Han Jiang slumped against the bedframe, staring at the faint blue interface floating in front of his eyes.
The system window was still there. Unmoving. Real.
His pulse hadn't calmed since the doorbell stopped ringing. Even now, there was that leftover mix of tension and relief sitting heavy in his chest—but something else kept slipping in underneath it. Something sharper. Almost unreal.
He let out a slow breath, like he was testing whether this was actually happening.
"So it really came," he murmured. "After all this time… I've been waiting for months. I thought I'd just been unlucky. No system, no advantage. Nothing. Just… stuck like everyone else."
His gaze didn't leave the blue text.
He let out a weak cough, more out of habit than illness.
Since waking up in this parallel world, checking for a system had become his routine—morning, noon, and night. He had spoken commands into empty rooms, stared at his reflection in the mirror hoping for some kind of notification to flicker into existence, even clasped his hands once or twice like that alone might trigger something.
Nothing ever did.
Bit by bit, he started to accept the possibility that this world was exactly what it looked like—ordinary. Mundane. No hidden mechanics, no status screens, no cheat-like advantages for a transmigrator. Just life, blunt and unremarkable.
"A month," he muttered, voice rough with frustration. "A whole month of terrible grades and microwave meals. I really thought I won't get any cheat in this world."
The blue words glowed. Han Jiang took a deep breath, and fixated on them.
[Achievement unlocked: First Contact]
[The Unseen System has been activated]
[Host: Han Jiang]
[Status: Bound]
[Welcome, Host. You have been chosen to witness what no one else can. Your journey will commence now.]
[Current Location: Jiangnan City, District 7, Apartment 304]
[Time: 23:47]
[Active status: 1 entity detected within 5 meters]
Han Jiang gasped. "1 entity detected?"
He glance at the door. The system confirmed that there was actually more than what he thought; something was out there. Or had been. The steps had halted at the far end of the room, but the entity was still in range.
The Unseen System activates at First Contact, defined as the moment a human directly experiences undeniable supernatural interaction for the first time. In Han Jiang's case, this occurs during the Dr. Chen-linked incident at 11:47 PM, which is coincidentally the same timestamp as the original factory event.
He brought his knees to his chest, the phone was ignored on the bed. The screen was still on from being on the forum. He fumbled for it and pushed down with his thumb until Dr Chen's message appeared in front of his eyes again.
"Check your door." The words stared back at him from the white page.
Han Jiang shivered. The air conditioner was on so the room was colder than expected. "Check my door?" he whispered. He went back and read it again; everything about it being read at 11:47pm with his knees tucked into his chest, and his phone above his head. About needing someone to know; about the helmet outside the door; the hand on his shoulder. "Was Dr. Chen trying to troll me?" he whispered to the empty room. "And of all people on that forum, he targeted me with a DM?" He checked the time stamp of the message again. 11:47pm. Same time as he read it, same time as the system activated.
The status of my system said that something on the hall has to be supernatural, Han Jiang rationalized in his mind.
"The 'First Contact' achievement proved this already. Normal people can't see floating blue windows like this."
He gave the door another look.
My system says there was one entity within 5 meters here, which implies that it was either in the hall or right at my door.
Han Jiang waited. He counted to 60 in his head while checking on his cell phone but there was no doorbell, no knock on the door. My apartment building was extremely quiet, the kind of silence only thin walls and normal neighbors sleeping at normal hours could produce.
He swung his legs off the bed. The tiles were icy against his bare skin. He tiptoed across the room and peeked through the peephole. The hall was empty. He blinked and shifted his head slightly; the corridor seemed to extend indefinitely into yellow florescent light, and two rows of apartment doors line it. No one was on the hallway and no one entered or left any of the doors; but at the center of my doormat lay a small cardboard box, about the size of a shoebox. The cardboard was dark from dried water stains which looks like they were from a long time ago; no tape on the box or anything, and no label. It was right there at the door; there was nothing on it before.
Han Jiang unlocked the door.
The safety chain was still in place. He unhooked it, opened the door just enough to reach out, and pulled the package inside before locking everything back up again out of habit.
The box felt lighter than it should have.
He noticed that immediately, but didn't dwell on it. Instead, he carried it into the kitchen and set it down on the small table. Empty instant noodle cups were pushed aside, along with a messy scatter of crumpled receipts, just enough space cleared for it.
Up close, the box looked wrong.
Old. Not simply worn, but aged in a way cardboard shouldn't be. The edges were softened and damp, faintly fuzzy from water damage, and the whole thing was slightly warped, as if it had endured heat and moisture over a long period of time. Despite that, it held its shape—like it had been carefully preserved to remain intact.
Han Jiang reached for his phone.
He reopened Dr. Chen's post, scrolling back through it as if something new might appear on a second reading. Then he checked again, slower this time, searching for anything he might have missed.
Nothing stood out.
Still, something about it was bothering him.
When the forum loaded properly, his expression changed.
The thread was gone.
He opened his browsing history next. Empty.
He searched the username directly.
"DrChenWhiteCoat."
No results.
Then he checked his messages, already expecting something different this time.
The entire conversation thread had disappeared.
Only a blank error page remained where it should have been.
"404 Not Found."
Below it, a single line:
"Content removed by user."
"User removed the thread," he repeated, "content removed by user."
He lean back in his chair, and set the box and his cell phone on the table in front of him. The system message in the corner of his eye still gleamed faintly.
"The system wouldn't have removed it," he muttered to himself. "It just activated, it can't connect to internet forums."
He tapped his fingers on the table, the box unmoved. "Then the world should have some sort of organization or powerful secret group to take care of something like this, ghosts, supernatural phenomena and what was in the hallway at my door."
He turned to face the window, the dark night outside of his curtains. The city of Jiangnan looked normal through his window. Street lights, apartment buildings, cars passing by. Yet, someone deleted Dr. Chen's post within minutes after Han Jiang read it. Someone removed the evidence.
"If they didn't exist then maybe the world would already be in chaos," Han Jiang said to himself, " they remove it for a reason, so the normal public don't see it; so they won't freak out. So they will never know ghosts existed in this world."
He thought of Dr. Chen's last message again; the picture where a hand appeared on his shoulder, the helmet lying on his door, the box on his table.
Han Jiang glanced down at his own box.
He wasn't going to open it. not for now.
But he knew for sure, just like when the doorbell rang earlier and a sense of dread was filled with him, that opening the box would alter his life forever.
The system's message glowed once more, catching his eye. He looked back at it and new words appeared;
[New objective: Examine the contents of the box]
[Reward: Basic Spirit Vision]
[Warning: Entity status has not changed. Stay vigilant.]
Han Jiang stared at the message, then at the box, and lastly at the door he had just locked, still holding the entity that was supposedly in the hallway at bay.
"Stay vigilant," he said. "Great."
Outside somewhere in his building, the elevator dinged and a noise like that had sounded normal, but Han Jiang froze, listened to a pair of footsteps who might be on his way to his door, or somewhere else entirely.
He sat in his small apartment, the box in front of him, the system glowing in his vision and finally understood that the normal life he had lived during this past month no longer exist, something else had taken its place, something like dead men were walking out of the hospitals to send packages to strangers at night. He didn't know the rules of this world but he will know it sooner or later.
The footsteps ceased. Han Jiang didn't breathe, instead listening with his ears strained. From the depths of the corridor, a door creaked open-not his, but nearby. A man, weary and with a voice like sandpaper, murmured something about being overworked and about poor coffee quality. A set of keys jangled, followed by the soft snap of a lock turning. The sounds receded with the footsteps down the hall, then were replaced by the sharp thud of a door slamming.
Han Jiang let out the breath he'd held. The system window still read:
[Active Status: One entity detected within 5-meter radius]
Yet the ambiguity was gone. The worker was five meters away, alright, but only because he was inside another dwelling, not out in the hallway. Whatever entity had been detected was no longer out there, but some place out of sight that his eyes could not penetrate but the system could pinpoint.
He looked at his phone. 11:56 PM.
It had been nine minutes since the doorbell rang. It had been nine minutes of him staring at a water-damaged cardboard box in his cramped kitchen, as his neighbors trickled home from their night shifts, his air conditioner rattling on too loud.
"Open the damn thing," he told himself. "You're going to do it sooner or later. The system already gave you a quest for it."
He pushed the box toward himself. It was soft, where the water had gotten in, the flaps holding together weakly through old fiber. He jammed a fingernail under the edge, then lifted.
Inside sat a blue work helmet.
The color was dulled, leached to a washed out blue-gray, but the shape was unmistakable. It was a hard helmet from an old factory documentary. The front had a brass fitting that looked like where you would mount a headlamp, now a green tarnished hole. And stitched into the side of the fabric lining was the logo: an unadorned spool of thread, and below it two characters reading 'Jiangnan Textile'.
Han Jiang knew what it was. Dr. Chen had already described exactly this helmet on his post. The one left on his porch. The one that belonged to a dead man from 1997.
"Okay," Han Jiang said, his voice a little hoarse, though his chest felt like a drum that had been beaten too long. "Okay. This is real. This is actually real."
He reached out to touch it, to try and lift it from the cardboard box for a better inspection. His fingers were within an inch of it when it moved.
Then, it lifted itself up. Slowly, gracefully it ascended from the cardboard box, devoid of any wind or momentum, spinning lazily in the air to allow him a good view of every side, every faded blue corner, every brass fixture, every stamp of the company name. Finally, it settled itself, directly facing him on the table, its lamp-mount hole like a vacant eye.
A blast of gold text flashed through Han Jiang's vision, obliterating the blue of the system display:
[The Shift begins in 60 seconds]
[Voluntary entry: Place helmet on head]
[Involuntary entry: Remain stationary]
[Survival bonus: Voluntary entry grants 30 seconds orientation]
Then the countdown started, numbers burning in the air:
59... 58... 57...
"Hold on," Han Jiang said, pushing away from the table. "Hold on, hold on, hold on. What do you mean 'Shift'? What happens if I don't put it on?"
56... 55... 54...
He glanced at the door. There was still an entity within 5 meters displayed by the system, but the status had changed: [Proximity: 4.8m... 4.6m...]
It was coming closer.
"Entry by choice gets me 30 seconds of briefing," Han Jiang said, running numbers in his head. "If I'm forced entry... Do I just stand here? Does it force me in?"
He reached for the helmet. He froze his hand about two inches away.
"Or I could just... Run away," he said. "Take my phone, unbolt the door, run away."
He stared at the window. Four stories up, no fire escape. The door was his only out, and the entity was coming from... The hall? The wall? He had no idea how this all worked, what the rules of this were.
40... 39... 38...
Another set of footsteps, this time more deliberate than those belonging to a weary worker,. Slow and heavy, dragging on the concrete one step after another.
Han Jiang rose from his chair. A grinding noise accompanied the scraping of the seat across the floor as he moved away from the table, putting space between himself and the helmet and his eyes fixed on the door.
"Come on," Han Jiang said aloud, "come on, this is a game, so play it. Dr. Chen said it wasn't angry. He said it was looking for someone to see it, it's lost. Maybe I can talk to it, maybe I can stop playing the system's game. Twenty seven seconds remaining…"
29...28...
The footsteps stopped directly in front of the door. They ceased their rhythmic sound just outside and the doorknob began to jiggle, not turning but vibrating and shifting. It sounded as if whatever was there was feeling the metal through the door with its finger.
Han Jiang's mouth went dry. "Okay," he whispered, "maybe talking is out." He looked at the helmet. Twenty seven seconds remained until whatever was about to happen, happened, if he waited then he would receive nothing if he put it on he would have thirty seconds to look at what had been going on..
"Fine," he said. "Fine, I'll wear the stupid helmet."
He walked toward the table and reached. The helmet was innocent and awful and just sitting there.
Then the doorbell rang. Three times, just like before.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Han Jiang flinched, and the hand he reached for the helmet with knocked into the side of the box. The helmet wobbled and stopped and then-
it moved.
It didn't slowly rotate, like the other. It sprang off the table, a blue streak shot directly across at his face. Han Jiang held his hands up and tried to jerk his head back, but it was too fast. The helmet smacked him in the face, and the strap tightened around his chin and gave him a choking sensation. The brass boss rested cold against his forehead.
"What the f*ck!?" Han Jiang yelled, clawing at the strap of the stupid helmet, trying to rip it off his head. "This stupid thing doesn't even give me options! It's all just another dead end!"
The helmet would not move. His fingers fumbled for an opening, a clasp, a buckle of any kind and found only the yielding material of the fabric which joined at the strap. He pulled and twisted and clawed at his throat as if searching for a seam.
The countdown reached its final digit.
[Forced Entry; Authenticated.]
[Survival Reward; Denied.]
[Initiating Shift...]
The world ripped apart.
Han Jiang felt it first as compression, like the pressure deep beneath the ocean, his ears plugging, his chest squeezed tight, and then sound-a high whine which escalated to a shriek, not inside his head but in his bones and teeth, reverberating through his spine. His kitchen flickered; walls turned translucent, then opaque, and then another shape altogether.
His table melted into a gray vapor; his phone spiraled in slow motion through an air that felt thick like honey; his apartment walls dissolved and pulled back from around him like damp paper, revealing not night, but some kind of corridor; it was long and industrial and lit by buzzing, sputtering fluorescent tubes.
The factory. Jiangnan Textile. He knew this, he knew.
And he was falling or being pulled or standing perfectly still as his surroundings tilted violently. The helmet grew warm against his scalp, then cool, then warm. He opened his mouth to scream, but his voice sounded-off; strained, distorted, like his cry was stretched like so much taffy.
[Shift complete]
[Location: Jiangnan Textile Factory, Main Production Floor]
[Time: 1997-10-14, 23:47]
[Objective: Survive until dawn]
[Warning: The Shifted cannot perceive you, but the Lost can. Remain unseen.]
Han Jiang hit the floor. Hard concrete. Dusty and cracked. The helmet-gone. It wasn't on his head anymore, though he could feel the impression of its cold brass, tight straps, on his skin.
He lay on his back, his breath catching in his chest, his eyes focused on a ceiling forty feet above him, a lattice of rusted steel and busted skylights. Moonlight fell in pale, thin streaks, fighting a losing battle with the sickly yellow glare of the fluorescent tubes.
The factory. He was inside the factory that Dr. Chen posted. The factory where Liu Wei died.
He rolled onto his stomach, pushed himself to his feet. His palms met the floor and came away coated with dust and something else, dark and sticky and smelling faintly of iron. He did not look. He did not want to know.
"Survive until morning," he repeated, his voice trembling slightly. "Remain unnoticed. Good. That is just wonderful."
He searched the dark production floor-for cover, for a way out, for any resource that would help him spend the next six hours inside a dead factory being hunted by a dead man. The silent machines-looms, spindles, conveyor belts that had not been switched on in years-filled the space, casting vast, absolute shadows between them.
Somewhere, deep in that darkness, something shuffled its feet against the concrete. The sound echoed, hollow and without direction. It seemed to come from every corner and no corner of the building.
Han Jiang ran.