At the ticket counter of the top-floor cinema in the mall, the giant electronic screen scrolled through today's showtimes.
Kiana tilted her head back, staring up at the rows of movie titles and posters with a slightly glazed look in her eyes.
"There are so many... Shu, which one should we watch?"
"You pick," Shu replied. Despite his words, his eyes were busy scanning the electronic screen, trying to deduce the exact plot of each movie based purely on its title and poster.
To be honest, he actually wanted to watch all of them. But that was impossible; it was already getting quite late.
Kiana glanced over at Shu, who was visibly struggling with the daily lineup. Suddenly recalling something, she took up his offer and began studying the movie posters in earnest.
The first was a disaster film.
Kiana only gave it a single glance before looking away.
She had already seen more than enough disasters.
The Honkai.
That was their disaster. She had absolutely no desire to witness any more.
Her gaze gradually shifted to the second poster.
It featured two heavily photoshopped, flawless faces—the male lead looked like a factory-standard model, and the female lead looked like an industrial benchmark for beauty.
Kiana glanced at Shu. Shu glanced back at the poster, his mouth twitching slightly.
"I feel like I've already seen this one," Shu deadpanned, looking utterly unamused.
Kiana blinked, then tactfully discarded that option as well.
She had already experienced the sheer power of Shu's imagination firsthand. He could conjure up the exact taste of a food he'd never even eaten before. So, mentally simulating an entire movie from a single poster? Perfectly reasonable.
The third was a superhero flick from a classic IP.
Shu took one look, his eyes practically stinging at the blatantly "cookie-cutter" characters plastered on the poster.
"Ah... A traumatized, down-on-his-luck protagonist suddenly encounters a life-threatening crisis, miraculously gains superpowers, uses them to satisfy his selfish desires, meets the female lead, they have a misunderstanding, they argue, and then another crisis strikes... yada yada yada..."
Shu's expression grew increasingly hollow as he narrated, his words dripping with a painful familiarity of these overused tropes.
Classic... way too classic.
"Is that really what happens?" Kiana stared at Shu in shock, fully believing him. "Well then... let's skip it. Next..."
The next one was an indie arthouse film.
The poster featured a person's back as they stood in a desolate field. The color palette was a dreary gray, and the whole thing just screamed pretentious and baffling.
Kiana stared at it for three seconds.
"What's this one... even about?" she asked.
Shu stared at the baffling poster, pondered for a moment, and then opened his mouth—unleashing a torrent of high-brow cinematic analysis that made Kiana's head spin.
Good heavens! If just listening to the synopsis was this excruciating, actually watching it would knock her out cold!
Kiana frantically cut Shu's lecture short and pointed a trembling finger at the final option.
It was an animated feature. The title consisted of two bold words—
Deep Sea.
Kiana's gaze locked onto it.
"This one..."
...
Target locked. Buy tickets, buy popcorn, buy sodas.
They went through the motions in one smooth swoop.
Kiana cradled two massive buckets of popcorn in her arms, holding two cups of cola in her hands, a look of pure bliss plastered across her face.
Shu stared at the two jumbo buckets of popcorn in her embrace, falling into a stunned silence for three whole seconds.
"Are you... still not full?" He tightly gripped the phone he'd just used to pay, suddenly beginning to meticulously calculate the remaining balance in his personal stash.
He felt like he legitimately might not be able to afford feeding her anymore...
Under Shu's nervous gaze, Kiana instinctively tightened her grip, as if terrified he might snatch the popcorn away.
"This is for watching the movie!"
"Do you girls seriously have a second stomach?"
"Popcorn is a snack! And snacks... snacks don't take up stomach space!"
Shu went silent.
He looked at Kiana; Kiana looked back at him.
They stared at each other for three seconds.
Then, Shu sighed.
"You win."
Kiana beamed, shoving a cup of cola into his hands.
"Hold this! Let's head in!"
...
Inside the theater, the clamor of the outside world was completely cut off. The overhead lights gradually dimmed.
Hand in hand, the two found their prime viewing seats and sat down side by side.
Kiana placed the popcorn on the armrest between them, angling her body slightly toward Shu's side.
Even in the darkness, their hands remained tightly clasped.
Then—the silver screen lit up.
The movie began.
Right from the start, the visuals were suffocating.
A dull, gray sky, a gray snowfield, a gray everything. Amidst a softly humming melody, a dark silhouette lay buried in the blizzard.
Through the pale particle effects, the most vibrant color on screen was a writhing, blood-like crimson.
Then, the scene cut to reality.
In an oppressively gray landscape nearly void of hue, even the bright red hoodie seemed exceptionally muted.
What followed was a gray world, a gray ship, gray pedestrians.
Only that dull splash of red amidst the crowd stood out, proving that—this was, in fact, the real world.
The young girl narrated her own story in front of the dreary gray sea. Then, with her at the center, the world gradually unfolded to the tune of a soothing yet sorrowful melody—
Shu watched the screen, his expression as placid as the initial scenes.
This kind of narrative setup wasn't exactly rare... at least, not to him.
The ensuing plot developments were hardly difficult for him to predict: the little girl would jump into the sea, fall into a coma, enter a whimsical fantasy world, find something there, see something, realize something, and eventually wake up—or perhaps, never wake up at all.
As for what that fantasy world would contain...
Sea otters, the Deep Sea Restaurant, her mother, and that flowing red particle stream from the intro...
Wasn't the answer practically plastered right onto the riddle itself?
Shu lowered his gaze slightly, staring at the red hoodie as it slowly sank into the ocean depths, preparing to mentally replay the entirety of today's events to pass the time.
But in the very next moment, the scenery shifted.
Shenxiu jumped into the ocean, just as he predicted, sinking into the deep sea, and then—
Colors exploded before his eyes.
It was as if all the paint in the world had been dumped into the ocean.
Those hyper-saturated reds, blues, yellows, purples, pinks, golds, silvers... Every conceivable color mashed together in an overwhelming deluge—churning, flowing, swirling, detonating.
It looked like the most radiant, chaotic finger-painting left behind by a child artist armed with an infinite palette.
The Sea Elf swam past, leaving a trail of neon luminescence in its wake.
The Deep Sea Restaurant emerged, resembling a gargantuan, kaleidoscopic monster.
Countless bizarre and fantastical marine creatures crammed every inch of the screen.
The animation moved too fast. There was too much visual data; the human eye simply couldn't keep up.
Shu's pupils shrank slightly.
Truthfully... this visual spectacle didn't entirely subvert Shu's expectations. After all, that deliberately oppressive grayness from the beginning would have been pointless if it wasn't meant to contrast with truly vibrant colors.
But... he never expected the contrast to be pushed to this extreme.
Light pollution.
Over-the-top flexing.
Trying way too hard.
Indeed... by any conventional aesthetic standard, these colors were too much.
Over-saturated hues, overly dense information, overstimulating visuals. Staring at it for too long was exhausting and made one's eyes ache. This wasn't some brilliant cinematic technique; this was a complete loss of control.
Yet, Shu couldn't look away.
He just stared, absolutely mesmerized.
He watched as the colors bombarded his vision in endless waves, watched the light and shadows dance joyously across his retinas, watched this world constructed of infinite colors shimmer and conceal even more colors within.
Was this... a loss of control?
Yes, it was a loss of control.
Because this was a dream.
Dreams were exactly like this—uncontrolled, manic, absolutely reckless, yet harboring countless fragmented details.
Dreams didn't need to conform to any pre-packaged mold to please an audience; dreams simply took everything repressed inside the mind and dumped it all out.
Were they just colors?
No. They were anger, sorrow, terror, and yearning.
Those colors bled into one another, indistinguishable from the rest, exactly like the chaotic tangle of emotions in the human heart—impossible to parse one from the other.
A kaleidoscope of hues, an explosion of data, gone in a flash.
And when you woke up, you'd forget the dream, left only with a vague lingering sensation, as if your soul had been gently bumped by something unseen.
So... what exactly did these dreams want?
Were they just serving the present moment?
Did they merely exist to vent the emotional baggage accumulated during waking hours?
Was it really just "what you think about by day, you dream about by night"?
He stared at the Deep Sea Restaurant on screen, watching that wildly colorful world spin before his eyes, and a sudden realization washed over him—
Those dreams... they weren't resigned to their fate.
They weren't satisfied with merely being "dreams."
They wanted more.
They wanted him to see more.
The little girl followed the Sea Elf, crashing into the Deep Sea Restaurant.
The rules of that world were absurd, its logic chaotic, but its emotions were raw and real.
She wanted to find her mother. She wanted to be seen. She wanted to be loved.
Hidden behind those utterly bizarre visuals was a child's deepest, most desperate yearning.
Shu's hand tightened slightly, urgently seeking the warm, soft touch resting within his grasp.
Kiana felt it.
In the darkness, she turned her head and cast him a gentle glance.
Shu didn't notice.
He just kept his eyes glued to the screen.