“My dear little Bai Yu, you really must take good care of that body of yours.” After Bai Yu left the apartment building, Hei Yan’s phantom, dressed in an exquisitely tailored black formal suit, appeared elegantly at his side. His voice was as gentle as a lover’s whisper, yet carried a trace of unmistakable coldness. “After all, if this delicate vessel were to shatter by accident, where would I be supposed to take shelter?”
The lights had just come on in the residential district. Warm lamplight stretched Bai Yu’s shadow long across the ground, yet Hei Yan’s phantom cast no shadow at all, as though he did not belong to this world. Around them were residents out for a stroll and children playing, the air filled with peace and serenity—utterly at odds with the conversation between them.
“This little bit of fatigue is nothing…” Bai Yu’s voice was very soft, carrying an exhaustion he could not conceal. He did not stop walking, only looked straight ahead, as though speaking to himself. “…Why were your abilities sealed back then? That evil nightmare’s power shouldn’t have been stronger than yours. How could it have affected you?”
Hei Yan’s illusory figure paused. He tilted his head slightly, a flicker of offended “displeasure” flashing through his crimson eyes.
“Oh? Are we going to… settle old accounts now?” His voice remained steady, yet it was like a thread dipped in poison, silently winding around Bai Yu’s nerves. “I thought that, regarding that rather unpleasant past, we had long since reached a tacit understanding. My dear little Bai Yu, clinging to the past is not a good habit.”
“Answer my question.” Bai Yu stopped beneath a streetlamp. Half his face was hidden in shadow, but his gaze was unusually persistent.
Hei Yan looked at him, then suddenly let out a soft laugh. The laughter was low and pleasant to the ear, yet it made the surrounding air seem to grow several degrees colder.
He slowly drifted in front of Bai Yu and bent down slightly, his crimson eyes examining Bai Yu’s weary face at close range, as though admiring a work of art that belonged to him.
“Very well, since you insist.” He unhurriedly adjusted his illusory bow tie. “Hasn’t the answer always been inside your body? Every time you find yourself powerless, every late night when you wake from a nightmare. What, do you need me to… help you ‘review’ the lesson?”
Bai Yu fell silent. That memory was like a brand engraved upon his soul; every touch brought searing agony.
The corners of Hei Yan’s lips curved into a cruel, captivating smile.
“It seems so. Then allow merciful me to draw back the curtain of recollection for you. Let us revisit that old place together, return to one year ago, to that lovely place called the ‘Eternal Ruins of Silence’… Let us properly savor, my dear little Bai Yu, how we crawled out of that hell where even ‘existence’ itself could be erased, supporting each other like two elegant dogs with broken legs.”
…
One year ago, a rainy night. The highest-level conference room in the central building of the Investigation Bureau was brightly lit. As the undisputed ace of Investigation Team One, Bai Yu stood before the holographic projection, his expression confident and composed, like a principal conductor about to take the stage.
“Target: Origin Concept Evil Nightmare, codename ‘Ruins of Silence.’ Its core concepts are ‘forgetting’ and ‘nothingness.’ According to current intelligence, this evil nightmare has already infected the abandoned library in the west district. Any matter or information that enters it will be gradually erased. Danger level: highest.”
“The concept of ‘nothingness’? Heh, what an… hollow artwork.” Hei Yan’s voice sounded in Bai Yu’s mind, carrying the arrogance of a connoisseur looking down upon the world. “Let us go see with our own eyes just what quality it possesses, little Bai Yu.”
At that time, Bai Yu had long been accustomed to Hei Yan’s arrogance, and even regarded it as proof of his strength. He believed that no matter what enemy they faced, as long as Hei Yan was there, they would be invincible.
When they stepped into that abandoned library shrouded in rain, everything seemed far too normal—one might even say far too quiet.
The sound of rain ceased abruptly the instant they crossed the entrance, as though the entire world had been muted. The air was filled with the moldy smell of old pages mixed with dust, but aside from that, there was no sound at all. No roaring monsters, no twisted illusions—only deathly silence.
This silence was not simply the absence of sound. Even the noises they made themselves—their footsteps, breathing, the rustle of their clothes—were rapidly absorbed by some invisible force, like objects thrown into a black hole, unable to stir even the slightest ripple.
Terror descended without anyone noticing.
“Captain, we… what did we come here to do again?” A young team member suddenly spoke in confusion, his eyes full of bewilderment.
An Mu froze. He was just about to reprimand him, only to find that after opening his mouth, he too could not recall the specific codename of this mission for a moment. A chill rose up his spine.
“It’s the ‘Ruins of Silence,’” Bai Yu immediately reminded them, his heart beginning to pound uncontrollably. “Everyone, pay attention! This evil nightmare is stripping away our memories! Focus your minds and keep repeating the mission objective and your own identity information to yourselves!”
However, it was completely useless.
The concept of “forgetting” was like a gentle poison, silently corroding every single person. They began to forget common sense, forget how to use their weapons, even forget the names of comrades who had fought by their side for years.
“You… who are you? Why are you pointing a gun at me?” Mo Fei looked warily at Lan Ce beside him, his eyes filled with unfamiliarity.
“I… I don’t know…” Lan Ce’s face was deathly pale, and the hand holding his gun trembled nonstop.
Panic spread like a plague. The team began to fall apart—not because of internal strife, but because the very concept that formed a “team” was being erased from their minds.
“Little Bai Yu… something… isn’t right…” For the first time, Hei Yan’s voice wavered in Bai Yu’s mind. That elegant tone became sharp and hurried. “My power… is being… devoured! No, not devoured—erased! This damned place is erasing my ‘existence’! It is denying me!”
Bai Yu’s heart sank to the bottom. Even a powerful nightmare like Hei Yan, born from a concept itself, could not resist this erasure on the level of existence.
He looked at the faces before him, each becoming unfamiliar and terrified, and he knew they had failed. Defeating this evil nightmare was now absolutely impossible. Their only goal was to escape.
“Retreat! Everyone follow me, we’ll withdraw through the main entrance!” he roared, trying to awaken his team members’ consciousness.
But when he turned and rushed in the direction they had come from, the grand bronze doors had already vanished. In their place were endless rows of bookshelves, stretching to the limits of sight, as though they had been in the center of this library from the very beginning, as though there had never been an entrance at all. Even the concept of an “exit” had been forgotten.
Despair, like icy seawater, submerged everyone. They were trapped in this tomb of forgetting, waiting to be completely erased, just like the dust-covered blank books on the shelves without a single word in them, ultimately returning to nothingness.
“It’s over… Bai Yu! You stupid human, you brought us into a slaughterhouse!” Hei Yan’s gentlemanly composure shattered completely. His voice was filled with violence and fury. “Before long, even the connection between you and me will be erased. Then you will forget me, I will forget you, and we will both become a speck of dust here—no, not even dust!”
“There has to be a way!” Bai Yu leaned against a row of bookshelves, gasping for breath. He forced himself to think, doing his utmost to resist the blankness that kept surging into his mind. “Since ‘forgetting’ is its power, then in reverse, could sufficiently profound ‘memory,’ sufficiently powerful ‘existence,’ be used to oppose it?”
“It’s useless! Any ‘existence’ here will be assimilated!”
“Then what if… we create an ‘existence’ it cannot understand and cannot assimilate?” A mad light flashed through Bai Yu’s eyes.
Hei Yan’s roar came to an abrupt halt. He instantly understood what Bai Yu meant, and his illusory form trembled violently. Then he let out a low laugh that was both morbid and insane.
“Heh… hehe… using the collision between soul and origin to play a magnificent funeral song dedicated to ‘nothingness’? Oh, my dear little Bai Yu, for you to occasionally propose such a creative idea is truly… a pleasant surprise.” His voice regained that strange elegance, but the madness contained within it was enough to make one shudder; even his own voice was trembling. “A complete fusion between a mortal’s soul and a nightmare’s origin? Do you know what that means? It means your body and soul will be blown apart in an instant, without even the tiniest fragment left behind. A grand and fleeting firework, nothing more.”
“That’s still better than slowly being forgotten here and vanishing as if we never existed!” Bai Yu’s voice was not loud, but it carried an ironclad resolve. “We fuse. Using the power of your origin and mine, we force open an ‘exit’ here that does not belong to it! This is the only way!”
“…Even if the price is your certain death? For the sake of saving mortals who will soon forget who you even are?”
“At least they can live.” Bai Yu glanced back at the teammates behind him whose eyes had already gone vacant, who were about to be lost completely. “Even if they forget me, as long as they’re still alive… that… that’s enough…”
After a long silence, Hei Yan let out a complicated murmur.
“…Madman. You truly are the most beautiful, most foolish, most insane human I have ever seen. Very well. Since you are so eager to stage this magnificent tragedy, then I shall be your conductor. Let us begin! Let this dull world witness the grandest, most dazzling… withering!”
In the next second, indescribable agony swept through Bai Yu’s entire body. It was not the pain of flesh and skin, but tearing and reconstruction from the very depths of his soul.
Hei Yan’s vast, ancient origin power, filled with chaos and madness, surged into Bai Yu’s soul like a burst dam, savage and unstoppable. His consciousness seemed to have been thrown into a meat grinder formed from countless negative emotions and primordial memories, crushed and remade billions of times every second. His body began to collapse. Black cracks appeared across his skin like porcelain on the verge of shattering; blood seeped from the cracks, only to be instantly devoured by dark energy. His eyes lost focus, his pupils turning into abysses burning with crimson flames identical to Hei Yan’s.
The entire library began to tremble violently. That “monster,” fused from human and nightmare, emitted an aura of “existence” full of contradiction and brutality that even the “Ruins of Silence” could not erase at once.
“Now!” From the fused body’s mouth came a roar in which Bai Yu’s and Hei Yan’s voices overlapped. He extended his half-energized arm and clenched his hand fiercely toward the empty space ahead!
“Raise the curtain… for me!!!”
Space, like fragile glass, was forcibly torn open amid a piercing wail. Beyond the rift was the familiar rainy night of the real world. An exit had been forcibly created!
“Go!”
The fused body of the two used the last of its strength to push the dazed and muddled teammates behind him into the rift one after another.
When the last figure disappeared into the rift, his body, already at its limit, could no longer hold on. The fusion began to forcibly unravel. That immense power that did not belong to him receded like a tide, leaving behind only a devastated ruin.
The instant the power withdrew, Bai Yu’s body collapsed completely like a sand sculpture with all its framework pulled away. His flesh, bones, and organs all fell apart, turning into the most primitive particles. His soul, too, cracked into countless faintly shimmering fragments like a mirror smashed by a heavy hammer. In the final moment before his consciousness sank fully into darkness, what he saw was that spatial rift slowly closing, and his own mangled, blood-soaked body collapsed in the cold rain before the Investigation Bureau’s central building.
“Now, do you remember? My dear little Bai Yu, just what a… ridiculous farce your so-called ‘miraculous recovery’ truly was.” Hei Yan’s cold and elegant voice pulled Bai Yu back from the painful memory into reality.
The streetlamp’s light was still warm, but Bai Yu could not feel the slightest trace of warmth. He only felt cold all over.
“After that, you no longer existed. You became a handful of brilliant dust—dust of the soul, beautiful, but utterly useless.” Hei Yan’s phantom floated before him, a trace of morbid infatuation in his crimson eyes. “Unfortunately, you foolish mortal, when you destroyed yourself, you dragged my origin into it as well. If you vanished, then my great existence would be tarnished along with you. That was something I could not tolerate.”
He extended an illusory finger and gently touched Bai Yu between the brows. The gesture was tender, but his words were cruel to the extreme.
“And so I, your humble symbiote, had no choice but to play the role of craftsman. I spent a very long time and used my precious origin, piecing together those tiny fragments of your soul as though repairing a shattered, unparalleled porcelain treasure. One piece at a time, I retrieved them from the edge of nothingness, then used my power as adhesive to assemble them again and stuff them back into this worthless pile of rotten flesh of yours.”
He withdrew his finger and took a step back, looking at Bai Yu with the gaze of one inspecting a masterpiece.
“So stop naively believing you are still the all-powerful ace you once were. Now you are merely my proudest work. A unique work of art, repaired with the origin of a nightmare, covered in cracks. Every time you use my power, those invisible cracks deepen. One day, you will shatter completely, and when that happens, even the most skilled craftsman will be unable to repair a pile of true powder.”
“As for me,” Hei Yan’s tone gained a hint of self-mockery, as though he were complaining about the flaws of his own creation, “my origin is no longer complete because I repaired this ‘artwork’ of yours. That is why some low-level, second-rate rule-distorting evil nightmares can temporarily interfere with me under certain conditions. That is the answer you wanted, my dear little Bai Yu. Are you satisfied?”
The truth was laid bare in a cruel fashion.
Bai Yu stood silently where he was, the streetlamp stretching his shadow thin and long, making him seem especially lonely. Slowly, he raised his hand and looked at his seemingly intact palm. Beneath this layer of skin lay a soul riddled with holes and a body barely sustained by the power of a nightmare.
He did not feel fear, nor did he feel regret. There was only a bone-deep exhaustion, and the heavy sense of destiny that came with dancing with a demon.
He took from his pocket the eyeball-shaped glass marble he had brought out of the “Other-Dream Coffee Shop.” Under the lamplight, brilliant colors refracted within the marble, like a pure miniature world.
“I understand,” he said softly, then clenched the marble tightly in his palm.
Even if he walked along the edge of shattering, even if the one symbiotic with him was such an elegant and violent demon, as long as he could still move, as long as he could still fight, he had to keep going. Because in this world eroded by nightmares, every small victory was hard-won. And he had long since paid the full price for it, becoming this one-of-a-kind, fragile work of art.