Seven hundred years ago, a Nameless left a promise at Mizhan:
“On the day the rail line is repaired, we will return.”
And so, for seven hundred years, the lights on Mizhan’s platform never went out.
Shen Yan, the station’s twenty-fourth-generation keeper, never believed in the so-called Astral Express, until one day at 23:48, when the star rail that had been silent for centuries suddenly began to tremble.
But the only thing that arrived was a battered black carriage.
Etched on its door were the words:
“Do not let the train return.”
Inside the carriage was a ticket bearing Shen Yan’s name.
Meanwhile, the real Astral Express discovered a strange entry in its records:
[Next stop: Mizhan.]
But in all the archives the train had preserved, they had never been there.
A world that had waited for seven hundred years.
A train that had never arrived.
And a group of Nameless who had been completely erased.
Shen Yan gradually realized that the so-called duty of a “station keeper” might never have been to wait for the train to return.
It was to make absolutely sure it never arrived.
