He was following the trace.
Red. Thin. A little sharper than before, he thought. Or maybe he was just getting used to looking at it. Hard to tell.
He walked. He kept walking. And at some point he looked down at the floor and thought - why hadn't he tried hitting it.
Just that. Just hitting it.
He stopped. Crouched down. Pressed his palm flat against the surface.
It felt like water. Not gelatinous, not solid - water. Pure, clean water. The kind you can't walk on. Except he was walking on it. Had been walking on it this whole time without thinking about it too hard because thinking about it too hard led nowhere good.
He pulled his fist back and hit the floor.
Nothing. No crack, no ripple, no sound that didn't die immediately. He hit it again, harder. Same thing. He tried pushing his fingers through - like maybe if he pressed slow enough they'd just slide in. They didn't. Solid. Completely solid, despite everything it felt like.
He sat back.
He thought about anime. Of course he thought about anime. Characters running on water, fighting on water, standing on water like it was nothing - some kind of power, some kind of technique. He'd always thought that was just the kind of thing that existed in those worlds and nowhere else.
Apparently nowhere else was bigger than he'd assumed.
Maybe this place just had different rules. No gravity, or not the same gravity. No time, or not the same time. Earth had its physical laws because the universe had built them that way - gravity, thermodynamics, all of it. This place had its own. Whatever they were.
He stood up. Kept following the trace.
He took out his phone.
6:07. Obviously.
He opened the calculator. Pressed a few buttons.
It worked.
He stared at it. Pressed more buttons. It kept working - clean, normal, no lag. He would have bet against it. He would have lost that bet.
So. Camera didn't save photos. Messages didn't send. Browser didn't load. But the calculator worked fine.
He thought about it while he walked. This place didn't block everything - just certain things. The things that needed something external. Something outside of the device itself. The calculator needed nothing outside - it just calculated, internally, on its own. Writing to memory, sending signals, connecting to anything beyond the phone itself - that this place didn't allow.
Or didn't want.
He wasn't sure there was a difference.
He put the phone away.
He thought about his thesis defense.
He didn't know why. It just came up, the way things come up when you're walking somewhere with nothing to look at. Five years of work summarized in forty minutes in front of a panel of people who'd already decided what they thought before he opened his mouth. BAC +5. His father had been proud. His mother had called three times that day.
He'd grown up in Japan. His father was French, his mother Japanese - which made him both and somehow neither, depending on who was asking. He'd wanted to study in Korea. Had been serious about it. His father had looked at him for exactly two seconds before saying it's because of the webtoons, isn't it.
It was partly because of the webtoons.
France had been the compromise. His father's idea, sold as an opportunity - good schools, calmer pace, a different kind of rigor than Japan or Korea. Everyone said France was romantic. Fashion, art, love. Macon had arrived and found a country that was just - normal. Functional. A little gray in winter. People who didn't romanticize their own city nearly as much as the rest of the world did for them.
He'd liked it anyway. More than he expected to.
The studies were hard but fair. You could fail and try again. You could take your time without it meaning your whole life was over - which wasn't something you could say about Japan, where one bad exam could close doors that never reopened. He'd stressed about it plenty. There were whole months where he'd asked himself if it was worth it, if he should just stop, find something else. Like everyone. Like every single person who'd ever been a student anywhere.
He hadn't stopped.
BAC +5. A job in Paris. An apartment ten minutes from the office.
A normal life.
He looked at the trace.
Still red. Still there. Leading somewhere he couldn't see yet.
He followed it.