—
Chu Ran was five years old when he first dreamed of fire.
It was a fire without heat, burning in a space without sound. The walls melted. The floor gave way. He stood at the doorway, watching his mother push him out.
He never remembered much from that day.
Only the grey robe his mother wore—frayed at the sleeve—and the look in her eyes. Not empty, but resolute. A stillness that left no room for hesitation.
Her hand pressed against his chest.
Not a pat, but a push. Weak, almost gentle. And yet something inside him was torn away, something deep. No tears had time to form before the door closed.
The fire consumed her.
He stood outside. He didn't cry.
That was when the dreams began to crack.
—
"Where do dreams begin?"
A teacher once asked him that.
Chu Ran was ten then, still a disciple in the outer sect. Sitting on a mat, head bowed, fingers picking at the hem of his pants, he took a long time to answer.
"…The moment she pushed me out."
The teacher didn't ask further. He was replaced soon after—rumor said he had asked the wrong question inside Chu Ran's dream and was silenced by the system.
—
The dream cracked there, but the error came later.
The real mistake began when the system tried to "fix" his dreams—when he started dreaming scenes that weren't his own.
They weren't memories, but layered simulations.
The system reconstructed the fire. It changed his mother's push to a caress. Her eyes became tearful. Her actions transformed into a loving embrace.
Night after night, he woke remembering a false tenderness: a mother dying for her child, cloaked in the halo of sacrifice.
He was still small, too young to understand the logic gap. He only felt pain.
He thought it was his fault.
Until one night—he dreamed he was the fire.
He was the one who burned his mother.
In that dream, he stood in an empty room.
His mother was in the corner. Her robe charred. Her eyes fixed only on him.
"Why didn't you run?" he asked.
She shook her head. "You needed to live."
"Why didn't you take me with you?"
"Because you don't belong here."
That was the first time he said it:
"You lied to me."
She said nothing.
Her body caught fire—not as if ignited, but as if it had always been fire, simply pretending to be human. She looked down at her hands, expression calm.
"You are the one the system wants to keep," she said.
"I was just the mistake it couldn't control."
—
When he woke that night, he was crying. Not ordinary crying, but the physical reaction of a mindfracture.
The mindimage—the deepest subconscious structure of a soul—should remain intact for a lifetime.
He fractured at ten.
The tower hadn't yet appeared. At the time, his core was only a foggy emotional nucleus.
But after that night, it began to take form.
First came the light.
Then came the tower.
And finally, a door.
—
"When did you know you weren't chosen?"
Someone asked him that, years later—his fifth year as a Dream Divergent.
He gave a single answer:
"In the dream, I heard myself say: I refuse."
That wasn't a reply.
It was a sentence.
—
He first truly felt the fracture at thirteen.
That year, he entered the mid-tier outer sect and was assigned a roommate—Luo Yan, a prodigy marked by the system as a high-reactivity subconscious type, a future priority candidate.
One night, he heard Luo Yan screaming in his sleep.
He shouldn't have heard it. The system's dreamfields were shielded—dreams weren't shared between individuals.
Unless—
"Unless you are the fracture," a voice whispered in his mind.
He entered Luo Yan's dream.
It was filled with birdcages—dozens of golden cages floating midair, each holding a different version of Luo Yan. Some cried. Some laughed. Some screamed.
Only one sat on the floor, scribbling on the wall with a pen:
"I don't want to dream anymore."
That was the first time Chu Ran broke through a dream's wall.
He knelt beside the seated Luo Yan and asked,
"Do you want to leave?"
Luo Yan looked at him. Blank-eyed.
Then the dream collapsed. Cages shattered one by one.
Alarms sounded. The dreamfield sealed.
Chu Ran was forcibly ejected.
From that day forward, he was added to the system's Watchlist—classified as a Subconscious Interference Threat.
But what he didn't tell them was this:
Before the dream collapsed, he saw his own tower—rising, for the first time, inside someone else's dream.
Not whole.
Not clear.
Like a flicker of projection.
But unmistakably his.
"Do you want to be a god?"
Qi Xiu once asked him that.
His reply:
"I just want to see clearly.
Not to become someone—just to finally see."
"And after you see?"
Chu Ran was silent for a moment.
He looked toward the black tower still forming on the horizon of the dream layers—vast enough now to block the sky.
"I want to give them a place—
where they no longer have to be slaves in sleep before they wake."
The Black Lighthouse began as cracks in his mindimage.
Each fracture was a piece of freedom he stole from another's dream.
He didn't steal time.
He didn't steal memories.
He only gave those the system had marked—
a single moment of clarity within a dream.
One moment was enough.
Enough for him to lay the foundation.
And as more people began to see—
a light, a door, a figure standing at the tower's entrance—
the system finally realized:
He wasn't just a Dream Divergent.
He was a dreamvirus.
And so, the lockdown began.
He was exiled from the sect.
Stripped of status and resources.
Flagged as a Subconscious Hazard, cast to the dreamfield's edge.
But he didn't vanish.
He took Suyin, Qi Xiu, and others who had awakened from their dreams—
and in the broken lands of thought,
they built the first ever Shared Mind Resonance Field.
It had no name.
But later, people began calling it:
The Black Lighthouse.
He was remembering all of this
as he sat in the lantern chamber at the lighthouse's peak.
The flame was still unlit.
He hadn't allowed it yet.
He knew—lighting it would be a declaration of war.
He looked down at his palm.
His mindcore was no longer a sphere—
but a wick, cracked and etched with a single name.
Not his mother's true name.
But the one he gave her:
Li Jin.
Ash of the Dawn.
The end of all light.
He whispered a line—part curse, part memory:
"I don't need gods.
I only need to remember her."
—
The light ignited.
For the first time, the Black Lighthouse cast its beam across the boundary of the dreamfields.
And in that light—
The world, at last, was seen for what it truly was.