'Where am I?'
Filled with confusion, Zhang Lei kept repeating this thought in his head as he felt an odd sense of peacefulness. A sense of unusual calmness in the darkness. He felt like he was floating on a river, being carried along on its gentle waves.
'What is this feeling? Am I... dead?'
He tried to remember how he came to be in this darkness but the lull of the floating feeling he experienced made his awareness fall steadily. Then a sharp downward pull accompanied with intense pain pushed him into full lucidity, cutting short the gentle and peaceful feeling.
Suddenly, he felt a crash and awoke with a start. Jumbled flashes of different scenes he couldn't make out, colors that flowed in an ethereal river-like manner and heavy discordant sounds all scrambled up in his mind making his head throb with pain. He tried opening his eyes but his eyelids felt very heavy like they had been glued together.
'Why do I feel so tired?' he thought as he employed more effort to open his eyes. After he got them open, he still couldn't see anything as it was dark and blurry. The blurry vision slowly came into focus and he was able to make out the rocky ceiling he was facing with the dim light.
'Where am I?!'
He moved his eyes around and observed the dank cave with the dim light. The movement of his head in tandem with his roving eyes struck him with intense pain which instantly brought back some memories of what happened.
'I remember!! I was hit by that truck. And that...that mysterious person in the light. What is going on? How did I get in a cave?' he wondered.
Zhang Lei tried to move his body but felt paralyzed and weak. He sensed a minute connection with his limbs which he focused on to test out his limbs.
He tried to move his hands by concentrating on his fingers first. By doing so, the minute connection steadily grew making his right fingers twitch before he slowly brought them together to form a fist. Moving them brought him mild pain but it was none that he couldn't bear. He did the same to his left hand and was successful.
He tried to raise his head up but the intense pain came back again immediately halting his progress. The pain was sharp and disorienting unlike any he had ever faced before. He slowly enclosed his hand in a fist, leaned on his side and used his elbow to slowly elevate his body of the floor.
Bit by bit Zhang Lei was able to get his upper body up. But immediately he got into position his breath rate suddenly increased and he felt as if something was rising up from his throat.
The thing had such an intense burning sensation that it burnt his throat causing him to puke on the floor. What he puked looked like a greenish liquid that immediately started to dissolve the ground it fell on. Horrified, he hurriedly distanced himself towards the cavern walls using his arms.
'What the hell was that?!' he internally screamed.
He wanted to shout it out but his throat felt completely dry and it instead came out as a cough. Once the coughing fit settled, he felt that the little pains he was feeling in his body had subsided substantially and his body was gradually filling up with some energy. His legs that felt numb was regaining its feeling.
Zhang Lei leaned against the cavern wall and used it to slowly get on his feet. Whilst getting up, he felt something was off with his body. It felt uncomfortable like he was wearing a mascot suit for a parade. This feeling was further exacerbated after he got fully on his feet as there was a noticeable height difference that he could perceive.
Zhang Lei was well aware that his height was actually 1.70 meters but somehow, he felt taller and it baffled him. He decided to worry about it later after he gets out of this damned dark cave. Feeling a bit confident of his rising energy, he took a step away from the cavern walls only to trip and faceplant on the ground.
The sharp fall prompted him that he barely had any clothing on as he felt the rough stones littered on the floor come into contact with his bare skin. He groaned from the pain and passed his hand over his chest, feeling the torn strips of smooth fabric that barely covered his body. Interestingly, the muscles he felt on his chest were a bit too pronounced, they felt like the muscles of a lean body builder.
'I don't remember training intensely. What is this?' he wondered.
As he continued to check his body, his eyes caught sight of a blinking object on the cavern floor. Intrigued, he crawled towards the object.
The object blinked dimly in the dark cave lighting the nearest area with low intensity. Once Zhang Lei reached the item, he picked it up and held it in his hand. It looked like a medallion with a runic-like symbol carved on it, a symbol that Zhang Lei somehow could understand.
"Mao...?" he said with a raspy voice.
Activated by the word, the medallion immediately released an intense light, blinding Zhang Lei. When he came to, the medallion had crumble into pieces on the floor. Shocked and failing to make sense of what had just occurred, he leaned against the cavern wall again.
"Something is not right. I need to get out of here. I....I need to get home." he mumbled with his raspy voice.
He then used the cave wall as a crutch to rise again. Leaning on the wall, he slowly edged towards the mouth of the cave which exuded a bright light.
Once he stepped out of the cave, he closed his eyes to avoid the blinding sunshine, slowly opening them for his eyes to adjust. With his eyes fully adjusted to the light, he was shocked by the sheer scenery sprawled out in front of him.
Laid out in front of him was a massive forest with trees that stretched all the way towards the horizon. His elevated position at the mouth of the cave offered him an unobstructed view of the sheer greenery spread out before his eyes.
Ancient looking trees that were so tall that they stretched towards the sky were a dime a dozen. They mixed in with smaller trees, relative to the giant trees, creating a sheer force of greenery that Zhang Lei could swear even the touted Amazon forest would not even come close. He was further shocked when his eyes traced towards the blue sky as he observed an outline of what looked like a massive object that resembled a satellite. This satellite looking object was somewhat obscured by the blue sky although that did nothing to hide its prominence.
He deduced that this object was probably orbiting in space like any man-made satellite but its outline in the sky brought into Zhang Lei's mind pictures of the massive spaceships seen in sci-fi movies.
'How big is that?!' he stared at the sky mouth wide open.
Buffeted by the warm wind circulating along the mouth of the cave, this was the thought that reverberated through his mind. The very thought of the outlined behemoth of a satellite in the sky shocked him intensely. It was unlike anything he had ever seen in his life short as it may have been. He doubted whether this thing existed in the sky before his accident.
'Is this a dream?' he questioned himself.
The sprawling jungle before him was unlike any forest he had ever seen in pictures on the internet. He was not an outdoorsman but even he could recognize that a forest of this sheer scale couldn't exist to talk of a giant satellite that is outlined in the sky. He became convinced that he was either losing his mind as a side effect of the accident or he was dreaming an extended dream on a hospital bed. He was more optimistic about the latter than the former.
He balled his hands into fists and observed them, finding the smooth skin and muscled hands very unfamiliar and real. With the blowing wind he felt the movement of a waist long hair and on his head, and what felt like a top knot complete with a hair pin. He then realized that he was covered in an apparel that was torn up in many places leaving what looked like an undergarment as the only intact clothing keeping him modest.
As he continued to observe the unfamiliar body and sights, a faint growl caught his attention prompting him to pay attention to a patch of trees below that were tangled together into a knot. Within the dark tangled trunks of the trees, he saw what looked like yellow slits staring hungrily at him. The yellow slits slowly revealed its attachment to a large head with a snout containing the scariest rows of sharp teeth that Zhang Lei had ever seen.
The wolf-like creature slowly exited the twisted trunk with its eyes solely trained on Zhang Lei. It stood at 1.8 meters tall with fur as thick as an overgrown bush and as black as a starless night sky complete with a very thick and bushy tail. The creature immediately bounded toward the cave for its prey. It used its powerful claws to deftly climb the steep rocky slope of the mountainous cave.
Fear gripped Zhang Lei's heart and rooted his legs to the ground as he stared horrifyingly at the nightmarish creature making its way up to him. The creature's growls kept getting louder and louder overtaking his entire thoughts. His body shook intensely as he fearfully stared at the creature climbing the steep rocky slope.
A leap the creature made to climb higher scared him enough to take a step backwards which caused him to trip and fall on his back. The fall shook him out of his daze kicking in his survival instinct which forced down his fear. Without thinking, he rushed back into the cave and used the dim lights to make his way to the end of the cave. He tried to search for a way out but the dead end of the cave shot down any hope of escape.
Flustered and quickly losing hope, Zhang Lei felt a rushing air from a hole on one side of the cave walls. He quickly moved towards the hole and noticed a loose clump of rocks which he quickly tried to crawl open. The growing growls made him even more desperate causing him to punch the hole to make it bigger. Whether it was desperation or the adrenaline running through him, his punches expanded the loose rock formation bit by bit, neither slow nor as fast enough as Zhang Lei wanted.
Whilst he kept punching away, he sensed an acute danger and dodged to his left-hand side immediately. His quick reaction saved his head from being bitten off by the creature as it had launched itself on him immediately it got into the cave. Unable to change its momentum due to the cave's constraints, the creature smashed into the loose rocks opening them up further.
Changing his mind, Zhang Lei made a beeline towards the cave's mouth but the beast easily caught up to him by lunging. He immediately dived to his side again merely dodging the fatal move of the beast. He observed as the beast's dive sent it almost out of the cave but it did an impossible twist in the air and hooked the floor of the cave with it's claws to avoid falling down.
Shocked at this impressive feat, Zhang Lei immediately made a beeline towards the expanded crack in the wall. He made it in a nick of time and tried to squeeze through it to escape. Whilst struggling to go through the crack, he sensed the same danger again. The fear and dread pushed him to forcefully squeeze himself through the hole earning a few scrapes on his chest. A sharp slash on his right forearm gave him the final push through the crack as he fell right into a body of water below.
The rushing current pulled him along despite his attempts to right himself in the dark depths of the water. He kept flailing in the rushing current as he was being tossed about indiscriminately. Suddenly, his head felt a sharp pain and he lost consciousness.