"Hah-"

The cold characteristic of the canyon scraped the corners of my mouth, and I gasped, my ribcage almost touching the ground.

"Why? Why is this happening? ”

As if suddenly remembering what had happened to me, I asked softly in an inaudible voice, as if in the dark, there was an answer to all doubts.

"Yao? Yao—Ah!! ”

As I stared at the oxidized and blackened blood stains between the cracks in the stones, my slightly groggy head suddenly ached violently, and this almost tortured experience was accompanied by a chill that penetrated deep into the bone marrow, causing the tendons all over my body to twitch unnaturally.

However, all the sensations were like the undulating tide in the realm of illusion, and after only a few moments, all that was left was a sweat-soaked garment and the warm marks under the wings of the nose.

I stretched out my finger and brushed it above the corner of my mouth, the familiar and disgusting touch that dragged me into the swirl of chaos in my mind again,

"Nosebleeds?"

Perhaps because of the residual stinging pain in the cranial cavity, my thoughts were much more blurry than they were at first.

"No, where is this? Didn't I just go to my room? And then, and then it seemed like something was going on...... It happened ......"

As I spoke, I looked at the reddish-brown trail half a meter away, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't recall the slightest clue about it.

Tapping the dust on my torso, I got up in confusion and looked around at the environment I was in.

There is no doubt that this is a tunnel underground, surrounded by damp rock faces, star-like glowing fluorite, and endless darkness, all of which invisibly create an atmosphere of indifference and solemnity.

"Wait......"

Suddenly, the stumps of the branches and leaves outlined by the blue light at my feet broke into my field of vision, and I bent down and gently stroked the dry and unreasonable leaves with my hands, while my eyes swept to the undulating ravines above the cave wall, and said to myself,

"I think I've been to this place before."

The broken leaves of the fingertips slowly drifted down, and finally came to rest in a shallow depression at the edge of the cavern.

The inconspicuous mark was strewn with broken branches, which looked irregular, but they all maintained an eerie arc, as if they were holding up the air, or this almost semicircular depression that had once carried some weight.

"No, don't you...... I'm back again? ”

Vaguely, an overly simplistic, yet chilling answer was about to emerge, but the resistance from the depths of my heart prevented me from accepting the fact that I had just deduced, because if it was as I expected, it would have been a foolish decision to stay in this cave.

"Crunch—"

However, before I could make a move, a clear chewing sound crept into my ear.

In an instant, I was frozen in place like a plaster, my neck twisted into the thick darkness behind me with fear and weakness.

"Click!"

The signature cracking sound of the bones sounded, and when it sank into the eardrums, it had already turned into the hum of a death knell.

Because I know what I am facing, and I know what terrible fate awaits me. After all, if it's really like the way I did when I first came here, I'm afraid that the only way out has been blocked by an even more terrifying existence.

"Lean ......"

I sighed softly, but my heart was not beating as hard as before.

After a rough guess, I deduced that I was trapped in an infinite carousel of movies, just as I did when I woke up at the top of the Holy Mountain, and that this cave was just a part of the script, and as someone who had experienced it, I knew exactly what kind of drama was about to play out.

Sure enough, just as I was thinking, there was a slight crawling sound behind my ears.

I wiped the sticky beads of sweat from my forehead with my hand, and at the same time prayed in my heart that the girl with the sword in hand would come a little earlier than last time.

But again, I guessed wrong.

Click-click-click

The chaotic tapping sound behind my ears became clearer and clearer, like a giant centipede crawling towards me.

"! What's going on! Come on! Why hasn't TMD come yet?! ”

The story went far beyond what I had planned, and with no way out, I stood in the hollow cavern as if I had lost my mind, and listened to the scattered stones behind me spread unhindered to a few meters away.

But suddenly, in an instant, all the sounds were gone. The sounds of chewing, climbing, breathing, and the pounding of my heart were all lost in the moment.

It was a strange feeling, I could feel the monsters in front and behind, I could smell the stench coming from them, and the shiver of the air as it skimmed over the hairs. However, I felt like I was standing on the surface of a black hole, and all the signals that my ears could catch were absorbed and disintegrated, and finally a monotonous silent film with only black and white was constructed in front of my eyes.

I felt something touch my back, and then, as if my legs had been replaced with unfamiliar gears, I danced awkwardly and comically like dolls chained to a fishing line in a street stall, and walked towards the thinning darkness in the distance.

That's exactly what it is.

In a trance, my footsteps had stopped for a long time, and I was like a baby born in a raw place, with only pure curiosity left in my heart.

With its fat head, its rough limbs, and its wriggling and deformed internal organs, I certainly remembered who it was, and I knew it would be there.

But whose is the corpse that it held in its mouth?

In the hands of the broken shell, the blade stained with dirty green slipped and fell silently on the rock wall.

Cold light and sparks burst out, and a pair of pale arms stretched out from the back of my head, covering my eyes for me.

"Where am I?"

In the distance, there was a melting white, all the way to the gray dome.

"The End Garden, or as you call it yourself—the White Lake."

I turned my head to look at the upright man next to me, his thick but neat beard stretching from his temples to his chin, and a few bulging muscles wrapped under his slightly tight army-green vest.

He slowly approached me, an elusive smile under his dark green eyes.

It's a pity that now I not only can't understand the meaning behind that smile, but even everything as far as my eyes can see is so strange and distant.

The agitation from the depths of the torrent, the collision of the breeze and the rocks, are like a dream-inducing song.

Standing on the shore of the cold lake, there are thousands of bones as clean as branches in my eyes.

For a while, I couldn't say joy or sadness, I could only taste a trace of loneliness floating in my heart, and read out the questions that did not seek answers outside the meaning.

"Who am I?"

With that, I looked up as if I had completed a task that had to be done, and that was it.

The man still smiled, and asked rhetorically with interest,

"Does it matter?"

Perhaps thinking that there was some truth in what he said, or simply thinking that it was too much trouble to think about it, I hung my head noncommittally and stared silently at the green leaves peeking out from the cracks in the stones.

"We all have a lot of identities, don't we?"

The man's voice sounded again, and I didn't look up, but just pricked up my ears and listened carefully,

"But not all identities require names."

The first spontaneous doubt dripped like ink and blurred in my mind.

I finally closed my gaze, raised my eyebrows and asked,

"But if you don't have a name, how can you know that this identity refers to me?"

As if sensing that my doubts were a little naïve, the man's smile was much brighter than before, and he looked at the turbulent lake from afar, and returned in a calm tone.

"Could it be that if you remove the title, the familiar person will change?"

"But—"

I gritted my teeth, knowing full well that he was right, that names were indeed just a tool for differentiation, not an attribute that defined an individual, but to lose this unique identity of my own made me feel anxious and uneasy.

"How?"

The man bowed his head lightly and stared at me,

"Are you afraid that if you lose your name, people will forget about you? Or even yourself? ”

I didn't know how to answer, but my anxiety didn't diminish in the slightest.

However, the man didn't seem to care about my crampedness, he straightened up again, looked at the vast white lake in front of him blankly and said softly,

"Then all they want to remember from the beginning is your name."

"No!"

Hearing this, I suddenly found that I had found a point to refute, and immediately excitedly added,

"You're wrong, even though it's just a title, but after all, names are an innate label that people are born with, and to understand a person, it's an absolutely necessary first step."

"So from the beginning they learned about someone else, not you."

"Why—"

Before I could finish speaking, the man explained to himself,

"Because whether it is a name, title, role, identity, position, class, all these things, they never belong to you, they are created by you, but they are just labels that are forcibly added to make it easier for others to classify you. The more these labels, the more concrete and satisfying your image will be in their minds – it's not you who they want to know all the time, it's your label. ”

I felt that this was a strong argument, so I shouted a little frustratedly,

"Good! According to what you said, do people have to discard all these identities and labels before they can really get in touch? How is this possible! ”

But when the man turned his face to look at the look on his face, I suddenly realized that what I was saying was probably not the tip of the iceberg he had envisioned.

"It's not enough!"

The man stiffened his face and lowered his voice and roared at me, and in his fiery eyes there was an uncontrollable impulse and disgust,

"Even if you put these aside, there is still a part of you from others, and that is the thickest barrier between everyone, the deepest barrier - your body."

"What?"

I was a little shocked, and a little panicked, so that even my voice trembled a little in surprise.

"Didn't you say you were going to let me die? But if I give up my flesh, what can I do with others? ”

"Soul."

"Soul?"

"Soul!"

I know, he's not kidding, but I can't stop laughing,

"No, no, no, what exactly are you talking about? And no matter how you know for sure if something really exists, and even if you're right, what are you going to do to get people to touch each other in this way? This is fundamentally ...... Not ......."

Halfway through speaking, I suddenly felt like a fish in my throat, and I was stunned in place, because the man was not looking at me at this time, but at the endless white lake.

In an instant, I was struck by lightning, and I was almost blown down by the breeze when my steps were shaking.

"Is it ......?"

"Yes."

"But how could it be—"

"Nothing is impossible."

The man said, took a few steps forward, and stood by the blue-white and glorious Hu Shui, with a vicissitudes that did not match his appearance.

"Thousands of years ago, this was our way of life, infiltrating and blending in the lake, communicating and feeling what is a person's temperament and what is the essence of a person from an angle that you can't imagine now, without labels, without distance, everything is extremely familiar and comfortable."

He looked up at the prison dome,

"Until this intimacy develops, and there is an irresistible boredom - they know each other too well.

Then, when the first soul leaves, there will be more to follow.

They created all sorts of containers to hold their boring lives. Those who only want to find a little distance become animals and birds that run or soar, and even humans who can communicate with each other in complex language, because this not only blocks complete contact, but also does not allow each individual to be too separated.

But what about souls who need near-total isolation......"

The man narrowed his eyes, and his sharp gaze seemed to penetrate the ground at a depth of 100 meters.

“...... In the past so many years, the forest sea on the ground must have been quite lush. ”

After speaking, the man was silent for a long time, and only after a long time did he ask softly as if he had woken up from a dream,

"Hey, what about you, would you be obsessed with this loneliness?"

"Me?"

Sucking in the faint fragrance of the air, I didn't know how to react for a moment. After examining my empty shell, I shook my head weakly,

"No, that's not what I want to pursue."

"yes."

The man twisted his torso, but the muscular muscles showed a strange softness,

"What you wanted from the beginning to be accepted by others was your soul, after all—"

His eyes closed slightly, and he whispered,

"—you have nothing else."

I looked up stupidly, but I could only read a hint of relief in his expression, as if the labels that had been attached to me, the things I had experienced that had shaped me—

It's nothing more than shackles.

And before you know it, those shackles have been removed, and only a clean soul remains.

Suddenly, the man raised his right hand behind his back, pointed to the vast lake, and said in a breathtaking voice,

"There is where you should go, a Garden of Eden built at the end of life, the beginning of all things, and the zero point."

As he spoke, the man opened his arms and bathed his whole body in the swirling blue-white glow, as if tasting the holiness and pleasure in it. The eyes that gazed at me were so loving, so pure, and his voice were imprinted into my soul like a soldering iron.

"Let's go home."