Maybe I never existed.
But something is still not right.
The world fell apart between the needles of the compass, and then reassembled in the next moment.
Multi-dimensional images remained on Blore's retina. Reality was like a crumpled and flattened parchment, painfully twisted on the boundary between truth and illusion.
The brass compass vibrated violently in his palm, and the shriveled human head embedded in the center suddenly opened its lidless eyes, with galaxy-like vortices swirling in its pupils.
"Look, this is the truth—" the head opened its cracked lips, revealing triangular shark-like teeth. "Even the world itself is questioning its own reality..."
"But that's clearly not right."
Blore blinked, an unnatural purple glow circling the edges of his irises.
The shadow of flowing black mist crawled across his face, outlining the abnormal changes in his bone structure - his cheekbones seemed to be 0.8 centimeters higher than three minutes ago, and the angle of his jawline was approaching inhuman perfect geometry.
Blore's voice fragmented into countless echoes in the black fog, and each syllable stirred strange ripples in the sticky air.
His fingers twitched slightly, and his knuckles made a crisp sound similar to the breaking of ceramic - some kind of cognitive barrier beyond human understanding was being reconstructed deep in his consciousness.
"Those things you told me," his vocal cords suddenly vibrated simultaneously at three octaves, a swirling pattern of miniature nebulae appearing at his Adam's apple, "who knows if they're true or not?"
The black mist seethed at his feet, like a sea of asphalt stirred by invisible hands.
The huge compass in front began to rotate backwards, and the brass needle scraped against the dial with a teeth-grinding groan.
The strange human head embedded in the center suddenly opened its empty eye sockets, and a dark green fluorescence seeped out from between its pearly white gums.
Blore's turn was ergonomically incorrect—his upper body completed the 180-degree rotation first, but his lower body delayed by 1.7 seconds.
This uncoordinated movement dragged out twelve afterimages in the mist, each of which took on a different timeline.
"Is it true or false?" His pupils shrank into two vertical slits, and cuneiform characters appeared on his irises, constantly reorganizing.
The black fog suddenly formed an absolute vacuum with a radius of two meters around him, and the surging mist retreated as if in fear.
The compass needle danced wildly, and countless faces screaming in pain appeared on the dial. But Blore smiled a smile that distorted the very space, and his cheekbones bulged unnaturally beneath his skin, forming the angles of an ancient statue.
"I'll certainly verify it."
"And you see, I seem to have learned it too, is that right? You can't scare me anymore."
The words solidified in the air into translucent, physical text, each stroke composed of glowing synapses. Suddenly, the words exploded, transforming into millions of transparent mayfly creatures that pounced on Luo Pan and began to devour the screaming faces.
A loud sound of chains snapping came from the depths of the black fog, and Broll's shadow suddenly split into seven different forms: some had bronze horns, some had wings made of nebula spread out behind their backs, and the shadow on the far right was using its third arm to flip through a book bound in human skin.
His eyes were now terrifyingly clear—not the clarity that a human could possess, but rather the momentary lifting of the eyelids of some long-dormant ancient consciousness.
The compass began to ooze tears of blood that smelled of rust, and the needle gradually twisted and deformed in the crazy rotation.
Blore took a step forward, and the ground where his boot soles touched instantly crystallized into dark purple crystal. He extended his right hand, which was becoming translucent, and gently touched the brow of the human head at the center of the compass with his fingertips.
"Now, let's see what the truth tastes like."
The corners of his mouth curled up slightly, a smile impossible for human muscles to achieve. The movement of lowering his head split the smile into two parts:
The upper half of his face was shrouded in darkness cast by the black fog, while the lower half was illuminated by the phosphorescent light from the compass.
Memories from twelve different timelines flashed in parallel in his brain, like white light dispersed by a prism.
"Maybe you could tell me that's what it is. Thanks."
He raised his head slightly, and the cervical vertebrae made a sound like crystal colliding.
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