Consciousness is dull.
Once again, Blore felt himself floating between dream and reality, the darkness surrounding him enveloping him like a thick liquid.
Every breath he took carried with it an indescribably sweet scent that reminded him of a mixture of rotting fruit and dried ink on ancient parchment.
"What on earth is this..." His voice vanished into nothingness, leaving no echo.
"No, what's the point of this?"
The confusion in my heart is like a tide.
Suddenly, the darkness in front of my eyes began to wriggle, as if countless tiny creatures were crawling under my skin.
Blore felt dizzy as flickering geometric patterns appeared on his retinas - sharp angles, obtuse angles, infinitely long straight lines that combined into shapes that could not exist in three dimensions.
These patterns gradually condensed into pictures, as if they were forced into his brain by some power beyond human understanding.
“It’s endless… What’s going on…”
He saw himself—or rather, a being resembling himself—slowly condensing from the chaotic mist. The mist was a frightening dark purple, like a shattered night sky, with nebula-like points of light flickering within, sometimes flickering, like breathing.
Blore felt a strong dizziness, and something seemed to be surging deep in his memory, but it was as if separated by a layer of gauze and could not be touched no matter what.
"Is this my...birth?" he murmured to himself, his voice so soft that it almost disappeared into nothingness, but with an indescribable tremor.
Without reason or warning, he inexplicably felt a near-painful familiarity, as if something deep within his soul was resonating. The figure in the mist gradually became clearer; his features, his figure, were all his own, yet it was as if he were looking back from across the ages. He reached out, wanting to touch, but just as he was about to—
The picture suddenly shattered.
He saw "Si Weijun".
Even in such a twisted dream, that person's presence was still so strong that it was suffocating.
His facial features were sharper than in real life, with the corners of his eyes slightly raised, as if containing some secret smile, or hiding a knife edge.
There was a luster deep in the pupils that did not belong to humans, like melted gold or burning stars.
His skin took on a mother-of-pearl iridescence under the dream light, sometimes shimmering cold blue, sometimes fading into lavender as his breathing shifted, as if his entire being was an illusion woven from light and mist.
Blore looked at him, his heart as if being gripped by an invisible hand, bitterness and unwillingness swirling in his chest.
"But why do I see you here?" he asked in a low voice, with a sense of grievance in his voice that he himself was not even aware of.
Who are you? Why didn't you tell me anything? There were so many opportunities, so many anomalies, so clearly... he should have noticed it long ago.
Blore knew he was being unreasonable, but he couldn't help it.
Every time they looked at each other, every time they wanted to say something but stopped themselves, every time Si Weijun looked at him with that deep, strange, even blazing gaze, but he remained silent - it was like a tiny thorn, silently piercing into his heart, accumulating over time, and finally turning into a dense pain at this moment.
He should have thought of it earlier... He had thought of it when he saw the "small" Si Weijun there, in that neem tree forest.
He stretched out his hand, wanting to grab the corner of the other person's clothes, but at the moment when his fingertips were about to touch, he saw "Si Weijun" sigh softly.
The sigh seemed to come from far away, with helplessness and a kind of indulgence that was almost doting.
"You're always like that," Blore heard himself say, his voice so soft it looked like a dream, "knowing everything and saying nothing."
The corners of Si Weijun's lips lifted slightly, and the luster in his eyes became deeper.
He raised his hand and gently stroked the corner of Blore's eyes with his fingertips. His movements were gentle and almost affectionate, but with a kind of fatalistic sadness.
"Some things, it's too early to know now."
His voice seemed to come from outside the dream, distant and vague.
Blore wanted to ask further questions, but the scene before him began to collapse, like mist blown away by the wind, and along with Si Weijun's figure, it gradually dissipated into nothingness.
Now he was alone here again.
But Blore had a hunch.
He took a deep breath.
A huge mist with brilliant stars flowed in front of him, but he did not move.
A soft sigh.
"Finally." Si Weijun's voice echoed directly inside Blore's skull. "We've been waiting for you for a long time."
Blore was about to ask who "we" meant, but his vocal cords seemed to be strangled by an invisible force.
At this moment, the dream changed again, and he felt himself being pulled by a powerful suction force, passing through the layers of reality membrane walls.
When his consciousness regained focus, he was already standing at the entrance of the strange world of Qilian.
In fact, he had never been here, but it seemed as if he knew this place.
The sky here is a sickly orange-red, and the clouds wriggle in a way that defies the laws of physics, sometimes gathering into shapes resembling human faces, and sometimes spreading out into countless tiny tentacles.
The air was thick with the mingled scent of metal and decaying flowers, and every breath brought a bitter taste to the back of Blore's tongue.
"Where is this..." He looked down at his hands and found tiny runes appearing on his skin. The symbols changed in brightness and darkness with his pulse, like living things.
An irresistible urge drove him forward. The ground felt surprisingly soft, like the internal organs of some gigantic creature, and every step he took caused subtle tremors in the surroundings.
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