Director: Wang Xirui

Synopsis

This is a world where everyone can use their consciousness to move freely between parallel worlds. No one has to bear any consequences. A passionate young man doing neuroscience research and a dryly funny senior schoolmate hit it off; he admires her, and she shows an unusual warmth. Today he finally works up the courage to confess his feelings. She turns him down, saying, "We are not from the same world", a brush-off, given that anyone can switch worlds at will! So the young man searches other worlds for one in which they are already together, but finds none; he cannot even find her. Driven by curiosity, he secretly follows her to investigate, and in another world hears of a crisis: a "master thief" who likes to seize trophies is attacking the research institute. He rushes back to his original world, where she is fighting the thief. Unlike everyone else, she does not surrender at once and escape to another world, but fights with all her wits and courage, and finally, with his small help, defeats the rampaging thief. As they open their hearts after the narrow escape, she reveals her secret: she is one of the rare people "without the shift sense". She cannot travel to other worlds. Her life has no forks in the road; she can only fight to the end, change reality and face her "only world". He understands that her persistence and courage are not purely "personality", but also come from a vulnerability she has no choice about. In the end, the young man decides to pull out his own shift-sense activator ("suicide" in every smooth world, an aesthetic "suicide"). For true feeling, he gives up the infinite