An Unsettling Awakening

On a pleasant afternoon, Lan Sen awoke from a large, pristine, and soft bed.

‘Wasn’t I dead?’

He examined his empty hands and the clothes he wore, noting the absence of his vibro-gun and orange space work suit. Instead, he found himself clad in a loose, white pajama set.

Hastily, he swung his legs out of bed, his feet finding a pair of slippers. With a slight bend in his knees, he bounced a few times, testing his sound legs and the somewhat unsettling pull of Earth’s gravity.

‘Had I returned to Earth?’

Lan Sen, sharp-eyed, surveyed the disheveled dorm room. Through the window screen, he glimpsed the autumn scenery outside, and immediately realized he seemed to be back at his alma mater on Earth, Campet College.

‘Hadn’t Sector W5 of America been razed by terrorist hydrogen bombs?’ he mused. ‘And wasn’t my alma mater destroyed long ago in the war? Was this a temporal displacement, or merely a dream?’

With a heavy heart, Lan Sen stepped out of his private dormitory.

The autumn wind carried a melancholic chill, and his mood felt equally frigid, burdened by a jumble of unsettling thoughts. He walked slowly, following a path carpeted with fallen maple leaves, toward the white spherical laboratory in the distance. No one else was visible on the way to the lab; only the rustling leaves and the sighing wind accompanied him.

‘Why is there no one here? Is this a dream?’ He casually plucked a withered maple leaf, crumbling it gently in his fingers, feeling the genuine texture against his fingertips. Then, he extended his tongue, tasting the bitter tang of the dry leaf.

‘Pah—’

This dream felt incredibly real.

A vague intuition told Lan Sen that something important awaited him in the laboratory.

[Iris scan approved. Campet College, Augmented Human, Lan Sen Larson.]

The moment he passed through the automatic door, Lan Sen’s brain swam, the fluids within his skull sloshing violently. Then, a sensation of weightlessness enveloped him; he seemed to be ascending in an elevator.

‘Am I flying upwards?’

A sudden realization struck him: his laboratory should have been located in a multi-story complex, filled with numerous colleagues and robotic assistants. It certainly wasn’t a spherical building nestled close to the ground, nor was it an exclusive, independent lab.

Having concluded that this bizarre scene was likely just a dream, Lan Sen quickened his pace, running toward what he believed to be his laboratory.

He entered a room completely covered in white insulating material. All around him were metal devices crackling with blue electrical light; pendulums performing simple harmonic motion under electromagnetic fields; small, levitating discs suspended by magnetic force between two iron plates in a vacuum; and, at the center of a sealed vacuum chamber, a gravity well enclosed within a lead casing.

This was Lan Sen’s laboratory, dedicated to researching the principles of electromagnetic and gravitational conversion. He vaguely recalled often creating interesting small levitating toys here. However, the true focus of his research, the core of his work, was the sealed chamber containing the gravitational equipment.

Before the outbreak of war, the transition of gravitational field technology from theory to application represented an entirely new research direction. Beyond a few fundamental theories, there were no experimental precedents to guide them. Countless scientists had met their downfall here.

Lan Sen knew he possessed no extraordinary talent. He and his colleagues had merely relied on the immense research funds provided by the American Alliance, essentially ‘buying’ a barely successful but impractical project: the Gravity Well device.

The principle of this device was to confine and concentrate a gravitational field within a hollow cylindrical apparatus, thereby generating a gravitational source with a stable direction. While it superficially resembled the principle of an electromagnetic coil, the intricate details differed significantly.

The device’s greatest challenge lay in how to increase the gravitational field’s intensity. Otherwise, any task a gravitational device could accomplish could simply be replaced by an electromagnetic one. Gravity’s sole advantage, then, was its immunity to electrical charges and its efficacy on all matter.

Opening the laboratory’s computer and seeing that the Gravity Well research had made no further progress, Lan Sen breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Just as I thought. I knew with my mediocre aptitude, there was no way I could have developed a black hole device.’

He was now certain that this was merely a dream, replicated from his own memories.

But if this was a dream, was his real self dead, or had he fallen into an unawakening slumber?

‘Hey, look here, you blockhead!’ Just as Lan Sen was lost in thought, an untimely, mocking voice cut through the silence. ‘Are you blind? I’ve been standing here for ages, a living, breathing person, and you just ignore me? I get it, you think you’re dreaming, so you don’t take me seriously. But I’m a notorious Demon God, for goodness sake; show a little respect, won’t you?’

A petite girl, clad in a miniature version of a light laboratory work suit, with silver-gray short hair and gray-blue eyes, leapt silently from a table. In her hand, she waved an experimental report marked with numerous circles and crosses.

‘Who are you?’ Lan Sen did not recognize the small girl before him; no such figure existed in his memories. Yet, her actions of scribbling circles and crosses on the experimental report irked him.

Without a word, he lunged forward, snatching his report from the girl’s hand.

However, the instant he seized the report, he felt a chilling presence above him, and sinister whispers slithered into his mind, freezing him into an ice sculpture.

‘How dare you be rough with a loli, how dare you be rough with a loli… Lan Sen, you deserve ten thousand deaths; I’ll slice you into a thousand pieces and turn your heart into fuel…’ Vicious curses echoed in his ears, as a cold blade pressed against his heart.

This terror was no less potent than having a vibro-gun pressed against his temple. On the precipice of death, he had a premonition: if he were rude to the little girl before him again, he would lose even the right to dream in the next instant.

Then, the girl’s complaining voice pulled him back from the icy clutches of death into the dream.

‘Hey, X, I’m the narrator here, and you’re the observer; don’t overstep your bounds,’ the girl chided. ‘Besides, would a dignified Blasphemous Demon God like me get angry over the mere impudence of a mortal? At most, I’d just give him a good tongue-lashing.’ While Lan Sen was still dazed, Gloria made a swift, feinting move and snatched the experimental report back into her hands.

Shrugging, she then smugly tilted her nose upwards, fanning herself with the important experimental report as if it were a mere fan, and made a highly punchable, mocking face. ‘I don’t know how you view this report,’ she began, ‘but in my judgment, if one of my students dared to write a report like this—no investigation, no research, just patching together previous papers and experimental results, or constantly rehashing old ideas, or simply fantasizing and writing it like a science fiction novel—I would definitely give them a solid punch to the back of the head to help them remember. You should be grateful you’re not my student.’

Having said this, she symbolically swung her small fist with vigor.

‘Just like this, one punch to bash their brains out.’