(12) “The Keeper of Books’ Question”
“...Long time no see.” The old man smiled warmly.
But Asti stood frozen in place, as if she had been turned to ice. Her lips parted, but no sound came out.
Morse immediately sensed something was wrong. “You know him?”
Asti didn’t answer. She only stared at the old man, an emotion even she couldn’t understand surfacing in her eyes—strangeness, familiarity, guilt, sorrow. They all appeared on her face at once, as if they came from different lives.
The old man didn’t rush her. He simply opened the book Absence. Its pages were thick, and a name appeared every time he turned one. Some names were complete, some had already blurred, and some had been reduced to nothing but a surname.
Morse noticed that this book was completely different from the conductor’s Archive. Archive recorded “existence.” Absence, on the other hand, recorded what “should not be forgotten.”
The old man seemed to see what he was thinking. “Archive maintains the world’s order. Absence allows the world to retain its regrets. If the world had no regrets, it would never move forward.”
Morse frowned. “So you aren’t enemies?”
The old man smiled. “No. We’re simply standing on different pages.”
He closed the book and looked at Morse. “All this time, you’ve kept asking, ‘Who is Asti?’ Today, I’ll ask you a different question.” The old man raised one finger. “If one day, you had to choose between the following two things: First, the world returns to normal, but Asti disappears from everyone’s memory. Second, Asti remains, but the world begins to slowly fall apart. Which would you choose?”
Morse didn’t answer right away. He looked at Asti, but she shook her head. “Don’t look at me. That answer can only be yours.”
Silence settled over the platform. In the distance, sheets of white paper continued flipping through the sky. Morse lowered his head. He suddenly thought of the cases from the first volume—the people who had been forgotten, the people whose names had vanished, the people who had struggled to prove they existed. Without order, there would be more of them. But without Asti, he would never again meet the person who always stood beside him in times of danger. Both answers felt like losing someone.
The old man didn’t hurry him. He simply waited in silence. After a long time, Morse finally raised his head. “I choose neither.”
The old man’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Oh?”
Morse took a deep breath. “If those are the only two answers allowed by the rules, then I’ll find a third. I’m not here to accept the choices the world gives me. I’m here to change it.”
The old man gazed at him in silence for a long while. Then he smiled—not mockingly, but with relief. “At last... the seventh you has given a different answer.”
Morse froze. “What does that mean?”
The old man didn’t explain. He only held Absence out toward Morse. “Open it.”
Morse took the heavy book. Its cover was cold, like he was holding a block of ice. When he opened the first page, there were no words inside—only a yellowed photograph. It showed an ordinary underground parking garage. Morse’s pupils contracted. It was the place where he worked. Standing in the center of the photograph were two people—one was himself, a few years younger, and the other... was neither Asti nor his partner, but a girl he had never seen before.
The girl turned toward the camera and smiled. An employee ID badge hung from her chest. Only the last two characters of the name on it were still legible—“ti.”
Just as Morse tried to make out the first character, the photograph suddenly caught fire. The flames didn’t burn up the photograph. Instead, they turned the girl’s figure to ash, bit by bit.
Asti suddenly took a step forward and cried out, “No!”
But it was already too late. Only Morse remained standing alone in the center of the parking garage in the photograph.
The old man gently closed Absence and said in a low voice, “This was the first time. Not the first time you met Asti, but...” He looked toward the endless sea of paper turning in the distance, his voice growing especially heavy. “The day Asti first disappeared from the world.”
A long train whistle suddenly echoed from deep within the platform. Unlike the train from before, this whistle sounded like a declaration that something far older was awakening. At the end of Platform Zero, a long-sealed, rust-covered door slowly opened.
(13) “The Door at Platform Zero”
The whistle continued to echo. It sounded less like a train and more like some being that had slept for countless ages, slowly awakening.
The rust-covered door opened all the way. Behind it was neither light nor darkness, but an indescribable expanse of blankness—not white, but a place where anything that entered would lose its color, its shape, and its name.
Morse only glanced at it, but a wave of dizziness washed over him, as if his own name were slowly being swallowed by that blankness.
The old man immediately closed Absence and said gravely, “Don’t keep looking at it. That isn’t an entrance. It’s the blankness left behind from before the world began.”
Morse looked away, and the suffocating pressure in his chest gradually faded. “Before the world... began?”
The old man nodded. “Before there was reality, before there were anomalies, before there were trains, the world was only ‘blankness.’ Later, someone wrote its first page.”
Morse frowned. “Who?”
The old man fell silent. Only after a long while did he slowly say, “I don’t know. The person who wrote the first page erased himself along with it, so no record remembers him, and no one knows his name.”
His partner suddenly added in a low voice, “The first absent one.”
The old man looked at her without denying it. “And the first author.”
At that moment, the conductor walked toward the old man for the first time of his own accord. They stood less than three steps apart, yet neither moved forward, as if they both knew that boundary could not be crossed.
The conductor spoke calmly. “Keeper of Books, the Archive procedure has been delayed.”
“I know,” the old man replied blandly.
“You shouldn’t have let him learn these things.”
The conductor looked toward Morse. “But he’s already begun to remember.”
The old man sighed softly. “It isn’t remembering. The versions of him from different worlds are beginning to overlap.”
The more Morse listened, the more confused he became. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The old man didn’t answer. Instead, he pointed toward the sky. At some point, the sheets of paper had stopped turning. Then one of them slowly drifted down into Morse’s hands.
There were no words on the page, only a simple pencil drawing. It showed an underground parking garage. Morse sat inside the security office, while Asti walked in carrying two drinks. The two of them were chatting—a perfectly ordinary moment. But in the lower-right corner of the drawing stood a third person. He was outside the door, without a face or a name, silently watching the two of them.
Morse looked up. “Who is that?”
The old man said quietly, “You.”
Morse froze. “What?”
The old man continued, “Not the you of now. The you who never went back after the sixth train ride.”
The air instantly froze. Morse remembered the line recorded on the ticket—Sixth trip, companion: Morse. Result: passenger lost.
“Lost...”
The old man nodded. “The train never found him because he didn’t die, and he wasn’t archived. He chose to remain at the boundaries of every world, silently repairing the stories that were about to collapse.”
His partner said softly, “So... the person who’s always been helping us...”
The old man smiled faintly. “It was always him.”
At that moment, Morse suddenly remembered countless details—the mysteriously opened doors in the first volume, the hints that always appeared at critical moments, the tickets that vanished and then reappeared, even the traces in certain cases that suggested someone had dealt with things one step ahead of them. So that was it... there had always been another him, ahead of them.
Suddenly, footsteps came from deep within the blank door. They weren’t the conductor’s steady steps, nor the silent footsteps of the absent. They were nothing more than the ordinary sound of leather shoes. Step. Step. Step.
The calm expression on the old man’s face changed for the first time. The conductor slowly turned around as well. His partner instinctively pulled Asti behind her. Everyone looked toward the door.
A figure slowly emerged from the blankness. He wore a black coat and looked exhausted. An old lantern hung from his left hand, while his right gripped a battered file. When he had fully stepped out, Morse stopped breathing—for the man’s face was identical to his own, except that he looked more than a decade older.
The man raised his head and looked at Morse. He smiled as if he had finally been waiting for someone to arrive, then said calmly, “At last, the seventh time. This time, don’t let Asti disappear again.”
(14) “Morse of the Sixth Time”
The air stood still. Morse stared at the man identical to him. Aside from the marks left by time, there was no difference in that face, those eyes, or even the way he stood. The only difference was that there was no confusion in his eyes—only exhaustion, and the kind of calm that came after experiencing too many goodbyes.
The old man silently closed Absence. The conductor did not stop him, as if waiting for a meeting that had been destined long ago.
“You...” Morse’s voice was hoarse. “Are you really me?”
The man smiled. “If you believe in memory, I’m not. If you believe in the train, I’m not either.” He paused. “But if you believe in your own choices, I am you.”
The answer explained nothing, yet somehow felt like an answer to everything.
Morse of the Sixth Time slowly approached. With every step he took, faint writing appeared beneath his feet on the platform. They weren’t footprints, but the names of cases—The Station That Doesn’t Exist, The Street Vendor Murder, Platform Four, The List of the Absent...
Morse’s pupils contracted. Those were all events they had experienced. But there were more—The Station in the Mirror, The Rainy Night Post Office, Ward Thirteen, The Nameless Bus, The Archivist. They were cases he had never experienced. Yet Morse of the Sixth Time had already gone through all of them.
“These...” Morse asked quietly. “Are they the future?”
The man shook his head. “No. They’re all failures.” He stopped in front of Morse. “Every case was someone who could have been saved. And I...” He lowered his head and looked at his hands. “I was one step too late every time.”
Asti stared at him and suddenly asked, “Did you save me?”
The man was silent for a long time. At last, he gave a bitter smile. “I did. And I failed. Many times.”
Asti’s heart sank. “Many times... How many?”
The man didn’t answer. He simply handed her the battered file. It was thin, and the cover bore a line of writing that had been nearly worn away—Asti.
Asti flipped through it with trembling hands. The first page contained only one sentence: “First failure.” The second page: “Second failure.” The third page: “Third failure.” ... She kept turning the pages. Each one had the same format, with only the number at the end changing—fifteenth, twenty-ninth, forty-third, fifty-eighth. The final page stopped at—“Ninety-ninth failure.” Everything after it was blank.
Asti’s hands began to tremble. “This... isn’t the seventh time, is it?”
Morse of the Sixth Time nodded gently. “For you, it’s the seventh time. For me...” He looked toward the endless sea of paper turning in the distance. “I’ve already seen ninety-nine Astis off.”
The entire Platform Zero fell into dead silence. Even the Keeper of Books closed his eyes.
Morse suddenly stepped forward and grabbed the man by the collar. “If you knew the future, why didn’t you just tell me? Why did you let everything keep repeating?”
Morse of the Sixth Time did not resist. He simply looked at him calmly. “I told you everything the first time, and you didn’t believe me. The second time, I told you only half, and you changed someone else’s fate. The third time, I said nothing, and Asti disappeared that very day.” He paused. “Later, I understood. What caused the repetition wasn’t the event. It was the answer.”
Morse stared at him. “The answer?”
“Every time, you rush to find the truth. But Archive’s rule isn’t about searching for the truth.” Morse of the Sixth Time reached out and gently tapped Morse on the chest. “It’s about confirming which truth you’re willing to believe.”
At that moment, all of Platform Zero suddenly shook violently. The pages turning in the sky began to burn rapidly—not one page, but tens of thousands.
The conductor abruptly looked up. For the first time, urgency entered his voice. “Someone rewrote the beginning.”
The old man’s expression changed. “No. Not rewrote.” He stared fixedly at the blank door. “Someone has...”
Before he could finish, a shrill tearing sound rang throughout the platform. A crack was forcibly ripped open in the center of the blank door. Beyond it was not darkness, but a bustling modern city—traffic streaming by, neon lights flashing, a world exactly like the one Morse knew. Yet a line of enormous black letters floated above the city, visible to everyone:
[ARCHIVE COMPLETE]
The next second, the entire city began to fold like paper, slowly folding down from the sky.
(15) “The Completed World”
The city was folding—not collapsing, not exploding, but as if someone had grabbed the entire world by its four corners and was slowly folding it into a file. Skyscrapers bent inward, roads overlapped, vehicles stopped in midair, and pedestrians remained frozen in their original movements, yet no one noticed that the world had begun to change.
A bus drove through the folding streets. Its body stretched, and its windows disappeared one by one. In the end, the entire bus became a thin black line and was filed away into the white pages above the city.
Morse’s scalp prickled. “That’s... reality?”
The Keeper of Books didn’t answer. Morse of the Sixth Time did. “Yes.” He watched the gradually disappearing city. “And it’s reality that has already been completed.”
Morse turned toward him. “What does ‘completed’ mean?”
“It means it no longer needs to be changed. Everyone who was supposed to be born was born, everyone who was supposed to die died, everyone who was supposed to meet met, and everyone who was supposed to disappear disappeared. The story reached its ending.” Morse of the Sixth Time raised his head. “So the train puts it away.”
“Wait.” Morse stared at the city. “If it’s already complete... why are there still people inside?”
Morse of the Sixth Time didn’t answer, because he saw it too. In the center of the city was an underground parking garage—the familiar entrance, the familiar sign, the familiar security office.
Morse stopped breathing. “There...” He recognized it. It was the place where he worked. And on the security-camera feed, someone was sitting there—Morse. Another Morse. He wore familiar clothes and sat in the security office, looking down at his phone. A drink that had gone cold sat on the desk, with another drink beside it. In front of that second drink was a sticky note that read: “Don’t forget to eat again.” The handwriting was familiar. It was Asti’s.
“She’s still there,” Asti suddenly said. Everyone looked at her. She stared desperately at the monitor. “The me in that world... is still there.”
Morse of the Sixth Time shook his head. “No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen it.” He closed his eyes. “I drank that drink. I saw that sticky note. The Asti in that world...” He opened his eyes. “Is already gone.”
Asti froze. “But that’s her handwriting—”
“Things left behind by the absent don’t disappear immediately,” the Keeper of Books added quietly. “A person can be erased, but the traces they left behind don’t necessarily vanish at the same time. Sometimes a person’s name disappears. Sometimes it’s a photograph. Sometimes it’s a voice. But the thing that’s hardest to erase...” The old man looked at the sticky note. “Is a habit.”
Morse said nothing. He suddenly understood. The world didn’t immediately become blank when someone disappeared. The truly terrifying part was this: the person no longer existed, but the world still retained evidence that she had existed. A drink. A note. A habit. An empty space no one knew why it existed. In the end, even those things would be archived.
The city folded faster. Just as the final skyscraper was about to vanish, the security office in the underground parking garage suddenly lit up. On the security-camera feed, “Morse” raised his head, as if he sensed someone watching him. He slowly stood, walked over to the camera, and then—reached out and knocked on the lens. Knock. Knock. Knock.
Morse’s expression changed instantly. He knew that gesture too well. It was the habitual way he tapped on a desk. Then “Morse” on the screen suddenly spoke. The camera had no sound, but everyone understood his lips: “You finally came.”
Morse’s whole body went rigid. Morse of the Sixth Time froze as well. “Impossible...” It was the first time he truly lost his composure. He rushed toward the closing crack. “Wait!”
Morse grabbed his arm. “Where are you going? That isn’t an ordinary world!”
Morse of the Sixth Time shook him off. “I know! It’s the world left behind after my sixth train ride!”
Morse froze. Morse of the Sixth Time stared at the crack. “I thought it had already been archived. I thought I’d left everything there. But now...” His gaze fell on the security office. “Someone’s still inside.”
The conductor suddenly spoke. “You can’t go in.”
Morse of the Sixth Time looked back. “Why not?”
The conductor watched the city. “Because that world has already completed its Archive. Anyone who enters again...” He paused. “Will become one of the absent.”
Asti suddenly grabbed Morse’s hand. Her hand was cold. “Don’t go.”
Morse turned back to her. For the first time, there was no hint of a joke in her eyes. “If you go in, I might really never be able to find you again.”
Morse didn’t answer. But the next second, the enormous black letters above the city suddenly changed. The original [ARCHIVE COMPLETE] was erased stroke by stroke by some invisible force and rewritten as:
[ARCHIVE ERROR]
The conductor looked up sharply. “Impossible.”
The Keeper of Books went pale. “Who’s altering the file?”
No one answered. In the next moment, “Morse” in the security office knocked on the camera again. Knock. Knock. Knock. Then someone slowly appeared behind him—a purple outfit, a familiar figure, a familiar face—Asti. She stood behind the Morse of that other world, slowly raised her head, and locked eyes across two worlds with the real Asti.
The two “Astis” froze at the same time. Then the Asti standing in the security office suddenly smiled. She raised her hand and made a shushing gesture toward Asti on the other side of the glass. Shh.
The next second, the entire city folded shut. The crack closed, and every image vanished. Platform Zero returned to silence. Only one train ticket had appeared on the ground.
Morse bent down and picked it up. There was only one sentence on the ticket: “The eighth train ride is about to begin.” And where the passenger’s name had previously been alone, there were now two names—Morse, Asti. At the very bottom, a line of red text had just appeared: “No one is allowed to get off this train.”