Ge Tianci fell into a hallucination—a spectral vision of the playground where every seat in the stands was occupied by a white-cloaked, ghostly puppet.
Their faces were obscured by the shadows of their hoods, lending the night an eerie, almost farcical dread.
His consciousness flickered again. When he regained awareness, only a single black-and-white "specter" remained in the stands. At the same time, the grinning mask turned its gaze toward him.
*Run.*
That was his first instinct.
The door behind him was still open, no longer locked. He had never set foot on this field before—it was unfamiliar territory within X Academy's grounds, but at least it was *safe.*
The moment he took a step, a sudden gust of wind—inhumanly fast—rushed past his ears, carrying something unspeakable.
Ge Tianci didn't look back.
But the worst part was—he couldn't move.
The *grinning mask* was standing behind him.
The music resumed, an invitation to a game.
His ordinary human mind, already frayed from repeated brushes with terror, could no longer conjure the image of himself panting back to the dorms, babbling to his peers—*What the hell was that? You won't believe what just happened—*
A vein throbbed in his temple. In a flash, he pivoted and swung a knifehand strike toward the mask.
His palm froze a hair's breadth from its surface.
Paralyzed.
The mask's arms unfolded—elongated, segmented, like a mantis's scythes, gleaming under the moonlight with an eerie, mechanical precision.
It extended an envelope toward him.
His hands regained movement, but an unseen force compelled him to take it, to tear it open. The mask remained silent.
Inside were five words:
***Everything is a dream.***
***Everything is a dream.***
The moment the letter left his hands, the mask tilted its head toward the moon, its insectoid limbs glinting like polished metal. The music swelled again.
"Who are you? Did you lead me here? What does this mean?" Fear gripped him; his voice trembled.
Humans fear the unknown. By now, all thoughts of bragging about tonight's horrors had vanished.
The mask didn't speak. Instead, a searing heat flared between Ge Tianci's brows—and in that instant, he *understood.*
Then—
He plunged into the dream.
***Everything is a dream.***
***All of it, false.***
The ruins of ancient Egypt materialized around him—pyramids collapsing, flames devouring stone. As fire licked at his feet, the monoliths of Stonehenge toppled before him, each engraved with solar sigils. Then, a deluge—tsunami waves surged from behind. Before the scene could shift again, the image of a *third eye*—the pineal gland—seared itself into his mind.
The ocean swallowed him whole.
Down, down he sank.
Time warped, accelerated. He could breathe underwater, eyes wide open. In the distant abyss, a great bird with a human face and burning wings streaked across the void—its feathers smoldering, its talons scarred from endless flight. Its eyes brimmed with tears, with regret, so heavy it seemed ready to plummet into the depths...
The deeper he fell, the colder the water grew. The bird's form blurred, and the scenery shifted—coral and seaweed dissolved like strokes erased from a canvas. Fish darted away as if deemed irrelevant.
Then, after an eternity, pale ruins emerged. His descent slowed. Clarity returned.
A mermaid—her hair a swirling mass of kelp, her hands webbed with fins—reached out, brushing his cheek. She sang, but not in sound—in frequencies, vibrations that resonated in his skull like the sirens of myth.
And he *understood* her.
She sang of a civilization—of humans thriving beneath the waves, of towering spires carved from reef and crystal, of the ocean's boundless wisdom...
Mesmerized, he lifted a hand to her dark-scaled fin. She didn't pull away, but her song trembled—a shrill, grief-stricken cry beneath the hymn. Behind every ode to divinity lay human helplessness. Before he could grasp it, her sorrow threatened to drown him.
As her lament faded, her fin grazed his face once more. For a fleeting moment, he thought he saw tears.
Time was malleable. All that remained in his grip were strands of seaweed and silt.
Then—the white city crumbled. The seabed split. Tribes warred. Blades left gashes in the marble, blue blood and scales washed away by the tides.
An inscription remained:
***"Atalantë ná lúmë ya hróna."***
A hundred years of civilization passed in a blink. Kelp withered. Poseidon fell. Mermaid scales became dust. The sea smoothed all traces—even memory.
As the third vision loomed, Ge Tianci sensed something. At the very least, the death of civilizations had stirred something in him.
The ancient kingdom of Loulan materialized. The mermaid's touch still cold on his skin, he now stood bathed in desert sun. Caravans bustled past. A gut instinct flared—his perception of time was too *fast,* reducing history to sand. Without thinking, he seized a passerby's silk robe, babbling in Mandarin. The man gaped, gesturing wildly, shouting in an alien tongue. Ge Tianci mimicked the sounds until an angry crowd gathered, jabbing fingers, demanding justice.
Unfazed, he stripped off his jacket and handed it over. Just as he moved to embrace the man—
The stranger's face aged before his eyes. Wrinkles spread like ripples. In seconds, youth became decrepitude.
The cycle of cause and effect had begun.
Ge Tianci looked up—and met the gaze of the *grinning mask.* It loomed in the sky, silent, a wordless warning.
Time accelerated again. He watched, wide-eyed, as beauty turned to bone, as Loulan's glory became ruin. The desert that once nurtured life now cradled skeletons. History's pages, once reliable, dissolved into the void.
Humanity's saga played out—apes stood upright, lands shifted, empires rose and fell. War. Alliance. Migration. Extinction. Civilizations unspooled like a scroll, their collective weight crashing into his mind in a single, blinding flash.
After experiencing 42 civilizations—
In medieval Europe, as the guillotine's blade fell toward his neck—
A mantis limb, piercing through a starry rift, hooked his collar and *yanked.*
He was ripped from the timeline.
The blade dropped onto empty air. The crowd's frozen confusion lasted only a second before they turned, indifferent, to the next condemned.