Mio noticed that something was wrong, starting with a very small detail.
She walked into the classroom and instinctively glanced towards the window seat. Someone should have been sitting there.
It wasn't the certainty of 'someone sitting there', but a more personal feeling — a sense of presence that should have been there.
She stood there, stunned, for two seconds.
Then she realised that she couldn't remember who should have been there.
She sat down, opened her textbook and tried not to think about it, but her gaze kept drifting to the empty seat.
The seat was empty, the desk clean and the chair neatly pushed back.
Too neat.
Mio lowered her head, trying to sketch his image in her mind:
His smile, the tone of his voice, the slightly helpless look in his eyes when he looked at her...
The image was there.
But she just couldn't remember his name.
Her heart clenched.
'Impossible,' she whispered.
She closed her eyes, trying to drift off to sleep.
This time, the dream was open yet eerily quiet.
It was like a room that had just been emptied: the furniture was still there, but the atmosphere had vanished.
She walked around in the dream.
There was a half-finished glass of water on the table and the curtains were billowing in the wind — everything pointed to 'someone who was just here'.
But that person was gone.
Mio stopped, feeling a tightness grip her chest.
She couldn't remember his usual words, couldn't remember what he'd said on that rainy day, or even…
Suddenly, she realised that she wasn't sure if he had been sitting by the window.
She opened her eyes, breathing rapidly.
'No, no, no, no, no.'
She gripped her wrist as if trying to fix her memory.
She tried hard to recall his name.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
The name seemed shrouded in mist; the harder she tried to remember it, the more it seemed to slip away.
For the first time, she felt true fear.
It wasn't about losing her abilities or being discovered by the world.
It was the fact that she knew she had forgotten someone, and that she still knew it.
That afternoon, she encountered the student council members in the hallway.
They walked past her without acknowledging her, but she heard them talking in hushed tones as they passed.
'The relevant anchor point is starting to loosen.'
She paused.
'Anchor point.'
She knew that word all too well.
That night, she sat on the edge of her bed and opened her notebook.
On the first page, in her own handwriting, it said:
'If you've read this far, it means you've already begun to forget him.'
Mio's hand began to tremble.
The following lines were written more rapidly.
'Don't believe that "empty spaces are normal", don't believe others who say you're mistaken. You're not alone in making mistakes; the world is losing memories.'
The last line was almost out of control.
His name was—
It was torn out.
Mio stared at the tear, her throat tightening. She suddenly realised something:
It wasn't that the world had forgotten Li first, but that she had been forced to take centre stage.
The night outside the window was dark.
Mio hugged her notebook to her chest and whispered,
'I can't forget.'
Even if the world wouldn't allow her to remember.
The first problem was the timing.
The morning study bell rang twice: first normally, then three minutes later as if the system had realised it had missed a step.
But nobody thought it was strange.
The students continued flipping through their books, copying notes and staring blankly into space. Li was the exception; he clearly remembered the second bell ringing.
He looked out of the window.
The sky was an odd colour.
It wasn't cloudy or sunny, but rather a combination of both: the clouds hung in the air, but the shadows fell in the wrong places.
Someone said, 'It's so hot today.'
Someone in another row responded, 'It's freezing.'
Both statements were true.
The stairs started to appear more frequently.
This wasn't an illusion — there was actually an extra step. Some people missed a step but didn't fall, as if their bodies had automatically adjusted their height.
'Did you think the stairs were weird just now?' someone asked.
"No, it's always been like this."
Li stood at the top of the stairs looking at the step that she didn't remember, and suddenly realised something: the world hadn't collapsed.
It was just being patched up as it went along.
During the lunch break, someone 'died'.
The biology teacher mentioned a name and said that he hadn't come to class recently due to an accident.
The whole class fell silent.
Someone raised their hand and whispered, 'Teacher, he was just playing ball on the playground.'
The teacher paused, then flipped through the register.
The register read: Deceased.
However, the person in question could still be seen moving in the surveillance footage.
"The system didn't synchronise properly," the teacher said finally.
The instant those words were spoken, Li knew which version of events the world had chosen.
After class, the playground was empty.
The people playing ball had gone, but the ball was still rolling on the ground.
No one felt that anything was wrong.
Mio stood by the railing, her fingertips cold.
She saw two possible futures overlapping.
In one, the campus had reopened and everyone had woken up to a new day. In the other, the world was frozen in this moment, constantly correcting its mistakes.
For the first time, she realised that the future wasn't a linear path.
It was a series of solutions that the system repeatedly tried.
Li was the option that was always highlighted in red.
In the basement, the Night Watchers were synchronising intelligence:
'Logical gaps are starting to spread to non-campus areas.'
'Traffic lights are showing both red and green simultaneously.'
'A street disappeared for ten minutes last night.'
'Not disappeared, but skipped by the world.'
Li sat in a corner, listening quietly.
He noticed something.
These gaps were becoming increasingly familiar to him.
He could tell half a second in advance which door wouldn't open, which stretch of road would require a few extra steps and which words would be ignored by the world.
'You're adapting,' a member of the Night Watchers whispered.
'You're synchronising with the errors themselves.' "
This is not good news.
Because when the world finally reboots, only Li will remember both versions completely."
Night falls.
The campus loudspeaker suddenly blares out, drowning the music in static.
A voice belonging to no one calmly announces:
'World stability assessment failed. Reboot preparations are underway.'
Mio looks up, her face pale.
Li stands in the shadows, suddenly realising:
'This isn't the first time the world has collapsed like this.
Only this time, he's still standing inside it.'
When the white crow appeared, the world fell silent for a moment.
It wasn't a physical silence, but rather a simultaneous pause in all anomalies, as if the world were waiting for a higher-level command.
Li saw the crow in the corridor behind the old library.
Few people went there anymore: the bookshelves were sealed off and the windows were covered in dust. Time seemed to slow down. The white crow stood at the boundary of light and shadow. He was dressed in an impeccably tailored school uniform — even the collar was too neat.
He was feeding the crows.
Real crows.
One of them perched on the windowsill and tilted its head as if to confirm his identity.
Li's shadow lingered for a moment at his feet.
The white crow glanced at him and smiled.
'It's come to this stage, huh?'
It wasn't a tone of surprise, but more like a review.
'You know me?' Li asked.
The white crow first nodded, then shook his head.
"I know 'you'."
'But this version... is a bit off.'
Li's breath hitched.
"What do you mean?"
Bai Ya didn't answer immediately, but he put down the last piece of food and clapped his hands together. A flock of crows fluttered up, their dark shadows circling in mid-air before quickly dispersing.
'To put it simply, what you're experiencing now—'
He looked up, gazing into the depths of the campus.
'Blank students, logical gaps, the final cleansing and a world error.'
"None of these are new problems."
Li's heart tightened.
Bai Ya's tone was flat, as if he were reading from a report.
'This isn't the first time the world has rebooted.'
The moment those words were spoken, Li could feel something resonating in his mind.
It was that familiar sense of discontinuity, the instinctive adaptation to flawed rules and an inexplicable weariness.
This weariness didn't stem from the events of the past few days,
Rather, it came from the feeling of having experienced many endings before.
'What role do you play in the reboot?' Li asked.
'The recorder,' replied Bai Ya.
"Sometimes an observer, sometimes a patch."
'If you're unlucky, you get wiped out along with everything.'
He spoke softly.
"And what about me?"
Bai Ya looked at him, his eyes serious for the first time.
'You are a variable.'
'And the kind that—'
He paused.
'The variable the world failed to delete.'
Li's shadow trembled slightly on the ground.
'Last time,' Bai Ya continued, 'you were deleted cleanly.
This time, for some reason, you remained.'
These words were colder than any threat.
Because they meant failure had occurred.
Mio walked from the other side of the corridor and stopped a short distance away.
She had heard those words.
This wasn't the first time.
The world rebooted.
She suddenly understood why there were blank areas in her dreams, not because the future was uncertain,
—but because memories were being repeatedly overwritten.
"What if the world could start over?" Mio's voice tightened.
The White Crow looked at her.
'Then you would be standing at the starting point again.'
'But—'
He added softly,
'You might not meet again.'
The wind blew and the windowsill was empty.
The windowsill was empty.
The White Crow turned and left, his figure quickly disappearing in the interplay of light and shadow.
Li was left alone, those words echoing in her mind.
This wasn't the first time.
This meant that if they failed, it wouldn't be the last time.
The countdown to the world began without ceremony.
There was no red alert or commotion; only the campus loudspeaker suddenly taking over all frequencies.
The music stopped abruptly and, after a brief period of static, a cold, inhuman voice rang out:
'World stability assessment failed. The reboot procedure is about to begin.'
The students paused for a moment.
Then, they continued chatting, flipping through books and walking as if the announcement had been nothing more than a trivial notification.
As if the announcement had been nothing more than a trivial notification.
Li stood in the middle of the corridor and noticed the loudspeaker's casing vibrating slightly. The sound seemed to permeate the space rather than emanate from within.
His phone lit up.
No source, no vibration.
Only one line of text appeared on the screen:
WORLD RESET 09:59:59
The numbers began to jump.
Each change felt like a jolt to his nerves.
Mio stood at the other end, staring intently at the countdown.
At that moment, her dream spiralled completely out of control.
Not collapsing, but overlapping.
She saw countless versions of the campus appear simultaneously: some quiet, some burning, some deserted.
In the vast majority of these scenes, Li was nowhere to be found.
She staggered and grabbed the railing for support.
"No."
In the nightclub's basement, all the screens went black simultaneously.
The backup system displayed its final message:
[Reboot cannot be cancelled].
[Variable processing: In progress."
Someone muttered a curse.
'This time it's ahead of schedule.'
'The world is accelerating.'
'As if they're afraid of another problem.'
Li suddenly felt a powerful pull.
Not on his body, but on his very existence.
The surrounding sounds began to fade, the colours gradually disappeared and people's outlines seemed to be erased.
He looked down and saw tiny cracks appearing at the edges of his fingers.
Like pixels dropping frames.
For the first time, he could feel the world reclaiming him.
At that moment, he heard Mio's voice.
It wasn't a real voice.
It was a dream.
The dream unfolded forcefully, dragging him in.
The outside world was counting down while the dream inside struggled to hold on.
Mio stood before him, her face deathly pale.
"Listen to me," she said quickly, as if in a race against time. "If I start to forget you—"
'You've already started,' Li said softly.
Mio froze, her eyes instantly reddening.
'Then remember me,' she said. 'As long as one person remembers, it's not complete forgetting.'
The countdown jumped to 00:00:10.
The dream began to crumble.
Cracks appeared in Mio's figure.
She mustered all her remaining strength to push something into his hand.
It wasn't a physical object.
It was a memory, forced into compression.
'This is the anchor point,' she said. 'Not to save you.'
'It's to—'
The world's voice drowned out everything.
00:00:03
00:00:02
00:00:01
In that final moment, Li could clearly feel someone at the bottom of the world locking away 'Li's existence'.
Not to save it, but to preserve it.
A white light engulfed everything.
When the world began to turn again,
Everything on campus was as usual:
Timetables were updated, lists were refreshed and memories were overwritten.
No one remembered the student who had been labelled a 'world error'.
Except—
In a corner that hadn't fully loaded, a memory that didn't belong here was quietly waiting to be recalled.