Chapter Ninety-Two: Madness

Blue-eyed Blossom flashed a fierce expression and lunged forward again.

Young Master Lan steadied the iron staff with his left hand, pointed at Blossom with two fingers of his right, and cried, “By command, obey! Void-Mind Charm!”

A bolt of white lightning shot from his hand and blasted straight through Blossom’s head.

The spell hurled Blossom over the side of the cruise ship. At that very moment, a thunderclap lit the night sky. He suddenly came to himself, not understanding what had happened, but he clearly saw the dark shapes circling above the ship in the night.

When the storm had first arrived, those silhouettes had darted through the rain, and he had assumed they were strange beasts of some sort. But they were not. They were more than a dozen fierce dragons with enormous wings and savage faces, circling the vessel.

No such creatures existed in the myths of our civilization. Where had they come from?

They were clearly not part of the incident, yet they kept their distance and watched from afar.

But Blossom had no time to think further. The ship drifted farther and farther away as he fell into the black, icy sea.

The scene before him ended there. The world vanished from his eyes, and he tumbled into darkness.

In the endless sensation of weightlessness, he saw a faint glimmer begin to form beneath him.

Then an irresistible, maddening pull dragged him into that light.

Yet there was no brightness within it, only boundless darkness.

Some sorrows come not from parting, but from never having said goodbye properly. And for some farewells, we would rather vanish without a word.

Before him: only darkness.

Blossom felt himself surrounded by it, falling and falling without end.

It was as though he were trapped in a bottomless abyss.

He could not tell how long he had been falling. Minutes? Yet it felt like centuries.

He no longer remembered from where he had plunged, nor where he was bound to land.

Then he opened his eyes.

Have you ever had this experience in the dead of night? The room is utterly black, and when you open your eyes, you still see only endless darkness.

You may even wonder whether your eyes are open at all, or whether you have suddenly gone blind. The only thing that tells you that you are awake is the consciousness of your own opened eyes.

You tell yourself that there must be a ceiling, or something else there; the reason everything is black is simply that your sight is limited, not because nothing exists. So your eyes have deceived you. But perhaps it is not your eyes that deceive you deliberately; perhaps it is your brain.

Blossom waited like that for a long time, certain that he was lying on a bed, his whole body aching.

That all-over soreness was not new. He had more than one injury on his body.

But this time it was different. His whole body did not merely ache; it had gone numb, as if even his blood had congealed.

He tried to lift his numbed left hand. There was still a little feeling in it. He raised it before his eyes, and in the darkness he could vaguely make out the shadowy outline of his arm.

After a while, his eyes slowly began to perceive things in the dark, and then he saw dim moonlight spilling into the room.

There was, it turned out, a small window at the head of the bed, and it stood open. Perhaps the heavy clouds had blocked the moon a moment ago, leaving him unable to see anything.

Now, with a trace of light at last, he could make out the ceiling before him. He truly was lying on a narrow bed, set in the corner of the room. The room was small and cramped; if single beds were placed side by side, it could hold at most three.

Blossom rolled over, and his entire back was numb. He tried to sit up, and after three or four attempts finally managed to prop himself against the bedframe. Beside the bed was a writing desk, and above it was that little window. Iron bars were fixed across the window, as though it had been fitted with anti-burglary bars.

Blossom looked out through the window. A slender new moon hung in the sky.

So nearly two weeks had passed since the Mid-Autumn Festival. Had I been unconscious all this time?