Lou Xun suddenly raised his head, as if he was pulled out of the river of time by some invisible force.

In an instant, the world cracked open in his eyes - his younger brother Bai Di's brows were slightly furrowed, and his amber pupils were filled with familiar worry;

The tense shoulders of Bai Di's three friends opposite him were like three fully drawn bowstrings, cutting the air into uneasy fragments.

But behind them, the oak panels of the tavern were oozing a dark golden honey.

The halo of dusk condensed into amber on the rim of the beer glass. The wildly growing beech trees outside the window frame burned their branches and leaves into the glass. Every new leaf was burning, splashing the green flame of midsummer on his retina.

The overly bright colors were gnawing at his memory—a fragment of a parallel time and space suddenly pierced his mind: Bai Di was wearing a navy blue sweater that he had never bought, and was grinning at him with his fangs showing in the snow.

But soon, the perspective changed rapidly.

Moonlight-like petals stretched out in the void, each one looking like a crushed Milky Way, with a cold blue hue amidst the crystal white.

Liquid silver glow flowed around the edges of the leaves, which grew slowly in the windless silence until they filled the entire field of vision. They were not rooted in the soil, but spread out from cracks in the void, clinging to the chaos where only dark red and pitch black were intertwined.

It was red like solidified blood, black like the collapsing night, and against this barren background, only the plant was breathing and expanding, as if it was the only life allowed in this world.

His consciousness was splitting and collapsing. He saw himself floating like dust, and also like the sky covering everything.

Time loses its meaning here, the past and the future are compressed into a still light, and his existence is entangled with the plant - every stretch of it is like an extension of his memory; every tremor of it is like the echo of his heartbeat.

The world was shrinking, and in the end only the bright outline remained.

And he became the eyes gazing at it, the darkness enveloping it, and the red silently surging beneath its roots.

Something indescribable was wriggling in his chest, like a tangled mass of tentacles, or like countless tiny insects gnawing at the boundaries of his sanity.

It was not pure love, nor was it simple desire, but a more twisted, almost blasphemous obsession - he wanted to possess the moonlight-like plant as his own, not to admire it, not to cherish it, but to crush it, dissolve it, and swallow it, let its silver glow seep into his blood vessels, let its veins grow under his skin.

It shouldn't exist in that desolate dark red and black, it should... belong to him.

But as soon as this thought emerged, his consciousness was suddenly torn apart - as if some existence from a higher dimension was staring at all this through his eyes, mocking his insignificance.

His fingers twitched, and in his hallucination, his skin began to peel off, revealing the squirming, inhuman flesh underneath, while his bones were alienating and twisting into a posture more suitable for grabbing and imprisonment.

Once the moonlight arrived, darkness became a curse. He could not tolerate it disappearing again, nor could he tolerate it being seen by any other being.

Even if the price is to make himself a cage, an abyss, or the rotting nutrients beneath its roots - he wants it to stay in his world forever and ever.

The remaining feathers of memory began to peel off at the critical point of dusk.

His vision changed rapidly again.

But where is this place?

Where has he come again?

At first, there were only a few ash-like butterfly shadows, casting fine shadows on the retina.

He stood in the cracks of the office building's glass curtain wall and saw that the reflection of the entire city was fading in color - the green of the trees on the roadside, the purple of the neon lights, the swaying brown in the coffee cup, all collapsed into trembling noise on the black and white film.

Suddenly, a wind surged from deep within the earth.

The butterfly wings multiplied wildly in the air currents, and the splashing scales opened up countless rainbow abysses.

It reminded him of overturned paint cans from his childhood, snaking across the canvas into forbidden shapes.

And now these colors are engulfed in a subatomic storm, tearing the old photo albums accumulated over twenty years into pale snow.

There was scarlet blood wriggling in the tornado's eyes.

At first he thought it was an illusion caused by retinal hemorrhage, until the sticky red began to breathe on its own.

Tens of thousands of eyeballs floated in the rainbow vortex, and each pupil shrank into a needle-tip-sized ∞ symbol.

The way they stared made his stomach churn—that wasn't the gaze of a living being. The ones truly watching the world were the eyes embedded in every corner, every piece of rubble.

They grew out of the cracks in the concrete, and their irises had patterns similar to those of human pupils, but they reflected a completely unfamiliar starry sky.

When you unconsciously pick up an eyeball, it will suddenly melt in your palm, turning into a pool of blood dew with a smell of rust, seeping into the cracks on the surface burned by the flames.

Molten gold-like magma slowly wriggles in the ravines, like awakening ancient pythons.

They exhale sulfur and carve scorching inscriptions on the cracked earth - perhaps it is some lost curse, or the final confession of this world.

The buildings pierce the clouds like black fangs left by the gods.

They jostle against each other at geometrically defying angles, casting spider-web-like shadows against the crimson sky.

The facades of these giant structures are not static. When you gaze at them quietly, you will find that the red and black ripples are slowly wriggling, as if the buildings themselves are the shells of some sleeping creatures.

The shadows fell more quietly than expected.

As the sixteen-eyed monster tore open the sky, the sound of clouds breaking was like the steel shelves of an entire library collapsing at the same time.

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