There was no entrance to the blank area.
At least, not for a normal person.
Li stepped into what should have been a wall at the end of the corridor.
He felt no weightlessness and did not fall.
The world simply seemed to have been horizontally erased.
The next second, he was standing on the core layer.
His first reaction wasn't fear,
but an unsettling sense of familiarity.
There was no logic to the structure of the building here.
The ground was translucent, like frozen water or an unfinished video.
In the distance, the ghostly remnants of broken corridors, staircases and classrooms floated, but none of them had doorplates, numbers or names.
This wasn't ruins; it was a cache that had been deleted but not completely cleared.
Li's terminal flickered wildly.
Error messages popped up one after another:
[Insufficient permissions]
[Record does not exist].
[Please confirm if you—]
[Insufficient permissions]
[Record does not exist].
[Please confirm if you—]
Before the last message had finished displaying, the screen went black.
The air suddenly felt heavy.
It wasn't oppressive, just a feeling that his very existence was being questioned.
Li realised something and muttered under his breath:
'It's judging me here.'
He took a step forward.
The screen began to shake.
It seemed that the entire core layer had triggered some condition.
In the distance, a humanoid silhouette began to appear.
It wasn't a physical entity, but rather a patchwork of residual records, erroneous timelines and countless denied possibilities.
It had no face.
But Li knew it was watching him.
Then, information flooded his mind.
There was no sound, just understanding.
[Anomaly ID: L]
[Judgement status: incomplete]
[Number of repetitions exceeds threshold].
Li clutched his forehead.
The headache wasn't physiological; it felt as though memories were being forced into a container that shouldn't be there.
He saw it:
The first time, it was 'deleted'; the second time, it was 'corrected'; the third time, the world skipped over any trace of his existence.
Each time, the same variable intervened:
Mio.
She wasn't standing beside him or blocking his way.
She appeared time and again at the moment 'the world decided to act'.
She wasn't rewriting the ending.
She was delaying the inevitable.
The figure began to disintegrate and reassemble.
as if recalculating.
[Anomaly correlation detected.]
[Intervention Source: Mio]
[Number of interventions: overload].
Li's breathing became unsteady.
He finally understood where that sense of familiarity came from.
It wasn't a dream; it wasn't an emotion.
He had been here before.
More than once.
But each time, before he could realise it, his memories were ripped away.
'Enough.'
These words weren't directed at the system, but at her.
It was said to her.
'I know you're watching.' Li's voice was low but firm. 'Don't bear it all alone anymore.'
The core layer trembled violently.
It was as if the 'permissions' had been forcibly ripped open.
The next second, a very faint and brief response came from the depths of the world.
It wasn't a voice.
It was Mio's feeling:
'You shouldn't be here now.'
Li smiled.
Very briefly.
'Then you shouldn't be alone either.'
The figure stopped.
The judgement was interrupted.
For the first time, the blank area didn't erase him immediately.
Instead, a completely new prompt slowly appeared:
[Abnormal Status Update]
'Observed Object → Participant'.
The chessboard had flipped over.
The rules were beginning to loosen.
Standing at the centre of the core, Li finally realised one thing.
The truth is never gentle.
But this time, he wouldn't be pushed out again.
Li was pulled into the dream while he was still fully conscious.
He neither fell asleep nor closed his eyes.
Suddenly, the world went out of focus.
The lines of the corridor began to blur, and voices sounded muffled and distant.
The next second, the dream superimposed itself.
Not an overlay,
but a synchronisation.
He stood in the academy's courtyard; the daylight was devoid of warmth.
The sky was excessively clear, as if it had been repeatedly rewritten as a background image.
"...Mio."
The name slipped out.
There was no response,
but pain.
It was a dull ache in his chest, as if an emotion was being forcibly shared.
Then he saw her; Mio was standing by the fountain.
Mio stood by the fountain,
But she was no longer the composed, distant figure he knew.
Her shoulders were trembling.
Slightly, but still impossible to ignore.
Her shadow was incomplete.
It was as if a part of her had been torn away.
Li Gang tried to approach—
The scene instantly zoomed out.
He was forced to 'see' what she was going through.
The prophecy was no longer a scene.
but rather a series of parallel lines of failure.
Li didn't exist in any of them.
She wasn't dead; she had simply never existed in the first place.
Mio stood at the fork in each line, reaching out again and again and pulling him back forcefully.
The synchronised pain wasn't the price.
It was a side effect.
Because she could no longer keep the harm to herself.
'Stop... you'll—' Li gritted his teeth.
Before he could finish speaking,
An even stronger synchronised shock struck.
He witnessed her first moment of losing control.
not crying or screaming.
But the entire prophetic scene lit up, as if countless shattered mirrors were reflecting her face simultaneously.
She finally admitted it.
She hadn't been calculating the optimal solution; she had chosen him.
'I shouldn't have...' Mio's voice broke the silence.
She wasn't speaking to him, but rather explaining to the world:
'I shouldn't have shown favouritism, but I couldn't.'
The dream began to crumble.
The atrium cracked open and daylight was swallowed by black gaps.
This was a sign of synchronisation overload.
Li suddenly reached out.
This was the first time he hadn't passively accepted things,
Instead, he was anchoring in the opposite direction.
He almost shouted, 'Look at me! Don't bear this alone anymore!'
The world seemed to freeze for a moment.
Mio looked up.
They finally made eye contact.
This wasn't a dream projection, nor a prophetic afterimage.
It was her.
In that instant, Mio's pupils contracted sharply.
She sensed it:
Li was standing there, not because she was shielding him, but because he himself had begun to bear it.
Simultaneous completion.
For the first time, dream and reality truly overlapped.
The prophetic images faded one by one,
They were replaced by a future line yet to be written.
Mio's voice trembled: 'You shouldn't have gone this far.'
'You shouldn't have gone this far.'
Rei's breathing was heavy, yet she smiled.
'Then you shouldn't make decisions alone anymore.'
The dream shattered completely.
Rei opened her eyes and found that she was still standing in the corridor.
But tiny cracks had appeared in the ground.
Reality had been dragged in.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Mio clutched her chest, confirming one thing for the first time.
She could no longer protect him only in dreams.