The final round of the international chess championship was silent in the way operating rooms were silent.
The hall held thousands of people, yet the quiet felt engineered, as though the air itself had been filtered and sterilized. It was not the absence of sound that created the stillness.
Cameras clicked in restless bursts while commentators whispered urgently into their headsets, and the audience inhaled as one, forgetting how to exhale—yet every sound felt muted, as if all of it existed only in service to what unfolded across the sixty-four squares.
Spotlights burned white above the stage, their glare merciless and unwavering. Beyond that harsh brilliance, the audience dissolved into shadows, faceless and indistinct.
Liang Jinhui sat perfectly upright in the middle of the room.
His charcoal suit fell flawlessly, not a single crease daring to exist. His cuffs rested at his wrists with exact precision, and even the angle of his shoulders felt deliberate. His expression was neither stern nor cold; it was something far more unsettling—a look of indifference. No irritation. No anticipation. No triumph. Only stillness.
Across from him, his opponent's fingers trembled above a knight stranded on hostile ground, a piece with nowhere safe to retreat. A pulse fluttered visibly in the man's throat, frantic and uneven. His breathing was too shallow, each inhale clipped short as though the air itself resisted him.
The digital clock ticked.
Each second fell like a measured drop of water in a cavern, echoing too loudly in the spaces between thought.
The commentators murmured in reverent tones:
"Grandmaster Liang is known for his surgical style…"
"He calculates seventeen moves ahead—some say more…"
"He doesn't attack emotionally. He dismantles."
Liang Jinhui's gaze did not leave the board, yet he noticed everything.
The micro-twitch in his opponent's jaw. The faint sheen of sweat gathering along the hairline. The slight dilation of pupils at the contemplation of a desperate queen sacrifice. The delayed exhale. The aborted reach.
Hesitation.
To Liang Jinhui, hesitation was a crack in glass. And once the glass cracked, it shattered along entirely predictable lines.
Seventeen moves ago, the outcome had crystallized—not as hope, not as probability, but as fact. The board had resolved itself in his mind into a single converging future. What remained now was not competition. It was execution.
His gaze shifted at last—not to the pieces, but to the man across from him. There, the tightening at the corners of the eyes. The fractional pause before touching the rook. The half-second delay lingered just long enough to betray doubt.
Most people believed chess was about intelligence or creativity.
It was neither.
It was about pressure.
About locating the invisible fault line within a structure and applying force with perfect restraint until collapse became inevitable.
Every board is a crime scene waiting to happen. The victim just doesn't know it yet.
His opponent moved the knight.
The mistake was subtle, neither dramatic nor obvious, invisible to any untrained eye, yet utterly terminal.
Liang Jinhui did not rush to capitalize. He adjusted his cufflinks with calm, almost absent precision, as though indulging in a trivial courtesy before proceeding. Then he moved his bishop. The soft contact of wood against wood sounded almost polite.
Three moves later, the opposing king was driven into a narrowing corner.
Two more, and the illusion of resistance dissolved entirely. There was no brilliance in the final sequence—only inevitability. Liang Jinhui slid his queen forward with steady, unhurried fingers.
"Checkmate."
He spoke the word quietly, without emphasis or emotion.
For one suspended heartbeat, the hall remained silent—as though the world required confirmation that it had truly ended.
Then the crowd erupted.
Applause crashed over the stage in violent waves. Cameras flared in blinding bursts. The commentators' composure shattered into exhilaration—youngest champion, flawless execution, historic dominance.
Liang Jinhui did not move.
The fallen king lay on its side, a monarch reduced to carved wood.
Across from him, his opponent stared at the board in disbelief, as if waiting for the pieces to rearrange themselves out of mercy. As if reality might, for once, refuse to follow logic.
Liang Jinhui felt nothing.
In his mind, he replayed the game—not as a series of risks, but as a chain of certainties. Each move had forced the next. Each defense had narrowed into compliance.
The applause washed over Liang Jinhui like distant static, muffled and irrelevant. It followed him even after he left the stage.
It lingered in the walls, in the polished floors, in the hollow backstage corridors where technicians spoke in hushed, efficient tones. The trophy rested in Liang Jinhui's hands—cold, metallic, heavier than its elegant design suggested.
He shifted the trophy to one arm and reached into his pocket for his phone. Notifications would be flooding in—sponsors, federation officials, international press. He preferred to scan information early, before narratives spiraled beyond control.
The screen lit up, and then it flickered twice.
His steps slowed, though he did not stop. The display went black—not powered off, not dimmed. Black in a different way. Depthless. As if the light had not been extinguished but swallowed whole.
A thin ripple of static crept across the surface. White specks shimmered against the darkness like distant stars breaking apart. The air in the corridor felt subtly colder, the kind of drop only someone trained enough would notice.
Liang Jinhui's grip tightened slightly around the trophy.
His phone had never malfunctioned. He maintained it meticulously. No unofficial downloads. No unsecured networks.
The static stabilized.
Then text emerged, clean and centered.
INFINITE NIGHT — Closed Beta Reopening
He stared at the words without blinking.
A second line formed beneath it.
You once reached the endgame.
Do you dare resume the match?
His brow creased faintly.
He had no memory of this game.
He did not participate in beta tests. He did not download experimental software with theatrical titles. If this were marketing, it would be invasive enough to be illegal.
A new icon materialized on his home screen.
A black square. At its center, a white chess crown rendered with unsettling precision.
He pressed and held the icon.
Delete.
The phone vibrated in acknowledgment. However, the icon did not move. Instead, a thin bar appeared beneath it.
Installing.
His expression hardened.
He attempted to power off the device. The command registered—then vanished. The screen remained active, unresponsive to authority.
The loading bar advanced with quiet certainty.
[20%… 43%… 75%…]
His mind shifted automatically, evaluating every possibility. Malware. Remote access breach. Federation sabotage. A targeted psychological tactic. Statistical probabilities assembled and dissolved in rapid succession, each dismissed for lack of supporting evidence.
No external connection spike. No system alerts. No irregular battery drain.
[98%… 100%]
The screen returned to normal brightness as if nothing had occurred. His wallpaper reappeared. Signal strength steady. Notifications stacked neatly in orderly rows.
Everything seemed ordinary.
Except that the app remained with a black icon and a white chess crown.
He tried again.
Delete.
Still, nothing happened.
The overhead lights flickered briefly.
Liang Jinhui's gaze lifted for a possible electrical fluctuation, then returned to the screen. The icon pulsed once—subtle, like a heartbeat.
For the first time that night, something existed beyond calculation.
He had seen hesitation in opponents' eyes. Micro-expressions cracking under pressure. Seventeen moves unfolding with mechanical clarity.
But this—
This was a move he had not foreseen.
—————————————————
Night did not fall over the city.
Beyond Liang Jinhui's apartment window, the city's lights flickered in rigid grids of cold fluorescence, each building a vertical column in some vast architectural arrangement. Traffic moved below in disciplined streams.
Inside the apartment, there was only silence.
Liang Jinhui lay on his back, eyes open to the dark.
He did not dream often.
When he did, they were orderly things—patterns assembling themselves with mechanical clarity, endgames unfolding in elegant inevitability. No chaos. No distortion. No color. Just logic resolving into a conclusion.
Tonight was different.
—————————————————
The chessboard stretched without end.
Black-and-white squares unfurled toward a horizon that did not exist, dissolving into a depthless shadow where distance lost meaning. Each tile gleamed with a mirror-like polish, yet reflected nothing—not Liang Jinhui, not the sky above, not even the pieces arranged in immaculate formation between the two players. The surface absorbed all light, all presence, as though it rejected the concept of reflection itself. There were no spectators. No ticking clock. No enclosing walls to define space. Only the board, suspended within a vast, breathing void that seemed to inhale and exhale with slow, cavernous rhythm.
Liang Jinhui stood on one side.
He did not remember walking there. There was no memory of arrival, no transition from one reality to the next. He simply existed at the edge of the board, as if placed deliberately—like one more piece set in position before the opening move.
Across from him stood a man.
The figure possessed outline and substance, enough to cast the impression of reality, yet the details refused to stabilize. Every time Liang Jinhui tried to focus on a feature, the curve of a cheekbone, the shape of the eyes—it blurred at the edges, slipping from comprehension. Clear enough to feel tangible. Indistinct enough to deny recognition. It was as if the dream itself resisted granting him resolution.
Between them, the pieces were already arranged.
Perfectly aligned.
But something was wrong.
The white squares were stained.
At first, Liang Jinhui thought it was shadow pooling in the seams between tiles. Then the darkness thickened. Spread with slow intention. A viscous liquid gathered along the ranks and files, seeping across borders, spilling from white into black without hesitation.
Blood.
It crept in languid streams along the carved edges of the board, slipping from one square to the next with a faint, rhythmic pattern.
The man on the opposite side did not move.
Neither did LiangJinhui.
They regarded one another across the pulsing board, the surface faintly throbbing beneath their feet as though something enormous lay buried beneath the grid—something alive, straining quietly against containment.
Then a voice spoke.
Not from the man.
Not from the void.
But from somewhere closer.
Somewhere that felt almost behind him.
"If you sacrifice yourself again, I won't forgive you."
The words were low and strained, wound tight as wire—threaded with anger and something far more fragile.
Fear.
Liang Jinhui's chest constricted without warning. The sensation was sharp, intrusive, and unfamiliar. His breath faltered, catching halfway between inhale and exhale.
Sacrifice?
His gaze dropped instinctively to the board.
His king stood exposed and unprotected.
His queen was gone.
He did not remember trading her. Did not remember calculating such a loss. Did not remember making a single move.
The blood reached the edge of his shoes.
Warm.
Viscous.
Real enough that he felt the faint resistance as it lapped against leather.
The man across from him took one deliberate step forward.
The sound reverberated unnaturally through the endless space, echoing longer than it should have.
"You always think you're the only piece that matters," the voice continued, softer but each word landing with quiet precision. "But you're not the only one on the board."
The tiles beneath Liang Jinhui's feet fractured.
Hairline cracks splintered outward in violent symmetry, splitting it into jagged imperfection. The board tilted violently, the endless grid shattering into falling fragments as gravity asserted itself. As if the world is about to collapse.
—————————————————
His body jerked upright before his thoughts could gather into anything coherent. Breath tore from his lungs in sharp, uneven pulls, and his fingers clenched into the sheets as if bracing for impact. For a fleeting moment, he did not know where he was—only that something had been falling, shattering, collapsing beneath his feet.
For one disorienting second, he expected warmth against his skin. Expected the slow seep of liquid through the fabric and expected the metallic scent of iron thickening the air.
But there was nothing.
Only the steady, mundane hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. The faint, methodical ticking of the wall clock. Ordinary sounds. The kind that belonged to a world governed by physics rather than dreams.
His heartbeat pounded violently against his ribs, unnaturally loud in the suffocating silence.
Liang Jinhui pressed his palm against his chest and forced himself to breathe deliberately. Inhale. Exhale. Once. Twice. Three times. He counted each breath with quiet precision, as if recalibrating after a miscalculation. Discipline did not return all at once; it came in fragments, gradually reclaiming control over his pulse, his muscles, and finally, his thoughts.
A dream.
It was only a dream.
He had faced grandmasters across polished tables under blinding lights. He had endured pressure that cracked others in minutes. He did not lose composure over figments of the subconscious.
And yet the words lingered with unsettling clarity, sharp as if spoken moments ago beside his ear.
"If you sacrifice yourself again, I won't forgive you."
Again.
The word echoed more persistently than the rest.
He leaned back against the headboard, the wood cool against his spine, and stared into the darkness as if it might rearrange itself into explanation.
Whose voice was that?
It had not sounded entirely unfamiliar.
But neither had it sounded familiar.
There had been weight in it—history woven through each syllable, something shared, something left unresolved. It had not been a distant warning, but an accusation grounded in memory, as if it pointed to a choice already made and a price already paid.
Liang Jinhui isn't someone who can be scared easily.
He did not believe in prophetic visions, subconscious omens, or symbolic warnings. He believed in structure—cause and effect, preparation and consequence. Outcomes were not foretold; they were constructed.
Yet the unease did not fade under scrutiny. It did not unravel beneath rational analysis. It lingered somewhere deeper, beyond logic's reach.
His gaze shifted to the faint glow across the room. The laptop screen on his desk was still illuminated.
Waiting.
Earlier that evening, an email had appeared in his inbox.
No sender name. No subject line.
Only a single sentence:
Your next match is ready.
And beneath it—
A link.
He had closed it immediately. Classified it as spam. A gimmick crafted to provoke curiosity. Someone was trying to bait him with theatrics and manufactured mystery. He doesn't need anonymous challengers, no interest in validation from faceless opponents behind a screen, and no reason to entertain invitations that concealed their origin.
However, the dream did not feel random.
It felt less like a coincidence and more like a continuation—as if a sequence had been set in motion long before he became aware of it, as if a move had already been played in a game he did not remember agreeing to play.
Liang Jinhui swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his bare feet meeting the cold floor. The chill seeped upward through skin and bone, grounding him in something solid, something undeniably real. It steadied him more effectively than logic ever could.
He rose and walked around the apartment without turning on the lights.
The curtains remained drawn, sealing the room away from the city beyond. The world outside continued in distant murmurs, but inside, the air felt suspended, as though the apartment itself were holding its breath.
The laptop cast a pale blue light across his face when he approached.
It carved sharper lines into his features, deepened the shadows beneath his eyes, and made him appear momentarily unfamiliar even to himself. On the screen, the email remained open.
The cursor blinked beside the link with mechanical patience, measuring time in silent intervals.
He stared at it without moving.
Rational thought assembled its objections with clean efficiency.
This is unnecessary. This is childish. You have nothing to gain from this. Each argument settled neatly into place, structured and sensible.
But another thought slipped between them—quieter, thinner, edged with something he did not like to name.
What if it knows you?
The endless board.
The blood that was creeping across white squares.
The missing queen.
The accusation had not sounded like imagination.
He exhaled slowly, the tension woven into the breath loosening only slightly as it left him.
"This is ridiculous," he muttered.
His voice sounded distant in the still apartment, absorbed by soft walls and unoccupied space, as if even sound refused to linger.
He should close his laptop.
He should go back to bed and let the strict discipline of his routine restore order. Morning would arrive soon enough. He would wake before sunrise, prepare his tea without sugar, and continue his preparations for the next tournament with practiced precision—studying openings, reviewing variations, and dismantling endgames until nothing remained hidden. His attention would remain on real opponents, ones of flesh and bone, bound by the certainty of human error.
It should have been the rational choice.
Instead, his hand moved.
Deliberate. Controlled. Not a single tremor in his fingers, not the slightest disruption in his breathing. The same unwavering steadiness that had dismantled grandmasters across polished wooden boards now guided the small arc of his wrist while he hovered the mouse.
The cursor drifted across the screen and came to a stop over the link.
He did not hesitate. He simply observed.
A prompt surfaced instantly—as though it had been waiting for this exact moment, as though it had calculated the precise second his restraint would falter.
ENTER.
One word.
Stark against the darkened interface. It carried no explanation, no embellishment, no warning. Its restraint felt intentional.
Almost mocking.
His pulse accelerated—not from fear, but from anticipation. The sharpened clarity that came before decisive action. The narrow, irreversible instant before choosing a line that could never be fully predicted, yet had to be taken.
Curiosity was a weakness.
It fractured concentration. It invited instability. It tempted the mind to wander from proven lines into uncharted territory where calculation thinned and certainty dissolved.
But it was also how new strategies were discovered—how limits were expanded, how the unknown was mapped and reduced to a pattern.
His finger pressed down.
He clicked.
For half a second, nothing happened. The cursor froze in place. The screen held its breath.
Then a brilliant white light burst outward, consuming everything in its path.
It did not merely grow brighter—it exploded, swallowing the darkness of the apartment in a single, violent instant. The room collapsed into a stark, colorless void where depth dissolved and distance became meaningless. Liang Jinhui recoiled, his hand rising on instinct to shield his eyes, but the light tore through his fingers, through his closed lids, through every fragile defense his body could muster.
The brilliant white light did not fade.
It grew stronger.
It expanded outward, devouring every boundary until the line between screen and air ceased to exist. He could no longer distinguish where the monitor ended and the room began. The desk disappeared. The walls followed. The ceiling vanished. Structure itself came apart, dissolving into an endless, unbroken field of light.
The hum of the refrigerator cut off mid-vibration.
The distant murmur of traffic ceased as if muted by an unseen hand.
Sound did not fade gradually—it retracted, stripped away in an instant, leaving behind an oppressive, absolute silence so complete it seemed to press against his eardrums.
There was only endless white in his surroundings.
Time stretched thin within it, undefined and unmeasured.
The unmistakable sound of a chess piece being placed upon a board. It echoed from somewhere ahead of him, precise and deliberate, carrying the unmistakable weight of intention.
As if a move had been made. And this time—
He had accepted the match.