Ring—Ring—
The sharp sound of a phone alarm cut through the dorm room, piercing the silence like metal being struck repeatedly beside the ear.
Ethan frowned, rolled over in bed, and instinctively reached for his phone.
His first thought was that he must have accidentally set another alarm.
The moment the screen lit up, a blinding white light stabbed into his eyes, forcing him to squint.
It wasn't an alarm.
The caller ID was filled with a row of asterisks.
Ethan's drowsiness vanished instantly.
He recognized those asterisks. It was a display method his boss had "specially requested." No name. No number. Just stars. Seeing them meant only one thing—
Something was wrong.
He stared at the screen for two seconds, an inexplicable tightness forming in his chest.
The call connected.
"Hello?" Ethan asked. His voice was hoarse from sleep, but he instinctively lowered it.
There was no small talk on the other end.
"Come immediately."
The male voice was deep and concise. "There's progress on last night's key."
Ethan's brow furrowed.
"Key" was internal jargon—referring to anomaly triggers that had been archived but never explained. Most of them lay dormant in the database for months, sometimes years, without ever being mentioned again.
"But I have an eight a.m. tutorial later—"
The words slipped out before he could stop himself. He immediately regretted it.
A cold chuckle came from the other end of the line.
"You've ever actually attended an eight a.m. tutorial?"
Silence followed.
Ethan opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Since "temporarily" joining the department six months ago, his schedule had become meaningless. All-nighters, field operations, sudden call-outs—those had long replaced lectures and tutorials.
"I'm sending you the location," the voice continued. "Twenty minutes. Don't be late."
The call ended abruptly.
The screen went dark, and the dorm room fell silent once more. Outside, the sky remained dim, the distant streetlights blurred by a thin layer of mist.
Ethan sat on the edge of his bed and exhaled slowly.
He checked the time.
06:13.
Less than two hours until the so-called eight a.m.
But he knew it no longer mattered.
Five minutes later, the dormitory was in chaos.
Cold water splashed against his face, forcibly driving away the last traces of sleep. Toothbrush, jacket, ID—everything was shoved into his backpack with practiced efficiency.
He paused briefly in front of the mirror.
His reflection looked tired, but his eyes were clear—sharper than they had been moments ago.
The door closed behind him.
Ethan stepped out of the dormitory building, the chill of the early morning air hitting him full force.
He didn't know what kind of anomaly awaited him this time.
But he knew one thing with certainty—
The moment those asterisks appeared, something had already crossed the boundary of human understanding.
And he had to reach the scene immediately.
His phone vibrated as he exited the dormitory area.
An encrypted message appeared—no sender ID, just a single line of text and a set of coordinates.
[07:02 — Assemble outside Block 13.
Late arrivals will face consequences.]
Ethan glanced at the map. His pace quickened unconsciously.
Block 13 lay on the western edge of the city, an old district long abandoned by urban planners. Years ago, there had been proposals for full demolition, but tangled property rights had stalled the process indefinitely.
Densely populated. Aging infrastructure.
The least likely place for an incident—yet the most vulnerable to one.
He pulled his hood lower and disappeared into the sparse morning crowd.
Twenty minutes later, he saw the familiar black police tape at the edge of the block.
Police cars were parked at the intersection, their sirens silent. Uniformed officers stood guard, expressions rigid, clearly under orders to say nothing. Pedestrians were redirected without explanation.
Excuses like "gas maintenance" and "line failure" had clearly been used too many times.
Ethan flashed his identification and passed through the cordon.
The neighborhood was quiet.
Unnaturally so.
It was past seven in the morning. Normally, people would be lining up for breakfast or hurrying to work. Instead, the entire street felt deliberately emptied.
No voices.
No footsteps.
Not even a dog barking.
"You're here."
Ethan turned toward the voice.
A middle-aged man stood by the roadside, wearing a plain trench coat and a baseball cap, a cup of cold coffee in his hand.
Zhou Yuan. His boss.
"The 'key' you mentioned—this is it?" Ethan asked quietly.
Zhou nodded, his expression more severe than usual.
"At 2:41 a.m., all communication signals within Block 13 were lost simultaneously," he said.
"They were restored ten minutes later—but only the signals."
Ethan's heart sank.
"And the people?"
"Gone." Zhou's tone remained calm, but every word landed with weight.
"One thousand three hundred and twenty-seven registered residents. Including transients, at least fifteen hundred people. All missing."
Ethan instinctively looked up at the rows of apartment buildings stretching before him.
They still stood intact—windows, balconies, corridors, everything in place.
Yet just hours earlier, they had been home to thousands of living people.
"No distress calls?" Ethan asked.
"None."
"No explosions. No fires. No abnormal energy spikes."
"It's as if someone pressed the delete key."
Zhou paused.
"The internal designation has been issued—Anomaly Number One."
Ethan fell silent.
He understood what that number meant.
Unprecedented.
Unexplainable.
Extremely dangerous.
"Your task is simple," Zhou said, tossing the coffee cup into a nearby trash bin. "Enter the block. Record any abnormal phenomena—especially repeating details."
"We're not expecting answers yet."
Then he added, evenly, "Just don't die in there."
It sounded like a joke.
It wasn't.
Ethan took a steady breath and nodded.
He activated the recorder. A red indicator light flickered on.
The moment he stepped into the neighborhood, he felt it—
The air had changed.
Not in temperature or humidity, but in pressure. An invisible weight pressed gently against his senses, subtle yet unmistakable.
Most of the shops along the street were open.
Steam still rose faintly from breakfast stalls. Soy milk had cooled, forming a thin film on its surface. A grocery store register was frozen on its last transaction.
Time hadn't moved forward.
It had stopped.
Ethan advanced, recording quietly.
"No visible signs of violence."
"Objects left in active use."
"Disappearance time appears synchronized."
He stopped before an apartment building.
The stairwell door stood ajar.
Inside, motion-sensor lights illuminated a narrow space. Footprints covered the floor—adults, children, even slipper marks.
They led upward.
And stopped abruptly at the third-floor landing.
No retreat.
No struggle.
As if everyone had left reality at the same point.
Ethan crouched down.
The footprints weren't erased.
They weren't covered.
They weren't cleaned.
They simply… ended.
A chill ran down his spine.
Then he noticed it—a faint marking etched into the wall at the corner of the landing.
Not a crack.
A symbol.
Extremely fine lines, drawn over and over, forming a structure he couldn't comprehend. It wasn't language. It wasn't decoration. It didn't match any known marking system.
Ethan stepped closer.
The recorder flickered.
"Signal fluctuation," the earpiece warned.
He froze.
The image stabilized.
Ethan stared at the symbol, his pulse quickening.
Instinct screamed at him.
This mattered.
"Unknown marking detected," he said softly.
"Location: Block 13, Building Three, third-floor stairwell."
"Recommend logging as a core anomaly clue."
The channel remained silent for several seconds.
Then a calm, unfamiliar voice cut in.
"Received."
"Ethan Lin."
"From this moment onward, your current location is officially classified as a high-risk anomaly area."
"Be advised."
"The countdown has begun."
Ethan stood alone in the empty hallway, rain pattering faintly against the window.
For the first time, he truly understood—
This incident was far from over.
And his life had already been irreversibly drawn into it.
Ethan remained still for several seconds.
The voice in his earpiece had disappeared as abruptly as it came, leaving only a faint hiss of static behind. The word countdown lingered in his mind, heavy and undefined.
He still looks at a watch on his left hand, which is from his boss. Zhou tells him that this watch is a timer for him.
4:49:57
'About 5 hours left', he thought.
Zhou had warned him to leave the anomaly area before the timer finish.
He don't know what will happened if it finish
Ethan slowly straightened, forcing his breathing to remain steady. His gaze returned to the symbol carved into the wall. Up close, it looked even stranger—too precise to be vandalism, yet too crude to be manufactured.
The lines intersected at irregular angles, forming a shape that resisted interpretation. Every time he tried to impose meaning on it, his thoughts slid away, as if the symbol itself rejected being understood.
He stepped back half a meter.
The pressure eased immediately.
Ethan noted the distance with care.
"Addendum," he said quietly into the recorder.
"Psychological pressure appears distance-dependent. Estimated threshold: one to one point five meters."
No response came from the channel, but the recorder confirmed the entry.
He turned away from the stairwell and continued the sweep.
As he moved through the building, more patterns emerged. Doors left ajar at similar angles. Shoes aligned neatly near thresholds. Personal items placed with unconscious symmetry, as if everyone had paused in the middle of ordinary routines.
He checked three more apartments.
In one, a laptop sat open on a desk, its screen frozen on a half-written email.
In another, a kettle rested on a stove, water boiled dry long ago, leaving a chalky residue.
In a third, an elderly man's medication box lay open on the table, pills counted out for the morning that never came.
No panic.
No warning.
Whatever had happened here had given no one time to react.
Ethan exited the building and crossed to the next.
Building Five showed the same signs. So did Seven.
By the time he reached the center of the block, the conclusion was unavoidable.
"This wasn't a localized event," he murmured. "It was synchronized."
Not just in time—but in intent.
At the heart of Block 13 stood a small public square, long neglected. A rusted playground occupied one corner, its swings swaying slightly in the breeze. Puddles reflected the gray sky above, rippling faintly with each drop of rain.
Ethan stepped into the square—and immediately felt the pressure intensify.
He stopped.
The sensation wasn't pain. It was closer to awareness, like standing beneath something vast and unseen.
He looked around.
Nothing appeared out of place.
And yet, his instincts told him this was important.
He activated the recorder again.
"Central square exhibits elevated anomaly response," he said. "Subjective sensation of spatial compression. No visible trigger."
As if in answer, the air trembled—just slightly.
Ethan's vision blurred for a fraction of a second.
He staggered, catching himself before he fell.
"Ethan." Zhou Yuan's voice cut in sharply. "Report."
"I'm fine," Ethan said after a brief pause. "Just… interference."
"Withdraw from the square," Zhou ordered. "Now."
Ethan didn't argue.
He backed away slowly, never turning his back on the empty space. With each step, the pressure receded, until the air felt normal again.
Normal.
The word felt increasingly meaningless.
He retreated to the edge of the block and leaned against a wall, allowing himself a moment to think.
There was a center.
There were repeating markers.
There was a precise timestamp.
And there was a term they hadn't explained yet.
Key.
"Zhou," Ethan said at last, lowering his voice. "That 'key' you mentioned earlier—what exactly triggered this case?"
There was a pause longer than usual.
"When we don't know," Zhou finally replied, "we call it a key."
Ethan frowned.
"That's not an answer."
"No," Zhou agreed. "It's a placeholder."
Another brief silence followed.
"Last night," Zhou continued, "a sensor registered an input."
"What kind of input?"
"Something pressed something it shouldn't have," Zhou said. "And the system responded."
Ethan's fingers curled slightly.
"What system?"
"That," Zhou said quietly, "is what we're trying to find out."
Ethan looked back at Block 13.
An entire neighborhood—erased without sound, without warning, without resistance.
Not destroyed.
Deleted.
"If this was a response," Ethan said slowly, "then what happens if it happens again?"
Zhou did not answer immediately.
When he finally spoke, his voice was lower than before.
"Then we'll know it wasn't a coincidence."
The channel went silent.
Ethan closed his eyes briefly, then opened them.
Whatever had happened here was not an accident.
It was a process.
And processes, once begun, rarely stopped on their own.
Somewhere beyond human perception, something had been activated.
And Block 13 was only the first confirmation.
Ethan straightened, adjusted his jacket, and looked once more at the silent streets.