Null Nocturne — Chapter list

A late-night student waits for a train that isn't on any timetable, and a quiet old man warns him this isn't his stop.

Home at dawn with no memory of the walk back, he finds clerks won't meet his eyes and taxis won't stop — and a slip of red paper pressed inside his notebook.

His mother quietly offers to listen but won't push; at the daytime station and store, he realizes more than one person already knows what he is.

Gu Mingye moves through an ordinary school day and finds everyone — clerk, guard, classmates, teachers, a watcher across the street — looking past his face and at him.

In a lesson on how groups instinctively avoid a marked individual, Teacher Lin meets his eyes and taps his book — telling him, without a word, that she sees.

He cooks dinner and finally tells his mother what happened; she asks whether there was a cyan oil lamp, and reveals the women of their family have known of this for generations.

Through a sleepless night, Mingye watches phantom footsteps, an unexplained pool of water, and old marks deepen, then messages his mother, who comes home and asks him to tell her everything.

Mingye recounts the night to his mother, who reads the changed slip, passes on his grandmother's words, sets two conditions for school, and on the way out he sees a coated stranger at the bridge shrine.

A school day where teachers signal to Mingye in coded ways, surveillance seems lifted, and he deliberately gives no response, learning that keeping his routine means choosing what not to look at.

Gu Mingye gets through an ordinary school afternoon, then his mother reveals a wooden box his late grandmother left for the next one in the family who can see.

They open the box together to find three things — a talisman slip, an old photo of two young women at a temple, and a hand-drawn map of the Old River District marked with five red circles.