Xu Yan did not realize he was dying at first.
Death, he would later understand, did not announce itself with drama. It did not arrive with visions of loved ones or a review of one's life. It came quietly, like the gradual dimming of a room's lights—so slow that the mind kept insisting nothing was wrong.
The beeping of the heart monitor was still steady. The fluorescent lights above the hospital bed still hummed faintly. A nurse passed by the open door, her shoes squeaking against the polished floor.
Everything looked normal.
That was the problem.
Xu Yan tried to lift his hand. The command reached his brain clearly, cleanly—but his body did not respond. There was no pain. No resistance. Just… nothing. As if the limb no longer belonged to him.
A strange calm settled over him.
Am I… tired?
His chest felt light. Too light. Each breath came shallow, automatic, like a habit the body had not yet realized it could stop performing.
The monitor's rhythm faltered for a fraction of a second.
Then steadied.
Xu Yan stared at the ceiling, at the faint crack running diagonally through one of the tiles. He had noticed it before, during long nights when sleep refused to come. He remembered wondering whether anyone else had ever looked up and traced that same crack with their eyes.
The thought felt distant now.
His vision blurred at the edges, not fading to black but softening, as though reality itself were losing focus. Sounds stretched unnaturally, each beep of the monitor lingering longer than the last.
Then—
something shifted.
At first, Xu Yan thought it was hallucination. The ceiling above him seemed to ripple, like heat distortion over asphalt. The crack in the tile bent, then curved inward, drawn toward a point that did not exist a moment before.
Space… folded.
Not light. Not shadow.
Distance.
The space above his bed fractured silently, opening into an abyss that should not have been able to exist within the confines of a hospital room. It was vast beyond reason, layered with blackish-purple darkness streaked by slow-moving points of light that resembled stars—except they did not twinkle. They pulsed, rhythmically, like a heartbeat.
Xu Yan's breath caught.
Fear finally arrived—but it came late, dulled, as if even fear were struggling to cross the widening gap between him and the world.
The beeping monitor stretched into a long, distorted whine.
The abyss expanded.
Xu Yan felt pulled.
Not his body—his self.
His thoughts elongated, memories unraveling like threads drawn toward an unseen hand. The sensation was neither pain nor pleasure, but something far worse: the feeling of being fundamentally misplaced.
This isn't real, his mind insisted weakly.
The abyss did not care.
Something moved within it.
Not a shape. Not a form.
A presence.
Ancient, vast, and utterly indifferent.
It did not look at Xu Yan the way a human would look at another human. It regarded him the way an ocean might regard a drop of rain—acknowledging it only because it had entered the wrong place.
A soul that does not resist the Void…
The voice did not sound aloud. It formed directly inside Xu Yan's collapsing awareness, each word carrying weight that bent his thoughts around it.
Interesting.
The pull intensified.
Xu Yan's final coherent thought was not of regret, or family, or unfinished dreams.
It was a single, absurd realization:
So this is how it ends.
The hospital room shattered like glass.
⸻
Xu Yan woke screaming.
Air flooded his lungs violently, burning all the way down as though he had been submerged for too long and dragged back by force. His body convulsed, muscles seizing as sensation returned all at once—cold, pressure, pain.
Stone scraped against his cheek.
He coughed, rolling onto his side, retching as his stomach rejected whatever emptiness had replaced its contents. The ground beneath him was rough, cracked, and cold in a way that felt alive, humming faintly with energy.
When he finally forced his eyes open, the sky nearly crushed him.
It was vast—too vast—layered in impossible depth, painted with flowing bands of color that resembled auroras yet pulsed with unmistakable power. Clouds drifted at different heights, some moving too fast, others unnaturally still, as though anchored in place by invisible hands.
Xu Yan froze.
This was not Earth.
The realization settled slowly, heavily. He pushed himself upright with shaking arms, heart pounding as he took in his surroundings. Ruins stretched around him—broken stone pillars, half-collapsed structures carved with symbols he did not recognize, their surfaces worn smooth by time or something far more corrosive.
His body felt… wrong.
Younger. Lighter. Stronger in some ways, weaker in others. When he looked down at his hands, they were unfamiliar—calloused differently, fingers longer, skin unmarked by scars he distinctly remembered having.
Panic threatened to rise.
Before it could fully take hold, space rippled.
The air in front of him distorted violently, folding inward like fabric being pulled through a ring. Xu Yan staggered back, instinct screaming danger as pressure crashed down on him.
The ground cracked beneath his feet.
A presence descended.
It did not emerge fully. It did not need to.
A colossal silhouette coiled within fractured space, its outline only partially visible—enough to convey scale so vast that Xu Yan's mind struggled to process it. Blackish-purple scales shimmered like a fragment of the cosmos itself, swallowing light, bending the surrounding reality inward.
A dragon.
Not the kind from myths or stories.
This was something older. Heavier. Real in a way that made belief irrelevant.
Xu Yan's knees buckled, slamming into the stone. Not in worship—his body simply could not support itself under the pressure bearing down on him.
The dragon's gaze settled on him.
Xu Yan felt exposed down to his soul, every thought laid bare, every weakness cataloged in an instant.
Kneel.
The word struck him like a physical blow. His head dipped involuntarily, teeth clenched as he fought to remain conscious.
The pressure intensified.
Stone groaned. Cracks spread outward from where his knees touched the ground.
Xu Yan's vision swam, darkness creeping in at the edges.
Then—
the pressure eased.
Not vanished. Just… reduced.
Enough for him to breathe.
The dragon regarded him silently for a long moment.
Then it laughed.
The sound did not echo through the air. It reverberated through space itself, sending subtle ripples across the ruins.
You did not shatter, the dragon said.
Most do.
Xu Yan swallowed hard, throat dry. He could not speak. Words felt painfully inadequate in the face of what loomed before him.
Live, the dragon continued, tone almost amused.
Let us see how far a mortal can crawl.
The space around the silhouette folded inward.
The dragon vanished as though it had never been there.
The pressure lifted completely.
Xu Yan collapsed forward, palms slapping against cold stone, gasping for air. His heart hammered violently, every beat echoing in his ears.
He lay there for a long time, unable to move.
When his breathing finally steadied, one thought surfaced above the rest—clear, undeniable, terrifying:
Whatever that was…
it had not killed him.
It had noticed him.
And somewhere beyond the vast, impossible sky above, distance itself seemed to stir—as if something had shifted, ever so slightly, in response to his continued existence.
Xu Yan did not yet know it.
But his death had not been an ending.
It had been an invitation.