Aiden sat alone in the dim glow of his bedroom laboratory, the soft hum of computers and equipment his only company. Cluttered around him were circuit boards, half-disassembled drones, and stacks of technical journals—his father's handiwork, left behind in this makeshift workshop. Though he was nominally a college student majoring in electrical engineering, tonight he felt more like a lone apprentice tinkering at the edge of a secret project. His fingers hovered over a small device no larger than a deck of cards: an experimental neural interface prototype, coded in secrecy and rumored within his father's inner circle to have potential far beyond simple brain–computer communication.
Soft moonlight filtered through the blinds, striking the soldering iron's silver surface and casting long shadows across the desk. Aiden rubbed his temple, recalling his father's last message: "Midnight. Lab 7. Don't be late." No explanation. No hint of what might happen. Just a terse directive, and the nagging fear that whatever lay ahead tonight would change everything. He'd followed instructions precisely, but doubt gnawed at him: Was he meddling in forces he could not control? Could this device open doors better left closed?
A sudden buzz on his phone jolted him from his reverie. A calendar alert: "Dream Experiment—Lab 7—00:00." His heart thumped as he tucked the interface carefully into his backpack. The corridors of the old engineering building felt colder and emptier than usual. Every footstep echoed, every distant drip of water a reminder of how late it was. Aiden's breath came in shallow bursts; the night air was thick with anticipation. He passed the security checkpoint, its scanner blinking green for his ID badge, and descended a narrow staircase that led to a lower level of labs—areas most students never even knew existed.
At Lab 7's door, he paused. A heavy steel shield bore a digital lock, its keypad emitting a pale blue glow. He entered the access code, a sequence his father had drilled into him, and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. Inside, the room was bathed in soft lavender light. In the center stood a circular chamber lined with padded walls and instrument panels. A single reclining chair faced a large monitor displaying a swirling cloud of data—EEG patterns, heart rates, maps of synaptic activity. Two lab technicians stood to the side, their expressions unreadable beneath surgical masks.
"Aiden," one of them greeted in a low voice. "Good you're here. Tonight's test is critical. We're syncing the interface to the subject's dream cycle. We need to map for a minimum of ninety minutes into REM without waking them. Understood?" Aiden nodded, swallowing. He approached the reclining chair, where a volunteer subject lay under electrodes. Gently, he connected the neural interface to the subject's temporal lobe. The moment he did, a pulse of soft light traced across the device's surface, as if sensing the subject's brainwaves.
He glanced at the monitor. The dreamscape mapping had begun. Images flickered: a looming spire, walls of mist, and the faint outline of an archway. Aiden's breath caught in his throat. He'd dreamed of that same spire only hours before. A peculiar thought struck him: was this technology not just reading dreams, but somehow amplifying or even sharing them across minds? He swallowed the rising dread and stepped back, hands trembling. The technicians exchanged worried looks. "We're getting interference," one whispered.
Half a world away, Lin Xi knelt on the wooden porch of his grandfather's courtyard, palms pressed together at his chest. The pale light of dawn touched the weathered beams of the old house, nestled at the foot of misty hills outside his city. He inhaled slowly, feeling the crisp morning air fill his lungs, and exhaled, focusing on the energy at the base of his spine. His grandfather had taught him that true Qi was less about brute force and more about harmonious flow—an art passed down through generations. Today, as always, the practice grounded him against the chaos of modern life and the nagging sense that something extraordinary loomed on the horizon.
"Your breathing is shallow," his grandfather observed from the shadowed doorway. "Relax the belly. Let the Qi settle like water in a jar." Lin Xi adjusted his stance, visualizing a pool of golden energy at his core, waves rippling outward to his fingertips. His grandfather watched briefly, then stepped back into the dim interior, leaving Lin Xi alone with the morning's stillness. On a small wooden bench nearby lay an ancient calligraphy brush and a scroll half filled with inked symbols—part dream journal, part philosophical treatise. These sketches came after his own sleepless nights, visions of a city enshrouded in perpetual mist, dark towers set against an unfamiliar moon.
As the sun rose higher, Lin Xi packed his scroll into a cloth wrap and made his way to the local academy. Along the dusty lane, neighbors greeted him, asking after the strange phenomenon rocking nearby towns. "Have you heard of the dream riots?" they whispered, hushed voices carrying rumors of mass trance states and collective hysteria. Lin Xi frowned. "More superstition," he thought. Yet beneath his skepticism beat a curious heart, eager to understand whether these events were natural or something else entirely.
That night, when his head hit the pillow, Lin Xi drifted into slumber quickly. The transition felt different this time—an electric hum at the edge of consciousness, as if reality itself was slipping. He suddenly found himself standing on smooth, cobblestone streets slick with dew. A pale moon hung low, its light refracting through a lingering mist that swirled around darkened towers. At the far end of the street rose an immense archway carved from obsidian and polished to a mirror sheen. Strange runes pulsed along its frame, casting a soft, phosphorescent glow.
Lin Xi's heart raced; he recognized the place from his sketches. He took tentative steps forward, each footfall echoing in the empty street. A soft wind carried a distant whisper—voices arguing in a language he did not know, begging and commanding, pleading and threatening. He pressed a hand against the nearest wall; its surface felt warm, alive, as if breathing. The runes shimmered under his fingertips, their symbols like braille reading a message directly into his mind: "Awaken, Guardian." A surge of energy shot through his arm, and images overwhelmed his senses—fragments of other dreamers, voices calling out in terror and hope.
Meanwhile, in Lab 7, Aiden watched the monitor's readout spike wildly. "He's in deep REM," the technician murmured. "But these patterns—" The swirling mist image on the screen seemed to materialize in the lab's haze. Aiden blinked in disbelief. He hadn't expected the interface to project anything like a living dreamscape. Was it possible that the device was not merely observing but also broadcasting? And if so, to whom or what? The hum of equipment grew louder, as though resonating with the dream world itself.
Suddenly, the subject's vitals spiked. The monitor went red. The technicians moved to stabilize the subject, but Aiden hesitated—he needed to understand what was happening. He tapped a command on the interface, shifting the display to a neural overlay. The subject's brain activity formed a jagged pattern—like a lightning strike across the cortex. And through the haze, a silhouette appeared: two figures, one tall and one slender, standing beneath the obsidian arch. The taller silhouette raised a hand in greeting.
Aiden's breath caught. He'd just seen Lin Xi in his dream. And the moment their images overlapped on his monitor, the device pulsed so brightly that Aiden's vision to white. He staggered back, heart pounding. When the lights returned, the lab was quiet. The subject lay still, breathing steadily, the map of brainwaves gently oscillating. But Aiden knew something irrevocable had changed. He had crossed a threshold: his life—and countless others'—would never be the same.
At the same moment, Lin Xi felt himself drawn toward the arch. Footsteps echoed behind him. He turned to see a figure clad in a long, flowing coat—dark hair caught in a silent breeze, eyes like molten steel. The stranger nodded once and pointed to a gateway embedded within the arch: a shimmering panel of translucent crystal. "Guardian," the voice whispered, "the trial begins." Lin Xi's breath caught. The stranger extended a hand, urging him forward.
Lin Xi stepped closer, and instantly, a rush of visions assaulted him: flashes of a world teetering on chaos, fractured governments, and faces twisted in mass hallucination. He realized the dream wasn't just individual—something was using these shared visions to reshape reality itself. Across the mist, beyond the arch, the words "Collect the fragments. Save the waking world." formed in glowing runes.
Aiden, groggy and pale, shook his head against the hum of machines. He yanked off the neural interface and staggered to the lab's exit. Outside, the hallways were silent—too silent. He raced up the stairs, his backpack heavy with the device, and burst into the night air. The campus lawns lay empty, moonlit and still. His pulse thundered. He had glimpsed a dream that was simultaneously his and someone else's. He needed answers. But where could he find them?
And in another city, Lin Xi awoke on the floor of his bedroom, drenched in sweat. The scroll lay open by his side, blank pages shimmering with residual ink—runic symbols he could no longer recall writing. His heart pounded. He glanced at the clock: 00:07. Exactly seven minutes after midnight.
Neither boy knew it yet, but they had been chosen—summoned into the same dream realm to stand as the first Guardians against a force that sought to unravel the mind of the world. In the days to come, they would learn of the Mist Shrouded City, of stolen fragments of consciousness, and of an ancient civilization pulling strings in the darkness.
For now, however, the night held only echoes of the mist, beckoning them toward a destiny neither could yet fathom.