Part I: The Dream…

Sitting at the top of the slide, I leaned forward and closed my eyes. The gravity grabbed me.

I shot out like a marble launched into a time-orbit, spinning along an invisible axis. The slide unfolded infinitely beneath me, twisting like a warped spectrum. Colors shattered, fused, and finally burst into a glaring white that almost blinded my eyes. My body felt like being spun and plunged into a glass tube—sky and earth tumbling with me—tightened, loosened, then tightened again by an unseen hand.

The slide had no end.

Each turn compressed my chest with brutal acceleration. Every time the panic rose, a pair of big and warm hands wrapped around me from behind —the only anchor in this chaotic corridor. But when I turned around, his face faded away instantly, like color paint dissolving in the water.

An endless Mobius-shaped slide.

A warm but blurring face.

That was all I knew about “him”— a man titled as “Father”.

I was sixteen.

A walking volcano.

Anger erupted easily — at myself, at anything and anyone coming closer, at the empty living room where a father should be sitting, rustling a newspaper.

I envied my friends at school. They could yell at their dads, slam a door, break something trivial at home, then reconcile in a few days. It made me sick to watch them hugging and kissing, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, as if nothing had happened.

But the volcano inside me had no outlet. The fire pressed against my ribs, almost tearing me apart. I could not erupt at my mother. The thin woman everyone called a “single mom” was too fragile, too exhausted to bear my blast. She had to rise on tiptoe to smooth my hair, but I always pulled myself away. Her hand froze awkwardly in mid-air when I ran.

My only outlet was the Mobius necklace he left behind for me, the only proof of his existence. On those long and hollow afternoons, I sat under the cherry tree in the backyard. I hurled the necklace across the grass as hard as I could. But it always ended up the same way: me on my hands and knees, combing through the lawn with my phone’s flashlight, inch by inch, searching for it.

It was one ordinary Sunday afternoon.

Lukewarm sunshine pooled across my desk— just like my lukewarm grades, nothing particularly good or bad. I tried to memorize key points for the midterm. The history notes were so dull that I almost dozed off on the textbook.

The ironic fact was that I actually loved history. Who built the Great Pyramid? Who raised Stonehenge? Why did the Maya collapse? Those unsolved mysteries amazed me, but the rigid dates and droning facts grated on my nerves. I couldn’t even make sense of my own history —why should I cram my head with those distant notes that had nothing to do with me? 

Frustrated, I shoved the book aside and started scrolling through the internet. I’d lately been obsessed with the Voynich Manuscript, that mysterious 15th-century codex full of undeciphered scripts and strange illustrations. As I clicked through those images, I heard something in its pages whisper to me, faint and flickering.

Nestled in the veins of a plant illustration—so subtle it would escape any casual glance—was a Mobius ring.

I clenched my pendant and pressed it against the screen.

A perfect match!

The screen shimmered with a line of pale text:

“Anchor confirmed. Path unlocked. Guardian access granted.”

Part II: Another Dream?

The sensation of weightlessness seized me once more. I was back in the endless slide from my dream — No, in a tunnel this time.

I stood on a track glowing with blue luminescence, held upright by an invisible force, spiraling deeper into the abyssal darkness. The track beneath me pulsed in a gentle rhythm—the tunnel itself breathing like an enormous living creature.

After one bend, the tunnel walls vaporized into thin, resilient glass. The path ahead was still swallowed by pitch-black, but now I could finally see what was unfolding beside me.

On my left, history moved forward — exactly as I just read in my history textbook.
The pyramids cast long shadows over the Nile.
Silk Road caravans chimed with camel bells.
Mongol horses thundered across the steppe.
Ottoman banners unfurled above Constantinople.
World War II stained the sky in grey and red.

On my right, history unraveled in reverse—as if someone were flipping through an open history book backward, page by page.
Rome collapsed like a receding tide.
Fires of civilization dimmed one by one.
The world sank slowly back into its prehistoric night.

At certain sharp turns, the two streams of timelines collided under the pull of centrifugal force. A surreal spectacle burst open before me, as if a sci-fi movie was spooling to life.

A medieval castle drifted above a modern city skyline, its mottled stone walls blending seamlessly with the mirrored sheen of glass skyscrapers, weaving a hazy abstract painting.
An Argentinosaurus—extinct for millions of years—strode gracefully through driverless traffic, its massive body phasing cleanly through the metal frames of autonomous cars, as if they all followed some higher-dimensional traffic rules.

Roman soldiers marched in perfect synchrony beside futuristic troops in exoskeletons, their bronze shields aligning with sleek energy weapons in a strange, momentary harmony.

“That look on your face! I saw it once before, on the day your father first arrived,” a warm, aged voice said from behind me.

I turned around. A small, elderly man stood beside me as if he materialized from thin air. He wore an oversized black judicial robe embroidered with intricate symbols—including a Mobius ring. Perched on his head was a silver wig twisted into a shape that also resembled a Mobius strip. His wrinkled face was like a dried walnut carved by time. 

“You know my father?” I blurted out. “Who are you? And what is this place?”

He smiled, a quiet warmth glowing in his eyes, “We both serve in the Order Bureau of the Mobius Tunnel.”

He lifted a finger and traced a curve in the air, “As you’ve noticed, the ‘history’ you know is only one side. The other side runs in reverse—just as complete and real. Humanity’s past and present don’t flow in a straight line here. There is no such thing as ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ on a Mobius loop. It is like walking down a hallway that loops back on itself. The beginning becomes the ending.”

He explained, “Our task is to keep the two timelines running independently. If the boundary is breached, equilibrium collapses—and both worlds collapse with it. My job is to stop unauthorized intruders.” His gaze dropped to the pendant on my chest. “You—child of a Mobius Guardian—carry the key to enter the tunnel.”

His brows furrowed. “But it is not your time yet. You shouldn’t be here.”

His words poured over me like heavy rain.

Only one question managed to surface: “My father… he was a Guardian?”

“Yes.” The grief softened his voice. “One of the greatest in centuries.”

He continued: “At certain bends, when timelines collide, we get Temporal Folds. Most are harmless illusions, as you’ve seen. But some folds generate too much force—flinging fragments from one timeline into the other and leaving permanent scars.”

He raised his hand, as if he was opening those case files from the Order Bureau:

“Stonehenge, described as a myth in tourist pamphlets on your side. But the truth is: those stones were 22nd-century construction slabs, supposed to be transported by mech-arms to build a stadium in Rome. Then a fold hit, and they ended up in Neolithic Britain instead. Harmless, just another riddle for archaeologists to solve. But other folds could destabilize entire civilizations— like the unexpected golden ages of the Maya or the Minoans.”

“Guardians would enter the affected node and perform corrective ‘surgery’. They erase the anomaly and restore balance.” He went on.

The surge of anxiety tightened my throat. “Isn’t that… dangerous?”

He nodded slowly.

A suffocating silence.

“Voynich himself was a Mobius Guardian. His manuscript is not just static—it updates on its own, mapping active temporal folds the moment they emerge. Only Guardians can decode it with our spectrum analyzer. When a Guardian locates the fold, the Mobius ring resonates with it, generating the matching frequency. That opens a fissure —a temporary corridor in time. But fissures are dangerously unstable. Many Guardians who entered… never returned.”

He paused, letting the weight of truth settle, “After your father fixed a major fold in the Kingdom of Loulan, he also disappeared.”

Those words were like a long-awaited key, snapping the hidden latch inside my memories. I was the little boy again, clutching my mother’s sleeve and asking where my father had gone. She would cradle his police badge in her palm, her thumb brushing its worn edges, and tell me he had left “for world peace.” It was such a clumsy lie, but good enough to comfort a crying child.

But here and now, in this impossible place that defied everything I understood, I felt— for the first time—that maybe it hadn’t been a lie at all.

“Will he come back?” My voice trembled.

“We still detect faint traces of his energy. He could be trapped in a temporal wormhole. We believe, one day, he will find his way back.”

A fragile but bright hope flickered inside me. “So… could I become a Guardian someday? Like him?”

The old man looked at me, his gaze cutting straight into my mind, “Child, the bloodline of a Guardian grants you the entry, but not the destiny. Becoming a Guardian is not by inheritance but by determination. When you are truly ready, the Mobius ring will guide you back to us.”

He swept his sleeve. Light gathered around us. The tunnel brightened.

“But for now…you should go home.”

The track shimmered with a soft, glowing blue, like a luminous giant whale carrying me upward—slowly rising from a deep ocean.

Darkness in the tunnel swallowed me again. A pair of big and warm hands wrapped around me from behind—an anchor of healing warmth in the turmoil.

I passed one turn and saw my younger self stumbling, falling, getting up again.

At another turn, I saw myself lifting a fallen child and comforting him the way my father once did, “Don’t cry.”
Then at the next turn, an elderly man with silver hair smiled at me—a look so familiar that my heart trembled.

Moving through the Mobius time tunnel felt like witnessing the whole arc of my own history. I was the baby, the boy, the man, the elder—all at once. 

Just before the tunnel dissolved, I caught a glimpse of my dad holding his morning mug, the one with a crack down the side, and that still kept its place in our kitchen cabinet. He was sitting in the living room, drinking coffee and rustling a newspaper.

Maybe it was a loop with no beginning and no end, or perhaps a long road ahead of me that I hadn’t figured out yet.

Part III: The Reality

I woke up to the smell of dinner drifting from the kitchen.

Outside the window, dusk had spilled across the sky, painting everything in quiet hues of navy blue and fading crimson.

My computer still glowed faintly blue. My body felt as though it were still spinning—falling, rising—caught somewhere between a single second and an entire century.

I rolled the Mobius pendant between my fingers.
Bits of the dream clung to my mind, floating up slowly like bubbles rising from deep waters.

A cloud shaped like a giant whale was gliding through my windows.

My mother was busy in the kitchen, as always. She still wore Dad’s old, oversized college hoodie that shrank her into a thin silhouette in the twilight. A gentle breeze from the window ruffled her hair, making a few strands of grey shine through.

She stood at the counter, chopping onions and preparing my favorite pasta. The sting smell pricked my eyes, leaving them warm and wet.

I stepped behind her, hesitated for a long second. Then I reached out and wrapped my arms around her thin shoulders, half expecting her to pull away. But she didn’t.

 “Mom,” I murmured, “let me help.”

She turned to me, and for a split second, I saw something in her eyes—maybe something we shared, unspoken but understood

“Finished with history?” she asked gently.
“Are you ready for what comes next?”