was an innocent party or... the culprit.

Calm down... At least judging from the original owner's relatively intact memories, he hadn't done this thing himself, nor was there anything that needed hiding. He would answer truthfully first.

Fan Ning steadied himself. "Alright, Officer Ellens."

The officer took an item from a drawer and placed it on the desk. "Explain first, what is this thing?"

Fan Ning looked at his brand-new touchscreen smartphone, then checked the original owner's memories of this world once more.

Cold sweat then began to break out on his forehead and his back.

...In this steam-industrial world resembling the Victorian era, I am not really in a good position to explain this to you, you know?

...If I say this is the Empire's latest model of flashlight, would you believe me?

No, how could someone get exposed the moment they cross over?