I built a desert in the city.

Yes, you read that right. I built a desert in a city buried in electrical currents, steel frames, and neon lights. It is the only place in the city where you can see more than ten stars clearly in the sky. The method is simple: pinch your nose with a tissue and blow hard, and you'll hear yourself suddenly running out of reality. At this moment, the view in front of you turns into a TV screen, and you jump out of it into the real world—a desert.

The city is indeed an old-fashioned television set, but it is falling apart. Its signal tower faces itself, and the information flow circulates. When a piece of information is reorganized, it forms a new message. This is the energy cycle of the city, which is how the city survives. Once something new is introduced, the city becomes chaotic, just like a snowy TV screen. To be precise, the city is built in the desert, not the other way around.

I was delighted to discover this fact and prepared to buy sandbags to enhance my desert experience the next day. The salesperson explained to me which weight of the sandbag to use for different sports, but I said I wanted to lie on top of it.

"What?" The salesperson paused. However, the city does not allow curiosity; it only does transactions that do not lose money. So, the salesperson only paused for a moment and dragged herself back from the desert. I regretted that she didn't stop for a little longer; who knows if she would have discovered the truth. Now, she was just looking at me and scanning my QR code at the counter, thinking about her ten-square-meter home and ten-kilogram little boy, using mathematical problems she wasn't taught in school to calculate her salary for the month.

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I went to buy a small, hot sun. It's summertime now; I heard someone murmuring. That person might think, "What can you do in the summer?" Maybe someone wants to buy a small sun, perhaps some people are naturally afraid of the cold, maybe some people live in a mysterious underground ice cave, perhaps someone wants to train themselves to become Houyi. After thinking for a while, that person gave up. I felt a little sad because even if I shouted loudly in the center of this mall, "You've all been deceived! This world is a desert!" They would still go home and suck up the second-hand information in the electrical current like leeches. In their minds, they might think, "Oh, a desert. There seemed to be a sandstorm in Beijing recently. Let's search and find out." That's how people in the city are, small enough not to fit in a desert, large enough to squeeze an entire desert out.

Fully equipped, I solemnly put on my eyepatch, turned on the small sun, and slowly lay in the sandbag. Pinch the tissue, and blow hard. The next day, people discussed my disappearance, the eerie sandbag in the bedroom, and the frightening red light emitting from the small sun. People talked nonsense about the desert, but not one person found me. I watched them on TV with joy. I'm in that sandbag, every grain of sand. I am the light reflected from the moon to the sun. I have numerous eyes distributed in everyone's bodies, in their brains, hearts, spleens, fingernails, hair, and eyes. I'm on those few stars covered by neon lights. Come and find me! But they didn't hear me. They went home, turned on their TV, computer, and cell phone, and focused on sandstorms and divorces.