> It was a regular day. The day's lessons at Swartz International University were over. One of the young professors stepped out to go home.
He saw a broken sky.
He walked forward. Nobody paid attention to it. Dai did.
As he walked down the footpath, the world around him continued as if nothing had changed. Students laughed, some arguing about assignments, others scrolling through their phones. The usual noise of the campus filled the air, steady and normal.
But above them—
Something was wrong.
The crack stretched across the sky like fractured glass, thin but unmistakable. It didn't spread, it didn't fade. It simply existed, silent and unnatural.
Dai slowed his steps. His eyes remained fixed upward, tracking the jagged line as if trying to understand its shape, its pattern.
Is this real?
He blinked once. Then again.
The crack was still there.
A faint uneasiness settled in his chest, not fear, but something sharper—curiosity mixed with discomfort. It felt wrong in a way he couldn't explain, like an equation that looked correct at first glance but collapsed the moment you examined it closely.
He glanced around again.
No one noticed.
Not a single person looked up.
It was as if the sky above them was perfectly normal.
Dai continued walking, slower now, his mind beginning to race. His thoughts tried to find logic, reason—something to anchor what he was seeing to reality. Light distortion? Reflection? Some kind of projection?
None of it made sense.
The crack didn't behave like light. It didn't behave like anything he understood.
For a brief moment, he felt the world shift—not physically, but subtly, like something invisible had moved out of place. The air felt heavier, quieter, even though the sounds of students were still there.
And then—
The crack flickered.
Not like light.
Like something unstable.
Dai stopped completely.
His hand lifted slightly, almost on instinct, as if he could reach out and touch the fracture in the sky.
He didn't know why he did it.
He only knew he had to.
But before his hand could rise any further, he hesitated.
A single thought cut through everything else.
Why am I the only one who can see it?
> The crack didn't disappear.
Dai lowered his hand slowly, his fingers curling slightly as if they had brushed against something unseen. He stared at the sky for a few more seconds, expecting it to vanish the moment he stopped focusing on it.
It didn't.
The fracture remained—thin, sharp, and completely out of place.
He exhaled quietly and resumed walking, though his steps had lost their earlier rhythm. Each movement now felt deliberate, measured, as if he were testing whether the world beneath his feet was still as stable as it appeared.
Think.
His mind moved quickly, almost automatically. Possibilities formed and collapsed one after another. Optical illusion. Fatigue. A temporary disturbance in perception.
None of them held.
Dai had spent years studying patterns—mathematical, physical, even behavioral. Everything followed rules. Everything could be understood, if observed carefully enough.
But this…
This had no rule.
Or perhaps—
He just didn't know it yet.
His eyes narrowed slightly as he focused again, this time not just looking, but analyzing. The crack wasn't random. It had structure. Jagged, yes—but not chaotic. There was a pattern hidden within it, something subtle, almost like a distorted line on a graph.
A thought surfaced.
Coordinates.
For a brief moment, the crack seemed to align with something in his mind—an invisible axis, stretching across the sky.
X.
Y.
The idea was faint, incomplete, but it was there.
And then it was gone.
Dai blinked, the sensation fading as quickly as it had appeared.
He stopped again.
This time, the world around him felt distant. The voices of students blurred into meaningless noise. The movement of people became nothing more than shapes passing by.
His focus narrowed to a single point—
The crack.
It flickered once more.
Not outwardly, not in a way others could notice—but to him, it shifted. As if something behind it had moved.
Watching.
A cold sensation ran down his spine.
Dai forced himself to look away.
For the first time since he had seen it, doubt crept in—not about whether it was real, but whether he should keep looking at it at all.
He adjusted his bag and continued walking, this time keeping his gaze forward.
The footpath stretched ahead, familiar and unchanged. The university gates were not far now. Beyond them lay the city—noise, traffic, normality.
Something safe.
Something that made sense.
But even as he walked, he could feel it.
The crack hadn't left his awareness.
It lingered, like a presence just outside his field of vision.
Dai clenched his jaw slightly.
Ignore it.
That was the logical choice. Observe later. Analyze later. Right now, there wasn't enough information.
And yet—
His steps slowed again.
Without realizing it, he stopped.
Silence pressed in around him, heavier than before.
Then, slowly…
He looked up again.
The crack had changed.
It was no longer just a fracture.
Within its thin, glowing edges, something faint had appeared—lines, almost invisible, forming and dissolving in an instant.
Symbols.
Not clear enough to read. Not stable enough to understand.
But they were there.
And for the first time, Dai felt something unfamiliar rise within him.
Not curiosity.
Not confusion.
Something deeper.
Recognition.
As if a part of him—something he didn't even know existed—understood what he was seeing.
His breath slowed.
His thoughts quieted.
And the world, for a brief moment, seemed to wait.
This is only the beginning.
---