The atmosphere inside the car was strange. Occasionally, an oncoming car would flash past on the roadside, its dim yellow headlights illuminating my dad and Felix Fan, both silent and saying nothing. The woman driving up front was an Underworld Agent I had never met before—she just drove, silent, her expression grave.
"Dad."
I called out. My dad slowly turned his head, looking at me with a face full of exhaustion.
"So tired, Roxie. I don’t know what’s wrong."
I looked at my dad in confusion. He never called me by my name—always "daughter" this, "daughter" that. I glanced sideways at Felix Fan beside me; he was the same, looking exhausted, his eyes blank, as if staring at something.
A large truck passed us on the left, its headlights flashing. I saw the Underworld Agent at the wheel, looking half-asleep. I was still trying to figure out whether this was a dream or reality. If it was real, everyone in the car was acting far too strange, and I couldn’t sense anything unusual about them. I’d wondered if my perception had been stripped away, but it didn’t seem to be the case.
I started trying hard to remember—the previous three times I woke up were on the plane. What happened during those times? No matter how much I thought about it, all I could recall was waking up around ten o’clock, and some abnormal event in the dream around two. Other than the timing, the three dreams had nothing in common.
I remembered Zhang Qingyuan once telling me about his own strange dreams. What he saw in those dreams were Earth Souls—and not just once or twice. Those dreams were usually fragmented, with patches of pitch-blackness, like being on a lonely island in the dark. I started searching my surroundings carefully, but I didn’t see anything like what Zhang Qingyuan described.
I started to get nervous. Just then, I heard a clicking sound on the glass. I hurriedly turned on my phone and looked out the window. In the faint light, I saw snow pellets falling—tiny grains of snow dropping one after another. Soon, the roof was crackling with their sound.
"Dad, are you okay?"