Baiju jolted awake, startled by the blinding sunlight piercing through the window straight into his face.
"Ahh—my eyes... oh my eyes...!" he hissed, flinching and pulling the blanket up over his head like a vampire in retreat. His head throbbed like a drum.
"Yah, get up. We have class early today, dumbass," came a groggy voice from the other side of the room.
Baiju groaned, rolling over and squinting from under the edge of the comforter. "Why does it feel like a train hit me...?"
He sat up slowly, hands cradling his forehead. The dull ache bloomed into a sharp sting right above his brows.
"Ughh..." He winced, fingers probing the sore bump. "What the hell happened last night...?"
Wang Shiyuan, his roommate, leaned over from his side of the room and gave him a look of smug amusement. "You got wrecked, bro. Like, epically wrecked. You walked straight into a streetlight pole after puking on some poor guy you were flirting with. I swear, if I had a video, I'd frame it."
Baiju grabbed the damp towel that had fallen onto his blanket and flung it at Wang Shiyuan's face.
"Oh, shut up. Like you didn't spend the whole night crying about your ex-girlfriend's Instagram story."
"Hey, emotional trauma hits harder than beer," Wang said, smirking.
Baiju rolled his eyes and turned toward his roommate's side of the room—and then blinked.
"…What the hell?"
Hovering an inch above Wang Shiyuan's head was something. Shiny. And gold. Like metallic parchment.
Baiju squinted, leaning forward.
It was... a piece of paper? No. A scroll maybe? It floated in the air like some divine paper lantern. Words were moving across it in elegant loops, like cursive, but they were blurry, like condensation fog on a window. He couldn't quite make them out, but they shimmered as they danced.
Baiju instinctively reached down from the top bunk, hand outstretched to grab it—
And his fingers slipped right through it.
Like mist.
"Wh—what the...?"
"What are you doing?" Wang looked up, frowning. "Are you trying to swat a fly or something?"
Baiju blinked, frozen. "Uh... no. I thought I saw something. Never mind."
"If you don't get out of bed now, you're toast," Wang warned as he yanked the comforter off Baiju and tossed it down to the bottom bunk. "You can thank me later when you're not sprinting across campus in your slippers again."
He slung his backpack over his shoulder and started for the door, snickering. "I'm doing you a favor."
Baiju didn't respond right away. He was still staring. Hard.
That glowing, golden sheet was still there.
Just floating calmly over Wang's head. Like gravity meant nothing.
"…I think I'm still drunk," Baiju mumbled to himself.
He rubbed his eyes. Once. Twice.
Still there.
Still glowing. Still shimmering. Still absolutely not normal.
"Okay, okay... I must've hit my head harder than I thought," he whispered.