Volume One: The Shuttle of the Times

My fate is like the shuttle of the times, tightly bound together with those around me.

Chapter One: The Shuttle of the Times

The moment time stopped, to be precise, there was no sensation at all.

Eric Bennett was surprised to see himself maintaining a low-key pace, both hands in his pockets, his left foot already stepping forward, with his back foot poised as support.

He was frozen on the street in this posture, like a statue—strange and bizarre.

His mouth was still slightly open from the surprise of the previous moment. Just three centimeters in front of his face, a fly, with its rear raised, was flying off in a rather dashing manner. Yet it seemed to share the same fate as Eric Bennett, as if someone had pressed pause, suspended in midair. Its green, glistening compound eyes made Eric Bennett feel a proportional wave of nausea in his chest and stomach.

The female owner of a nearby grocery store was splashing dirty water toward the street, the water scattering in midair with clawing, menacing shapes. The bean-sized droplets wobbled in the air, but damn it, they just wouldn’t fall.

A glowing lamp on a pole cast its light over this street corner. Under the fluorescent light, swarms of mosquitoes and moths clustered together, like a cloud solidified by concrete.

And just ten seconds ago, this world was still operating according to Eric Bennett’s normal worldview.

Three months ago, a new competitor joined his company’s project team—a top student from a prestigious domestic university. Compared to him, who had struggled academically since childhood and finally graduated from a third-rate university, the difference in their educational backgrounds was like night and day.

A month later, this new competitor had, in the blink of an eye, blended in with everyone at the company and was equally outstanding in business, making Eric Bennett pale in comparison.

Then, a week ago, the company’s board adopted the competitor’s project proposal, and Eric Bennett was reduced to a nobody. Later, the competitor, with the boss’s daughter in his arms, summoned him to the boss’s office.

So, with an unsurprising ending, Eric Bennett lost to his formidable rival, lost the project manager position he’d held for three years, and was given a seven-day vacation—as if exiled, a victor’s disguised humiliation of the defeated.

Eric Bennett’s life was far from as brilliant as his name. Walking through his hometown, a small city where he’d lived for nineteen years, along a road he’d walked for at least ten years, the starry night above was dazzling, the lights dim, and Eric Bennett gave a bitter laugh. He realized his life was just like the road before him—full of hardship and gloom.

His grades were so bad he barely got into a lousy middle school. A brutal high school experience led to an equally brutal college entrance exam, and in the end, he could only attend a university so obscure most people hadn’t even heard its name. If life had countless turning points, Eric Bennett had never seized a single one. Every battle in his life was linked to failure, piecing together a tragic existence of his own.

Eric Bennett originally thought his life would always be like this—constantly defeated, lingering on the margins of the bottom, eventually marrying a wife who wasn’t exactly ugly, supporting a family, and living out his days.

As he walked somewhat desolately along this street in his hometown, a place for healing, a part of Eric Bennett’s memory—yellowed and almost moldy—was unearthed. Many years ago, he had walked this same road to his gloomy middle school, just like now.

And he was in the same posture, the same position, even the same moment of time frozen. It was as if two points in time, separated by more than a decade, suddenly converged and overlapped on this sparse, starry winter night.

Time paused carelessly just ten seconds before this moment of convergence.

The whole world was silent and still. Eric Bennett had no idea what he had encountered—a deity, a demon, or perhaps a horror scene like The Grudge. All he knew was that, apart from being able to think and having his senses intact, he couldn’t do anything—not even blink. Strangely, even after staring wide-eyed for nearly twenty seconds, he didn’t feel the slightest fatigue.

Watching helplessly as the world froze before his eyes—was this the Mayan-predicted apocalypse arriving early? Or was it all just his imagination? But Eric Bennett told himself he wasn’t foolish enough to mistake such a vivid scene for an illusion.

Eric Bennett was sure that no one could explain this moment—not Einstein, Newton, Archimedes... Even those so-called experts and professors who shout on TV every day would be left speechless if they encountered this, just like him, staring blankly.

Suddenly, the world moved, but time reversed instead of moving forward.

The water splashed from the grocery store next door, every last drop, viciously shot back into the basin. The slightly mature and charming female owner retreated back into the store and disappeared, making the scene feel eerily like a horror movie.