Jiang Bailu opened her eyes to a white, circular plaza, a full moon pressed flat and blazing.

Sunlight poured straight down like a waterfall. It washed over ringed arrays of square blocks. The glow made their clear shells betray what they hid.

They were all people sealed in crystal.

Men and women, old and young, every face hushed with closed lids. Breath should’ve failed behind crystal, like fish under ice. Yet their cheeks were rosy, as if napping in spring.

…? Confusion fluttered first, a sparrow in her chest. Then the edge slid in. Her vision wore a filter, like gauze over a lamp. She understood in a lurch. She was one of the people in crystal.

At that instant, breath went manual, like a jammed gear. Suffocation surged up like black water and swallowed her.

No—can’t—going to suffocate— Panic hissed like steam.

Coffee Moon! She flung the name like a flare.

A white-robed ghost unfolded beside the crystal, a pale flame walls couldn’t smother. Coffee Moon raised a fist. The crystal around her shattered like brittle ice. She dropped hard, hit stone, and gulped air like a drowning girl breaking the surface.

Where is this place? The thought was fog snagged on thorns. Her mind couldn’t catch a thread.

I have to… go back. Someone’s… waiting for me… Huh? Who… who’s waiting? The anxiety came first, a cold hook, then her hands clutched her head. She tried to think. The effort scattered like dry leaves in wind.

Her lowered gaze snagged on her clothes. A white lab coat. The one she wore most.

But something was off. The collar climbed too high, like a winter wall. The hem was ragged, a banner torn by storms. She remembered buying this not long ago. It shouldn’t be in tatters.

What happened? Why am I here? Why can’t I recall anything? Why do I feel someone is waiting for me to return? And what is this ghost at my side—the one I call Coffee Moon—what is it?

…Nothing came. The blank was a polished stone.

It wasn’t the blur of time; it was a hole carved clean, as if someone had pried those memories out with a knife. Wanting to remember did nothing.

But why remember the lab coat? Is this my true body? Is the coat more important than the memories? The thought cracked her calm like thin ice.

What kind of person am I? Why did I forget everything, yet keep a lab coat and the name Coffee Moon? The plaza stayed serene, a temple at noon. May sunlight warmed her skin like a shawl. Still, an icy hollow opened in her bones.

What… did I lose? Even not knowing what I lost chilled me more. It felt like opening your favorites and finding a deleted video—blank gray where it used to be—while the title won’t come, no matter how you claw at it. A shiver ran through her like a reed in wind.

To shake it off—at least for now—she poured strength into her legs. She rose and moved, letting motion be a lifeline.

She had Coffee Moon smash every crystal on the plaza, each block an amber coffin. It freed the trapped men and women, young and old, and laid them flat on the stone like sleepers after rain.

She felt breath and pulse under their skin, small drums under silk. Yet none of them woke, no matter how she called. They slept like stones in a deep river.

No choice. She left them where sunlight could find them and went alone to explore beyond the plaza.

The place looked like a city. Houses, corridors, and pillars ringed the square in measured rhythm, like beads on a string. Beyond the staggered roofs rose a palace—plain in shape yet glorious—like a mountain stripped to marble. Everything was pure white, snow-bright under the sun. Light bounced off it in soft flecks, as if every wall were carved from white jade.

It felt too dreamlike for the human world. She touched a carved column, grooves spaced like a metronome. Cold climbed into her palm like spring water. These were things, not hallucinations.

If it’s real, then why is no one walking these streets? Are they all sealed in crystal, like the plaza sleepers in amber?

She was in a dead, empty city, and she was likely the only one awake. The idea should’ve added weight to her taut nerves. It didn’t. The string was already tuned to its last notch.

So be it. She could only accept and search for a clue in this city of white bones.

Less sighing at the road, more walking it—the voice that once told her that was… never mind. The name wouldn’t surface.

Coffee Moon floated behind her shoulder like a shadow with numbers for stars. At least she had it.

She didn’t know what it was. Yet looking at this black ghost inked with digits and symbols soothed her, like rain on eaves. It had to be part of her soul—if souls were real.

One woman and one ghost left the plaza and stepped into streets of white jade. As her head cooled from the senseless shock, stray facts began to return, not about herself but about the world.

The solar system has eight planets, eight lanterns hung in cold night. Earth has seven continents, seven slabs of land across blue water. Infinite Power has six kinds, six strings on a hidden instrument. Shadow Curtain International runs five branches, five fingers in a dark glove. Europe has three sovereign city-states, three little crowns on an old head. And the buildings here? Ancient Greek in style, columns like bundled reeds.

She let out a dry laugh that fluttered like paper. I can’t have time-traveled to ancient Greece, right?

If she could remember the word time-travel, she was on a roll. Momentum felt like a breeze at her back.

She began hunting for written signs, trying to place this city by its language. Soon, on a square stone by a doorway, she found what had to be a house plaque.

Neat letters were carved there. English. Plain, modern English, like street signs after rain.

[Jones Family]

The city had looked like a temple or a wonder in her mind. Those three words gave it breath. Someone lived here. Someone ate and quarreled and grew old here. Someone built a home here.

Where did they go?

“Coffee Moon, open the door.” The command rose as natural as lifting her own hand.

The white-coated ghost slipped through the stone-barred gate like mist through reeds. Inside, it lifted the bar and pulled the door wide with a soft scrape.

She stepped into the courtyard. Along the walls on both sides, flowerbeds sat like empty coffins. Thick brown-black soil still lay there, but no dead leaves remained. Time had chewed them to nothing.

She used the same trick on the house door. Inside was an ordinary dwelling, too ordinary, like a snapshot under dust.

Stone table. Stone chairs. A glass chandelier furry with ash. They felt cold and secretive, greeting a visitor who came decades late. A shaft of sunlight fell through the window, and stirred dust glowed like tiny schools of fish.

People here loved stone. Everything that could be stone was stone, as if wood were a rumor.

Jiang Bailu refused to believe even the bed was stone. She rushed into the bedroom. The bed was stone.

How do you sleep on that? The ultimate hard bed, a slate for dreams.

She tried lying down to test the locals’ life. Pain jabbed her shoulder like a pebble in a shoe. She hopped up fast and checked the ache in her waist and shoulder, tallying the damage like a miser counting coins.

The house was maybe eighty square meters. One living room. One dining room. One study. One workshop of unknown purpose, its tools gone like teeth. The bathroom and toilet were separate. Two bedrooms, one large, one small.

Only one thing wasn’t stone: a wooden crib in the master bedroom. At least the residents had basic sense. The bedding inside had rotted to ghosts, just gray-white fibers clinging like cobweb.

After she checked every room, she sat on the stone bench in the living room to rest a moment. Light was good. Space was wide. Aside from the ultimate hard bed, it was a comfortable little detached home, a shell warmed by sun.

She could picture it. An ordinary couple. Two kids, one tall, one small. Life moving forward like a cart creaking along.

Now only an empty house remained. Dust and sunlight kept her company, two silent old friends.

And houses like this lined the street, emptiness after emptiness, a row of eye sockets.

How many people had lived here? At first, the quiet had been just silence, a neutral lack of sound. Now she felt something else, the human kind of cold and fear: life had once filled this place, and now it was gone.

As a human… The words scraped by. As a human?

Why did that phrase snag? Why did a tiny wrongness rise from the bottom of her heart like a bubble?

“I’m… not human?” she murmured, disbelief a frost on her lips.

No. Think. She thought in Chinese without trying, a mother tongue slipping like water. Her hair was black, night on a river. She should be a person of Huaxia.

And by the knowledge not about me, Huaxia’s Great Way shattered nearly a century ago. No ascending allowed. Disobedient monsters came and went with their schemes, and got cleaned out like weeds. Only a few small branches lowered their heads and worked alongside ordinary humans.

She ran hands over her body. No soft ears on the crown of her head. No tail at her back. Her canines weren’t sharp. By every simple sign, she was human.

“…Weird.” The word drifted like a leaf.

Maybe her group sense of being human clashed with the personal blank of not knowing who she was. Maybe the two currents crossed and made eddies.

She left the Jones place and checked the Williams place and the Robinson place along the road. Same layout, same stone bones. She got lazy about it. She followed the main street straight to the palace.

The palace walls were grand, the kind old Huaxia would inscribe with dragons—a love of majesty carved in white.

The gate was shut, of course. The marble wall, over ten meters high, had a beauty that kept strangers out, like winter cliffs. None of that was a problem for Jiang Bailu. She didn’t know where the bar was, and she didn’t want to break a relic. There was another way.

She took Coffee Moon’s hand, cool as silk in snow. Her ghost lifted her gently into the air.

In the next heartbeat, Jiang Bailu knew she loved flight. Even with her name gouged out of her memory, she still knew this: the sky made her happy. That alone was a large mercy, a candle in wind.

Her view rose slowly. She drifted above the wall line and looked in—

“…?”

Vertigo hit like a hammer blow. The world lurched. Darkness rushed her vision, a curtain studded with random sparks. Feeling left her fingertips and toes, sailing away like kites. Heat flooded her body, fierce and unstoppable, forcing her mouth open in a mute cry.

Even Coffee Moon couldn’t hold its shape. The hand gripping hers thinned into shadow and vanished. She began to fall.

What is happening? Am I about to die? Die here, like this? No. Stay awake—

…

“Celestial Speech, Flight.”

In the haze before she dropped into total dark, she heard her own voice speak those words.