Lu Zhiyu always thought the end of his life woud at least comes with a sense of drama to it. Instead, it arrived in the most ordinary way possible. A hospital room that smelled faintly of disinfectant, a doctor who chose his words carefully, and a diagnosis that didn’t bother pretending it could be misunderstood. Yes, its advanced lung cancer. Treatment existed, yes, but it would be long, exhausting, and uncertain whether it would work. When asked what he wanted to do, Lu Zhiyu didn’t hesitate for long. He just thanked them, stood up, and walked away.
People would rather call that decision irresponsible, even cowardly. Lu Zhiyu didn’t see it that way. To him, it felt like the natural conclusion to a life that had never truly belonged to him. He had followed the expected path for decades—school, work, responsibility, routine—without ever stopping to question whether he wanted any of it. His parents were gone. Family gatherings had faded into memory. Friends existed, but only in name, reduced to occasional messages and forced politeness. The thought of spending his remaining time chasing slim odds inside hospital walls felt empty.
So he quit his job and returned to Jiangcheng, a city tied to memories he rarely revisited. His childhood home was still standing, neglected but intact, like it had been waiting for him. Dust coated the furniture, the air felt heavy, and silence filled the rooms. It wasn’t comforting, exactly, but it was honest. If his life was going to slow to a stop, this was where he wanted it to happen.
While cleaning the house, sorting through old boxes and forgotten corners, Lu Zhiyu found something that didn’t belong to the present. A red wooden box, its surface worn smooth by time, tucked away as if intentionally hidden. He recognized it immediately—it had been his grandfather’s. The old man had been quiet, distant, and strangely meticulous, the sort of person who never explained himself. Inside the box were a handful of odd items, none of them particularly impressive, except for one thing: a white scroll that looked impossibly new.
The scroll felt wrong in his hands. Too clean…. Too perfect. At first, it appeared blank, but after looking closer, Lu Zhiyu noticed a tiny grasshopper drawn near one edge. Acting on impulse rather than reason, he touched it.
The grasshopper moved.
It didn’t animate or shimmer—it simply slipped out of the scroll and landed in his palm, warm and alive. Lu Zhiyu froze, waiting for panic to arrive. It didn’t. Curiosity took its place.
Over the following days, he tested the scroll carefully. Objects placed inside were compressed into flat images, preserved without aging or decay. Food stayed fresh. Metal remained unchanged. Time, as far as he could tell, didn’t function there at all. Living creatures were another matter. Anything larger than an insect was rejected violently, as if the space itself refused to accommodate them. Ants survived. Small insects endured, existing in a strange suspended state.
The more he observed, the clearer it became that the scroll obeyed rules—rules rooted in logic rather than magic. Space required matter. Time required space. Remove one, and the others collapsed.
This wasn’t a painting. It was a sealed world.
Lu Zhiyu named it the Scroll of the World, mostly to give shape to something that felt too large to leave unnamed. Using a camera, he managed to glimpse its interior and discovered something that unsettled him more than anything else: a silver infinity sigil suspended within the two-dimensional void. When he came into contact with it, the sigil merged with him, flooding his mind with fragmented information and unbearable pressure. It wasn’t just knowledge—it was control. Authority over the world within the scroll.
After that moment, the scroll no longer resisted him.
Under the cover of night, Lu Zhiyu began moving soil, water, and raw matter into the Scroll of the World. Outside, the effects were subtle but dangerous, enough to hint at consequences if he pushed too far. Inside, land emerged from nothing, surrounded by endless sea. He stabilized space first, acting on instinct more than certainty. Creating a sun and a moon drained him nearly to the point of collapse, the sigil’s energy plunging as light and warmth spread across the newborn world.
Only then did time begin to move.
He accelerated it without fully understanding why, setting the inner world’s flow far beyond the outside. Seasons passed in minutes. Growth followed naturally. Change became unavoidable.
Standing alone in the old house, staring at the Scroll of the World, Lu Zhiyu realized something had shifted. His illness hadn’t vanished. Death was still waiting. But for the first time, his remaining days were no longer about waiting for the end.
Something had begun—and it was watching him just as closely as he watched it.
