Jiang Nuan was standing on a broad tree root.
The root stretched downward, and between the interwoven roots on either side flowed ring after ring of energy, like the rings of a tree.
Each ring reflected a different scene.
Someone was running through the snow. Someone else was raising a glass in a restaurant.
They were the memories of this world.
One of the scenes made her stop. Her hand rose of its own accord and touched it.
It was from when the Lighthouse Base had just begun construction.
The wind howled through the snow.
Rows of construction sheds stood at the foot of the slope, while in the distance, the base was still no more than an unfinished skeleton.
A middle-aged man crouched at the edge of the snowy ground.
He wore an ordinary gray work uniform and held a piece of freshly shaved wood.
The grain was unusual, resembling a sleeping snake.
Snake-patterned wood.
The middle-aged man used a small knife to shave away the bark bit by bit, then smoothed the pen shaft with sandpaper.
By the time night fell, he had finally finished carving the pen.
Sitting beneath the dim yellow light of the construction shed, he lowered his head and carefully engraved a line of characters along the inside of the pen shaft.
—To my love, Zhou Hao.
Zhou Hao. So it really was him!
It seemed that his assumed local identity in this restricted zone was that of a construction worker.
The scene shifted.
A middle-aged woman sat at a drafting table and accepted the pen from him.
She froze for a moment. Then, after seeing the words on the shaft, the tips of her ears slowly reddened.
“For me?”
Zhou Hao scratched his head and glanced away. “Mm.”
“There’s a tree at the base where I’m working. I thought its wood would make a good pen shaft.”
The woman lowered her head to look at the pen, then suddenly smiled.
“Zhou Hao.”
“This pen looks pretty ordinary.”
Zhou Hao’s expression stiffened.
“But I like it very much.” The woman smiled and leaned over to hug him.
Zhou Hao raised a hand and wiped the dust from his face—the grime he had not yet washed off after work. He smiled too, then put an arm around her.
Jiang Nuan stood within the tree ring and watched the scene.
According to the files, Zhou Hao was a member of an investigation team who had disappeared inside the restricted zone, only to reappear later.
But it turned out that in this restricted-zone world, he had once truly lived.
The scene changed again.
Drawing paper covered the table.
Outside the window, heavy snow was falling. In the distance, the unfinished lighthouse was half-hidden beneath the gray-white sky.
The woman held the inking pen, revising the sketch in front of her again and again. “It’s still not right. I just can’t capture that feeling.”
Zhou Hao, who had just returned home from work, smiled when he heard her.
“It already looks great.”
“You say that every time.”
The woman held the inking pen and lowered her head to look at the portrait of Zhou Hao she was drawing.
“Inking pen, oh inking pen, help me make this drawing a little better.”
The instant she finished speaking, the shaft of the inking pen gave a faint flicker of light.
No one noticed.
The woman lowered her head again and traced the drawing stroke by stroke.
The night gradually deepened.
When Zhou Hao looked up again, the picture on the table was finished.
It was better than anything she had drawn before—so good that it seemed impossible for it to have come from the same person.
The woman jumped to her feet. “Huh? I actually managed to draw it? This pen couldn’t really have magic, could it?”
Zhou Hao smiled and praised her a few times as well.
But he failed to notice that several more fine lines had appeared around the corners of the woman’s eyes.
*
The scenes that followed began to speed up.
Zhou Hao discovered that something was wrong.
As a former member of an investigation team, he was instinctively alert to anything abnormal.
His wife’s painting skills had suddenly improved for no apparent reason. And although the change was subtle, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes were undeniably deeper than they had been a few days earlier.
That pen should not have possessed the power to answer wishes.
And it certainly should not have taken away a person’s time after granting one.
So he went to the still-under-construction base and investigated the snake-patterned tree from which the wood had been taken.
Even his A-rank ability could not break through the defensive barrier that surrounded the tree.
Zhou Hao stood beneath it in silence for a long time.
At last, he raised his head.
“If you can answer wishes…”
“Then can you tell me what you really are?”
The snake-patterned tree gave no response.
The wind swept through its crown. Countless branches and leaves rubbed together, producing a low, rustling sound.
Zhou Hao stood where he was, then suddenly laughed.
“All right. I’ll give it a try.”
He looked at the snake-patterned tree before him, his tone carrying a hint of self-mockery.
“If you really can grant wishes…”
“Then send me home. Send me back outside the restricted zone.”
After saying that, he shook his head first.
“Forget it. Pretend I never said anything.”
It was only a tree. How could it possibly send anyone out of the restricted zone?
But the roots of the snake-patterned tree suddenly lit up all at once.
Countless white points of light surged up from beneath the ground and enveloped Zhou Hao.
The smile on Zhou Hao’s face froze. He abruptly looked up.
But it was already too late.
That was no ordinary wish.
To cross the boundary between worlds and return outside the restricted zone required a price far heavier than making a painting look better.
The time within his body was extracted as payment for the wish.
Zhou Hao, who had originally been around fifty, suddenly found his face covered in wrinkles. His hair turned white within the space of a few breaths.
He raised a hand, trying to grasp at something. “Wait! I didn’t really mean—”
The moment the words left his mouth, his entire body was swallowed by the white light between the roots.
The scene shifted back to the woman.
She stood by the window, gazing again and again toward the snowy ground in the distance.
Zhou Hao did not come back.
She waited through one night, then through many more.
Later, she tore the painting to pieces, locked away the inking pen, and never touched it again.
*
Jiang Nuan stood motionless for a long while.
No wonder Zhou Mengmeng’s painting skills had suddenly improved after she used that inking pen.
But a wish that required time as its price…
Jiang Nuan closed her eyes.
She understood now.
This world had never intended to trap anyone.
It was willing to shelter those who had wandered into the gray mist, and it was willing to answer the wishes of those who wanted nothing more than to live well.
But there was no such thing as a free lunch. The same was true here.
This was a world constructed by Lu Zhaoming with space-based and time-based abilities, and those powers sustained its operation.
They also measured the weight of every wish.
Zhou Hao’s wife had wanted to become a better artist. The price was small: a few wrinkles, a few strands of time slipping away.
Zhou Hao had wanted to cross out of the world and return beyond the restricted zone.
The price was the decades of life he had left.
Just then—
The roots, which had fallen silent, suddenly trembled violently.
Jiang Nuan looked up.
The warm scenes within the tree rings were being eaten away at the edges by wisps of black vapor.
The woman standing by the window, waiting for someone, slowly turned around.
There was no trace of anticipation left in her eyes.
Only deep, bitter resentment.
“He doesn’t want you anymore.”
Something spoke from within the black vapor.
It was anomalous energy.
At the same time, the scenes in the other rings began to twist as well.
“I want him to come back…”
“I don’t want to die…”
“Why me…?”
“Give me one more chance…”
“I want to go home…”
The voices grew more numerous and more chaotic, while the black vapor swelled with them.
The core of this restricted zone used time as the price for answering the wishes of those within this world.
But the anomalous energy before her could only burrow into memories, endlessly magnifying fear, resentment, and regret, then drawing strength from the negative energy they produced.
Until, like parasitic black vines, it completely enshrouded the roots of the world’s core.
The black vapor converged from every direction and lunged straight at Jiang Nuan.
The resentment slammed into her face, making even breathing difficult.
But Jiang Nuan wasn’t afraid. If anything, her anger flared.
What she needed to purify wasn’t these painful emotions.
People had every right to feel resentment, fear, and regret.
It was precisely because of such things that they were living, breathing human beings.
What deserved to be erased was the thing before her—the thing that kept tearing open their wounds and feeding on their pain.
Jiang Nuan raised her hand.
Silver-white light gathered in her palm, forming a cold crescent moon.
“Get lost!”
The purifying energy slammed into the black mist.
A sharp screech pierced the entire corridor of roots.
The black mist at the front was swallowed by the silver light and vanished without a trace.
Yet the remaining darkness did not retreat.
It spread along the transparent tree rings in all directions, and wave after wave of emotion burrowed into her mind.
This time, what surged toward her did not belong to some stranger from this world.
Blinding white lights. Cold restraints. Experiments that went on day after day, as though they would never end.
Those were Number Zero’s emotions.
During those long, repetitive days, the only time she could catch her breath and feel a little happy was when the laboratory door opened.
Lu Zhaoming would bend down and pat her head, chatting with her now and then.
Young Lu Shiyan would sneak a piece of candy into her hand whenever no one was looking.
Lu Zhaoming had been like a father to her, while young Lu Shiyan had been her only friend—at least, that was what she had believed at the time.
But before long, she learned that the person who had pushed her into that field of white light was none other than Lu Zhaoming.
She had trusted him. That was why she hated him so much.
That hatred, buried deep within her memories, was magnified again and again by the black mist until only one word remained from Number Zero:
Liar.
She wanted to leave this place—to go somewhere without laboratories, somewhere no one could decide whether she lived or died.
The corridor of roots shattered around her.
As the white light faded, a familiar university hallway appeared before Jiang Nuan.
The class bell rang in the distance.
At the end of the corridor, a familiar dormitory door slowly opened.
Warm light spilled from within.
It was as though she had never left.
The black mist condensed into a blurred figure standing by the door, reaching out a hand to her.
“Zhou Hao wanted to go home.”
“So I sent him home.”
The voice paused for a moment, gentle to the point of seduction.
“Do you want to go home?”
“To your real home.”
