I wandered through the city at night.

Neon lights flickered calmly through the torrential rain.

Raindrops hammered against my black umbrella, blending with everything around me drenched by the rain, as if they carried their own strange rhythm.

Everything around me formed a hazy canvas beneath the dense rain.

I could just make out blurred figures nearby and cars moving slowly along.

They held umbrellas of every color. Together with the curtain of rain, they hid their faces.

The patter of rain mingled with the horns blaring on the road, one after another.

The anxiety I’d felt before gave way to a long-lost sense of peace.

The raindrops swallowed every sound, turning them all into a hazy accompaniment.

I lifted my head and looked through my umbrella at the dark night, wrapped in heavy black clouds.

It was as if the entire sky had been draped in a black curtain—deep and indistinct, oppressive and stifling.

I walked unhurriedly along the street, taking the road that led home.

Because of the downpour, I hadn’t ridden my usual cheap bicycle.

My home wasn’t very far from the office. It would’ve taken me only half an hour to get there by bike.

But now I could only walk through the rain-lashed streets.

The rain had swallowed my shoes and soaked the cuffs of my pants.

Still, I was grateful for the rain. It had let me leave work early.

Thunder roared. The gloomy sky seemed to split open in an instant, and a brief, ghastly flash of white lit up everything around me: buildings, cars, pedestrians.

Then everything sank into darkness again…

Every so often, a cold raindrop slipped past my black umbrella and smacked me in the face, bringing me a little more to my senses.

Work, work, work.

Every day was more high-pressure work, overtime, work, overtime.

Looking back on the past few years, a question crossed my mind for a brief moment—

What am I even doing?

I drifted through life in a daze, like a walking corpse, reduced to a broken cog.

I couldn’t think—

Somewhere in the distance, he heard the sound of a flowerpot falling and shattering in an alley.

A cat’s wail, like a crying baby, and a dog’s furious barking flashed by with a blurred figure in the alley.

I paid it no mind and kept walking.

The rain was coming down hard today. One careless step and I’d land in a puddle.

Rainwater seeped into my shoes. The feel of wet socks against my toes was miserable.

I walked onto the bridge beneath my black umbrella. The horns of cars in every color and their high beams blurred together in the rain-filled air.

I paid it no mind and kept walking.

But my nose felt terribly blocked, as if I couldn’t draw in any air. As time passed, the feeling grew worse and worse.

A mournful wind drove the rain against my umbrella, forcing me to brace it with both hands against the pressure of the storm.

The torrential rain blanketed everything around me, and the world grew more and more indistinct.

It was as if my whole body had been submerged in water.

I was puzzled, but I paid it no mind and kept walking.

A black umbrella swayed in the raging storm, as if it might be torn to shreds at any moment.

Car after car drove through the pooled water, splashing it over the umbrella lying by the roadside. The water collected inside then trickled from its edge, resting against the ground, back onto the road.

—

I opened my eyes.

Rushing currents slammed into me from every direction, engulfing my entire body.

White noise flooded my mind. My ears seemed able to sense my body struggling.

I struggled desperately.

My waterlogged clothes dragged me down like weights.

I tried to breathe, but water flooding into my nose left me in agony. A strange stabbing pain spread through my head, and tears kept spilling from my eyes before dissolving into the water.

A blank whiteness consumed my mind. I felt awful. My body’s instinct to survive made me open my mouth and gulp for air, but the moment I did, a flood of water poured in.

I choked on mouthfuls of water, feeling miserable. I wanted to struggle harder, but my limbs were growing slower and slower.

Like a stiff puppet…

I never tried to call for help. Or maybe I simply never thought of it. All I wanted was to breathe.

Gradually, my mind slowed and my consciousness blurred.

But my thoughts were strangely sharp.

Images flashed across the blank screen in my mind, one after another, like slides in a projector.

A cat knocking over a flowerpot. A little figure scrolling on a phone in a cramped, sealed-off room. An umbrella drifting through the downpour…

And there were other images, clear as day, that flashed by in an instant.

But I couldn’t pay them any mind. I had no idea what they meant.

My limbs struggled weakly, while my blurred consciousness tried to make me keep fighting.

But there was nothing I could do.

My eyelids grew unbearably heavy. My body felt light and floaty now, and so did my limbs.

I forgot that I was in a river on a rainy night, and slowly closed my eyes.

—

It was a great tree. Its trunk was tall and massive, its roots thick and tangled.

Its branches twisted outward from the main trunk, sprouting lush leaves.

Just looking at the enormous tree made it seem magnificent.

But the space around it was empty. There was nothing there at all—only that great tree, silently continuing to grow…

That was the last image I saw before I lost consciousness…

——

“Drip… drip…”

The intricate chimes of a clock roused Ye Zhuangyan from sleep, tugging at his soul.

After a long silence,

his consciousness gradually returned, and his sealed-off senses slowly came back to life.

“What… happened to me…?”

The moment his consciousness returned, Ye Zhuangyan’s body instinctively made him open his mouth and throat.

Ye Zhuangyan had expected to choke on another huge gulp of water, but no flood of liquid came.

Once he came to his senses, Ye Zhuangyan realized he was gasping for air.

The air here didn’t seem very fresh, though. It was thick with the stench of rotting meat and things going moldy in the damp.

“Wasn’t I… dead?”

As oxygen filled his lungs, Ye Zhuangyan felt a deep, instinctive joy.

It was the thrill of survival, the joy of being alive, the relief of not having died.

He smelled the rot in the air, tasted the bitter liquid still in his mouth, and felt his own body—the rough ground against his skin. Ye Zhuangyan realized he was still alive.

Then he tried to open his heavy eyes.

Eternal darkness split apart.

The first things he saw were a pair of small, pale hands, some strange pale green liquid, and shards of glass.

Ye Zhuangyan lifted his head and looked around, only to discover in shock that he seemed to be in some unknown, abandoned laboratory.

Behind him stood a huge upright glass pod, large enough to hold an average-sized adult. The pod had been shattered.

The pale green liquid left on its inner walls matched the liquid on the floor. Damaged equipment lay among the shards of glass.

Ye Zhuangyan had never seen anything like it, yet it seemed strangely familiar.

As if he himself had once been the person immersed inside.

He braced his unfamiliar body and tried to get up.

But his newly restored senses didn’t seem ready for it. The slightest movement made him feel off-balance, and the body he’d just pushed upright with his hands fell back to the floor.

Ye Zhuangyan didn’t notice that when his deathly pale skin touched the glass shards scattered across the floor, the sharp edges didn’t cut him. They left only a faint red mark.

Ye Zhuangyan’s head felt heavy—not just foggy, but physically heavy, too.

Ye Zhuangyan felt that something about his body was wrong. On her arm, she could feel not the bristly stubble of short hair or her cheek, but something soft and silky covering it.

Long, deep-green strands fell across his cheek and swept over his eyes.

“Is this… my hair?”

When he fell, his head happened to land on his own arm. His smooth, long, deep-green hair spread out around him, stained with pale green liquid.

Ye Zhuangyan blinked, puzzled, but his swollen head made it impossible to focus on thinking about any of it.

He simply gave up struggling and lay there on the filthy floor. He couldn’t bring himself to think about whether the ground was dirty or not—he didn’t even know why he was still alive.

His head throbbed, making it impossible to think about anything.

Ye Zhuangyan emptied his mind and thought of nothing. Only then did the pressure and fogginess in his head begin to ease.

Before long, Ye Zhuangyan drifted back into a deep, groggy sleep.

…

For the first time in a long while, Ye Zhuangyan dreamed. In the dream, he was a girl who looked very young.

Ye Zhuangyan didn’t know who she was, yet he felt an indescribable closeness to the girl before him.

He stood opposite her. She watched him, and he studied her in turn.

He couldn’t make out her blurred face. All he could tell was that she had long, deep-green hair and green eyes.

She wore a white sundress and was barefoot.

“She must be beautiful…”

Yet her beauty reminded him of a night-blooming cereus, there and gone in an instant.

Ye Zhuangyan couldn’t help thinking so.

The girl pressed her thin lips together slightly. It was a faint smile.

He couldn’t see the girl’s face clearly, but he could tell what was reflected in her green eyes.

A sense of release, of acceptance…

And longing.

Ye Zhuangyan could read those feelings, but he couldn’t understand them.

Just then, the girl parted her lips slightly and smiled as she said two words.

But Ye Zhuangyan couldn’t hear her. It was as if the wind had carried her voice away, leaving only a breeze brushing past his ear.

“Who are you?”

Ye Zhuangyan wanted to ask, but he couldn’t make a sound.

He was confused. He wanted to walk over to her. He wanted to see her clearly.

But the moment he lowered his head to take a step, he saw…

An unfathomable abyss lay between them.

Ye Zhuangyan’s heart lurched. He jerked his head up, then froze.

The girl’s figure had somehow drifted farther and farther away.

And behind the girl…

A gigantic ancient tree stood silently between heaven and earth.

Beneath that ancient tree, both he and she seemed so tiny, like ants trapped by a single drop of water.

Powerless, and absurd…