Chương 73: Knight X

Have you ever wondered, as you close your bedroom door and turn off the light, where exactly you're heading? Every night we perform the same ritual: we lie down in bed, close our eyes, and voluntarily surrender ourselves to the captivity of complete uncertainty. We give up control over our own bodies, switch off logic, and let consciousness dissolve into the darkness. Isn't that remarkable?

Sleep is the greatest magic that ever existed, dating back even before the Great Rift, available to every single one of us completely free of charge. It's something that, to this day, defies any real explanation, slipping away from every attempt to dissect it, study it, sort it into neat little boxes.

Imagine: you can fall asleep in an ordinary city apartment or in an illusory forest beneath the light of a false moon, and a moment later find yourself standing atop an imaginary mountain, talking to people who never existed, fighting against the most terrifying monsters in the universe, or reliving moments from a distant childhood. Our brains construct colossal three-dimensional worlds, write the most intricate scripts, and make you believe in the most absurd things imaginable.

And all of this unfolds in the absolute silence of a nighttime room, while the body lies motionless somewhere far removed from the drama playing out within, separated from its own consciousness by an invisible, impassable wall. For some, sleep is a way to relax. For others, it's a chance to feel like someone, somewhere, for once.

And for others still, sleep can become a forced memory from the past, or a failed conversation that simply refuses to let go, replaying over and over in the mind like a broken record, sinking into memory like sharp, unhealing splinters. Well, it was that last variety that Lloyd dreamed.

"Where am I?..." He slowly began to open his eyes, feeling his awareness gradually sharpen, filling in with details, sounds, smells — the familiar scent of morning coffee drifting in from somewhere in the kitchen, the quiet hum of the refrigerator behind the wall. Standing before him was a young man staring into a mirror — dark hair, green eyes, still-unworn dark thick hoodie and pants, without a single tear, without a single trace of exhaustion from endless battles, without a single bloodstain on the sleeves.

It was himself — Lloyd recognized his own reflection instantly, though something about the whole scene felt strange, as if he were watching himself from the outside, both spectator and participant in this memory at once, caught somewhere between dream and reality.

"Is that really me?..." The young man — the very same Lloyd he'd been just three days ago, before the Exam, before the blood, before everything that came after — washed his face with cold water, shook the droplets from his fingers, lingering for a second in front of the mirror as if steeling himself, studying his own reflection with some vague, inexplicable unease in his eyes. Then he slowly opened the creaking door and stepped out into the hallway.

The wood groaned faintly under his hand, the sound unnaturally loud in the silence of the dream, echoing somewhere deep within his consciousness, as though this entire remembered world had been built out of fragile, ringing glass. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Suddenly Lloyd's face — the one watching everything unfold from the outside — twisted, his eyebrows shooting up.

"This day. This was that exact day. Three days ago, just a couple of hours before the Exam began." Lloyd followed himself, walking down the familiar, achingly recognizable hallway of an ordinary, unremarkable apartment — light-colored walls, a neat rug by the front door, a dim ceiling light casting an even, homey glow. Every detail of the place stirred something inside him — warm and heavy at once, recognition mixed with an inexplicable ache.

The young man ahead seemed completely unaware of his presence, as if Lloyd, the observer, were nothing more than a bodiless ghost hovering somewhere on the border between sleep and memory, watching his own past unfold from the outside, powerless to intervene, powerless to change a single thing, powerless to shout a warning back to his former self about what lay ahead.

And then Lloyd saw the scene he'd been so afraid of encountering again, the one he'd so desperately not wanted to see — a scene lodged somewhere deep beneath his ribs like a heavy, unpleasant weight, one he'd failed to forget these past three days despite every effort. Standing before him was a lean man in his forties, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe as though his legs could barely hold him up after a long day.

He wore black jeans and a wrinkled white shirt, darkened with sweat under the arms and across the back, the top button undone. A dark tie hung loosely around his neck, crooked and half-undone, unmistakably marking him as someone who'd just come home from work — the very same work that had taken far more from him than it had ever given back, draining his strength drop by drop, year after year.

His face was covered in fairly thick, unkempt stubble, touched here and there with grey, but what stood out most were his eyes. Blue, but dark, devoid of any spark, exhausted, as though burned out from within by an endless, years-accumulated fatigue — the kind of fatigue that no single night's sleep could ever cure, nowhere near as blue, as bright, as striking as Rozi's. Deep, almost violet circles sat beneath his eyes, lending his whole face a sickly, sallow tint.

A receding hairline was clearly visible across his forehead, only completing the image of a man worn down to his very limit, a man for whom every new day was another test of endurance, another battle fought in silence, without a single complaint, teeth clenched, simply pushing forward because there was no other choice left to him.

He looked at Lloyd — the past version of him, still unaware of what lay ahead — with a rather angry expression, deep furrows gathering across his forehead, his lips pressed into a thin, displeased line, trembling with poorly restrained irritation. The air in the hallway seemed to grow even heavier, even thicker, saturated with old exhaustion and unspoken resentments that had built up here over years, settling into every corner of the apartment like invisible dust.

And then his voice rang out — hoarse, worn down by fatigue, cracked, as though he hadn't spoken in days, each word clearly costing him some real effort — but far more important than the voice itself were the words he spoke, echoing through the corridor of the dream, driving themselves straight into Lloyd's memory like sharp, unforgettable splinters, offering no escape even here, deep within his own mind. — You're heading to the Player's Exam, aren't you, Lloyd?