The air was different when he awoke.
Heavy. Still. As if the world had been paused mid-breath.
Yu Yung-an opened his eyes slowly. The ceiling above him was not one he recognized—smooth, whitewashed, lined with unfamiliar cracks like veins running through time. His body ached with a strange inertia, as if every limb had just returned from somewhere far away… or someone else's life.
The dream still clung to him.
He sat up, breath shallow, and instinctively reached for the side of the bed. No cross. No river. No Zhang Huan-an. But the words echoed, stubborn as blood in his veins:
"You must choose… or I will choose for you."
He placed a hand on his chest. His heartbeat was steady—but it didn't feel like his own.Not entirely.
"I remember…" he whispered, almost afraid the room would answer.
But the room remained silent. Only the thin curtains swayed gently, moved by a breeze that shouldn't exist—this room had no windows.
Yu Yung-an rose, bare feet touching the cold floor. He walked to the small metal door and paused, pressing his ear to it. No sound. No footsteps. No sign of time passing.
He had been asleep for days. Maybe longer. And yet…his body remembered a single night—a single Tuesday—as if it had only just occurred.
He turned toward the desk in the corner. A blank notebook lay open. His own handwriting, scrawled across the page:
"2024.06.04（TUE）— Midnight.He looked at me with my face.But the eyes… weren't mine.And I was the one who remembered it."
The pen had run dry at the edge of the page. He hadn't written it. Or had he?
He sat down, fingers trembling, and whispered into the stillness:
"Zhang Huan-an… who were you really trying to become?"
The dream had ended.But something else had begun to awaken in its place.
A memory not his,a life not lived,and a truthwaiting at the door.
He rose to his feet and walked toward the door.
His footsteps made no sound. The entire structure felt wrapped in a thin film of time—not quite real, not entirely unreal. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant, yet there was something else beneath it—something he couldn't name.
The door stood before him: pale gray, metallic, without a lock—yet held shut by something unseen, something that weighed against his will.
He pressed the handle. The door yielded with a soft click.
The hallway beyond was unnaturally still. The lights were cool-toned, casting no warmth. On the walls hung a series of untitled paintings, like fragments snipped from someone's memory. With each step, he seemed to bring weight from the dream into this place—layer by layer, the remnants of memory pierced through.
—This wasn't his first time waking up.The thought came suddenly.This building, this hallway, this exact silence—he had walked it countless times in his dreams, though he'd believed then it was merely a glimpse of some distant "future."
Now he wasn't so sure—Was it prophecy?Or a repetition of a past someone tried to erase?
He stopped before a wooden door.Carved into its surface were three crosses, nested within each other. The innermost cross had nearly fused into the grain of the wood—it could only be seen if one leaned in closely.
No sound came from behind the door.But he knew—Something was waiting.
He lifted his hand, not to knock, but to press his palm gently against it.
In that moment, a sharp sting surged through him.
It wasn't an illusion.Not a hallucination.It was a reaction—something his body rememberedfrom a life he hadn't lived.
He pushed the door open.
Its hinges gave a quiet sigh—like an echo from some distant memory. A wave of dry air swept past him, carrying the scent of aged paper, dust… and something deeper, something more ancient—like silence compressed by time itself.
He stood at the threshold, unmoving.
Before him lay an old library. Walls lined with wooden shelves stretched to the ceiling, filled with yellowed, disordered books—like the wreckage of abandoned thoughts. A single desk sat in the center, an oil lamp flickering atop it. The flame didn't illuminate the room, but it gave breath to the shadows.
And one of those shadows… wasn't his.
"You've finally come."
The voice came from somewhere deep within the room, calm, as if it had been expecting him all along.
He didn't reply right away.He stepped forward, the wood beneath him creaking with each footfall—as though he were walking across the buried bones of time.
Behind the desk sat a figure shrouded in dimness. He couldn't make out the face—only the gaze. Eyes watching him from beyond the reach of the light.
"Do you know where this place is?"
He shook his head.
"This is the world that memory chose not to keep," the figure said quietly."A meeting point for what time has lost."
He held his breath.
"You've been here before—only then, you hadn't yet remembered who you were."
In that moment, the scent of Zhang Huan-an brushed past him again—subtle, undeniable.
And he understood:
What lay beyond this door…wasn't just space.It was the spine of memory itself.