Lan Yingchen

A high-schooler in Yunjin in 2065, seventeen years old, raised single-handedly by his mother. He is calm, curious, and loves to reason things out. He carries a secret he has never spoken aloud to anyone: the things in this city that no one else can see, he can see them.

On her deathbed his grandmother left him a bronze mirror, and a single sentence: the things you will see, your grandma saw them too when she was young—don't be afraid, but don't speak of them either.

That day, for the 28th time, he saw 'the thing no one sees'—a ring floating above the street corner, its line broken somewhere between the three and four o'clock positions. The first 27 times, those things vanished the instant he looked; this time, the ring refused to go.

He tried to point it out to a classmate, and got the same old answer: that's a lamp, that's a cloud, that's that building, you're just too tired. What chilled him more was that this broken ring was identical, line for line, to the pattern on the back of his grandmother's bronze mirror.

An admission letter appeared in his mailbox, from a school called 'Myriad Academy.' The strange thing was: he showed the letter to his mother, to his classmates, to his homeroom teacher—everyone could read the words on it, yet the moment they turned away, none of them could remember those four characters, 'Myriad Academy.'

Only he remembered. After noon, the letter was supposed to vanish on its own, yet it stayed—because he had already decided he would go.

Carrying the letter, the bronze mirror, and his notebook, he stepped into an earth-god shrine in Beigu. Passing through the main hall and pushing open an old wooden door behind the statue, what lay beyond was not the alley behind the shrine, but a long corridor paved with white marble and carved with dragon motifs from every dynasty. His phone lost all signal completely.

After 420 steps, he walked into a central courtyard and saw a white tower, surrounded by entrances in five entirely different civilizational styles. His roommate Ge Zhiheng waited for him in the corridor of the Eastern Branch and tossed out a single line: you got here in 8 days. It's not that you saw early—it's that you were found too early.

Nahid of the Middle Eastern Branch poured the sand from her pocket onto the table. The sand piled itself into a circle with a gap, and from the circle's center rose a smaller circle—identical to what he had seen within the 'Void' that dawn.

Through an Indian classmate translating from her Arabic, she told him: 3 years ago, I dreamed of a boy with a glowing circle inside his body. Today, the sand tells me that boy is you.

The meaning of those two overlapping circles slowly surfaced. The general-studies teacher told him through metaphor: one circle is one 'entry'; two overlapping circles mean being called by two places at once—and that very faint voice that kept calling him in his dreams, within the Void, was perhaps another him.

That same day, Aria Winter of the Western Branch warned him: the second shadow that walked out of the mirror is not her, but another her. He began to realize that the one being 'copied' might not be him alone.

He began recording at fifteen. At first only to prove he was not losing his mind—if the things were hallucinations, keeping a long enough record would surely turn up something that failed to line up.

The format is fixed: date, time, place, what was seen, who was nearby, whether they reacted. He does not write reflections; writing them would colour the next judgement.

By the 28th occurrence he had three years of data in hand. Nothing in it failed to line up, and that fact unsettled him more than the seeing did.

The notebook is not uploaded and never photographed. He worked out early that if these pages were ever seen by someone else he would have to explain them. He still has not worked out how.

His grandmother left him a bronze mirror. The face is too clouded to reflect anyone, and the pattern on the back has been worn flat—plainly carried by someone for many years.

What she said as she gave it to him was short, short enough that he took it for an old woman's figure of speech. He put the mirror in a desk drawer and did not take it out for years.

After the seeing began he brought it out a few times. The mirror does nothing—it does not glow, does not warm, does not show anything else.

He carries it anyway. He cannot altogether explain why, except that it is the one thing his grandmother left him and explicitly tied to this.