Fantasy, heroine + group portrait + reversal + details
Shannai always has the same dream.
In the dream, there was endless water, bitingly cold, wrapping her around and sinking. She opened her eyes and saw nothing, only a string of broken bubbles overflowing from her lips, like silent murmurs. Whenever the feeling of suffocation is about to take away all consciousness, a low and distant voice will penetrate the heavy water curtain and knock on her skull——
"Remember your name..."
She woke up with a start, her clothes soaked in sweat.
It's four o'clock in the morning in this mountain town, and there's deathly silence outside the window. In her palm, she was holding an object that had just appeared in her dream - a dark green jade pendant.
Shanna works in an inconspicuous second-hand bookstore and lives a simple life, like a piece of rice paper soaked in water, blurring all the past. She thought she would stay like this "thin" forever, until that rainy night, an uninvited guest broke into the bookstore.
The person who came was soaked to the skin, and only a cold and hard-lined jaw was exposed under the hood of the black robe. He handed over a book tightly wrapped in oilcloth, with a tattered cover and no title.
"Return everything to its original owner." His voice was hoarse, with a trace of imperceptible fatigue, but it made Shan Nai's heart clench tightly. This sentence sounded unusually familiar.
He left the book behind, turned around and disappeared into the rain, as if he had never appeared.
Shanna's fingertips traced the oilcloth, and the tanned animal skin made the pages of the book look unusually flexible and ancient. What was recorded inside were not words, but strange pictures drawn with mineral pigments and... Some kind of dark pigment: a huge underground palace structure, a twisted star map, and some inhuman, armored and sharp guards.
