ED | Chapter 3

In a haze, Shi Jiu heard the daily roar of the garbage truck downstairs at dawn. He half-opened his eyes and saw the familiar ceiling light overhead, while the sky outside the window was barely lit.

A reassuring warmth wrapped around him. Shi Jiu pulled the blanket over himself and finally remembered that he had had a strange dream. The pressure that person gave him in the dream still left him shaken after waking.

In the end, it was only a dream. Shi Jiu buried himself back into the warmth of the bed and planned to steal a little more sleep.

When he opened his eyes again, he was blank for a long while before he finally reacted.

He was standing at the edge of a square, facing a building in the corner. This six-story structure was designed like two flat stones stacked on top of each other. Above the entrance, five words were written: Origin Laboratory.

A laboratory… was the place he had been to before also a laboratory?

He looked around warily and immediately saw the stone monument in the center of the square. The huge monument, surrounded by greenery, bore these words:

Love is the answer to everything.

His forehead still hurt a little. As Shi Jiu touched the aching spot, he turned and looked up, and in the next second his eyelids jerked uncontrollably.

He saw the one who had arrested him. On the fifth floor of the building in front of him, one of the windows reflected that person’s tall figure.

The Shi Jiu in the dream reacted quickly. He had actually returned to this dream again!

The thought sent all the blood in Shi Jiu’s body rushing straight to his head.

But the moment he raised his head and saw that expressionless face, the other person seemed to sense something and lowered his gaze. Their eyes met directly from above.

Shi Jiu’s pounding heart had not yet settled when that figure vanished instantly from the window.

His body reacted faster than his mind. He broke into a run.

He did not want to become a prisoner in a dream too. Once was enough, and now again? Right now he had to escape this square and get far away from that person.

A young man sprinted out through the square’s huge entrance. Behind him stood two towering white stone pillars, joined by an arc in the middle. At the top were carved six words: World Civilization Center.

Whether in the Civilization Center or the city streets, there were people coming and going. Some hurried past, while others stopped to chat with others.

Shi Jiu had no time to care about the noise of the city. He nimbly weaved through the crowd, only feeling his heartbeat quicken from the run, his blood starting to surge with heat.

This was the first time he had encountered consecutive dreams.

Ahead was a small alley where he could turn off. Though he was not familiar with the city in the dream, the streets and alleys with their many forks were always the best place to shake off an enemy.

In the gap between breaths, Shi Jiu looked back and happened to see that person come out of the Origin Laboratory’s main entrance.

There was still some distance between them.

Yet the moment he looked back and turned into the alley, he only felt his body slam into something. With a cry and the sound of countless pebbles scattering to the ground, Shi Jiu and the person he had bumped into both fell down.

A girl was knocked to the ground on her knees and seat. The bag of stones in her hand dropped, and the loose little pebbles spilled all over the floor. She stared blankly at the mess, at a loss.

Shi Jiu quickly got up and helped her to her feet, asking anxiously, “Are you okay?” His words were for the girl, but his eyes had already turned behind him.

There were too many people in the city, blocking his view. He could not tell whether that person had caught up.

“No, I’m fine.”

The girl spoke slowly, her movements equally sluggish. She stood up unhurriedly, brushed her skirt twice at random, and let her gaze fall to the stones all over the ground.

“As long as you’re okay!” Shi Jiu said quickly. After confirming that the girl was not hurt, he turned and ran deeper into the alley.

The girl watched in surprise as that person fled almost as if running for his life, then lowered her head.

Thousands of pebbles, each no bigger than a thumb.

After a moment, she sighed softly, crouched down to sort the bag again, and slowly picked them up one by one to toss back inside.

Half a minute later, hurried footsteps rang out in the alley, growing closer and closer until they were right beside her ear. Then the girl heard the same familiar voice, panting above her: “Sorry, let me help you pick them up.”

Shi Jiu moved quickly, scooping up handful after handful to put into the girl’s bag. His muscles were tense, and every two seconds he would look back to confirm whether that person had discovered him.

“Thank you,” the girl suddenly said.

Breathless, Shi Jiu said quickly, “I was the one who bumped into you by accident.” He only wanted to clean up the trouble he had caused as fast as possible.

As she picked things up at a snail’s pace, the girl looked up and studied Shi Jiu. Then she murmured, “That’s strange, you’re not an adult yet? I can’t connect to you. Ah… I thought you were an adult.”

Shi Jiu’s hand paused for a moment. He improvised on the spot. “I, I should be… I don’t know. Um, I was in an accident a while back, and I can’t remember a lot of things.”

“Huh? You can’t remember anything?”

“Most of it.”

As they spoke, Shi Jiu saw the girl’s movements slow to nearly a stop. The slower she moved, the more anxious he became, and his own hands sped up as he repeatedly glanced toward the other side of the corner.

If he were caught again, he might have to go to prison once more. But he did not want to go, and this dream was strange. It was not the kind born from the subconscious. It had logic.

“Then you probably haven’t come of age yet. I can’t apply for your consciousness. Have you not undergone evolution yet?”

Shi Jiu suddenly caught the key point in her words. He frowned slightly, then quickly relaxed, afraid of making it too obvious. “My consciousness? Evolution?”

The girl explained to him, “You forgot even that? After becoming adults, we can evolve to consciousness communication. But the person you want to communicate with has to open their permissions, and we apply for a channel. Once we’re familiar, they usually open it. After it’s open, all your thoughts and thinking patterns become transparent. Everyone likes honest people, after all, so most people open it unconditionally to anyone.”

All the little stones by his side had been returned to the bag. A few were still scattered outside the corner, and there were just too many. Shi Jiu hesitated, wondering whether to go around and pick them up, but fearing he might run into that person, he casually replied, “Ah, I see.”

While hesitating, Shi Jiu still bent slightly and moved several steps to the side to pick up the ones farther away.

Shi Jiu was frantic, while the girl’s explanation drifted slowly into his ears. It seemed she was worried he had forgotten everything, so she explained it with great enthusiasm and in great detail.

In their civilization, adulthood came at twenty. After that, one could achieve consciousness communication with others. This communication did not use language, but rather a wave-like frequency.

People could receive the frequencies of others and understand their thoughts and all their mental processes. It was an extreme ability of empathy and counter-empathy. The moment a signal was received, one would feel it personally and understand all the other’s related experiences, as well as the feelings and actions brought about by those experiences.

There were no misunderstandings between people, no secrets, no distortions of information caused by scheming or language barriers.

Under such conditions, people treated one another honestly. They were kind and friendly, yet still kept proper boundaries. They enjoyed spiritual pleasure, and this led to an unprecedented flourishing of the arts across the entire civilization. Pure merchants were not in the first tier, and the commercial value of goods was mostly an incidental byproduct of some kind of imaginative creation.

It was a highly individualized, highly creative world. Aside from supermarkets and shops, creative stores were the most common. It seemed that art here was an everyday thing, and every kind of art was intensely personal, not something that accommodated all converging tastes downward, but rather something that waited for minds on the same frequency to connect.

Hearing this, Shi Jiu suddenly remembered that when the one who had arrested him asked his age, he had said twenty-six, twenty-seven…

His hands slowed a little. He turned his head to look at the street and found no trace of that person. Maybe he had shaken him off just now?

At that thought, Shi Jiu let out a quiet breath of relief, and the heart that had been hanging in the air finally settled somewhat.

He must have shaken him off. Otherwise, with so little time, the other person should have caught up already. If he still had not been captured now, there was a good chance he had been lost in the crowd.

Perhaps that person had also applied for consciousness communication permissions, but when he found that Shi Jiu did not even have a channel, he knew Shi Jiu was “not an adult.” And he had given an adult age in return. No wonder the reaction had been like that.

The other person probably thought Shi Jiu was playing him, and combined with his own performance at the time, it was completely like a mocking, taunting prank.

As the last visible stone dropped into the girl’s bag, Shi Jiu stood up and brushed the dust from his hands, his expression somewhat apologetic. “Sorry, I…”

Before he could finish, his peripheral vision caught something behind the girl, and he swallowed the rest of the words back down.

In a direction he had not expected, deep in this turning alley, a pure black shadow was leaning casually against the wall. Its gaze seemed fixed on him the entire time, and now that shadow had already raised a gun.

Shi Jiu’s breathing stopped, and his limbs stiffened for a brief instant.

Run! That was the only thought in Shi Jiu’s mind right now.

He spun around abruptly. The hem of his clothes had just lifted when a faint silver flash shot toward him. Shi Jiu only felt a numbness in his leg, and the world in front of him instantly went black. Then his body lost control and toppled toward the ground.

He fell straight down. The girl almost screamed, but before Shi Jiu’s body could completely hit the ground, a figure rushed in swiftly, one arm wrapping around his neck to steady his collapsing body, then lifting him entirely into an embrace.

Shi Jiu felt himself enveloped in a warm embrace. His head naturally tilted against something warm, and against that warm ear he heard a steady heartbeat, as well as the two voices speaking.

The girl said, “Your eyes… You are, Mr. Chen?”

A faint voice was close at hand. “What did he do to you?”

The girl said, “Nothing! He, he was helping me pick up the stones.”

“Good.”

He could not wake up. Even if he struggled, trying to force himself awake to escape this unconscious state, even if he tried to use dream-control-like behavior to achieve his goal, the numbing surrender made him completely unable to move, and his brain sank as if soaked in water.

It felt like being dragged into a dream within a dream.

At the end of his awareness, Shi Jiu forced out a few words with great difficulty: “What grudge do I have with you?”

The person holding him did not stop walking. Hearing that weak voice, he answered coldly, “Think for yourself.”

As if Shi Jiu could think of that.

Then Shi Jiu, as if entering full anesthesia, completely fell into unconsciousness.

On the bustling street, Chen Ai was carrying an unconscious young man toward the interior of the World Civilization Center. A few onlookers watched him, then quickly looked away with respect. Chen Ai’s target was very clear. If he could not find this person’s true identity, he absolutely would not let him go this time.

Except for the young girl just now. She stood where she was, her lips moving slightly, staring at the two of them as they stood close together.