Wang Lin regained consciousness in a silence too heavy to be natural.
It was not the absence of sound that disturbed him, but the way that silence seemed to impose itself upon him, like a compact substance. A silence that did not merely surround his body, but pressed directly against his consciousness, slowing each thought before it could even take shape.
He did not open his eyes immediately.
An unusual inertia clung to his eyelids, as if some invisible mechanism demanded a prior verification before allowing sight to return. His mind, still numb, seemed to analyze the environment without relying on the senses, evaluating the stability of the world before consenting to inhabit it fully.
His body felt distant.
Not absent.
Not asleep.
But separated.
As if it had been extracted from him, displaced elsewhere, then reinserted with imperfect precision. A thin, invisible layer—a poorly sealed membrane—now seemed to hold him at a distance from his own sensations.
Had he slept?
The question formed slowly, without urgency.
Or had he fallen into something deeper?
Each breath arrived with a slight delay, offset by a precise beat, almost mathematical. Air entered his lungs without resistance, without pain, but the sensation was no longer instinctive. He had to consciously accompany each inhale, as though his body had forgotten how to breathe on its own.
His heart was beating.
Regularly.
Too regularly.
A constant rhythm, without variation, without hesitation. As if an external cadence had imposed itself upon him, tuned to a frequency that did not belong to him.
The familiar ceiling of his bedroom slowly entered his field of vision.
White.
Smooth.
Immutable.
A surface without flaws, without history, suspended above him like an indifferent witness.
"...Huh?"
The sound of his own voice felt distant, muffled, almost filtered. He had the strange impression that the words took too long to leave his mouth, as if they had crossed an additional layer of reality before becoming audible.
His throat was dry, rough, burning. As if he had not drunk anything for hours. Perhaps days. A dull pressure still wrapped around his chest—not painful, but persistent—the phantom residue of a weight that was no longer there, yet whose memory refused to fade.
His mind tried to gather itself.
In vain.
Fragments drifted through his consciousness, disjointed, without apparent logic, like debris after an invisible explosion:
a light too intense to be looked at,
an overwhelming presence, impossible to flee,
a calm, composed, imperial voice...
a voice that left no room for doubt, nor negotiation.
He could no longer hear the words.
Only the authority they carried.
He tried to sit up.
Instantly, a dull pain shot through his neck. Sharp. Immediate. Not violent, but precise enough to force him to freeze. It was not an injury. Rather, a warning, as if his own body were ordering him not to move faster than it could endure.
He remained still for a few more seconds.
Listening.
Inwardly.
Something had changed. He knew it with a cold, almost clinical certainty. Not a visible alteration. Not yet. But a deep structural modification, whose contours he had not yet been granted access to.
Instinctively, his hand rose to his face.
The blindfold.
His fingers met the familiar black fabric. Reassuring. It was perfectly in place, exactly where it should be. Neither shifted. Nor wrinkled. As if it had never left his face.
Still there.
An uncontrolled sigh escaped his lips.
Not true relief.
Rather, a precarious balance between recovered safety and a dull, creeping anxiety. The feeling that this simple strip of fabric was preventing something worse—something that should never have been released.
He lay there, motionless, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
The steady ticking of the wall clock finally reached his awareness. A banal sound. Ordinary. Almost comforting. A familiar anchor within a body that had become foreign.
But each second felt denser than the last.
Heavier.
As if time itself hesitated to move forward without clear instruction.
"I must have dreamed."
He spoke the words softly, without conviction. A mechanical attempt to restore a normality he no longer felt.
Because something was wrong.
His heart was still beating too slowly. Too perfectly. Not the living irregularity of a human body upon waking. His organism was functioning with a cold precision, devoid of hesitation, like a system recalibrated according to parameters that were not his own.
And yet, he did not feel weakened.
Nor ill.
On the contrary.
His body felt denser. More present. As if it occupied more space than before. As if reality itself now acknowledged him with greater gravity, recognizing his existence in a new way.
He finally sat up at the edge of the bed.
The movement was slow. Controlled.
His hands trembled slightly. A discreet but persistent quiver. Not fear. Not yet. Rather, an overload—like a nervous system trying to process an influx of information it had never been designed to handle.
He observed the room.
The bedroom was intact.
The desk cluttered with poorly stacked notebooks.
The chair pushed askew.
The bowl of noodles from the night before, cold and abandoned, still rested on the wooden surface, frozen in its insignificance.
A trivial detail.
A fragile anchor.
Nothing had changed.
And yet, everything was different.
He stood up.
His feet touched the floor with a strange sensation. The wooden planks responded beneath his weight with unusual clarity, as if matter itself acknowledged his presence with more seriousness than before. Each step felt precise. Final. Almost solemn.
He had the fleeting impression that each of his movements left an invisible imprint in the air. Or perhaps elsewhere. Somewhere deeper than air.
"Ridiculous..."
Fatigue.
It had to be fatigue.
An accumulation of nights too short.
Of thoughts never allowed to rest.
Of silences stretched too long.
He glanced at the time.
Still early.
Too early for this malaise to have any acceptable rational cause.
He sat back down on the bed, elbows resting on his knees, gaze lost in the void. He tried to slow his breathing. To recover a familiar rhythm. Without success.
Deep within his chest, a mute certainty began to take shape.
Slow.
Inexorable.
Like a black tide rising without sound, without violence, but with absolute determination.
This had not been a dream.
Something had been triggered.
Something irreversible.
And this time, the world would not wait for him to understand why.