Chapter 3 The Dream That Wasn’t

Chapter 3 — The Dream That Wasn’t

The sky had two moons.

That was the first thing Shen Wei noticed, and it was enough to stop his thoughts completely. Two moons—one large and silver-white, the other smaller and tinged with pale blue—hung in a sky so dense with stars that the darkness between them seemed thin, almost translucent. He stood in grass that reached his knees, on a hillside that sloped down into a vast, unbroken forest. The trees were enormous, trunks wider than his apartment, canopies merged into a single dark mass stretching to the horizon.

He could not see any buildings. No artificial lights. No transit lines. No holographic advertisements. No city.

And then the air hit him like a wave.

It was thick, not like humidity but with something else entirely. It flooded his sinuses and filled his lungs and set every nerve in his body ringing. Qi. Raw, unprocessed, natural Qi so concentrated he could taste it on his tongue, feel it pressing against his skin, sense it saturating every cell with an energy so far beyond his daily experience that comparison seemed meaningless. The Qi in Yongcheng’s Lower District was thin, recycled, filtered through industrial processors and diluted by millions of cultivators drawing on the same depleted grid. This was Qi as it must have existed before the depletion—wild, abundant, alive.

His pathways opened involuntarily. His meridians, long accustomed to the thin trickle of urban Qi, suddenly flooded with energy so dense and pure that his body convulsed. He fell to his knees in the grass, gasping, his vision blurring as his cultivation base destabilized. Stable at Stage 3 for over two years, and cracking now. His meridians burned. His dantian surged, contracted, surged again.

He pressed his hands against the ground and forced himself to breathe. The grass was cool and damp beneath his fingers.

This is not a dream, he thought, and the thought was so calm and so clear amid the chaos of his body that it frightened him more than anything else.

He slowly raised his head and looked around. The hillside continued upward behind him, rising toward a ridgeline silhouetted against the stars. To his left, the forest stretched unbroken. To his right, a stream glinted in the moonlight, threading down the slope toward the trees. And ahead, far in the distance, a mountain range rose against the sky—peaks so high they disappeared into luminous clouds glowing faintly from within.

Something roared.

The sound came from the forest, deep and resonant, vibrating in his chest. It was far away, but the sheer volume of it suggested something enormous. The roar echoed off the mountains and faded into silence.

Shen Wei’s hands were shaking. His body was shaking. The Qi flooding his pathways had not stopped—if anything, it was intensifying. His meridians opened wider, accepting more, but only barely keeping pace. He could feel his cultivation base shifting, the stagnant equilibrium of Stage 3 cracking under the pressure. Stage 3 was never designed to handle this concentration.

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He needed to leave. He needed to go back. He didn’t know where “back” was or how to get there, but he needed to go, because his body could not sustain this and if he stayed he would either break through or break apart and he was not prepared for either.

He closed his eyes and thought of his apartment. His bed. His desk. The thin walls and the recycled air and the sound of Mrs. Tong’s cooking show. He thought of the pendant—

And then he was lying on his bed, gasping, drenched in sweat, the pendant clutched in a hand he did not remember raising to his chest.

The ceiling of his apartment stared back at him, familiar and flat. The clock on his desk read 3:17 a.m. He had been asleep, or wherever he had been, for approximately four hours.