“Ah… don’t!”
Jiang Wanning suddenly sat up in bed. Her black hair clung to her temples, and her sleepwear was soaked through at the back, sticking to her skin, cold and damp.
She pressed a hand against her chest, her knuckles whitening from the force. Her heart pounded wildly in her palm as if something was trying to break out from inside her chest.
How many times has it been now? She couldn’t remember.
She only knew that every time she woke from that dream, it felt like she had been pulled up from deep water, gasping for breath, her body freezing cold, her mind filled with images that did not belong to her.
She sat in the darkness for a long time until her heartbeat gradually steadied, then reached for the glass at her bedside.
The water was cold. The moment she drank it, her throat tightened as if she were swallowing something hard and foreign.
The dream had been too clear. Clear enough that it did not feel like a dream at all.
In it, a girl of about fifteen or sixteen appeared, maybe even younger. Malnourished, small, thin as a twig.
Her gaze was unfocused, her head always tilted slightly when she looked at people, a trace of drool hanging at the corner of her mouth. She spoke incoherently, repeating only a few words over and over again: “Hungry,” “scared,” “sister.”
Her clan called her “Wanwan.”
Jiang Wanning closed her eyes, and those images surged back like a tide, impossible to hold back.
She saw the girl being held in an old woman’s arms.
The old woman was about seventy or eighty. Her back was already bent, her fingers deformed from years of labor, yet the way she held the girl was steady. One hand supported her back, the other gently combed through her tangled hair.
The girl babbled something indistinctly, and the old woman responded, even if she did not understand, she answered again and again.
“Be good, Wanwan. Grandmother is here.”
She saw a teenage boy, about fifteen or sixteen, tumbling down a hillside, his knee smashing against a rock, blood streaming down his leg.
Grimacing in pain, the boy sat up. The first thing he did was not look at his wound, but open his palm. Inside was a wild fruit, small, half green and half red, already bruised from the fall.
He held it to the girl’s mouth. “Wanwan, eat this. It’s sweet.”
The girl took a bite and frowned, spitting it out. It was sour. The boy froze, then laughed, tears spilling from his eyes as he said he would pick her something sweeter next time.
Next time. He said next time.
But that next time never came. The sky collapsed first.
On the day of the earthquake, Jiang Wanning felt the entire world in the dream lurching and flipping. The ground twisted like paper in a giant hand, rising, cracking, collapsing.
Mud houses fell one after another, raising clouds of yellow dust mixed with cries and the wailing of livestock.
The girl was pinned beneath a woman, curled in the corner formed by two tables, surrounded by collapsing earthen walls and broken beams.
The woman lay over her, a wooden beam crushing her back, blood seeping from her mouth and dripping onto the girl’s face. The girl cried in fear, and the woman wiped the blood away with her thumb, whispering softly, “Don’t be afraid, don’t look.”
Don’t be afraid. Don’t look.
Those words repeated again and again, like a curse, like a final farewell.
Later, a volcanic eruption came as well. Jiang Wanning had never seen a volcano, but in the dream the sky turned dark red, the air filled with the smell of sulfur that burned her throat like blades.
Scorching ash fell from the sky, blistering the skin on contact. The clan ran toward higher ground. Some people collapsed mid-run, their backs covered in ash like a layer of deathly snow.
A middle-aged man took off his outer garment and covered the girl’s head with it.
The coat was full of holes, but it still blocked the ash.
Bare-chested, he ran ahead, his skin burning red in patches. He looked back once to confirm the girl was following, then turned forward again.
He never looked back a second time.
Then came the flood. Water surged in from all directions, muddy and heavy with sand, broken wood, and even corpses. The girl was carried on a young woman’s back. The water had already reached the woman’s chest, each step was exhausting, yet her hands never loosened their grip.
“Sis…” the girl murmured faintly from her back.
The young woman’s shoulders trembled. She did not turn back. Her voice was torn apart by the wind, but Jiang Wanning still heard it clearly.
“Mm, I’m here.”
That was the first time the girl called her “sis.” It was also the last time.
They eventually reached a patch of high ground, a rock no bigger than a tabletop, already crowded with people.
Everyone was soaked, lips turning purple, teeth chattering. There was no food, no clean water, only endless rain and cold.
People began to die. First the elderly, then the children, then the weak. Their bodies were thrown into the water, swallowed by muddy waves without a trace.
And then, people began to eat one another.
Jiang Wanning did not want to watch, but the dream did not let her escape.
She saw a group of starving people swarm a lone man like beasts.
She saw blood splatter across the rock, diluted by rain, flowing into the water and drawing more murkiness.
She saw the eyes of the living change, no longer human, but like wolves, hyenas, anything that would tear apart its own kind just to survive.
But the girl was protected.
Several clanspeople formed a circle around her, shielding her in the center. They faced outward, backs inward, like a wall of flesh and blood.
Outside, there were screams, struggles, the sound of chewing. Inside, the girl curled in her grandmother’s arms, her ears covered, her eyes shielded.
“Don’t listen,” the old grandmother’s voice was already faint. “Don’t look.”
The grandmother was the first to die. Not eaten, but starved. She gave the last bit of her food to the girl, then leaned against the rock and slowly closed her eyes. Her hand never let go of the girl’s.
One by one, the others disappeared. Some never returned after going out to search for food. Some were dragged away in the night without even a scream.
They all knew going out meant death, but someone had to go. Someone had to trade their life for even a mouthful of food to keep the girl alive.
In the end, only the young woman remained.
She was so thin her face had collapsed, cheekbones protruding sharply, eye sockets deeply sunken, lips cracked and bleeding. But her eyes were still alive, fixed on the cave entrance, holding a sharpened wooden stick.
The girl clung to her clothes from behind, whispering over and over, “Scared… sis, scared…”
The young woman turned and pulled her into her arms. Her strength was nearly gone, but the embrace was complete, one hand covering the back of the girl’s head, the other wrapping around her back, as if trying to fuse her into her own body.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Don’t look.”
Footsteps echoed at the entrance. Many footsteps.
The young woman pushed the girl toward the deepest part of the cave, where a crack in the rock was just wide enough for a small body to squeeze into. She shoved her inside and blocked the opening with her own body.
From the darkness, the girl heard sounds outside: crashing, shouting, the young woman’s screams, and then… chewing.
Then a very soft voice, as if all strength had been drained from it, squeezed out from deep in the throat.
“Wanwan, don’t come out.”
And then there was nothing.
Jiang Wanning always woke up at this point.
She sat on her bed, her back soaked in cold sweat, fingers clenched tightly into the blanket until her knuckles turned white.
She stared at the blank white wall opposite her. A thin crack ran across it from top to bottom like an open wound.
She remembered what the psychologist had once said. His surname was Fang, early thirties, wearing round-framed glasses, speaking in a slow, measured tone. During their first session, Doctor Fang had asked her:
“What do you think emotional detachment is?”
She had answered, “It means not feeling sadness.”
When awake, she could function normally. She could work, eat, and talk to people like anyone else.
But at night, those images would surge back up—the old grandmother’s twisted fingers, the boy’s bloodied knee, the middle-aged man’s burned back, the young woman’s final words: “Don’t come out.”
They seeped in like water through cracks, impossible to block.
Jiang Wanning picked up her phone. 4:17 a.m.
There was an unread message from Doctor Fang, likely a mass-sent article titled “Several Facts About Traumatic Dream States.” She did not open it and placed the phone back down.
She lay back down. Closed her eyes. Darkness filled with those faces again.
She turned once, then again, then finally sat up and switched on the bedside lamp.
Warm yellow light illuminated a small space. On the bedside table sat half a glass of cold water and an open book.
She closed it. The cover read four words: Existence and Nothingness.
She could not remember when she had bought it, probably in her second year of university when a philosophy professor had recommended it.
She had read only a dozen pages before putting it down. Now the pages were yellowed and brittle, edges curled like the dying leaves of a plant.