Space folded like ripples on a dark lake, and dusk tore away. Night spilled like ink. Stars pricked the velvet sky. The campus lay still as a grave. Ahead, in a moth-dim pool of light, the little boy kept rallying a ping-pong ball against the wall, alone as a stray moth.

Unease rose like cold dew on skin. Ouyang leaned against the teaching block’s wall, and the calm mask he wore every day cracked like thin ice.

He had been dragged back to that slice of time three times, like a leaf caught on one eddy. He didn’t feel like a tourist; he felt a thread tugging him, a knot that was his to untie.

Two throws of the dice remained, two tides left to turn. The problem could appear on the next crest, or in the last wave. For the boy it meant years, seasons turning like pages. For Ouyang it was minutes, a candle stub burning fast; he had no time to sit and brood.

A blaze tore across the sky with a whoosh, like a white-hot brushstroke. A comet hauled a long tail, and froze its most beautiful instant on the dome of night. A ghost-blue flame carved the dark like a blade. No eyes but his saw it. Ouyang didn’t smile; his brows cinched tighter, like storm clouds knotting.

A comet, the old broom star, was a bad omen in folk mouths, like frost in spring. If it swept the heavens now, did it sweep in misfortune too?

He didn’t know how long the silence lasted; time felt like sand in an hourglass. Then a tide of voices surged back in. The school was the same brick hive as before, buzzing with play. In a quiet corner, a kid mouthed vocabulary like seeds. On the track, others ran, breath steaming like horses at dawn.

From that flow, Ouyang read an ordinary morning, as plain as porridge. He searched for the boy with his old hunter’s sight and found only strangers. He drifted through the school like a ghost lantern seeking a familiar wick, and saw no shadow of him.

Panic bit first, a fox snap in the dark. “Did I miss something?” The thought fluttered like a trapped sparrow. Had last year hidden a snare he never saw?

Stubbornness burned like a coal. Ouyang slipped through walls, hoping to net that familiar silhouette in a classroom like a fish in a pond. He slid past one wall and blanked out. Tiles, bright as ice. “Wait—damn it, this is the girls’ restroom, isn’t it?”

A girl’s hands went to her waistband, the motion like a curtain tug. Ouyang plunged through the wall like a startled eel. Heat rushed to his face; his cheeks went tomato-red. Sweat beaded like rain. He didn’t know if it was shock or shame; either way, he looked like a boy caught in sunlight.

He coughed into the empty hallway, the sound thin as paper. “Ahem… peeping? Nah. Mission first. Finding that kid comes before dumb detours.” He pitched himself that lie like a life ring and pretended it floated.

When his pulse calmed like settling dust, he returned to the hunt. He swept the campus like wind over grass, and then the light snapped on in his skull. “Am I an idiot? Just stake out his class. If I wait at the net, he’ll swim back.”

He glided to the boy’s classroom. The boy’s seat sat empty, like a lantern without flame. Morning recitation rose and fell like a tide. Ten minutes slid by, the bell close as a gull’s cry. At last, the boy shuffled in, canvas bag on his back like a modest shell.

The teacher arrived and books opened like a field of leaves. The boy lifted his face, intent as a statue watching a river. But his eyes were glass ponds with no fish; they held no focus, only drift. The teacher kept nodding at him, secret and pleased, like a gardener spotting a straight row. On one’s own class, a “model listener” was sunshine.

Well—sunshine, if you didn’t see the lamps behind the paper. The truth lay under the lacquer like wood grain.

Ouyang felt only respect, as deep as a bow. He knew he could never sit that still; he’d doze like a cat in five minutes. The boy had a terrifying “auto voice filter.” When the teacher floated fluff, he was gone, a kite past the clouds. When a key point knocked, his ear twitched like a hare’s. In a breath, his soul snapped back from nine heavens away.

Ouyang knew he couldn’t learn that trick; it was a hawk’s eye only that boy owned, one-of-a-kind.

At last, the bell rang, bright as a silver spoon rapping china. The boy walked out and found a patch of grass, then lay down like a boat turned on calm water.

“You’re gonna start your life of cutting class again, aren’t you?” Ouyang eyed the backpack like a sly flag. He felt the answer in the tilt of the boy’s shoulders.

Before, the boy would’ve sparred a little, words like pebbles in a brook. This time he just lay in the grass, watching blue sky and white clouds drift like sails. Ouyang shut up, and he “lay” there too, a shadow beside a shadow, eyes on the same slow river of sky.

Silence thickened like honey. Ouyang broke first, breath snagging on the quiet. He wanted to pry the lid off.

“Hey, Xiao Xuan, you okay? Did you never get over what happened last time—” The word stumbled, and his hand clapped over his mouth like a lid. Wrong kettle, wrong time. Maybe last year had pressed him flat. Maybe Ouyang’s topic was a thorn, not a balm.

But his very face was already a match to last year’s tinder. His presence tugged open old drawers all by itself.

“Sorry…” He let his hand fall, the word small as a leaf. It took him a long breath to say that much.

This time the boy moved, a ripple across a still pond.

“You don’t need to apologize… it was me…” He lifted one hand to shade his brow, like a visor against the blaze. “Truth is, I’d already suspected that person. I never really had ‘friends.’ My world wasn’t theirs, like parallel rails. Her arrival rang an alarm bell, but I dulled myself like a drunk. Even while seeing the crack, I still wanted to give her a chance.”

He sighed up at the sky, a long thread of breath like smoke. A strange smile tugged his mouth, thin as a scar. “I only learned at the last second—she never needed a chance from me. That was just me, dressing up my own vanity. Still, I have to thank her. She taught me a lot—so much.”

“That’s the survival law you won’t find in textbooks, like thorn paths outside the garden. Like I told you at the start: fairy tales… are lies.”

From him, Ouyang learned Lan Yan’s end. The girl fell hard, like glass flung from a tower. Her so-called boyfriend got caught; it had been a staged play from the beginning. He was with the mob, a pack with a rooster-red crest. To lure the boy out, he and Red Cockscomb put on a show, all smoke and paint. Lan Yan went along, doe-eyed, for the boy she loved, and stepped into the trap.

Behind the sugar glaze of a dream, the paper tore. The fairy-tale theater ripped open to brick and blood. Reality was raw and red; she couldn’t swallow it. In the end, her mind snapped like a harp string. Maybe she’d spend the rest of her life under white lights, in a place where windows don’t open.

Those we pity carry a thorn you can hate. Those we hate carry bruises you can pity. People are knives and fruit, both.

“I think… I’ve found the road I’ll walk.” The boy smiled at the sky, calm as a lake. “There’s no castle built of clouds over the sky. There’s no elf grove at the forest’s edge. So I want to create a dreamlike ideal land. I know it’s a fever dream; I’m not saying I must make it real. I’ll keep it as a star to steer by.”

“From today on, I’ll chase that first dream and spend my life laying its stones, a country of the heart.” His voice was a lantern in the dusk.

In that moment, Ouyang saw a familiar shadow rise from him, like a figure overlapping. For a vow and a first dream, that person had kept walking, alone with his own night.

In the First Epoch they had a saying, carved like frost on bronze: The one who struck the immortal Jue to life was a Dream Chaser for all his days.

No one knew what dream he chased, like a kite beyond sight. No one knew where his road ended, like a path swallowed by fog.

“Xiao Xuan, keep going,” Ouyang said, a hand on air, a blessing like warm rain. “One day, your dream will come true.”

The boy nodded, a reed bending. “Come true… that kind of dream may never bloom. As long as there’s thought, there’s contest; as long as there’s contest, there’s hurt. Only beings without feeling, like puppets on my strings, could build that place. But without feeling, are they human? In my ideal land, the people aren’t robots obeying whistles. They’re flesh and blood, able to love and hate like rivers rise and fall.”

“So maybe, from the start, the dream was born with a crack,” he said, soft as falling ash.

They talked a long time on the grass, words like leaves blowing. Midway, the boy’s phone rang, a tin bird chirping. It looked like the teacher had called his sister about him skipping class. He didn’t get scolded like thunder; he just said, cool as shade, “I’m skipping to adjust my mood.”

And then he skipped, honest as noon. Ouyang noticed steel in his voice when he spoke to his sister, a stiffness like winter bark. Maybe last year had put frost between them.

They didn’t leave that out-of-the-way patch of green all day. They lay there and talked till the sun swung like a pendulum. Dreams, scraps of the past, the old scars and the small lights. Their distance closed like two boats rafting together. They vented about life like wind through pine, and they listened like stones by a stream.

“Will everything just roll on this plain and quiet?” Ouyang murmured, a thought like a pebble in his mouth. “If it could, plain isn’t bad.” Nothing strange happened this time; that meant next time—the last time—something heavy would fall.

“Xiao Xuan, next time will be our last meeting…”

Dusk bled in. The sun sank like a ember. The world was dyed red, a scroll washed in fire.