It was a mechanism. A mechanism capable of ensnaring a person without their knowledge.

Ma En understood at last: eyes had been watching him — many eyes — but the eyes themselves were not the culprits. Watching for individual watchers was useless; it had always been useless. Something else looked through those eyes, something behind them — a person? A thing? He didn't know and couldn't guess. But if such a thing existed, then it had already crossed into the territory of the genuinely bizarre, and no framework in his existing knowledge could catch it or explain it.

Of course, you could force explanations. Field theory, string theory, energy-information theory, quantum theory, metaphysics — any of these could be bent to fit. But it would accomplish nothing. Every such inference was grounded in nothing more than subjective assumption.

A vast mechanism encircled him. The mechanism was objective, real, operational. But objectively, humanity might not possess the foundational understanding required to decode it — just as humanity couldn't truly explain the universe, couldn't truly explain the galaxy, couldn't truly explain the hidden nature of what burned inside the sun.

Ordinary people believed they understood how the universe was born. The most familiar account was the Big Bang. Before field theory gained currency, scientists had been equally confident that atoms could explain everything.

But how many people knew that dozens of theories had been proposed for the question of how the universe came into being and in what form it existed? That of the nine most credible, the Big Bang was not the most favored?

Every theory had its blind side. There was always some facet it couldn't account for that another, less regarded theory could. There was always some mathematical formula that broke down where a different formula held.

Ma En loved mathematics precisely because mathematics was forever striving toward beauty — and every time it seemed to achieve it, a flaw appeared. To this day, human mathematics had never reached a state of genuine beauty and harmony. And every theory built on that mathematics inherited the same imperfection.

Not field theory. Not string theory. Not quantum theory. Not metaphysics. Perhaps whenever a subjective consciousness observed an objective reality, distortion was inherent — and that distortion amplified itself the moment thought began.

All imprecision was objective and inevitable.

Science renewed itself through constant overthrow, yet there were always people who wanted to believe they'd already seen it all, cracked God's code. People who tried to force the genuinely incomprehensible into frameworks they'd convinced themselves — or hoped — had already "solved everything."

Just like the past month's version of himself.

Just like the version of himself right now.

When the unknown and the bizarre truly existed, truly manifested in your immediate surroundings, and you chose to ignore it — chose to sprint full-speed toward a world where the bizarre didn't exist — you would, inevitably, make the wrong decisions.

How could you not? The error was objective and inevitable.

In his final instant of clarity, Ma En understood at last what the Room 3 neighbor had meant by you can never escape. No "realistic measures" would physically stop him. But there existed a situation, a mechanism, a bizarre thing that made escape structurally impossible — not through walls or chains, but through the architecture of perception itself.

He hadn't been alert to the bizarre. He hadn't thought about the right thing. He couldn't have guessed it. Couldn't have understood it. So how could he possibly have escaped?

Even the smallest test, the most transparent feint — he'd still triggered the mechanism.

No — turn it around. Didn't his own situation prove, to some degree, that the Room 4 Ghost Story really did contain the genuinely bizarre?

— There's a feeling I used to have. The past version of me believed the bizarre truly existed. Having that belief confirmed — that alone is enough to feel excited. Glad.

— But can I hold on to this? Will I wake up with it intact? Did my past month's self really do nothing at all? Or has this — today's version of me, this clarity — happened before, over and over, and failed every time?

— My past self would have entered with an even stronger conviction that the bizarre was real. And still lost. Which means the bizarre in play here is far beyond what any human effort can resist.

A faint voice murmured near Ma En's ear — not a pleasant sound, and not intelligible. It was pain. It was torment. But Ma En also sensed that the voice was not something external — it was his own voice, rising from the deepest part of himself, trying to tell him something. Something he should have thought of on his own.

He couldn't make out the words, yet he understood the content:

This vast, bizarre mechanism, when it produced its specific effect, caused the target to lose memory and lose the direction of their own thinking. This method of acting directly on individual consciousness had been theorized and applied in human psychology.

It was dreaming.

Ma En's eyes snapped open. In the same instant, he understood his situation. He was inside a dream, engaged in a contest on the level of consciousness. He couldn't determine whether this was his own dream — in theory, the only dream he could enter was his own, but if bizarre factors were involved, even that theory couldn't be trusted.

He lay flat on the ground, rigid as a body laid in a coffin. Torrential rain hammered down on him; water had already pooled beneath his body, and he couldn't tell when the rain had begun. The mud-water was genuinely cold — real against his skin — and yet the cold made his head feel clearer than it had ever been.

"Bringing conscious activity into a specific frequency, and at that frequency, interfering with the subject's consciousness — this is a theory humans have proposed, and using drugs and electrical stimulation, they've achieved measurable results. The theory's human trials, the practical applications in criminal interrogation..." Ma En spoke as though addressing something in the air, or perhaps only himself, as though channeling the voices of those researchers at the moment of their experiments: "The subject's consciousness was as though dreaming..."

He paused. Still lying flat, he slowly removed the black-framed glasses that were, somehow, still on his face.

"But that's only the human version." A cold half-smile crossed his face. He got to his feet, tossed the glasses on the ground, and crushed them under his heel. "I don't need these."

Above him hung the moon — so vast it looked ready to fall, and yet it produced no sense of unreality. Storm clouds blanketed the sky, but the enormous moon had torn straight through the cloud layer. Rain whipped sideways in the wind; anything more than a dozen meters away dissolved into blur. Even so, one direction pulled at him with an overpowering sense of déjà vu, as though he'd walked this way many times before. He couldn't recall the specifics, but the impression was too deep to ignore.

Dangerous.

Ma En understood perfectly well what it meant if he'd walked this way many times and remembered none of it.

Even so — to verify. Perhaps his past selves had thought the same. He chose to move toward the pull.

A dozen steps in, a feeling drew his eyes to the left. He pushed through mud and tall grass and found it: a black umbrella, ruined almost beyond recognition. Barely a skeleton — ribs stripped of their canopy, shaft snapped halfway down, mechanism parts and drug-capsule fragments scattered in the muck around it. The state of the thing was vivid enough to let him picture the person who'd carried it: stumbling, panicked, bones broken — or dragged here by force and slammed into the earth until the frame gave out.

— Might not have kept all his limbs, either.

"What a mess." Ma En said this to himself alone, and picked up the wreckage.

He knew perfectly well that the danger ahead would not be stopped by a functioning umbrella, let alone this ruin — otherwise it wouldn't be in this condition. But a weapon in hand was a weapon in hand, even if only for morale. He was going forward regardless; there were things he needed to confirm.

Another hundred meters. More footprints on the ground — faint, waterlogged, outlines wrecked by standing water and soft mud, but roughly the same shoe size as his. A few steps further, and he caught the silhouette of a second black umbrella.

The second umbrella. Its canopy was down to a palm-sized scrap of fabric, but the frame was intact and the shaft unbroken — markedly better than the first. He dropped the first and picked up the second. He checked the mechanism — destroyed — but when he unscrewed the head of the shaft to access the drug compartment: empty.

The first umbrella's location had still had drug capsules scattered on the ground around it.

Used the drugs and still couldn't last?

Another few dozen meters. A third black umbrella. This time he didn't see its outline first — a feeling, nothing more, and he followed it into a narrow crevice between rocks where the umbrella had been deliberately wedged. Hidden. Cached.

— Still me? What decision was I making? What was I thinking?

The third umbrella was better than the second. The canopy was perforated — corrosion holes, and torn sections — and the shaft bore several marks that looked distinctly like bullet impacts.

— You're kidding. He blocked rounds with the umbrella shaft?

Ma En unscrewed the drug compartment. The pills were intact.

He dropped the second umbrella and kept the third.

He didn't go further. The three umbrellas had already told him a great deal. No written messages, no remains he could identify as his own, but if these all belonged to past iterations of himself, then the conclusion was plain: they had been fleeing. Even inside the dreamscape, the danger could not be fought. Not with weapons, not with drugs, not with will.

More than that — it was sufficient proof that this was not his own dream. Artifacts persisting between visits meant the dreamscape existed independently of any single dreamer.

Dying here almost certainly meant losing his memory and his reasoning upon waking. It wouldn't kill him in reality, but surviving the dream was a prerequisite for surviving the waking world — because a Ma En who woke up without memory or logic had no capacity to resist. He didn't know how his previous selves had managed to recover their clarity, but he doubted the Room 3 neighbor's prompting was the original trigger.

— No. Maybe that man saw what my past self did in here, and that's why he came out to nudge me this time.

— Next time, there might not be another chance.

The positions and orientations of the three umbrellas were suspicious in their own right. If those details were signals left by past selves, then the direction he should run had already been determined.

Ma En looked around. Nothing visibly threatening. The roar of rain and wind smothered any unnatural sounds, but the swaying trees, the oppressive atmosphere, the curtained visibility — all of it made him certain that the thing no human effort could match was in there somewhere, watching him through the murk. Hidden. Cold-blooded. Patient.

This was only his imagination.

He couldn't confirm whether he'd already been spotted. But he didn't hesitate. He angled away from the line the three umbrellas had drawn, turned, and broke into a sprint.

The muddy ground resisted every stride, and he had to keep his senses open in all directions — alert for an attack from any quarter. The rain hammered down. Thunder rolled across the blackened clouds. Lightning lit the sky in pulses of purple-red — exactly what he'd seen through the train window before consciousness went dark.

Then — a bolt of searing white dropped from the sky and struck a tall tree directly in his path. The tree erupted into flame in an instant, fire wrapping its trunk despite the downpour, rain unable to touch it.

Ma En registered: that's not possible.

Of course it wasn't. And what followed was less possible still.

As he watched, the burning tree lurched upward — heaved by a force from below, pushed half a body-length out of the earth. Soil and rock exploded outward in every direction, the violence of a giant rising to its feet and throwing its arms wide. The root system — vast, deeply anchored, spreading in every direction — tore free of the ground and into the air, whipping and lashing the earth like tentacles.

Stone fragments pelted Ma En's body, stinging through the wet fabric. The shock of impact snapped him back. He wanted to shout, wanted to say something — but there was no one here, and clearly no time for shouting. The scene was beyond anything he'd encountered, but screaming at it would accomplish nothing.

The tremor forced him to check his footing. The transformation ahead sent him veering in another direction without a thought. The rain, the shaking ground, the icy mud, the pain in his body — all of it was real enough that he no longer wanted to debate whether this was a dream. If he ended up dead regardless, the distinction wouldn't matter.