"I think this world is the one that's wrong."
Lu Mingfei sat on the sofa, his voice quiet but firm. He raised his head and looked at the two people across from him. There was something rare in his eyes—not that usual lazy, indifferent look, but an almost stubborn seriousness.
"Erii existed," he said, enunciating each word. "I saw her. I played games with her. I took her to an amusement park. We watched the sunrise together from a mountaintop. I remember what she looked like, I remember her voice, I remember the way she sounded when she called me Mingming."
He paused and took a deep breath.
"Those weren't dreams. They weren't hallucinations. They weren't Spirit Words of the Dragon Kind. They were all real."
"If none of you remember her—" He looked at Caesar and Finn. "If there's no record of her in this world—then that isn't my problem. It's this world's problem."
Caesar leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his chest, listening intently.
When Lu Mingfei finished, he nodded.
"I understand," he said. His tone was level, but there was no hint of perfunctoriness in it. "If Nono disappeared, and everyone told me that Nono had never existed, that it was all my hallucination—then I'd think this world was the one that was wrong too."
Lu Mingfei froze for a moment, then a look spread across his face that said, "I knew it, the boss gets me after all."
He nodded forcefully at Caesar.
The boss was the boss.
He knew how to understand people, how to accept them.
Then, ten minutes later—
Lu Mingfei found himself sitting in a hospital corridor.
White walls, white lights, and the faint smell of disinfectant. At the end of the hallway, a nurse pushed a cart past, its