Drowning in the Unknown
Yuer sat on the floor, her back pressed against the side of her bed, arms wrapped tightly around her knees.
Her mind refused to quiet down.
The memory—no, the vision—was still vivid in her head.
She had felt it. The crisp autumn air, the weight of expectation, the fleeting warmth of childhood laughter.
It wasn't a dream.
It wasn't a hallucination.
It was real.
And that terrified her.
The Outsider
She had always been different.
Even as a child, she had sensed it.
While others ran under the sun, she sat in the shade, a book in her hands.
Her parents, worried that she was too withdrawn, had gently urged her to play with the other children.
But she never saw the point.
She wasn't shy. She wasn't afraid of people.
She just found meaningless conversations exhausting.
She observed more than she spoke.
She listened more than she participated.
And she had always, always felt like an outsider.
A Search for Answers
She got up and walked toward her bookshelf, fingers trailing across the spines of the books she had collected over the years.
Some were well-worn, others barely touched.
Her gaze fell on three familiar titles:
📖 "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Youth Edition)"
📖 "Unsolved Mysteries of the World"
📖 "Aesop's Fables"
Books her parents had bought for her, believing they would nurture her curiosity.
But they were too simple.
Too shallow.
Too small to explain what was happening to her.
She wanted something deeper. Something that could make sense of this chaos in her mind.
But where could she find it?
She couldn't ask her parents—they would think she had gone mad.
She couldn't ask her classmates—they would only be concerned, not helpful.
And a doctor?
Her parents would panic.
They might even take her to a temple, a shaman.
She wasn't going to let that happen.
She had to figure this out on her own.
A Logical Mind Faces the Impossible
She wasn't like most fifteen-year-olds.
She didn't believe in ghosts.
She didn't believe in fate.
But she did believe in the mind.
And she knew, with absolute certainty, that her mind was being invaded.
She had read about mental disorders.
There were cases where people misremembered events, where their brains tricked them into believing in false memories.
But this was different.
This wasn't just a mistake in her own memory.
This was someone else's past intertwining with hers.
And the worst part?
She understood it.
She felt it.
It wasn't foreign. It wasn't disconnected.
It was becoming hers.
A Message from the Unknown
She turned back to her journal.
The page from last night still stared back at her.
"Who are you?"
She exhaled.
What had she expected? That her own writing would respond? That some ghost would answer her?
She shook her head, feeling foolish.
But just as she reached to close the book, she saw it.
A new line.
Thin, sharp handwriting.
"You already know."
Yuer's breath caught in her throat.
Her fingers hovered over the ink.
The handwriting was different from hers.
And yet, something deep inside her whispered—
It came from her own hand.