Lu Mingfei, become the king of gambling in dungeons!

The rain of the off-season is unpredictable, the crimson rainbow turns into a sliver of light in the sky that marks the passing of stars, torrential rain falls in the east of the city, and light rain falls in the west.

Walking from west to east across the broken bridge, both sides of the long street are lit up, with streetlights, windows, and street lamps in front of shopping malls shining brightly all the way to the subway entrance of Apple Garden Station.

From then on, it was another space, hidden beneath the clouds and mist, the joys and sorrows, the mundane details of life. It was a place where beings other than humans roamed, the Nibelungen, the land of the dead.

Nibelungen is an independent space constructed through alchemy, where the rules of spacetime are vastly different from reality. Common sense from the human world is distorted and inapplicable here; describing it as a spacetime rift would be quite apt.

The clock struck twelve for the last time, and soon after, it stopped.

Everything in the Nibelungen was put to a halt.

Within the Nibelungen region—including the edge of the subway station where the stench of death permeated the air—everything stood still.

Molten iron slag, electric arcs and storms tearing everything apart, a young killer and a monster girl embracing each other in a fire tornado.

A half-destroyed train full of passengers, a ghost train about to burst from its lair like a tidal wave, and a boy running wildly with a Nokia N73 in his hand, splashing water everywhere...

Everything fell silent; the world was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. All the stories of late summer and approaching autumn had come to a rest.

Doomsday and memories, outcasts and conflicts, revenge and return—these heavy symbols have a chance to breathe, regardless of whether they are good or bad, and regardless of what the future holds.

Footsteps echoed in the infinitely slowed-down time.

Two ghosts of the floating world meet here.

Earlier, they strolled in the city's light rain, stopping and starting, brushing past traffic, happiness, and the world, briefly parting ways where they needed to, and then reuniting at the end of the Nibelung railway.

After a brief exchange of glances, one of them said:

"It's a good day to reunite. Is this century coming to an end?"

The subway was rather hot at the moment, so they each took off their black formal attire and put on even hotter ancient costumes in flowing robes, twirling around on the steel ruins, undoubtedly celebrating and raising their glasses in a toast.

The ghosts' mental state was clearly dire, and there seemed to be no mental hospital in the world capable of housing them.

There was still a long time before the play started, so the banquet was rather ordinary and could hardly be described as a lavish affair.

Two bottles of Bulmer cider that were only half full, a hollowed-out crab roe-flavored potato chip, fries, chicken wings, and Heinz ketchup from KFC, two cases of nearly empty nutritional drinks, and a perfectly intact cream cake.

The mask beside me was unusually thick, and the polishing of its outline showed that the craftsmanship was mediocre. The person it represented was not well-known, and it was a cheap black market mask belonging to Emperor Henry V and Pope Callixtus II.

The gluttons, having eaten their fill, sat and leaned against the broken steel bars for a short rest—the bulk of their meal was nutritional drinks, two cases of which were simply too much. They occasionally looked up at the tunnel ceiling, waiting for the next entertainment.

The railway tracks extend to the end of the underground subway, where strangely gleaming steel ruins are piled up in the grayness. Twisted long steel bars resemble prehistoric snake bones, and broken iron frames intersect to form hills. At the end of the railway is a pile of steel ruins, sharp as a thorny thicket in the Book of Judges.

This subway line doesn't exist in reality, so it's a path with no chance of survival.

The ghost play, as seen from the masks, depicts the Worms Religious Agreement, in which Emperor Henry V made concessions to Pope Callixtus II. This marked the end of the "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" principle, symbolizing the decline of monarchical power and the rise of papal authority in the Western Middle Ages.

"God will take away the kingdoms of the four corners of the earth." The believers brandished axes under the grand banner, and their warhorses rode through rivers of blood that were deep enough to reach the bridles.

Ultimately, the Pope agreed that secular emperors and monarchs could intervene to a limited extent in the appointment and election of church officials, provided that they adhered to the fundamental principle that church law was the sole criterion for regulating elections, and that they were never allowed to bestow upon newly appointed bishops sacred objects that symbolized religious authority, such as rings or scepters.

The era of multiple monarchs has ended, and earthly power has been seized by a much larger iron hand.

All old powers will be swallowed up by new powers.

The ghosts didn't care about any powerful agreements from nearly a thousand years ago, nor did they have any intention of remembering or respecting Henry V and Callixtus II. The old dynasties, which had been like shifting sands, had long since gone to their graves.

The mask was bought to be used as a pad, to make sitting more comfortable and elegant, as the exposed sharp steel and thorns were really prickly on my buttocks.

The ghost, wearing an emperor's mask, fiddled with a light blue portable music player that was clearly quite old. He disassembled the old casing to check the DSP, then connected the silver headphone cable, his movements as slow as an elderly person living alone who needs care.

The ghost, wearing a papal mask, held a black box that emitted a tremendous heartbeat. A bouquet of snow-white roses lay horizontally beside him as he hummed a bloody hymn. Judging from some of the decorations on his body, he was undoubtedly a devil, or perhaps even calling him a devil would be an understatement.

The devil and the emperor sat side by side.

They are waiting for the moment of sunrise.

It's past midnight now, and the sunrise in this area today should have been over some time ago; it's too early for the sunrise the next day.

But this is Nibelungen, a place beyond conventional explanation, where time is either static or moving slowly forward.

What appears distorted and chaotic from the outside is not entirely disordered from the inside. In fact, it has its own set of operating rules, and each encounter with reality is like the orderly collision of multiple gears.

The two worlds are both independent and interfering with each other. While the real world remains unchanged, they manipulate the time of Nibelungen and its surroundings, letting this gear turn through midnight, dawn, and daybreak.

Suddenly, a dreamlike light appeared on the pile of iron thorns, falling like Christmas cherry blossoms. The rising sun peeked out from the cracks in the iron dome of the subway station, like yellow trees blooming with white pear blossoms, and the world was instantly brightened, the gloom vanishing without a trace.

The light of tomorrow is so bright and magnificent, along with the clear sky after the clouds and rain, that it elevates and transforms even the ghosts, revealing human expressions.

One of them said:

"I should have bought the family bucket meal."

Another person said:

"In this world, you and I are the only ones on the same side."

They greeted each other with good morning and then spoke in hushed tones.

"Every word you said sounded like a blessing, but I want to eat an egg tart."

"Brother, if someone loves you, they will try every excuse to bless you, over and over again, until you get tired of it."

"Today is a grand day of reunion and farewell, but thankfully, our separation will only last seven days."

As the brilliant morning light faded into the distance, the emperor said nothing more and handed over the other end of the wired headphones connected to his light blue Walkman.

The gears turn back, and time, which had been still, begins to flow again.

Previously, the Walkman was playing the StarCraft theme song "Terran Two," and before that, a minor key version of "Red Rose White Rose." Now, it has switched to a blank track without any accompaniment notes.

They could hear each other's heartbeats, in opposite directions.

Happy birthday, another one we've spent together in ten thousand years.