The little leaf boat glided lightly through a stream of light.
With a flicker, the sound of gurgling water reached his ears. Brilliant colors filled his vision. Zheng Qing could only faintly sense threads of flowing light weaving and surging around him, almost solid enough to be a real river.
The little boat flickered again, seeming to merge into countless streams of light at once. In an instant, countless scenes that seemed both familiar and strange rushed toward Zheng Qing. In some, the Silent Forest burned with raging flames; in others, starlight filled all of Buji Island; in still others, vast torrents of purple energy surged from the horizon, drowning the red, black, and silver starlight.
Every scene was so real, yet every one was so illusory.
When the little boat flickered for the third time, Zheng Qing felt his body suddenly plunge. The drifting, floating sensation vanished. It felt both like being pulled out of the water on the verge of drowning, able to gulp down fresh air again once the dying hallucinations faded, and like being abruptly stuffed into a leather casing, unable to breathe at all. Heavy reality seemed like thick armor, wrapping layer after layer around his once clear, lucid thoughts.
Two utterly contradictory sensations flooded his consciousness at the same time.
He could not help falling to his knees and vomiting violently, tears and mucus streaming down his face.
"—Much better than I did the first time I returned from the higher dimensions," his teacher's familiar voice sounded beside his ear, bringing him immense comfort. "I passed out on the spot back then... Well? Does it feel familiar?"
Familiar?
Zheng Qing paused briefly, then suddenly recalled being thrown out of the airplane when he first enrolled as a freshman. What he had felt then was