Ch. 010| The Dream from Three Years Ago

Dinner over, 19:50.

Ge Zhiheng: "We leave once you're ready."

Lan Yingchen tucked the bronze mirror into the bottom drawer of the nightstand, left the letter in the top drawer, and slid the paper notebook into the inner pocket of his coat.

"...Is this all right?" Lan Yingchen asked.

"The bronze mirror is safer left here," Ge Zhiheng said. "The Middle-Eastern College tends to 'read' objects. Nahid won't read it of her own accord, but the implements her family has laid out may react to the mirror."

Lan Yingchen nodded. He checked the mirror's position once more, then followed Ge Zhiheng downstairs.

---

The walk from the Eastern College to the Middle-Eastern College kept to the outer rim of the Main Court. Lan Yingchen had never taken this route before.

Night had fallen completely. The flagstones of the Main Court were lit by a faint glow he couldn't quite name — not moonlight, not lamplight, more as though the stone itself were giving off the very slightest light from somewhere within, just enough to see the path by, not enough to make out detail. In the dark the White Tower stood taller than it did by day, its outline edged with a thin pallor. The cloud layer over its summit hung lower than it had that morning, the sort that looks like rain but never breaks.

They passed the outer wall of the Forbidden Library. Ge Zhiheng was brief: "Off-limits. First-years aren't allowed in for the first year."

Lan Yingchen didn't ask why.

At the entrance to the Middle-Eastern College, he stopped.

The entrance was not a door — it was an arch the color of desert sand, faint star-charts etched across its span. Lan Yingchen studied the chart for a second; it felt familiar, though he couldn't say how.

Ge Zhiheng: "Nahid is waiting inside."

The two of them stepped through the arch.

---

The atmosphere inside the Middle-Eastern College was nothing like the Eastern College.

Here ran vaulted corridors that opened one into another, the opposite in every way of the Eastern courtyard-and-cloister design. The walls were sandstone, the floor polished stone. Small oil lamps hung low, their flames an orange-yellow. A faint scent threaded the air — a slightly sweet smell of dried plants, unlike the sandalwood common in the Eastern College.

Two upperclassmen crossed from another corridor, glanced at Lan Yingchen, offered no greeting, and walked on.

Ge Zhiheng: "They knew you were coming."

"...Everyone knows?"

"The Middle-Eastern College has ten students. Maybe four of them know. The other six will have guessed," Ge Zhiheng said.

Lan Yingchen didn't ask for particulars.

The central court of the Middle-Eastern College was not a well — it was a sand pool. A round, shallow basin at the center, the sand a deeper shade than ordinary sand, as though it had been roasted. At its center stood an ancient bronze astrolabe with a very fine needle — and just as Lan Yingchen looked at the needle, it moved, a single faint twitch.

The astrolabe pointed at him.

Lan Yingchen paused for half a second.

Ge Zhiheng noticed it too. But offered no explanation.

"Nahid is on the second floor," Ge Zhiheng said.

---

Nahid's room was in the deepest corner of the second floor.

Before its door stood Nahid's senior — the one from yesterday's class, in the deep-violet robe and the headscarf embroidered with silver star-charts. She looked at Lan Yingchen and Ge Zhiheng, inclined her head slightly, pushed the door open to let them in, then followed them inside and settled onto a small cushion against the wall by the door.

Once inside, Lan Yingchen saw four people in the room.

Nahid sat on the floor at the far end, a small candlestand and a sand pouch before her. Aarav sat beside her, still in the dark-brown, gold-threaded robe from that morning. Against the far wall there was also a middle-aged man Lan Yingchen had never seen, in a deep-violet robe and a silver-edged headscarf, expressionless, like a sentry but not a threatening one. Nahid's senior took her place on the cushion against the near wall.

Ge Zhiheng: "The one against the far wall — he's an elder of the Middle-Eastern College. Nahid's senior's teacher."

"...A chaperone?"

"When the Middle-Eastern lineage receives an outsider — especially for a revealing like this — both the senior and the elder have to be present," Ge Zhiheng said. "I'll be here too. Aarav is the interpreter."

Lan Yingchen sat down on the small cushion across from Nahid.

Nahid inclined her head slightly. Lan Yingchen returned the gesture.

Aarav spoke, in Chinese. "...Nahid will tell of her dream from three years ago. She asks that you not interrupt while she speaks. When she's finished, she'll wait for your questions."

Lan Yingchen nodded.

---

Nahid began. She spoke in Arabic. Aarav listened and rendered it into Chinese as she went — slowly; his Chinese wasn't precise, and at times he stopped to find a way to say it.

"...Three years ago. One night," Aarav translated. "I dreamed of — a place that was all black. No roof and no walls, only black."

"In that black place there was a boy. The boy was about — fourteen. A year older than I was then. He was crying."

Lan Yingchen's breath caught for a moment.

"Inside the boy's body — 'inside,' not outside the body — there was a ring. The ring was glowing, the light a pale blue, not harsh."

"At first I thought he was being lit by some light. Only when I came closer did I see — the light was coming out of his body."

"There were two shadows within the ring. One was him. The other — also seemed to be him, but somehow a little different."

Lan Yingchen couldn't quite follow. Aarav translated slowly, sometimes stopping to look at Nahid for confirmation; Nahid would give a small nod, and then he'd go on.

"At first I thought it was someone already dead," Aarav translated. "But Nahid says — no, that one was a person 'being called.'"

"...What does that mean?" Lan Yingchen asked, low.

Aarav exchanged a few words in Arabic with Nahid, then translated: "...Nahid says she can't interpret it either. But she remembers the feeling. It was 'someone calling him, and him being called over.'"

Lan Yingchen thought of the voice in his own dream.

---

"Then — the boy turned and looked at me," Aarav translated. "He saw me."

Lan Yingchen had assumed Nahid would say the boy was startled, or frightened. But the sentence that followed was nothing of the kind.

"The boy looked at me for a few seconds, as though he recognized me," Aarav translated. "He stopped crying."

"He spoke."

"He said one thing. In the dream Nahid heard his voice. Very faint, as though through a layer of water."

Lan Yingchen's breath caught for a moment.

"As though through a layer of water" — that was the very thing he had heard inside the Void today, the phrase he had been repeating in his notebook for days. The way the boy in Nahid's dream three years ago had spoken, and the "voice calling his name" he'd heard today, had the same texture.

"I couldn't understand what he said," Aarav went on translating. "But I wrote the sounds down in Arabic letters."

Nahid took a small slip of paper from the pouch in front of her and held it out to Lan Yingchen. The paper was coarse; three Arabic letters were written on it in ink.

Lan Yingchen couldn't read it.

Nahid glanced at Aarav. Aarav took the paper, looked at it for three seconds, and then — in a more standard pronunciation — sounded out the three syllables:

"Lán — Yǐng — Chén."

Lan Yingchen — did not move.

But something inside him aligned itself once more, much like the "alignment" when the White Tower bell rang, only deeper.

Aarav looked at Lan Yingchen and said, in calm Chinese:

"What the boy in the dream said — was your own name."

---

Lan Yingchen didn't respond at once.

He looked at that small slip of paper — three Arabic letters spelling his name. Three years ago a thirteen-year-old Middle-Eastern girl, in some room over by the Persian Gulf, had dreamed of him, then written down the sounds of his name in Arabic and filed them into her family's records.

Three years. She had searched for three years.

"Nahid says —" Aarav translated, "in her family's records she wrote: 'There is a boy who does not exist. I have dreamed a dream of a person who does not exist.'"

"But she kept remembering this dream," Aarav went on. "Because the boy cried so truly."

---

Lan Yingchen didn't ask at once.

Cried so truly.

In that stretch of time three years ago, he hadn't cried in front of anyone. Not at the funeral. Not in the car on the way home. Not at school. He'd chosen a version of himself — the version that was fine, the version that kept going to school, the version that didn't trouble his mother.

Only once had he truly cried. Three days after the funeral, on an afternoon when his mother had left for work, he was alone in his grandmother's living room, going through her old drawers, and found a scarf she had knitted by hand. The scarf still carried that light scent of hers. He held the scarf, sat in the chair where his grandmother always used to sit, and cried for about forty minutes. No one was there.

Lan Yingchen had always believed those forty minutes belonged to him alone.

But Nahid — on the other side of the world — on some night in that stretch of time, had dreamed of him.

"...Your dream," Lan Yingchen asked. "What — season was it?"

Aarav translated, Nahid answered, Aarav translated back:

"...Autumn. Cool. She was asleep in her own room."

"...Autumn," Lan Yingchen said.

His grandmother had died that autumn. Those forty minutes in her living room, three days after the funeral — that was that autumn too.

Lan Yingchen had meant to ask "which day, exactly" — but he didn't. The exact day might match, or might not. Whichever day it was, he had already been seen.

---

He asked something else instead.

"...Why confirm it's me today?"

Aarav and Nahid spoke briefly in Arabic.

"...Today, inside the Void, the sand told her," Aarav translated. "When the sand made two rings, Nahid saw the ring on the boy from her dream three years ago. The same one."

"She says she's confirmed that you're the boy from her dream."

Lan Yingchen didn't press further.

He asked something else instead.

"...What do the two rings mean?"

Nahid thought for a moment, said a passage in Arabic, and Aarav translated it haltingly:

"...She says she won't interpret it. She says it's beyond her family's ability. She says —" Aarav paused, checking Nahid's words, "she says you should ask Acharya Devraj."

"Devraj?"

Aarav nodded. Nahid nodded too.

Lan Yingchen looked at Ge Zhiheng. Ge Zhiheng nodded as well.

"Tomorrow — morning — you ask him," Nahid said directly, in her limited Chinese.

"...All right," Lan Yingchen said.

---

Nahid put the small slip of paper back into the pouch. "...This — I keep. My family's record."

Lan Yingchen nodded. It had never been his to begin with.

But a question occurred to him.

"...Nahid," he said. "Today — this morning, in the Void — the sand made two rings — why confirm it's me only today? Why not sooner, in three years?"

Aarav finished translating. Nahid thought for a moment, answered in Arabic, and Aarav rendered it into Chinese:

"...She says her family's records have written down many 'people dreamed of.' Most of them don't exist; a dream is just a dream. She doesn't usually go looking for them."

"But this dream, she remembered for three years. Because the boy cried so truly."

"Until today — she did the Void, the sand ran out of her pouch on its own and piled into the ring on the boy she dreamed of three years ago. Only then did she know the boy was in this very class today."

Lan Yingchen didn't press further. But he noted this in his mind — Nahid's family records held "many people dreamed of." Which meant each generation of Middle-Eastern foretellers dreamed of many "people who would appear in the future," most of whom were never found afterward and were filed away as "a dream is just a dream." Lan Yingchen was one of the few who had been found.

---

On the way back to the Eastern College, Ge Zhiheng walked a little faster. Lan Yingchen followed behind, sorting through everything that had just been said.

The dream from three years ago:
- The boy, fourteen, crying — matches Lan Yingchen's grandmother having just died
- A glowing ring inside the boy's body — matches the "Seeing" anomaly
- Two shadows within the ring — one him, one the him "being called"
- The boy said his own name — matches the "someone calling me" in Lan Yingchen's dream

The last point weighed most: what the boy in Nahid's dream said — was "Lan Yingchen." For three years Nahid had held onto these sounds without knowing whose they were. Today it was confirmed.

But turned around, this point led somewhere else — the "someone calling me" Lan Yingchen had heard in his own dream, that voice — could it have been himself?

Lan Yingchen stopped walking.

Ge Zhiheng stopped too. "...What is it?"

Lan Yingchen thought for a moment, and decided not to say. The thought ran too deep, and saying it now he couldn't put it in order anyway. When he asked Devraj tomorrow, the answer might surface on its own.

"...Nothing. Keep going."

Ge Zhiheng looked at him for a second, then walked on.

---

When they reached the Main Court, Lan Yingchen turned, without thinking, to glance back toward the Middle-Eastern College.

The braziers of the Main Court had already gone out. The cloud layer over the White Tower's summit had thickened a little since they'd come. Lan Yingchen wondered whether anyone was inside the White Tower, whether Devraj lived in it, and how he was to find Devraj tomorrow morning to put his questions to him.

Ge Zhiheng seemed to read his worry.

"Tomorrow — after class — you walk straight over and ask," Ge Zhiheng said. "Devraj won't dodge your questions."

"...I'm worried that if I ask, he won't answer."

"He will," Ge Zhiheng said. "Nahid's already passed you on to him — he knows you'll ask."

---

Back to the dormitory. It was already dark beyond the window. In the courtyard Amara's drumming had begun again — the same rhythm of "one beat, a three-second pause, another beat."

Lan Yingchen took the bronze mirror out of the nightstand drawer and looked at it. The ring was still on the back. The gap between the three- and four-o'clock marks.

Possibly the same ring as the one glowing on the boy in Nahid's dream three years ago.

Possibly the same.

He put the bronze mirror back and lay down.

That drumming in the courtyard — "one beat, a three-second pause, another beat" — went on.

Lan Yingchen closed his eyes and listened.

The drum's "one beat" overlapped, very faintly, with the voice off to his left and behind that called his name. But this time it was clearer than last night — "Lan Ying Chen," three syllables, falling onto the drum's first beat, second beat, third beat.

Lan Yingchen opened his eyes, took the paper notebook from his coat's inner pocket, and wrote with a mechanical pencil:

The name — it's someone else calling me.
The drumbeats line up; all three syllables match.

He closed the notebook. The eight rings on the beam were still there. The gap between the three- and four-o'clock marks, all eight facing the same way.

【Ch. 010 End · Eastern College → Nahid's Room, Middle-Eastern College → Eastern College Dormitory】