Deep Sea Embers

The boundless thick fog rolled outside the window, and it seemed as if the whole world had disappeared beyond the fog. Only the chaotic sky light penetrated the fog and shone into the room, making this quiet room maintain a kind of semi-darkness. bright light.

In the slightly messy single apartment, Zhou Ming was lying in front of the table, and the sundries on the table were roughly pushed aside, and he described as haggard as he was writing:

"On the seventh day, the situation did not change. The thick fog shrouded everything outside the window, and the window was blocked by an unknown force... The whole room seemed to be 'cast' into some kind of abnormal space by something...

"There is no way to communicate with the outside world, no water or electricity, but the lights are always on and the computer can be turned on - even though I have unplugged it..."

As if there was a slight wind noise suddenly coming from the direction of the window, Zhou Ming, who was burying his head in writing in the diary, suddenly raised his head, his haggard eyes lit up slightly, but the next second he realized that it was just himself. The hallucinations, there was still only a thick pale fog lingering outside the window, and a dead world shrouded his small dwelling indifferently.

His eyes swept across the windowsill and saw the wrench and hammer that had been discarded indiscriminately—the traces of his attempts to leave the room in the past few days, but now these hard, coarse benzene tools just lay there quietly, as if mocking of his predicament.

After a few seconds, Zhou Ming's expression became calm again - with this unusual calm, he lowered his head again and returned to his writing:

"I'm stuck, completely clueless, I've even tried to tear down the roof, walls and floor over the past few days, but with all my strength I haven't been able to leave a trace on the wall. The room becomes like... a box 'cast' with the space, with no way out...

"Except for that door.

"But what's going on outside that door...is even more wrong."

Zhou Ming stopped again, he slowly examined the handwriting he had just left, and flipped through the diary carelessly, looking at the things he had left in the past few days - repressed words, meaningless thoughts, Irritated doodles, and bad jokes when you force your mind to relax.

He doesn't know what it means to write this down, who can read these gibberish things in the future, and in fact he's not even a person who is used to writing a diary - as a middle school teacher with very limited leisure time, he can Not much energy is spent on this.

But now, like it or not, he has a lot of free time.

After waking up, he was trapped in his room.

Outside the window is a thick fog that will not dissipate. The fog is so thick that you can't even see anything but the fog. The whole world seems to have lost the alternation of day and night. He died, the water and electricity were cut off, the mobile phone had no signal, and no matter how loud a movement was in the room, it would not attract rescue from the outside world.

It seems like an absurd nightmare. Everything in the dream is running against the laws of nature, but Zhou Ming has exhausted all methods to determine one thing: there are no hallucinations, no dreams, there are just worlds that are no longer normal. , and a temporarily normal self.

He took a deep breath, and his eyes finally settled on the only door at the end of the room.

An ordinary cheap white wooden door with a calendar that he forgot to replace last year and kept until today. The doorknob was polished brightly, and the door mats were placed a little crooked.

That door can be opened.

If this closed and alienated room is like a cage, then the most vicious thing about this cage is that it actually retains a door that can be opened at any time, tempting the prisoners in the cage to push the door and leave at all times—but The opposite of the gate was not the "outside" that Zhou Ming wanted.

There are no old but friendly corridors, no sunny streets and vibrant crowds, and nothing familiar to me.

There is only a strange and disturbing foreign land, and "over there" is also an inescapable predicament.

But Zhou Ming knew that there was not much time left for him to hesitate, and the so-called "choice" did not exist from the beginning.

His food reserves are limited, and only the last quarter of the barrels of mineral water is left. He has tried all means of getting out of trouble and asking for help in this closed room, and now there is only one way in front of him. That is to be prepared to go to the opposite side of the "door" for a chance of survival.

Perhaps, there is still a chance to investigate what caused this strange and embarrassing supernatural situation.

Zhou Ming took a deep breath, lowered his head and left the last few paragraphs in the diary: "...but no matter what, the only option now is to go to the other side of the door, at least it can be found on that weird ship. Some food, and my exploration and preparation over there over the past few days should be enough to survive on that ship...even though the preparation I can do over there is really limited.

"Finally, to the latecomers, if I can't come back, and someday in the future, some rescue workers or the like really open this room and see this diary, please don't put what I wrote down It's all considered an absurd story - it really happened, and although it's creepy, there really is a person named Zhou Ming who is trapped in a crazy and weird space-time vision.

"I tried my best to describe all the anomalies I saw in this diary, and also recorded all my efforts to get out of trouble. If there is really any 'later', please at least Remember my name, at least remember that this happened."

Zhou Ming closed the diary, threw the pen into the pen holder next to him, and slowly stood up from behind the desk.

It's time to leave, before falling into complete passivity and desperation.

But after a short thought, he did not go directly to the only door that could lead to the "outside", but went straight to his bed.

He must face the "foreign land" opposite the door with a safe attitude - and his current state, especially his mental state, is not good enough.

Zhou Ming didn't know if he could fall asleep, but even if he forced himself to lie on the bed to empty his mind, it would be better than going to the "opposite" in a state of mental exhaustion.

Eight hours later, Zhou Ming opened his eyes.

Outside the window was still a chaotic haze, and the unidentifiable light of day and night brought a depressing gloom.

Zhou Ming directly ignored the situation outside the window. He took out the food from the little reserve left, and ate it until he was full, and then came to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room.

The man in the mirror still had messy hair, looked rather embarrassed, and had no temperament to speak of, but Zhou Ming still stared at himself in the mirror, as if to permanently imprint this look in his mind.

He stared at the mirror like this for several minutes, and then whispered to himself, as if to say to the person in the mirror: "Your name is Zhou Ming, at least on the 'side', your name is Zhou Ming , keep that in mind at all times.”

After that, he turned to leave.

Coming to the door that he was all too familiar with, Zhou Ming took a deep breath and put his hand on the handle.

Apart from a suit of clothes, he did not carry any extra things, neither food nor self-defense equipment. This is the experience left by the previous "explorations" - he couldn't bring anything except himself. this door.

In fact, he even felt that even this "self" had to be questioned, because...

Zhou Ming turned the handle and pushed open the door. A gray-black mist that was rising and shrinking appeared in front of him like a curtain, and in the rising and shrinking mist, he seemed to have heard the sound of waves coming in. ear.

Stepping across the layer of fog, the slightly salty sea breeze came towards him, the illusory sound of the waves in his ears became real, and there was a slight shaking sensation under his feet, Zhou Ming opened his eyes after a brief dizziness, The place was a wide, empty wooden deck, the towering masts standing under the dark clouds, and the slightly undulating sea beyond the ship's side.

Zhou Ming lowered his head and saw a stronger body than he remembered, a captain's uniform that looked exquisitely crafted and expensive but completely unfamiliar in style, a pair of palms with thick knuckles, and the A classic-looking black flintlock pistol.

Yes, even "self" has a question mark.

(Mom! I'm back!)