My raised right hand turned palm-up. The moment I activated my ability, a torrent of flames surged into existence above it.

  The fire converged toward the center, coalescing into a blazing fireball nearly half a meter across.

  Superpowers are a staple in countless fantasy stories. Some can halt time, others dominate minds, still others reshape flesh. A few come with elaborate mechanisms that take hundreds or thousands of words just to explain, leaving listeners dazed.

  Mine is nothing like that.

  In a single phrase: I manipulate fire.

  I can summon flames from nothing and control them at will, or seize and direct any existing fire within my line of sight. It’s classic, almost archetypal—so much so that in virtually any story centered on superpower battles, there’s bound to be an early-game fire-user character. And pretty much anything those fictional characters can do, I can manage at least eight or nine times out of ten.

  The “Fireflies” I summoned earlier are, at their core, nothing more than tiny individual flames. The reason they can serve as scouting tools should be obvious.

  Normal fire requires the classic triad: fuel, oxidizer, and heat. My flames bypass all of that. They appear from thin air, needing none of those material conditions. Or rather, all those conditions are replaced by my own mind.

  My mind is the fuel. My mind is the oxidizer. My mind is the heat.

  In other words, my flames are my mind made manifest. The “Fireflies” scattered outward are fragments of myself extended into the world—naturally able to perceive the surroundings in my place.

  And of course, since they are flames, they possess tremendous destructive power against the physical world.

  I slowly lifted the roaring fireball. It collapsed inward, compressing into a searing orb the size of an eyeball. With a flick of my finger, I sent it hurtling forward.

  It struck the solid concrete wall without resistance or explosion. The dense ball of heat punched straight through like a spoon sliding into soft tofu, emerging on the other side into whatever lay beyond the basement.

  Through the spiritual link with the flame, I gained a clear view of the exterior.

  Then I held my breath.

  Nothing—

  Beyond the basement, there was absolutely nothing.

  No ground. No sky. No color. No sound… only boundless, unbroken darkness.

  From this outside perspective, the basement was nothing more than a small concrete box suspended in an infinite void. Nothing else existed. Even when I maneuvered the orb directly beneath it, there was no support—no structure holding the box in place. Not only were there no other objects, there wasn’t even air or gravity.

  It resembled outer space, but outer space at least has countless stars, harmful cosmic radiation, and the thinnest traces of interstellar dust. In a way, it’s almost lively.

  This place was different. Absolute, uncompromising silence. A realm of utter nothingness.

  As though every scrap of matter had already met its apocalyptic end, and this was the finished spacetime.

  Loneliness. Terror. Suffocation.

  The endless emptiness poured into my lungs like an infinite asphyxiation. This basement was no more than a speck of dust in the vast afterlife, and I was its sole passenger—poised at any moment to dissolve into meaningless foam and vanish without trace into the void.

  I stood frozen for a long time before finally dismissing the external orb and viewpoint. I sank to the floor, trying to reorganize my thoughts.

  Returning to the real world via an “outside route” was clearly impossible.

  Fortunately, even though the exterior was a vacuum, the basement’s air wasn’t leaking out through the hole I’d made. If I entered my “second form,” I could function in a vacuum anyway, and sealing a small breach like that wouldn’t be difficult.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  On the bitter-bright side, the phenomenon revealed one more truth: certain physical laws simply don’t apply here. That counted as a discovery, at least.

  So what now? Back to figuring out the conditions for the cave’s reappearance?

  If the “Fireflies” I’d left in the real world were still connected to me, I could try other approaches. But that link had long since severed.

  I let out a self-deprecating laugh. Just this morning when Chang’an showed up, I’d been thinking—if he really had encountered something anomalous, I’d finally get to unleash my powers in style, narrating my “ability profile” like some comic-book hero while showing off. Life really does love to disappoint. My ability turned out to be completely useless in a situation like this.

  Someone once said all fear stems from insufficient firepower. But no matter how overwhelming the firepower, it probably couldn’t do a thing about the current predicament.

  Maybe this dead end was inevitable—an inescapable destiny waiting for me all along.

  My power is straightforward and brutally strong, easy for anyone to grasp. But anomalous entities are fickle and unpredictable; no one knows what form their killing blow will take. Even if you hold a spear that destroys everything and a shield that defends against everything, there are still countless things you simply cannot do.

  I pushed myself up off the floor using my knees and began pacing, scanning the shelves for any useful clue.

  The yellow cardboard boxes weren’t entirely empty. Some held small trinkets—cartoon stickers, plastic keychains, candles, and so on. None of it looked remotely helpful for my current situation. Earlier I might have excitedly pocketed them as souvenirs of the trip. Now I had no such impulse.

  To sharpen my focus, I stopped maintaining the “Fireflies” that lit the room from every direction. Instead, I picked up one of the candles from the shelf, lit it with a thought, and set it on the ground. The basement returned to darkness, but that single point of flickering light helped me concentrate. It also stirred memories of the past.

  Come to think of it, back in my third year of junior high, when I first awakened my ability… the trigger had something to do with a candle too…

  People who’ve had near-death experiences often say that right before dying, the mind involuntarily replays the past.

  Was I suddenly remembering things now because I knew I was going to die here?

  Time continued ticking forward, second by second. How long had passed? I didn’t know.

  My analysis of the situation remained at a standstill.

  Since my stomach still wasn’t growling too badly, that meant dawn was still far off.

  But this was a spacetime outside the real world—maybe time flowed according to entirely alien rules here. Perhaps days had already passed outside. Like the old folktale of the chess-watcher whose axe handle rotted while he was lost in another realm, I might have been abandoned in this extra-cosmic place, forgotten by the world.

  Marx said man is the sum of his social relations. Right now, I had been severed from every single one. I didn’t even know whether return was possible. If I died here, it wouldn’t be as a human—it would be as some nameless animal.

  Perhaps influenced by the anomalous environment, an even stranger thought crept in: what if I had always been a resident of this basement? What if I had never truly lived in the real world at all, and everything I remembered was just an illusion?

  I patted my pocket. There were house keys inside—but that proved nothing. They couldn’t confirm I had ever lived in that house, or even that the “real world” in my memory actually existed. Keys are defined by locks. There were no locks here, so this piece of metal couldn’t even be proven to be a key.

  My ID card, loose change—these things only have meaning within society. Outside of it, they’re just oddly shaped bits of matter. Just like me right now.

  Every meaning built upon the concept of “society” had evaporated here. The objects, my personality, even the clothes on my back—they all seemed to be dissolving in this dim space, exposing the raw, primitive nakedness beneath.

  In the midst of that strange tremor, a faint intoxication rose within me. In this domain cut off from everything, I felt as though I were slowly molting into some unforeseen, alien existence.

  A hermit is either a beast or a god.

  Incredibly, even though I was filled with fear, unease, and pessimism, I felt no regret and no panic.

  Because I had walked in here with resolve and full awareness.

  I’d mentioned it before in passing: part of the reason I chased adventures beyond reality was a deep desire to see what kind of self would emerge in the face of the impossible. To put it boldly, I considered it a kind of yearning for the Way. And now, confronted with deadlock, despair, and the imminent prospect of dying alone… it seemed I had finally glimpsed a truer version of myself.

  In everyday life, I might have felt proud of the current me—excited, even thrilled. But right now those fiery emotions were absent.

  It wasn’t that negative feelings had overwhelmed me. Quite the opposite: I felt an unprecedented sense of release.

  It was like the clouds parting to reveal clear sky. No matter how many dark emotions surged up, none of them could touch this pure, serene state of mind.

  That said, I’m not about to spout anything like “If I hear the Way in the morning, I can die content in the evening.”

  I’m far too greedy for that. A reward this small could never satisfy me.

  I wanted to break through this deadlock with my own strength—prove that I wasn’t just some disposable early-game character who dies offhandedly in a story of adventures beyond reality.

  After this, I wanted to go home and see Alice again, eventually make her spill every last one of her secrets. I wanted to uncover the mysteries of Luo Shan and the Demon Hunters, figure out how supernatural forces carve up their territories in this world. There were countless other things I still wanted to explore—far too many to count.

  So here was the question: could I actually do it?

  Just as negative emotions couldn’t taint this clear state of mind, no amount of mental clarity could deny the objective reality of the dead end.

  Because I was calm, I understood perfectly.

  This might very well be the end of my adventure.

  My journey was over before it had truly begun.