When the boundary between the virtual and the real dissolves, the virtual gifts you scroll past suddenly become crystals in your palm, and the AI on your screen smiles at you with the scent of real flowers. Can you still tell what is real and what is fantasy?
Su Wan, an ordinary livestreamer, one day discovers that everything around her has started to feel “wrong”: a freshly watered flower withers and blooms again in an instant, words leave her mouth before she can think, and even time begins to waltz. One second it is midsummer; the next, snow is falling.
Traveling with her are Ling Chuan, a stone-faced swordsman who can cut through the turbulence of time; Yun Zhi, a gentle embroiderer who can restore the memories of civilization; and Xiao Meng, a little fairy whose wings shimmer with the golden light of the Origin. Armed with a key that can cross dimensions, they are forced into an adventure spanning reality and illusion, being and nothingness, cause and effect, emotion and reason:
In the dimension of reality and illusion, they meet a guardian who uses virtual wings to hide a real wheelchair, and learn that the virtual is the wings of a dream, while reality is its foundation. In the dimension of being and nothingness, they fight a dark mist of emptiness that devours all, and come to understand that existence does not derive its meaning from being eternal, but from having “truly burned, once.” In the labyrinth of cause and effect, they untangle the deadlock of “sowing seeds only to reap thorns,” and learn that every choice is a ripple cast into the future...
When appearances clash with reality, emotions battle reason, individuals lose themselves in the collective, and the momentary diverges from the eternal, this adventure is no longer about fighting monsters and leveling up. It has become a practice in “balance.” Like the flying apsaras in the Dunhuang murals, one must have both the grace of flowing ribbons and the resolve of steady lines. Like you and me, we must chase the wind in the virtual world while putting down roots in the soil of reality.
