Alistair Blackwood woke in the crypt with his bones aching as though they had been ground to powder and refilled with broken glass. The candle he had placed beside the stone coffin three nights ago had burned down to a nub. Three nights. He pressed his palm to the glass of the small mirror he kept in his coat pocket and saw a stranger staring back at him: a man of sixty, with silver threading through his dark hair, deep grooves carved from nose to mouth, and eyes that had seen too many lifetimes.

He had entered Lady Penelope Ashworth's dream on Tuesday. In the dream, he had spent forty years with her. They had married in a small chapel in the Yorkshire moors. They had raised three children—a boy who loved horses, a girl who painted watercolours, another boy who died of fever at age seven. They had grown old together on a small farm near Harrogate, where he taught mathematics to village children and she tended a garden full of white roses. He had held her hand as she died in their bed, an autumn morning, the light coming through the window like honey.

And then he had woken.

And three nights had passed.

Alistair sat on the cold stone floor of the crypt and wept. He had wept before, in this very crypt, after waking from other dreams. But this time the tears felt different. This time he understood: he was accumulating years the way a miser accumulates gold, and the currency was everything he loved.

The Blackwood family crypt sat beneath the chapel of Blackwood Hall, a crumbling estate in the Yorkshire dales that Alistair had inherited at age twenty-eight along with the curse. He did not know when the curse had begun. The family records were incomplete, damaged by fire and time. But the diary entries he had found in the sealed study told a story that grew more terrible with each generation.

His great-grandfather: entered a dream in 1842, woke after what he believed was one night, discovered his mustache grey and his hands trembling. Spent the remaining thirty years of his life entering dreams, losing decades each time. Died alone in his study, surrounded by empty bottles of laudanum.

His grandfather: discovered the pattern in 1867. Attempted to resist sleep for weeks. Failed. Lost five years in a single dream about a woman he had never met but loved more than his wife. Returned to find his children had grown up without him, his estate had been mismanaged, his reputation destroyed.

His father: accepted the curse with the resigned horror of a man who understood it was genetic, inevitable, inescapable. Spent his final years in a drug-induced coma, terrified of waking because he knew that waking meant losing more time, more people, more of himself.

Alistair had been different. At Cambridge, he had studied mathematics and believed in patterns, in logic, in the possibility of solving problems. When the first dream came—on a night when he had been walking home through the fog from a lecture on non-Euclidean geometry—he had approached it as a puzzle. He kept notes. He tracked his sleep. He tried to understand the mechanics of the ability.

He had not understood until it was too late.

The door to the crypt opened above him. Footsteps descended the stone stairs. Alistair closed the mirror and stood, his old bones protesting.

Dr. Silas Mortimer appeared at the bottom of the stairs, carrying a leather medical bag and an expression of professional curiosity mixed with personal concern. He was Alistair's friend, or as close to a friend as a man like Mortimer could manage.

"Blackwood," Mortimer said. "You sent for me."

"I need you to examine me," Alistair said. His voice was deeper than he remembered, rougher. The voice of a man who had spent decades speaking to village children and dead wives.

Mortimer raised his eyebrows. "You sent for me at midnight from the family crypt. I assumed you were having an episode."

"Examine me, Silas. Please."

Mortimer set down his bag and began his examination with the methodical care of a man who had examined hundreds of bodies and minds. He checked Alistair's pulse, examined his eyes with a small mirror, tested his reflexes with a hammer he produced from his bag. He listened to Alistair's heart with a stethoscope that seemed absurdly anachronistic in a crypt.

"When did this begin?" Mortimer asked finally.

"Tuesday," Alistair said. "I entered a dream. I spent forty years in it. Three nights passed in reality."

Mortimer was silent for a long moment. Then: "You are experiencing a delusion of extended temporal experience. This is consistent with the hereditary condition your family suffers from. Your father exhibited similar symptoms in his final years."

"It wasn't a delusion."

"Then explain the wrinkles, Blackwood. Explain the grey hair. Explain the arthritis in your hands."

Alistair looked at his hands. They were the hands of a man who had spent forty years teaching mathematics to children and tending a garden. The knuckles were swollen, the skin thin and spotted with age. But he was twenty-eight years old. He had been twenty-eight for three hundred years.

"I don't know how to explain it," Alistair said. "Because I don't know what's real anymore."

Mortimer packed his bag slowly. "There is a treatment. I've been developing it. It involves controlled electrical stimulation of the cranial nerves combined with opiate suppression. It will induce a state of permanent wakefulness. You won't dream again."

"And if I'm dreaming right now?"

"Then you'll dream of waking up. But you will be awake when you open your eyes."

Alistair considered this. The offer was simple: never dream again. Never lose another lifetime to the false warmth of another person's subconscious. Never wake up alone in a crypt with the bones of his ancestors and the memory of a wife who had never existed.

But he also knew what it meant to never dream again. It meant accepting that the only reality left to him was this cold stone room, this crumbling estate, this body that had outlived everyone he had ever loved. It meant becoming a living ghost, walking through a world where everyone he encountered was younger than the dreams he had survived.

"Give me the treatment," Alistair said.

Mortimer began setting up the apparatus in the crypt. It was crude but effective: copper electrodes, a small battery, wires that would carry the electrical current into Alistair's skull. Alistair sat on the stone floor, leaning against the wall, watching the candle flame flicker.

As Mortimer worked, Alistair thought about Penelope. Not the wife he had lost in the dream, but the woman whose dream he had entered. He had never met her in reality. She had been a patient of his father's, he discovered later, a young widow who had suffered from insomnia and had been referred to Blackwood Hall for experimental treatment. He had entered her dream by accident, drawn into her subconscious the way a river draws in rainwater.

He had spent forty years loving a woman he had never met.

The electrical current hit him like a hammer. Alistair cried out, his body arching against the stone floor. The world went white, then black, then white again. He felt something being torn out of him, something essential and irreplaceable.

When he opened his eyes, Mortimer was standing over him with an expression of professional satisfaction.

"It's done," Mortimer said. "You won't dream again."

Alistair sat up slowly. He felt hollow, as though someone had reached into his chest and removed his heart. He was awake. He was permanently, utterly awake.

And he had never felt more dead.

Years passed. Alistair Blackwood lived to be one hundred and twelve years old. He never dreamed again. He walked through the world like a ghost, watching everyone he loved die, watching the estate crumble around him, watching the world change in ways he could barely comprehend. He wrote nothing. He spoke little. He simply existed, a man who had spent three hundred years in other people's dreams and had lost everything that made existence worth enduring.

On his deathbed, surrounded by descendants he barely recognized, Alistair Blackwood closed his eyes and smiled.

For the first time in three hundred years, he was about to dream again.

And he knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never wake up.

OTMES v2 Encoding: TI=88.5 | T1绝望级 | M1=9.0,M4=7.5,M8=8.5 | N1=0.65,N2=0.35 | K1=0.70,K2=0.30 | theta=160deg | T9-06+T10-02