Chapter 2 Inheritance of Dust

Shen Wei woke with the pendant pressed against his sternum, the cord of its wrapping wound between his fingers. Morning light fell through his single window in a narrow blade, cutting across the floor. For a moment he lay still, testing the sensation—the jade was cool now, dormant, as though the warmth of last night had been a fever dream.

But he did not believe in fever dreams. He believed in data, in reproducible results, in the stubborn accumulation of evidence. One observation was an anomaly. Two would be a pattern.

He rose, showered in the narrow stall that delivered lukewarm water for exactly four minutes (his building’s Qi recycler was perpetually overloaded), and dressed for work. He set the pendant on his desk and examined it in daylight. The jade was dark and flawless, a deep viridian that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. He photographed it from several angles with his tablet, then ran the images through an open-source artifact identification database. No matches.

At Clearsky, the day was unremarkable. He monitored his furnaces, flagged Furnace 7’s persistent temperature drift again, and ate lunch with Lin Yue, who was calculating how many more months she needed to save before she could afford a catalyst pill to help her break into the next stage.

“Sixteen months,” she said, poking at her rice. “Sixteen months if I don’t eat anything fun, don’t buy new clothes, and don’t get sick. Twenty if I want to, you know, occasionally enjoy being alive.”

“What’s the quality of the pill you’re looking at?”

“Grade 2. It’s what I can afford. Grade 3 would be better—higher success rate, smoother breakthrough—but that’s another year of saving.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think about just taking the Grade 1 and rolling the dice. Forty percent success rate. Those aren’t terrible odds.”

“They’re terrible odds if you’re in the sixty percent.”

“Thank you, Shen Wei. Very encouraging.”

“Save for the Grade 2. Sixteen months isn’t that long. And that’s at least sixteen more months of me.” He said jokingly.

After his shift, he used his employee access to search Clearsky’s internal database for Project Starfall. The records were sparse—the project had been led by a Dr. Fang Qiu, a spatial mechanics researcher who had since left the company. The project’s stated goal was to “investigate micro-dimensional perturbations in urban Qi field matrices,” which was academic language for “looking for cracks between dimensions.” The project had found nothing conclusive, and funding had been pulled after two years.

But buried in the project notes was a subsection on artifact acquisition. The team had collected seventeen objects from various sources—purchased from antique dealers, recovered from old ruin sites, donated by private collectors—hoping to find items with spatial properties. Sixteen had been confirmed inert. The seventeenth was listed as: “Jade pendant, provenance unknown. Acquired from estate sale of a private collector (deceased). No spatial response detected. Classified as non-significant.”

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Provenance unknown. Estate sale of a deceased collector. A dead end, literally.