The pill bottle was empty again.
Plastic, orange-yellow, its surface worn pale, feeling light as a feather in his hand, offering no sound when tapped. Like his life. Mo Yuan curled up in the corner of the sofa, the curtains drawn tight, only a single slit letting in a thin beam of daylight that cut through the dim room. Dust swirled soundlessly within that light.
Quiet. Too quiet.
The silence made his scalp tighten more than noise ever did. Those usual things—the shrieks and whispers that tore at his mind, the distorted colors and shadows crawling at the edges of his vision, even the illusion of the floor softening and collapsing beneath his feet—had all been temporarily suppressed by those few colored little things. They were his anchor, the doctor had said. White walls, white spores, a voice without inflection: "Take your medication on time, Mo Yuan. It will help you distinguish between reality and illusion."
He slowly raised his head. The walls were solid, seeping no blood nor crawling with unfamiliar text. The air was stable, not wavering or folding into eerie, non-Euclidean angles. The sound of car horns outside was distant yet clear, no longer shrouded in malice or meaningless roars.
A near-vacuum-like "normalcy" enveloped him.
He should have felt relief, even joy. Wasn't swallowing those pills each time a plea for precisely this fleeting, fragile moment of clarity?
So why did his heart feel so heavy in his chest, pounding with a sense of rootless emptiness? The ever-present, whisper-like background noise was gone, and the dead silence left behind was deafening. It was as if a dimension he had relied on for survival had been abruptly ripped away. He had fallen from a bizarre, feverish nightmare into a strange world stripped of color and rigid in its lines.
It felt more unsettling than the hallucinations.
Unconsciously, he rubbed the empty pill bottle, his fingertips tracing its smooth, cool surface. There seemed to be something… at the bottom?
He unscrewed the cap, turned the bottle upside down, and shook it hard.
No expected residue of powder came out.
Instead, a small, carefully folded note, its edges slightly frayed, slipped silently onto his open palm.
His heart gave a sudden jolt—the heavy thudding turned into a frantic drumbeat.
Who put it there? When? He never let this bottle out of his sight.
His fingers stiff, he slowly, very slowly, unfolded the note.
The words on it were printed in a cold, impersonal typeface, like some kind of verdict: "Stop taking the medication. What they're giving you is actually hallucinogens—you were never ill."
The words burned into his eyes like red-hot needles.
…Never ill?
Then all these years… those fragmented visions, those haunting voices, those distorted timelines… all of it was…
Impossible.
A new hallucination? Some kind of… test?
He crumpled the note fiercely, his nails digging into his palm. A sharp pain shot through him.
Not a hallucination.
Almost simultaneously, as he registered the pain—
Bzzz.
An extremely faint, high-frequency vibration seemed to ring inside his skull, vanishing as quickly as it came.
Then, he felt it—a thin, veil-like barrier that had always shrouded his senses shattered completely and dissolved.
It wasn't the hallucinations disappearing. It was… a filter switching off.
The world had never felt so clear, so stable, so minutely detailed.
The fine cracks in the wall paint, the trajectory of every dust particle floating in the air, the precise arc of every leaf swaying outside the window, even the exact angle and brightness of the light falling on the floor—everything flooded into his eyes and ears with an almost brutal, absolute "realness."
It was too clear, so much so that it felt… cold and harsh.
Gasping, he involuntarily took a step back, his spine pressing against the cold wall.
Then, his old smartphone on the bedside table lit up by itself.
No incoming call. No notification.
Only a single message appeared abruptly on the blank lock screen, in the same printed font, staring back at him like an emotionless eye:
"Congratulations on passing the final test. Welcome to the real world—a place far crueler than your hallucinations."
Mo Yuan stood frozen.
The sound of traffic outside vanished. The world fell dead silent. Everything that had just become "clear and stable" now began to twist before his eyes, settling into a deeper, more suffocating darkness.
The pill bottle slipped from his limp hand, fell to the floor by his feet, and rolled away with a hollow, light sound.