Chapter 3
Standing in the bathroom and pondering over what had happened, Wen Qian started to convince herself.
She must have had an illusion, the pearl had dropped during the day.
What about the wound? Was the wound also her illusion? But the wound had suddenly disappeared, that was unscientific!
Should she inflict a wound on herself to test it out? Better not do that.
Just when Wen Qian doubted herself, something even more unscientific happened.
She just muttered to herself: "Could it be that the wound ate the pearl? Can it eat other things too?"
Then, right before Wen Qian's eyes, the hair clip disappeared completely, in her own hands.
The hair clip vanished in her hands!
So Wen Qian picked up a comb.
What kind of magic trick was this?!
Could this be a ghost? Recent college graduate Wen Qian started to doubt life itself.
Where did the disappeared items go? Just as Wen Qian was examining her palms, the items reappeared in her hands.
So what she saw was real!
The disappeared items could come back!
How did they disappear into thin air?
She blinked hard, then reached for the soap.
Thinking, would this disappear too?
Then the soap was gone too.
Her hands had become black holes?
Wen Qian went to the kitchen, opened the cabinet, and reached for the bowls and plates left by previous tenants, and the items disappeared one by one from her hands.
My god! Things that she touched disappeared, where did they all go?
Would her wallet disappear if she touched it?
She was already very poor.
After rummaging around the kitchen, she finally noticed the trash can.
She wondered if she even needed to throw out trash anymore, she could just let her palm take care of it.
But on second thought, that would make her a trash can, which felt weird.
The disappeared items could come back out, so where were they in between disappearing and reappearing?
Also, this felt strangely familiar.
"This, this is just a storage space!" Wen Qian had only been exposed to online novels in college, and had read many stories about storage spaces.
Could it be that this pearl hair clip she bought opened up the space when it encountered her blood?
This was too bizarre!
Did she hit some huge luck here?
The storage space, how big could it be? It would be great if she could go in and take a look, Wen Qian thought.
Then Wen Qian realized the scene before her eyes was no longer the kitchen.
Below her feet was a gray floor, the four walls were also gray, but right above was white, emanating soft light that allowed her to see everything in this space.
On the floor were the soap and bowls and plates that had disappeared.
As Wen Qian looked around this space, she felt it was about the same size as her small rented room, a little over 2 meters wide and 4 meters long. As for the height, she couldn't quite tell for now.
When she wanted to leave, she blinked and found herself back in the kitchen.
So Wen Qian immediately went back to her room, closed the doors and windows, drew the curtains, and quietly tried going in and out of the space alone in the dark.
She realized that only her gaze could enter the space, and gradually she could see the inside of the space in her mind, but clearly, her body could not enter the space.
Everything inside the space was clear in her mind.
She tried putting her bed inside and found she could do so, so she put all the items from her room inside, and found the process very smooth.
Taking things back out was also easy.
As Wen Qian tried it herself, she found herself getting more and more adept.
With this portable storage space, wouldn't moving be even more convenient?
But Wen Qian had no plans to move, and planned to use this space as her storage room.
She started putting things she didn't need for now into the space, like her luggage and her thick winter clothes.
To test the space, she even put the frozen meat from the fridge inside, and a cup of hot water, to see if this space could maintain the temperature of items.
Just because this space appeared, Wen Qian was very excited, and didn't go to bed until midnight after showering. Even so, her mind was still thrilled, suspecting she was the chosen one, wondering if she should buy a lottery ticket to see if she would win.
The excitement persisted until after 1 am before she fell asleep listening to thunderstorm white noise in her earphones.
Wen Qian had a dream.
Sometimes it was her own perspective, and sometimes it seemed to be the audience perspective watching a movie.
She dreamed that she was hit in the head by a mineral water bottle blown over by strong winds when she went out to work.
She dreamed of the high temperatures persisting, so hot that An City issued a work suspension notice, and the plants on the mountains started turning yellow.
The whole summer was scorching hot, and many people died from the heat. There was also news on screens about mountain fires it seemed.
She also dreamed of thunder and rain. At this point, Wen Qian was a little confused, she felt like she had woken up already but her body couldn't move.
Because the sound of this rain and thunder was very similar to the white noise she listened to while sleeping, she felt like her brain had woken up first
but the rain kept going.
She saw that the lake near the apartment building she lived in had merged from two sections into one, and the area kept expanding.
The temperature had lowered a bit due to the rain, but it was still hot and muggy. After the cool down, the mosquitoes came back to life.
At the same time, people all over the world were caught up in various natural disasters on the news, as if the Earth had started a cleansing.
The term "apocalypse" began spreading again.
Next in the dream came an epidemic disease that broke through the previous pattern of "highly contagious, low fatality rate", spreading through the world.
It spread quickly and had a high fatality rate, making it even harder for people to survive in these disaster conditions.
In Wen Qian's dream there were some parts without images, only different sounds, but they all sounded like news broadcasts.
The last scene she dreamed of was heavy snow, thick heavy snow covering the ground, but it was not a latitude or altitude that would be covered by heavy snow.
People seemed to have fallen into an even more dire situation.
The dream was very chaotic, without a specific timeline or order.
Wen Qian suddenly sat up in the dark, frantically feeling around to turn on the lights.
The light went on. The landlord had chosen very bright white lights which Wen Qian found glaring.
She reached over to grab some tissue by the bed to wipe her sweat.
She had woken up drenched in sweat, Wen Qian hadn't been this scared in a long time.
These dreams were extremely realistic, her heartbeat still hadn't gone back to normal.
The time was just past 5 am, it seemed she could lie down for another hour plus.
Wen Qian lay back down, but turned on a small lamp before switching off the big light. She couldn't calmly fall back into darkness right now.
She looked at the dim small lamp, and started recalling the dreams that were almost completely forgotten, trying to find videos or photos she had seen before in the few remaining images.
The human brain was very complex. Wen Qian felt the scenes in her dreams should be things she had seen before but forgotten, only to be discovered again in the corners of her memory this time.
She had examples before of suddenly remembering childhood images.
But she couldn't find any matches in her mind now no matter how hard she searched.
So the very tired Wen Qian fell asleep again.
This time when the alarm woke Wen Qian up, she did not have such a pleasant waking up. She hadn't had such difficulty getting up in a long time.