Ben knocked on his own front door, carrying a few sweets in one hand and a small bouquet of flowers in the other.
A moment later, his mother opened it.
The instant she saw him, her eyes widened in surprise.
Ben smiled and offered her the gifts.
“These are for you, Mom.”
His mother pulled him into a warm embrace and said with a smile, “That’s very kind of you, son.
Now go and change out of those wet clothes.
How’s the weather?
Has it finally calmed down, or is it still pouring as usual?”
Ben slipped off his wet coat and headed for the kitchen to put down the bags before answering, “It’s the same.
Nothing’s changed.
The forecast said the rain will keep going for several days…
and the strange part is, we’re in the middle of summer.”
Martha frowned slightly, as though the thought puzzled her, but before she could say anything, her husband’s voice came from the top of the stairs.
“Martha!
Has Ben finally come back?
I was starting to worry about him.”
Ben smiled, then suddenly appeared in front of his father and hugged him.
The two of them laughed together before heading into the living room and taking a seat on the sofa.
“All right,” Martha said, walking toward the kitchen.
“I’m going to make some food.
You two love staying up until dawn, but I’m going to bed and taking care of my health.”
Ben laughed.
“Go on, Mrs.
Martha.
Sleep like the weak, haha.
I’ll stay here with Dad, Marcus, and enjoy the movies and the news.”
Martha lifted a brow and looked at him with challenge in her eyes.
“Is that so?
We’ll see who’s weak between us, haha.”
They all laughed softly, and Martha went into the kitchen to see what Ben had brought in the bags and prepare something for them to eat.
On the other side of town, Guanda sat alone in her home, wrapped in her blanket while the sound of rain drifted in through the windows.
She picked up her phone and decided to call her family on video.
“I hope Dad’s awake, at least,” she murmured, glancing at the screen.
She placed the call and waited a few moments until her father’s face appeared.
The moment Guanda saw him, she smiled.
“Hi, Dad.
How are you?”
“I’m fine, better than fine,” her father replied with a smile.
“What about your studies?
I want top grades from you.
There isn’t much time left before you come back to us in California.
I want you to impress everyone, just like you always do, my clever girl.”
Guanda smiled.
“Don’t worry, Dad.
I won’t let you down.”
She paused for a second, then asked, “By the way, where’s Mom?”
Her father shifted the phone slightly, and her mother appeared asleep on the bed.
Guanda smiled softly.
“All right, all right…
let her sleep.”
Then she added, “And how’s my little brother, Peter?
I still can’t believe I haven’t seen him since he was born.”
Her father chuckled.
“He’s fine, still very little.
He hasn’t even turned two yet.
By the time you come back in about a month, he’ll already have started eating more solid food.
He’s a beautiful child, and his eyes are blue like the sky.”
Guanda’s smile widened as she listened, and something like longing touched her face.
“I can’t wait to see him and hold him in my arms.”
Her father smiled, but then suddenly lifted his head as though he had caught the smell of something burning.
“Wait…
it looks like the pie’s burned!”
He got to his feet at once and said, heading toward the kitchen, “I have to go now.
Good night, sweetheart.”
Before Guanda could answer, the call ended.
For a few seconds she only stared at the phone screen, the words she had been about to say still trapped in her throat.
Slowly, she lowered the phone, then lifted her eyes to the ceiling and whispered with a sad smile, “God…
I hope they stay happy forever, even if it comes at the expense of my own happiness.”
“[There is nothing better than family in this mortal world…
we live in it only for a short hour, then pass through it as though we had never been here at all]”
While Ben sat with his father in the living room, Guanda was preparing for sleep.
In White’s house, Nerv had already surrendered to sleep, while White lay on her bed, unable to close her eyes.
As for Clark, he had sunk into a deep sleep.
Then the dream began.
It was not an ordinary dream…
not even something the human mind could truly understand.
It had no familiar place, no familiar time.
It was a dream and not a dream at the same time, like a message or a revelation arriving from beyond the stars.
It was something that did not belong to this world in any way; a scene no human mind should have been able to create on its own, because everything about it lacked even the simplest principles of coherence that Clark had known all his life.
What he saw was not merely strange.
It was something a mind from this world should not have been capable of imagining at all.
Clark found himself standing in a world unlike anything he had ever known.
There was no sky, no sun, no moon, not even a horizon for his eyes to reach.
The void around him stretched without limit, so vast he could not tell where the ground ended or where it began.
He looked around in confusion, trying to make sense of it, but nothing gave him an answer.
Then he heard it.
His heartbeat.
A violent thud in his chest.
Then another.
And then his pulse began to quicken, until the sound filled that empty world, as if his heart were no longer inside him at all, but the only thing that existed within the void.
A suffocating heat surged through his body, and the air grew heavy in his lungs.
He pressed a hand to his chest while the world before him began to shake.
“What…
is happening?”
And then, something appeared above him.
It was not the sun, nor the moon, nor any celestial body his mind could recognize.
It was a colossal symbol hanging in the void.
Interlocking circles, woven through one another with impossible precision, cut across by straight heavenly lines, and between them spread strange geometric marks, as though it pointed toward something beyond the very concept of infinity.
Clark stared at it, unable to move.
And for the first time, he felt that the symbol had not appeared before him at all…
but had appeared because he was looking at it.
Then, all at once…
he felt a hand settle on his shoulder.
His whole body froze.
He could not turn, as though some invisible force held him in place.
His heartbeat thundered harder and harder, each beat a hammer blow, until it felt as though his heart were trying to tear its way out of his chest.
His breathing trembled.
A sharp urge to vomit seized him, and his whole body began to shiver beyond his control.
Something was behind him.
Something unlike anything else.
A manifestation beyond description, one that transcended the concept of existence and nonexistence; it was not merely a surreal state, but something that surpassed even the concept of absolute surrealism itself and its credibility, as though every human attempt to understand it were doomed to collapse before it could even begin.
Clark tried to move.
He could not, not at first.
Then, slowly, he began to turn…
so slowly.
And with every degree of that turn, his heart pounded harder until the sound became a scream inside his skull.
At last…
he saw no being.
No body.
No face.
He was staring into infinity itself.
His eyes widened, and his mouth opened to let out a scream, but no sound came.
Then, all at once, Clark found himself seeing countless worlds.
They appeared before him one after another, overlapping and blurred, like torn images flashing past his eyes too quickly for him to grasp any single one.
Different worlds entirely; some drowned in an endless darkness, others seemed suspended in a vast void, while some things appeared that his mind could not even give a name to.
He tried to focus on one of them, but the scene vanished before he could make sense of it.
Then all those images cut off at once.
Beneath New York City.
He saw the network of sewer tunnels stretching under the city, damp passages wrapped in darkness, water gathered silently across the ground.
And at the end of one of the tunnels…
A mysterious door, standing in a place where it should not have existed, its surface covered in intricate carvings that resembled the symbol he had seen moments before.
Interlocking circles, precise geometric lines, and a strange axis extending from its center.
“Clark!”
Then…
Clark jolted awake.
He sat upright in bed, sweat pouring down his face, neck, and chest.
He gasped violently, one hand pressed to his heart, which was still racing with terrifying speed.
Only then did he realize he was in his room.
And that everything had been nothing more than a dream.
Or so it should have been.