The One I Could Never Find

Dusk falls, neon lights up, and the city becomes a boundary between two worlds. Ten years ago, on a rainy evening, I ducked into an abandoned subway station to escape the downpour and saw a silver-white heart suspended in midair. With every beat, it turned raindrops to ice. Beside it, a phantom bore a striking resemblance to my missing best friend, Lin Mo.

Since then, night has become a theater of the uncanny: shadows in suits devour neon lights, dark red patterns crawl across walls, and beneath the skin of late-night pedestrians lurk the outlines of inhuman creatures. No one believed what I’d seen, until I was hunted by the Nightwalkers and unexpectedly awakened the ability to disguise myself, letting me vanish into the darkness.

Now I keep to the rules, walking the narrow divide between the two worlds as I search for Lin Mo. Following a trail of clues, I found an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city. At the center of the dark red patterns in its basement was a dim “core,” just like the heart in the subway station. There I found Lin Mo’s notebook: Nightwalkers are beings formed from human consciousness fused with the city’s energy; the core is their source of power, and the consciousness of the missing is imprisoned within it.

I had barely started reading when the core suddenly ran wild, its patterns coiling around my limbs. At that desperate moment, Lin Mo’s voice sounded in my mind: “A mysterious organization is controlling the core. It’s absorbing negative emotions and devouring the city!” So that was why I could see the Nightwalkers and had the power to disguise myself: my consciousness had resonated with his back then. I poured my concern for my friend and my commitment to justice into the core, and its violent energy gradually calmed. As the light faded, Lin Mo stepped out, and the core became a barrier protecting the city. The sun rose, and at last I understood: dusk is the prelude to protection. Even now, I still don my disguise each night and serve as a secret guardian, facing the darkness with courage and protecting truths known to no one.