The transition from a domestic, warm reality into a visceral nightmare did not register as a sudden jump-scare in Zhou Yuxuan’s mind; instead, it filtered through his consciousness like a cold drop of ink bleeding into clear water.
His internal defense mechanism instantly engaged, freezing his pulse before it could skyrocket.
His analytical faculties, ever detached, began calculating variables even as the atmosphere in the dining room turned suffocatingly heavy.
Why now?
he thought, his gaze locked onto the two rigid figures sitting in the shadows of the dining table.
Why so sudden?
The hospitality, the calculated pleasantries, the motherly doting—all of it had been an elaborate stage play.
But the underlying mechanics behind their hostility remained a jagged question mark.
Were they merely cannibals, operating under the same grotesque impulses as the elderly couple he had encountered upon his arrival?
A deeper, more chilling realization surfaced from his memory.
Ronald never asked about my true identity.
When Yuxuan had spun the tale of arriving via a bizarre, anomalous bathroom portal, Ronald hadn’t blinked.
He hadn’t demanded details, timelines, or proof.
A normal human being, bound by mundane curiosity and fear of the unknown, would have pried.
Ronald hadn’t.
He had simply accepted the anomaly as if it were a daily occurrence—or because he himself belonged to the very fabric of this world’s unnatural horrors.
Who could truly comprehend the nature of the destiny I have been dragged into?
Yuxuan’s thoughts ran cold.
“Grrrggh…”
A guttural, low-frequency vibration rattled the windowpanes, tearing through the unnatural silence of the house.
It didn’t sound human.
It sounded like shifting stone and tearing muscle.
Before his eyes, the mortal facades of Ronald Denbergh and his mother began to dissolve.
The transformation was an agonizingly slow, kinetic display of body horror.
The skin along Ronald’s jawline split, revealing a wet, dark vacuum beneath.
His spine elongated with a sequence of wet, snapping sounds, tearing through the fabric of the red coat he had proudly worn just minutes prior.
His mother’s form bloated unnaturally, her silky purple nightdress ripping into shreds as her limbs twisted at impossible, broken angles.
Their human anatomy was being aggressively rewritten into two terrifying, bizarre entities.
For the first time since his arrival in this steampunk metropolis, a genuine sliver of terror pricked at the edges of Yuxuan’s mind.
He took a deliberate, calculated step backward, his boots sliding silently across the wooden floor.
“Guagghhrrgh!!!”
With a deafening, unified roar that shook the very foundation of the building, the two entities burst forward, their hunting instincts fully awakened.
Ronald—or the thing that used his form—swung a massive, fleshy appendage that resembled a cross between a calcified tentacle and a mangled iron beam.
The strike was blindingly fast.
It slammed directly into the center of the heavy wooden dining table, breaching it instantly.
Splinters of polished oak exploded into the air as the table split clean in half, the impact cratering the floorboards beneath.
They rushed him, driven by a singular, violent imperative to eradicate the anomaly known as Lie Longterm.
Yuxuan didn’t attempt to fight.
Piercing through the cloud of dust and flying wood, his eyes mapped an escape route.
He spun on his heel, his movements precise and unburdened by panic, and bolted toward the main entryway.
His hand slammed against the iron latch of the side door, throwing it open with brute force, and he plunged out into the external chill of the night.
Breathing heavily, Yuxuan skidded onto the cobblestones.
He instinctively looked left and right, scanning for threats, operating under the fleeting assumption that the open street might offer a tactical advantage.
But the street was dead.
An oppressive, terrifying silence held the entire sector captive.
The bustling market from earlier had vanished entirely, leaving behind an empty, hollow labyrinth of stone and iron.
Not a single soul walked the pavements.
The gas lamps flickered with a dying, sickly luminescence.
Then, reality itself began to untether.
A deep, systemic groan echoed from beneath the earth.
Yuxuan watched with widening eyes as the paved road beneath his feet began to fracture.
Great, jagged fissures tore through the cobblestones, but instead of collapsing into a void, the broken pieces of stone began to drift upward, defying gravity.
Within seconds, the infection of deconstruction spread to the surrounding architecture.
The heavy brick houses, the iron reinforcements, the towering steam pipes—all of it began breaking apart into individual, floating fragments, lifting into the purple-blue twilight like ash from a bonfire.
Left with no stable ground, Yuxuan could do nothing but run.
He leaped from one fracturing piece of pavement to another, navigating an environment that was actively liquefying into a surreal dreamscape.
Yet, every path he chose was entirely useless.
The entire sector was breaching itself from the inside out, disintegrating into a chaotic vortex of floating matter.
Who could possibly understand the laws governing this madness?
Why was the world collapsing the moment he touched its inner sanctuary?
The cold, hyper-rational mask Yuxuan always wore finally shattered, replaced by a rare expression of deep, utter confusion.
The violent deconstruction of the world reached a crescendo.
A sudden, upward surge of atmospheric pressure caught Yuxuan, lifting him clean off his feet and throwing him into the air.
He landed heavily onto a massive, floating boulder—a chunk of the city’s bedrock that had torn away from the crust.
As he gripped the stone, tumbling through the sky, he noticed a bizarre pattern in the chaos.
The floating ruins weren’t just drifting aimlessly.
They were violently colliding, locking into one another, and merging like pieces of a cosmic puzzle.
The debris of the steampunk city was actively building something new.
As abruptly as it had begun, the trembling ceased.
The chaotic wind died down to an absolute, freezing standstill.
Yuxuan stood up on the floating boulder, adjusting his balance.
When he looked out into the expanse, his breath caught in his throat.
He was standing on the precipice of a horrible, bizarre abyss.
Hanging directly in front of him was the colossal black hole that dominated the sky, its swirling event horizon closer than it had ever been.
The surrounding ruins of the city were frozen perfectly in mid-air, forming a ring of shattered stone and iron around the singularity.
But it was the structure directly beneath his feet that caused his throat to tighten.
The fragments of rock and iron had merged to form a colossal, recognizable silhouette.
It was a shape that absolutely did not belong to this steampunk, dark fantasy world.
“How…?
And why…?”
The whisper escaped his lips, a rare crack in his iron-clad composure as his mind struggled to process the sheer impossibility of the sight.
It was a monumental stone statue of a human figure.
A figure completely native to the world Yuxuan had left behind.
The statue depicted a person clad in a thick, pressurized spacesuit.
Its giant stone hands were brought together in front of its chest, permanently locked in a quiet, solemn clapping pose.
The monument was severed at the torso, a half-body relic floating in the void of an alien cosmos.
Yuxuan was standing directly on top of its glass-plated helmet.
“Why an astronaut…?” he gasped, his eyes reflecting the dark, polished stone of the visor beneath his boots.
Before he could formulate a theory, the sky shifted.
The dull, stagnant purple-blue light emitted by the black hole violently mutated, igniting into a blinding, searing cascade of red and yellow.
The illumination was terrifyingly bright, mimicking the raw, naked fury of a hyper-dense sun.
The black hole had awakened.
The deep, endless spot at the absolute epicenter of the singularity began to spin with volatile velocity, generating a localized gravitational pull that distorted the very concept of space.
It began sucking everything into its maw.
The frozen ruins, the floating boulders, the remnants of Ronald’s home—all of it was pulled into the turning gyre.
From the terrifying depths of the black hole, a sound echoed.
It was a vast, distorted wail, like the collective scream of a dying universe: “Waaaaaaaah!”
The gravitational tide slammed into the giant astronaut statue, breaking it apart.
Yuxuan’s footing vanished as he, too, was pulled into the irresistible vacuum of the singularity.
His body tumbled through the blinding red-yellow glare, falling rapidly toward the pitch-black core of the dark void.
Yet, as the darkness rushed to swallow him whole, the fearless, analytical expression on Zhou Yuxuan’s face did not shatter.
He didn’t scream.
He didn’t close his eyes.
Instead, a singular, quiet sentence escaped his lips just before the absolute darkness of the void consumed his consciousness entirely:
“It’s a dream.
All just a dream.”
I’M WRITING SOMTHING VERY MASSIVE MASTERPIECE, I’LL TRY TO DO MY BEST TO EXECUTE IT MASTERFULLY.
I WISH YOU WILL SUPPORT ME!