At the Light Academy station platform, unlike previous stops, they didn’t see any waiting monsters outside the train. The platform was eerily empty, its dim lighting casting long, impenetrable shadows.
The passengers who disembarked with them didn’t scream in terror. At first, they assumed that everyone had solved the puzzle correctly since this time the riddle had seemed relatively simple.
But thinking back on it now… perhaps it wasn’t that no one had chosen the wrong door. Maybe those who did were simply dealt with in complete silence.
After all, no one ever said that the dangers at a station’s platform had to be physical monsters.
As soon as Yu Zhenzhen sent her message in the group chat, Lin Wu and the others responded one after another.
Ya Tong: Library? Is that the tall building with the spire? I’m inside the building behind it. I’ll head over now.
Yu Zhenzhen: Yeah, the one with the red spire. Is there anyone else in your building? I haven’t seen anyone on my side.
Lin Wu: …Wait. Is it daytime or nighttime where you are?
Yu Zhenzhen: What kind of question is that? It’s obviously daytime!
Lin Wu: …
Xi Yuan: No people? How’s that possible? I’m inside the library building. It’s packed with students.
Yu Zhenzhen: Different libraries? Or maybe the soundproofing is just too good. I haven’t heard a single noise from anyone else.
Yu Xi looked up again. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could make out the rough outlines of buildings. She was inside a structure, but she had no idea what kind or how many floors up she was.
She seemed to be standing in the middle of a long hallway. On her left was what appeared to be a classroom—she could vaguely see the large window frames and the dark void inside. She had just walked out of that room through an open door.
Logically, there should have been a row of windows on her right side, but when she turned, all she saw in the darkness was a solid wall.
No windows. A rather unnatural architectural choice. But perhaps she was in a basement or a similar underground area.
Yu Xi: Lin Wu is probably in a similar area as me. It’s pitch black here too.
Lin Wu: Where are you? I think I’m in a dormitory room. There’s a bed, so it looks like a sleeping area. The walls have tall, semi-circular windows, but outside the window is just a hallway. The opposite wall is completely sealed off.
Xi Yuan: My identity here is an art teacher. According to my background memories, this academy does have a basement, but it’s just a regular storage area—there shouldn’t be any large underground structures. The academy has a Western-style setting, it’s in a remote location, and it operates under a closed-campus system, so there isn’t much interaction with the outside world…
Yu Zhenzhen: Hold on. If it has a Western-style setting, does that mean it’s a magic academy? Maybe my mom and Lin Wu are in some kind of darkroom or hidden chamber?
Xi Yuan: …It’s not a magic setting. But what you said about a darkroom could be possible—maybe my character’s background just doesn’t include that information.
Yu Zhenzhen: Wait. You just said… it’s noon? Are you sure?
Xi Yuan stood by the library window, looking through the clear glass. Outside, the golden sunlight hung high in the sky. He reached out and pushed open the window, letting in the warm breeze. Blue skies, bright daylight—it was unmistakably midday.
Xi Yuan: Yeah, I’m right by the window. It’s noon, and the weather’s great.
Yu Zhenzhen gripped her phone tightly and slowly looked up.
She stared blankly at the western horizon, where the warm orange hues of the setting sun painted the sky. But instead of feeling warmth, a cold chill crept over her body, making the hairs on her back stand on end.
Her phone vibrated nonstop—the others were messaging her, asking why she had suddenly gone silent.
What was wrong?
Yu Zhenzhen lifted her phone and typed out each word carefully:
This is really strange. Why? It’s not noon here. It’s evening… And I haven’t seen a single student since I got here.
Yu Xi furrowed her brows. If both Xi Yuan and Yu Zhenzhen were telling the truth, then something was very wrong with this Light Academy. It might be completely different from every other station they had encountered before.
After about ten minutes of discussion, they pieced together a rough picture of their current situation.
Yu Zhenzhen and Ya Tong were in the academy at evening time and had yet to see a single student. However, they weren’t alone anymore—they had already regrouped and were planning to explore the nearby buildings.
Xi Yuan was in the academy at noon, inside the library. The place was full of students—some studying, some napping behind books, some whispering as they chatted. Everything around him looked like a completely normal school.
Lin Wu and Yu Xi were in an indeterminate time, inside buildings with no external windows.
Lin Wu was in what appeared to be a dormitory—empty, but relatively well-maintained.
Yu Xi was in an old, dust-covered classroom that looked like it had been abandoned for years.
Neither of their areas had electricity or light sources. The silence around them was suffocating. They weren’t together, and their surroundings gave off an eerie, unsettling feeling.
Lin Wu: Maybe we’re just in different parts of the same building. I’ll look around and see if I can find a way to you.
Yu Xi: That could explain our locations. But what about Zhenzhen and Xi Yuan? Their times don’t even match…
Xi Yuan: Maybe it’s like Fairy Tale Amusement Park—different zones within the same area. If the academy is large enough, time discrepancies could be possible.
Ya Tong: You mean time differences due to location?
Xi Yuan: Exactly. It might not be about physical space but rather time zones—like separate regional campuses. An M-Country campus, a Y-Country campus, for example.
Time zone discrepancies could explain why they were experiencing different times of day. But they needed more evidence to confirm it.
For now, Yu Xi and Lin Wu had no choice but to explore on their own.
Yu Xi put away her phone and lifted her flashlight again, scanning her surroundings.
The corridor stretched out long and empty, her footsteps echoing faintly. The beam of her flashlight passed through the shattered glass of a classroom window, revealing rows of overturned desks and dust-covered walls. There were shelves inside, still standing, but everything looked like it had been abandoned for a very long time.
The air was thick with the scent of mold, and the silence around her was absolute. She could hear nothing but the sound of her own breathing.
It was eerily like a nightmare—trapped inside a strange, empty, dark building, having to be on guard with every step, never knowing what might be lurking in the unseen corners of the darkness.
She had been through countless apocalyptic worlds and stations, had witnessed horrors and grotesque infections beyond imagination. But this was the first time she had encountered something like this.
Even though her team of five had been split up, what about the other travelers who got off the train with them? A station should never have only one team—so where was everyone else?
She walked forward, moving carefully through the corridor, and spotted the shadow of a window frame on the opposite wall of another classroom. Adjusting her flashlight, she found the classroom door.
The door was half-open. She stepped inside. Her eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, allowing her to see every detail underfoot. She maneuvered around the fallen desks and chairs and made her way to the window frame on the opposite wall.
Most of the glass was shattered, but behind the window was not the open air—it was a stone-bricked wall. Not a solid concrete wall, but individual stacked stone bricks, as if someone had deliberately sealed off all the windows of this building with them.
Yu Xi pulled a hammer from her spatial storage and struck the stone bricks behind the window.
If these bricks were added later, then breaking through should lead to the outside world. She struck again, harder this time, but the bricks didn’t even budge. She gripped the hammer tightly, adjusted her stance, and swung with full force.
With the amount of strength she put in, even steel should have dented—but the bricks only cracked slightly without shattering. No debris fell. No light seeped through. Through the tiny fracture, she saw that the space beyond the brick wall was even darker than the interior of the building.
Then she heard it.
A strange, creaking noise—like something rusted, slowly moving.
A faint dripping sound followed, a rhythmic
drip, drip, drip
echoing from all the bricked-up windows. It was as if some liquid was seeping through the cracks.
A heavy, metallic scent filled the air. She raised her flashlight.
Thick, red liquid was seeping down the dusty brick wall.
Blood.
Her phone suddenly vibrated. A new system message had appeared.
Notification: Layer Boundary Damage +1. Sanity Value Change Triggered.
Sanity Value: 19 (Initial Value: 20).
Warning: If Sanity Value reaches zero, boarding eligibility will be revoked.
Yu Xi froze. She had played games before—she knew what a sanity (San) value meant.
A place where Sanity points were tracked meant one thing—supernatural forces were at work.
In other words, brute force was not the solution here. To leave or explore this station, she couldn’t rely on sheer strength.
Her attempt to break the wall had been a violation of the station’s rules. It had damaged something unseen, triggering an invisible retaliation and causing her sanity to drop.
She put the hammer away and took two steps back. The blood had already stopped dripping, and the cracks in the bricks were slowly sealing themselves again.
This wasn’t the way out. Instead of forcing her way through, she needed to investigate the entire building first and find a way to regroup with her team.
Yu Xi exited the classroom and continued down the long, dark corridor. At the far end, a large window loomed, its upper half forming a semi-circle, its lower half divided into rectangular panes. Like before, the glass was intact, but beyond it was the same gray-bricked wall, sealing it completely.
At the corridor’s turning point, a grand, heavy wooden staircase lay in wait, dark and silent. The stairs extended both upward and downward, confirming that she wasn’t on the ground floor.
She chose the downward stairs, but before she had taken more than a few steps, her phone vibrated again.
This time, it was a message in the group chat.
Xi Yuan:
Something just happened at the library. One of the walls suddenly cracked. The locals panicked, thinking it was an earthquake. In the rush to evacuate, a few people got injured—but there was no actual quake… I think this station might be about ground collapses or seismic disasters.
Yu Xi reread the message a few times, then replied.
Yu Xi:
Was it just the wall cracking?
Xi Yuan:
Just now, it was—
His message cut off suddenly.
Something must have happened on his end.
But right now, a thought had surfaced in Yu Xi’s mind—one that needed immediate verification.
She continued downward, descending two more floors before reaching the bottom.
The space before her was vast, with an impossibly high ceiling. The light from her flashlight barely illuminated anything beyond her immediate surroundings. She scanned the area, using the faint outlines of structures to locate what appeared to be the center of the floor.
There, she found a large counter. Moving around it, she brushed aside the thick layer of dust on its surface and found a heavy, worn-out book.
The book was tattered and aged. She wiped off the dust, and under the flashlight’s beam, she could clearly see the title printed on the cover.
Library Borrowing Register.
In a quiet corner of the ancient building, a dim, yellow glow flickered from a camping lantern.
Next to it was a small camping table and chair. On the table sat another rechargeable lamp, adjusted to low brightness, and a cup of steaming hot cocoa.
Yu Xi, bundled up in a thick down jacket, was sketching in her notebook under the faint light.
She had spent two to three hours mapping out the entire building—every level, every floor plan, drawn in careful detail.
There were no exits. No other travelers. No supply points. No living beings. No activated egg fragments.
Every path leading to the outside—whether windows or doors—had been sealed with stone bricks. Attempting to break them was a violation, reducing her sanity. This meant one thing.
She was trapped inside this building.
Over the past few hours, messages had trickled in from her teammates.
Earlier, when Xi Yuan’s message was cut off, another tremor had struck the building. This time, a different corner of the structure had a section of the floor crack open. Like before, the damage was minor and temporary, but it sent the students into a frenzy before quickly settling back to normal.
Meanwhile, Yu Zhenzhen and Ya Tong had deployed drones to scout the entire academy. However, when the drones attempted to fly beyond a certain point outside the perimeter walls, they encountered a repeating-loop effect, where they kept crossing the same stretch of air over and over.
Everyone in the group knew what that meant.
It was the station’s boundary—an invisible barrier preventing escape.
To confirm, they personally went to the perimeter and found the same results. No matter where they tried to leave the academy grounds, once they stepped four to five meters beyond the buildings, they would re-enter the same section of space they had just left.
The station’s limits were clear.
The entire station was confined to the academy grounds. There was no leaving until they uncovered a way out.
Now the question was, if the entire Light Academy station was limited to just the academy grounds, then where exactly was Xi Yuan?
Ya Tong: What we can confirm now is that besides the two of us, there are other people inside the school. The drone captured images of young men and women peeking through the windows of various buildings, likely drawn out by the sound of the drone. However, none of them opened their windows. Many had their curtains drawn and only dared to glance outside through small gaps. Their expressions were full of wariness—almost as if they were afraid of something.
Additionally, there are quite a few other travelers in the school. Since the students are hiding, these newly arrived travelers, just like us, stand out in the empty campus. But since it’s already nightfall, Zhenzhen and I have found a room with a good vantage point to settle in.
From this, we can assume that those hiding behind the windows and curtains aren’t just native students—some must be travelers who arrived at the station earlier than us.
After hearing this, Yu Xi shared her own theory.
Have you heard of the concepts of the real world, surface world, and inner world?
Not many in their group had played these kinds of games before, but the terminology alone was enough to highlight the key point.
If the station was only as large as the academy, then their previous assumption of time differences caused by geographic spread was incorrect.
This new theory fit their situation better—same station, same academy, but different layered worlds.
Xi Yuan might be in the real world, while the others could be in the inner world. For example, Yu Xi strongly suspected that the first wall crack in Xi Yuan’s library might have been caused by her own actions.
Of course, this was still just a preliminary guess. More exploration and information would be needed to confirm it.
Meanwhile, Yu Zhenzhen and Ya Tong had triggered a sanity (san) value drop when the sun set. Their drop wasn’t caused by breaking walls like Yu Xi’s—it was because they were still outdoors when night fell. This was why they had quickly found a building and locked themselves in a secure room.
A room with broken walls or windows was not safe. Even Yu Zhenzhen’s shield didn’t help. Their sanity only stopped decreasing when they found a fully intact room and sealed it shut.
Currently, both of them had 17 sanity points remaining, having started at 20.
Lin Wu also experienced a sanity drop, but he hadn’t broken any walls. Instead, while searching a dormitory, he found an old, tattered notebook hidden beneath a mattress.
The moment he flipped through it, the dormitory changed. The walls began oozing blood, and the glass windows on the hallway walls reflected pale, hollow-eyed faces pressing against the panes. The figures outside seemed to be struggling to enter.
His phone buzzed twice—one notification was about his sanity value dropping, and the other congratulated him on triggering an event.
Lin Wu had likely found something important. After explaining the sanity change, he quickly sent a final message before going silent.
The message was from an hour ago:
I think I found a way to reach Xiao Xi… This station isn’t just about a surface world and an inner world—there’s more to it.
After finishing the full 3D map of the building and drawing detailed floor plans of each level, Yu Xi took pictures and uploaded them to the team chat.
The team chat had only one function beyond sending text—image transfers. The upload speed was painfully slow, and they had never used it before.
But this station had no way to obtain a phone, so they had no choice but to rely on the chat’s limited functionality.
After a long wait, the images finally sent.
Xi Yuan’s message arrived soon after.
You were right. You’re not in the teaching building. You’re in the library. The internal structure is exactly the same.
His confirmation proved their theory—there were multiple layers to this world.
That meant she and Xi Yuan were in the same place. The first time the library’s wall cracked, it was very likely caused by her actions.
The second time must have been another traveler trapped in the inner world.
Yet, at that time, she hadn’t heard anyone else breaking walls nearby. Which further proved what Lin Wu had said:
This world wasn’t just about surface and inner layers—there was something else at play.
Inspired by Lin Wu’s discovery, Yu Xi had searched the entire building for potential clue items.
But no matter how hard she looked, she failed to trigger any events. What did happen, however, was another three-point drop in her sanity value.
She was now down to 16.
After losing four points in total, she began feeling physical effects—not fatigue, but a mental drain. A deep cold crept over her, making her feel as if she were trapped inside an icy tomb.
She knew this was just her mind playing tricks on her. After all, after taking five doses of strong anti-sugar pills (strength pills), she hadn’t truly felt “cold” in a very long time.
Yu Zhenzhen had already pointed out that shields couldn’t prevent sanity loss, meaning her self-cleaning protective suit wouldn’t work either. In the end, she pulled out a thick down jacket, wrapping herself up completely. Then, she took out a piping hot cup of cocoa for warmth and to clear her mind.
Once she finished discussing with her teammates and analyzing all available clues, exhaustion washed over her again.
This place had no way to tell time, but since it was already nighttime for both Yu Zhenzhen and Xi Yuan, she decided to rest for a few hours and continue once it was “morning.”
She had initially planned to summon the treehouse inside the first-floor library hall, using its strong defenses for rest.
But after learning that shields didn’t work against sanity-draining attacks, she suspected the treehouse’s defenses wouldn’t either. Not to mention, the treehouse was enormous—far too conspicuous. It would stand out like a beacon in the darkness.
So she gave up on that idea.
After finishing her cocoa, she packed away the camping table, chair, and lamp. Then she pulled out a crystal bubble, activated it, and lodged it behind a row of cabinets. Crawling inside, she sealed it shut from the inside.
The crystal bubble’s defense was just as strong as the treehouse, but it was much smaller. It fit her snugly, making her feel safely cocooned.
Even if other travelers arrived, they wouldn’t be able to break through immediately.
She turned off her camping light, and darkness consumed her surroundings once again. After one final check of the bubble’s seals, she bundled up in her down coat, pulled on the hood, retrieved a pillow and a fleece blanket from her storage, and lay down to sleep.
Yu Xi was woken up by the vibration of her phone.
Her surroundings were still pitch dark. She couldn’t tell if it was morning or night, but checking the countdown timer, she estimated she had slept for about six hours.
A new system message had appeared.
Congratulations on surviving the first night. Reward: Awakening Tea (Restores sanity at 0.1 per second for 15 seconds, for a total of 1.5 points).
Yu Xi was surprised. So sanity loss could be recovered. 0.1 per second seemed small, but over 15 seconds, 1.5 points was a decent recovery.
Just as she was about to take the Awakening Tea, she noticed something.
On the outer shell of her crystal bubble, there was a deep red handprint.
Something had passed by while she was sleeping.
And not only that—it had pressed against the crystal bubble and stared at her from the outside.
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