Chapter 1

Chapter 1: That Day, the Fog Was Thick

Endless thick fog rolled outside the window. It was so dense that it felt as if the whole world had vanished beyond it. Only a dim, muddled daylight pushed through the fog into the room, leaving this quiet place in a half-dark, half-bright gloom.

Inside the slightly messy studio apartment, Zhou Ming sat hunched over his desk. The clutter on the table had been roughly pushed aside, and his haggard face hovered over a notebook as he wrote quickly:

“Seventh day. Nothing has changed. The thick fog still covers everything outside the window. The window is sealed by some unknown force… The whole room feels as if something has ‘cast’ it into some kind of anomalous space…

“There is no way to contact the outside world. There is no water or power. But the lamp stays on, and the computer can still start up—even though I have already pulled out its power cord…”

A faint sound of wind seemed to blow from the direction of the window. Zhou Ming, who was bent over his diary, suddenly lifted his head. A small light came into his tired eyes. But a second later he saw it was only his imagination. Outside that window there was still only the pale, clinging fog. A dead, silent world lay there, coldly covering his tiny home.

His gaze swept across the windowsill. He saw the wrench and hammer tossed there at random. They were the traces of how he had tried to leave the room in the past few days. Now those hard, clumsy tools just lay there in silence, as if mocking his helpless state.

After a few seconds, Zhou Ming’s face became calm again. With this calm that felt like an anomaly, he lowered his head once more and went back to his writing:

“I am trapped, with no idea how to get out. In the past few days, I even tried to tear up the roof, the walls, and the floor. But even when I used all my strength, I could not leave the slightest mark on the walls. This room has become like… like a box that has been ‘cast’ together with space itself, with no way out at all…

“Except for that door.

“But what is beyond that door… is even more wrong.”

Zhou Ming stopped again. He slowly read over the words he had just written. Then he flipped through the diary a bit carelessly, looking at what he had recorded in the last few days—heavy, gloomy lines, meaningless wild thoughts, impatient doodles, and bad jokes he wrote when he forced himself to relax.

He did not know what use any of this writing had, or who might ever read this nonsense in the future. In fact, he was not even someone who usually kept a diary. As a middle-school teacher whose free time was very limited, he had never had much energy to spend on something like this.

But now, whether he liked it or not, he had plenty of spare time.

After one sleep, he had found himself trapped in his own room.

Outside the window was thick fog that would not fade. The fog was so dense that he could not see anything but fog itself. It was as if the whole world had lost the cycle of day and night. The same dull and sleepy light filled the room all twenty-four hours. The window was locked. Water and power were cut off. His phone had no signal. No matter how much noise he made in the room, he could not draw any help from the outside.

It was like an absurd nightmare, a dream where everything moved against the laws of nature. But Zhou Ming had already used every method he could think of to make sure of one thing: there were no illusions here, and no dream. There was only a world that was no longer normal, and a self that still seemed more or less normal for now.

He took a deep breath. His gaze finally rested on the only door at the far end of the room.

It was just an ordinary, cheap white wooden door. The calendar he had forgotten to take down last year was still pinned to it. The handle had been worn bright from use. The doormat in front of it sat a little crooked.

That door could open.

If this sealed, twisted room was a cage, then the cruelest thing about the cage was that it kept a door that could be pushed open at any time. It tempted the prisoner inside, again and again, to push it and leave. But beyond that door was not the “outside” Zhou Ming wanted.

Out there were no old yet familiar stairwell halls, no bright sunlit streets filled with lively people, none of the things he knew.

There was only a strange, unsettling foreign place. And “over there” was also a trap he could not escape.

But Zhou Ming knew he did not have much time left to hesitate. The so-called “choice” had never really existed from the very beginning.

His food stores were limited. Only the last quarter remained of his few large containers of mineral water. He had already tried every method of escape and every way of calling for help inside this sealed room. Now there was only one road left to him: he had to get ready and go to the other side of the door to seek a single slim chance to live.

Maybe he would even get a chance to find out what had caused this bizarre and desperate supernatural situation.

Zhou Ming took a light breath, lowered his head, and wrote the last few paragraphs in the diary:

“…But no matter what, the only choice left now is to go to the other side of the door. At least on that strange ship I can still find some food. And the exploration and preparations I did over there in the past few days should be enough to let me survive on that ship… even though the preparations I could make there were actually very limited.

“Last of all, to those who come after. If I do not come back, and one day in the future some kind of rescue worker opens this room and sees this diary, please do not treat what I have written as an absurd story—it really happened. As chilling as it is, there really was a person named Zhou Ming, trapped inside this mad and eerie space-time phenomenon.

“I have done everything I can in this diary to describe all the Anomaly phenomena I saw, and to record every effort I made to escape. If there really are any ‘later ones’, please at least remember my name. At least remember that all this once happened.”

Zhou Ming closed the diary, tossed the pen into the holder beside him, and slowly stood up from behind the desk.

It was time to leave, before he sank completely into helplessness and a dead end.

But after a short moment of thought, he did not walk straight to the only door that might lead to the “outside”. Instead, he went directly to his bed.

He had to face the “foreign land” beyond the door in the best state he could manage. Right now, he was not ready, especially in his mind.

Zhou Ming did not know if he would be able to fall asleep. But even forcing himself to lie on the bed and empty his mind was better than going “over there” while he was too mentally tired.

Eight hours later, Zhou Ming opened his eyes.

Outside the window there was still a chaos of fog. The light that knew neither day nor night carried a heavy gloom that pressed on him.

Zhou Ming ignored what lay beyond the window. He took some food from his dwindling stores and ate until he was almost full. Then he walked to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room.

The man in the mirror still had messy hair and looked quite worn out. There was nothing special about his looks or presence. But Zhou Ming kept staring stubbornly at himself in the mirror, as if trying to burn this image into his mind forever.

He stared like that for several minutes. Then he spoke in a low voice to himself, as if talking to the man inside the glass: “Your name is Zhou Ming. At least ‘on this side’, your name is Zhou Ming. You must remember that at all times.”

Only after that did he turn and walk away.

When he came to the all-too-familiar door, Zhou Ming took a deep breath and set his hand on the handle.

Besides the clothes on his body, he carried nothing extra. He took no food and no weapon for self-defense. This was the lesson left by his earlier “explorations”—he could not bring anything through this door except himself.

In fact, he even felt that he had to put a question mark behind this “self” as well, because…

Zhou Ming turned the handle and pushed the door open. A mass of gray-black fog that swelled and shrank like some kind of The Veil appeared before his eyes. In that shifting fog, he already seemed to hear the sound of waves in his ears.

As he stepped through that layer of fog, a slightly fishy, salty sea wind blew against his face. The vague, unreal sound of the waves became clear. A gentle rocking rose under his feet. After a brief spell of dizziness, Zhou Ming opened his eyes. Before him was a wide, empty wooden deck, tall masts standing under dark clouds, and a gently heaving sea beyond the rail, its edge nowhere in sight.

Zhou Ming lowered his head. What he saw was a body stronger than the one in his memories, a captain’s uniform whose fine workmanship and high cost were clear at a glance but whose style was completely unfamiliar, a pair of big, knobby hands, and, held in those hands, a black flintlock pistol with a classical, elegant look.

Yes, even his own “self” needed a question mark.