The first ray of morning sunlight passed through the specially reinforced porthole of the dormitory, split into fine, warm beams that fell gently across Bai Yu’s face.
He slowly opened his eyes. In those eyes, which always seemed to carry far too much of a heavy past, there was now a rare trace of drowsiness and peace.
The noise and laughter from last night’s meal with his teammates seemed still to echo by his ears—the charred aroma of grilled meat, Mo Fei’s deafeningly loud voice, Lan Ce’s rare, relaxed complaints, and the faint smile Captain An Mu hid beneath his stern expression… These scenes, so full of ordinary human warmth, were like the gentlest tide, washing over the desolate wasteland within him that had long grown used to coldness and deathly silence.
Bai Yu sat quietly on the bed for a while, feeling this hard-won calm.
He did not get up at once. Instead, he closed his eyes and sank his mind into his own body.
The soul that had once nearly collapsed from forcibly releasing Hei Yan was now wrapped in a warm yet sorrowful power. A-Wan’s lingering attachment was like the gentlest bandage, soothing those hideous cracks one by one.
Though it could not cure his problem completely, it at least spared him the agony of feeling as if he might utterly “disintegrate” at any moment.
Bai Yu lifted the blanket and got out of bed, stepping barefoot onto the cold alloy floor as he walked toward the wardrobe.
On this rare holiday, he did not want to wear that uniform symbolizing battle and responsibility again. He chose carefully, his fingertips brushing over one neatly ironed garment after another.
In the end, he picked out a soft, beige turtleneck sweater. Its weave was delicate, and the height of the collar set off his slender neck and slightly pale jawline just right. For the lower half, he chose a pair of well-tailored dark gray casual trousers, the fabric carrying a faint sense of drape—comfortable without looking too careless. Lastly, he selected a pair of spotless white sneakers.
When he stood before the full-length mirror, the young man reflected there had shed the sharpness and exhaustion of an ace investigator. He looked more like a clean, slightly melancholic senior from the literature department.
That refreshing air, so utterly at odds with the cold and murderous atmosphere of the Investigation Bureau, made even him feel a long-lost hint of relaxation.
After washing up simply, Bai Yu did not go to the cafeteria. Instead, he headed straight for another place.
The library of the Nightmare Investigation Bureau.
Aside from his own dormitory, it was probably the place in the entire headquarters where he felt most at ease.
Passing through corridor after corridor constructed from cold alloy, Bai Yu finally arrived before a pair of massive wooden double doors.
He reached out and gently pushed open the heavy doors.
“Hum—”
After an almost imperceptible sound, all the clamor of the outside world was completely cut off. A vast, solemn world filled with quiet slowly unfolded before him.
The enormous dome rose so high its top could not be seen. Sunlight poured down through specially filtered skylights, forming straight columns of light that cast tiny motes into the air.
The towering bookshelves were like a silent steel forest, arranged in perfect order and stretching all the way to the end of sight. The air was mingled with the distinctive leather scent of books.
It was so quiet here that he could hear his own heartbeat.
This was the “sanctuary” of many investigators, the final refuge where they mended their shattered spirits after bloody struggles against madness and death.
Bai Yu took a deep breath, feeling that familiar atmosphere, and the lines of his face softened unconsciously. He did not go to the areas storing classified case files and Nightmare analysis materials. Instead, with practiced familiarity, he passed through several massive bookshelf zones and walked straight toward the deepest corner.
The Literature and Fantasy section.
He slowed his steps and extended his long fingers, letting his fingertips glide lightly across rows of book spines.
Some felt smooth, some rough. Each book was like an independent little world, waiting to be opened.
He enjoyed the process of choosing. In itself, it was a silent form of healing.
At last, his fingers stopped on a thick book. Its cover was deep blue, printed with an enormous abandoned starship.
The title was Starlight at the Edge of the World.
Bai Yu drew the book from the shelf and found a single armchair by the window to sit in.
Sunlight happened to stream through the porthole behind him, gilding his shoulders and the open pages with a layer of warm gold.
He turned to the first page.
It was a story about a lonely explorer. The protagonist was a relic archaeologist who piloted a small spacecraft through long-forgotten cosmic routes, searching for the remains left behind by intelligent civilizations that had already perished, trying to decipher traces of their former existence from shattered starships, abandoned space stations, and silent colonies.
At the beginning of the story, the protagonist discovered the wreckage of a legendary “Leviathan”-class biosphere ship. That starship was so vast it resembled a small planet. It had once carried an entire civilization on an interstellar voyage lasting tens of thousands of years. But now, it drifted quietly in the void, like a skeleton gnawed clean by cosmic storms. All the lights on its hull had gone out, and only dead white noise remained on the communication channels.
The protagonist entered this ship of death alone. He passed through the ruins of enormous, empty cities and walked among ecological gardens that had once been lush and blooming, but now held only withered branches and fallen leaves. The only thing he could do was crack the remaining data terminals and read the logs left behind by crew members long since dead, attempting to piece together the civilization’s complete final elegy from hope, confusion, arguments, and despair.
Bai Yu became absorbed in the book.
It was as if he had seen himself.
Was that lonely explorer not precisely him?
Were those deathly starships drifting in the cracks between reality and nightmare not those nightmare incidents filled with deadly traps?
And what he had to do was the same: from those broken, indistinguishably true-and-false “rules”—those “logs” belonging to the Nightmares—he had to decipher the one path to survival and piece together the truth of the entire tragedy.
In the book, the protagonist read in the logs that the civilization’s final destruction had not come from war or disaster, but from encountering a kind of “existence” that could not be understood, observed, or defined.
That “existence” had no form and no will. It had merely “passed by” the starship. Yet its very “passing” fundamentally negated the “logic” of that civilization’s existence, causing their society, their technology, and even their existence itself to quietly fall apart, ultimately returning to nothingness.
At this point, Bai Yu’s breath caught slightly.
He thought of the Ruins of Eternal Silence.
Yes. That was exactly the feeling.
That feeling of smallness and powerlessness when facing an incomprehensible higher-dimensional existence, as if all meaning of one’s own existence had been stripped away.
So there had been someone else who had once pondered the same question and committed it to the page.
This resonance across time and space gave Bai Yu a strange sense of comfort. He was no longer the lonely traveler bearing a terrifying secret. At least in this moment, in the world of this book, he had found a “companion” who could understand him.
“Heh… How childish. Fear piled up with words, nothing more. The true ‘unknown’ is far more vast, far more beautiful than these impoverished imaginings.”
Hei Yan’s voice quietly sounded from the depths of his consciousness, carrying a hint of commentary like that of a connoisseur.
“Shut up. I’m reading,” Bai Yu replied in his heart without the slightest courtesy.
“…”
Hei Yan seemed to be choked by this rare firmness from him, and actually fell silent.
It seemed he had also tacitly accepted that in this peaceful moment belonging only to Bai Yu, he, as a qualified “tenant,” should not make unnecessary noise.
The corner of Bai Yu’s mouth curved into a smile even he himself did not notice.
He immersed himself completely. Following the protagonist’s footsteps, he explored that silent stellar corpse, regretting the passing of the vivid souls in the logs and admiring the protagonist’s lonely yet unwavering commitment to the mission of “deciphering.”
Time slipped quietly by amid the soft rustle of turning pages.
Outside the window, the angle of the sunlight changed without anyone noticing. Those straight white columns of light gradually slanted, softened, and finally turned into a warm, languid orange-yellow, like spilled honey slowly spreading across the entire library floor.
Bai Yu did not notice the passage of time at all. He only felt that his heart, which had grown somewhat numb and hard from too many battles and deaths, was being slowly soaked through by the story in the book and this brief peace.
He felt that he was no longer a vessel carrying a shattered soul, no longer an investigator dancing with a demon. In this moment, he was merely an ordinary young man, a reader intoxicated by the sea of stars.
This pure self, stripped of all identity and responsibility, was the thing he longed for most.
When he finally lifted his head from the book, it was because a faint rumble from his stomach had awakened him.
Only then did he realize that the sky outside the window had already been dyed with gorgeous evening clouds, and the library’s automatic sensor lights had quietly turned on, emitting a soft glow.
He had actually sat here quietly for an entire afternoon.
Bai Yu stretched widely, and the bones throughout his body gave a series of satisfied little cracks. The weariness that had always lingered between his brows seemed to have been driven away by more than half through this afternoon of immersive reading.
He placed the bookmark carefully, closed Starlight at the Edge of the World—the book that had comforted him for an entire afternoon—and then stood up, returning it to its original place on the shelf.
After doing all this, he was in no hurry to leave.
He merely stood quietly between the rows of tall bookshelves, watching the last ray of the setting sun pass through the porthole and refract across the dancing dust in the air, scattering radiance as brilliant as a galaxy.
Such peace was only temporary.
Perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps in the very next moment, the piercing alarm would sound once more, dragging him back into that reality filled with madness and death.
But at least he had possessed this moment.
He had possessed this brief peace that belonged only to himself, found among dust motes and pages.
And that was already enough.
Enough to support him as he faced the next stretch of endless darkness.