Lin Yuan's fingertip hovered above the ward keyboard. She hesitated for a moment, then typed the record: "23:47, patient's right index finger exhibited occasional minor involuntary tremor. Closely monitored. No other changes noted." Enter. The characters flowed into the river of electronic archives, merging with countless similar entries like "vital signs stable" and "persistent unconscious state." A ripple, utterly insignificant.
She closed the record interface, her gaze drifting back to the hospital bed. He lay as quiet as a plaster statue displayed in a museum, only his chest rising and falling rhythmically with the help of the ventilator. That earlier twitch was like a grain of sand mistakenly dropped into still water, its ripples now completely vanished. Must have been my imagination, she thought, rubbing her temples as the fatigue of the night shift began to seep in.
Yet something held her feet in place. Not duty, not sympathy, but a... vague sense of dissonance she couldn't articulate. She approached the bedside, observing more carefully this time. His face, young, pale, held neither pain nor peace, only an absolute blankness. Out of habit, her hand rose to check his pupillary light reflex—though this had been repeated thousands of times with never a change—but paused mid-air.
The light. It was the light she had dimmed. In the dimmer illumination, the contours of his face seemed... sharper? No, it was the shadows. Under the green glow of the monitor screens, the shadows in his eye sockets and beside his nose seemed a millimeter deeper than usual. Maybe it was the angle.
Lin Yuan dismissed this unfounded thought and completed the routine check. Everything was normal. She left the room, gently closing the door behind her. The corridor was silent, only the faint hum of instruments echoing from the distant nurses' station. She needed to attend to another patient's call.
The moment she turned away, inside the room, on the electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring electrodes attached to both sides of his head—which typically traced near-flat lines indicative of deep unconsciousness or severe brain dysfunction—one channel registered an extremely brief, needle-thin spike. It was too fast, too faint, failing to even trigger the preset anomaly alarm threshold before vanishing into the baseline noise, like a sigh no one heard.
---
Darkness. The cloying stench of rot. Eternal imprisonment.
But this time, something was different.
The black vines him no longer merely consumed and dissolved mechanically. Their movements now carried a new "texture"—an exploratory, hesitant. The tips of several of the thickest vines no longer burrowed into the "statue's" interior. Instead, they began to glide slowly along its "waxy" surface, tracing the contours of the faceless visage, outlining the shapes of shoulders and arms. The motion was light, yet carried a chilling sense of "curiosity."
Moreover, the concentrated force of that "gaze" from hundreds of vines directed at a specific point (the source of the dimmed light) had not entirely dissipated. A cold "attention" lingered in the rotting garden, like mist. Each movement of the vines seemed to carry a faint echo—an echo of that weak disturbance from a distant elsewhere.
His "consciousness" (if it could still be called that) was steeped in this new horror. On top of the original, pure agony of being consumed, a layer of sharper chill was added. They were not just eating him. They were beginning to "perceive" him, perhaps even... "learning." Learning his contours, learning the minuscule "stimulus" brought by that break in absolute darkness—the slight change in light and shadow.
This thought itself terrified him more than being consumed a billion times over.
In the distance of the garden, the ruins of "statues" appeared even more lifeless under the leaden sky. He suddenly "realized" that the difference between himself and them might not just be his maintained form. The difference lay in the existence of an, almost broken "thread" connecting him to the "outside," the real world. And that thread had just been gently plucked—by something, by someone.
The vines seemed to "perceive" the existence of this thread as well. Their became more focused, adjusting the density and angle of their coils ever so slightly toward the direction of the "point" they had "gazed" upon in the dream. It was as if they were tuning an antenna, trying to capture that fleeting signal once more.
A sharp, non-audible "shriek" resonated through the garden, a vibration. It wasn't anger; it was more like... excitement. A cold excitement at discovering a new "toy" or a new "path."
They temporarily slowed their consumption of him. Their entire "malice" and "interest" were now directed at that intangible barrier, the direction from which another disturbance might come.
---
Morning. Handover time.