The city of Novaris gleamed under a cold, artificial sun.
Towers of polished steel and glass rose like needles into the pale sky, shimmering with holographic reflections and the soft pulse of regulated energy.
It was a world ruled by logic, built on the bones of knowledge and innovation. Magic, myth, and anything unmeasurable had long since been cast aside—outdated remnants of a primitive past.
Ren Shen was a man of this world. He grew up surrounded by researchers, sharpened by rigorous study, and shaped by a world that prized precision above all.
His father, Doctor Shen Ru, was a renowned neural engineer pioneering human-machine interfaces; his mother, Professor Yan Fei, specialized in artificial cognition. In the Shen family, belief was measured in algorithms and proofs.
But Ren was different.
He couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing—something no theory had touched yet.He believed in questions long buried: what came before the Unity Age? Why did ancient cultures obsess over symbols, rituals, and star patterns? He wasn't a mystic.
He was a researcher. Just one who dared to ask questions his peers laughed at.
He had a family, too. His wife, Lin Qiu, was a precision data architect, sharp and grounded.
Their daughter, Leina, six years old, was precocious and endlessly curious, already designing puzzles and dreaming about the stars.
They were the light of his life, the reason he pressed forward even when mocked.
In the third year of his appointment at the Novaris Institute for Theoretical Discovery, a global anomaly shook the scientific community. At a drilling site near the northern polar cap, researchers uncovered a subterranean ruin—an untouched vault from the Pre-Unity era, sealed tight with composite alloys and mechanisms unidentifiable even by modern tech.
Inside was a single object.
A book.
Not printed. Not digital. A real, physical book made of no known material. Its pages bore intricate glyphs, etched with impossible precision. Most dismissed it as cultural debris. Ren, however, felt something.
He volunteered to catalog the artifact. No one else wanted the job. He took it to his lab and began decoding.It spoke to him—not in words, but in sensation. When he stared too long at its pages, the symbols seemed to writhe and shimmer. He scanned it, tried to decrypt it using comparative linguistics and patterning software. The algorithms flagged anomalies: structured intent without origin.
Over months, Ren stopped sleeping well. The glyphs followed him into sleep. He'd wake with answers waiting—half-formed, like memories that weren't his. He inputted phonetic variants into simulators and discovered tonal patterns—harmonies that reacted with the book.
Then, one evening, he made a breakthrough.
A sequence.
Not just glyphs. A chant. A rhythm. When he whispered the pattern aloud, a low vibration crept through the floor; instruments shut down and the air seemed to ripple, as if reality had hiccuped. The book grew warm in his hands, like it had a pulse of its own.
Panicked yet thrilled, he ran simulations.
The sequence, he realized, resembled spatial coordinates. But not of space he recognized. They weren't spatial coordinates in the usual sense—they mapped patterns in the brain, emotional rhythms, mental architecture.
He decided to present his findings. But… would they even believe him? What if he was wrong? He'd never get another chance like this. If they didn't—
No, they would.
He secured a presentation slot at the Central Hall of Scientific Revelation. It was to be the defining moment of his life. If they believed him, everything would change.
The night before, he tucked Leina into bed and kissed her forehead. She asked, "Will the stars be proud of you tomorrow, Daddy?"
"I hope so," he said, though he could already feel the weight of his own doubts settling in his chest.
The next day..
The large hall hummed with anticipation as Ren stepped onto the stage. His heart pounded in his chest, each beat thundering in his ears. His palms were clammy, his breath shallow. He forced himself to stand still, but his legs wobbled, betraying his nerves. The gleaming screens around him flickered to life, casting an almost eerie glow. A sea of scholars, researchers, and high-ranking officials filled the seats, their eyes fixed on him. He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and began.
"Esteemed colleagues," Ren's voice echoed through the hall, "Today, I stand before you with a discovery that I believe will challenge everything we know about the nature of reality itself." He gestured toward the holographic projection that loomed above him, showing an intricate series of symbols and lines.
"Up until now, we've believed that reality is bound by the laws of space, time, and energy—simple, objective principles that govern all phenomena. But what if I told you that there exists a layer beneath these laws? A hidden structure, encoded in the very thoughts and emotions that shape us?"
He paused for effect, letting the words hang in the air, before continuing. "I have discovered a sequence, a pattern embedded in the core of our consciousness. A sequence that corresponds to spatial coordinates—not in physical space, but within the brain itself. These coordinates govern our thoughts, our emotions, and even the way meaning is structured in our minds."
Ren's fingers danced over a console, and the symbols on the screen rearranged, twisting into a web of interconnecting pathways. "This is not a mere theoretical construct. When I whispered the pattern aloud in my private lab, something extraordinary happened. The room trembled. The air vibrated. And the book I had been studying... it warmed. As if responding to the sequence."
The crowd murmured in astonishment. Some exchanged curious glances; others raised skeptical eyebrows. But Ren pressed on, his excitement growing.
"This sequence is not just a random set of glyphs. It is a map—an encoded guide to the very core of consciousness. When activated, it could allow us to manipulate thoughts, to alter emotions, and, perhaps, even to tap into the hidden potential of the mind."
As he looked over the crowd, his eyes hesitated for just a moment—drawn inexplicably to a figure seated in the center of the auditorium, perfectly still.
They wore all white, as if they'd stepped out of a painting—a stark contrast to the dull grays of the hall. The white fabric caught the light in an almost otherworldly way, as though it wasn't meant for this world at all. Not the sterile white of a lab coat or medical robe, but something ethereal and clean, like light made fabric. Their presence was striking, not for any extravagance, but for the deliberate precision of their design: crescent spiral earrings that glinted under the stage lights, a Controlled Fracture Ring that glimmered with shifting cracks held impossibly in place, and an ...a bracelet of orbiting rings, moving without gears or threads. He couldn't say why, but the motion felt... wrong. Like gravity had rules he no longer understood..
But it was the wristwatch that truly caught Ren's attention.
Elegant. Impossible.
A minimal band of polished obsidian, but the dial… the dial didn't tick. It looped. An Infinity Loop Dial, the hands gliding in a seamless figure-eight motion, never resetting, never pausing—just flowing, like time set free from sequence. The surface beneath the glass wasn't static either. Patterns rippled beneath the face, syncing eerily with the rhythm of the sequence Ren had spent weeks decoding.
They didn't applaud, didn't whisper, didn't move. Just watched. Intently. As though they were not here to learn, but to witness. Ren blinked, thrown slightly off rhythm by the sudden chill that passed through him. He cleared his throat and continued, though unease now crept into the edges of his mind—like he had seen them before. But where?
With his hands still trembling slightly... He continued.
"I have already run simulations. The results are—"
Suddenly, the lights flickered.
Ren faltered for a moment, he glanced at the console. The sequence was still there, pulsing, but—something was wrong. The numbers flickered, warped. Ren's stomach twisted. The rhythm he had discovered, the chant he had whispered, began to shift on its own. The symbols twisted, contorted into shapes he didn't recognize. The air in the hall grew dense, almost suffocating.
A low hum began to rise from the stage's speakers, building in intensity. Ren's heart raced as he tried to regain control. "No… this isn't right."
The room trembled more violently now. The screens that surrounded him blinked erratically, flashing bright bursts of light. The instruments—those meant to record and analyze his presentation—began to malfunction. Sparks flew from the wiring. The air shimmered, vibrating with an unnatural energy.
And then, there was a sharp crack.
The book that had once warmed in his presence now burst into flames. The holographic projection flickered and shattered, releasing a blinding burst of light.
Ren felt his knees give way as a wave of dizziness washed over him. A storm of thoughts flooded his mind, disjointed and chaotic. The sequence pulsed in his mind, an uncharted frequency—something ancient, something... wrong. He could feel it in his bones. This wasn't just discovery. It was danger. His vision blurred as the ground beneath him seemed to twist, becoming a void of spiraling fractals.
The crowd screamed, some rushing toward the exits, others frozen in terror. The officials at the back of the hall attempted to control the situation, but their efforts were futile. The very fabric of the space seemed to warp, as if reality itself was bending around the sequence he had unleashed.
And amidst the chaos, Ren's eyes found the figure again.
They sat perfectly still, watching him with the quiet focus of someone who already knew how it would end.
Their gaze locked with his—calm, patient, expectant.
As if this moment had been inevitable.
Ren opened his mouth, but the words jammed in his throat. He wanted to scream, explain, apologize—he wasn't even sure which. But nothing came out. Just the sound of his breath, fast and useless.. The words were there—caught somewhere between fear and awe—but they refused to form.
In an instant, the entire hall plunged into darkness, the last echoes of his voice drowned by the overwhelming hum of the disturbance. Then, the silence came.
And with it, the realization that Ren had unlocked something far more dangerous than he had ever imagined.
He collapsed to the stage floor as a final jolt surged through his mind—neurons firing in patterns he could no longer comprehend, thoughts unraveling like threads of light. His body convulsed once, twice... then stilled.
He fell, eyes wide. It wasn't fear or pain—it was too big for that. He had seen something. Touched it. And it had broken him open.
But just before the darkness took him, Ren's thoughts flickered to his family. His wife's face, pale with concern, and their daughter's smile, wide with innocence. The memory of Leina's voice, soft and bright, echoed in his mind. "Will the stars be proud of you tomorrow, Daddy?"
Her words lingered, sharp and bittersweet, piercing through the chaos. For a moment, it felt as if everything had stopped, the world hanging in balance as the weight of his failure pressed down on him. "No," he thought, a hollow ache spreading through his chest. "The stars won't be proud of me. I've failed you both."
As Ren dies and the hall falls into chaos and darkness, the figure with the Infinity Loop wristwatch stands, the watch's dial still looping silently.
They step over the ruined stage, gaze lowered to Ren's lifeless body, then raise their wrist and tap the face of the watch once. The hands pulse briefly.
A ripple of something unseen spreads outward—quiet, contained, deliberate.
They smile.
And then, only silence. Only nothing.