Chapter 5 Across the Veil

The transition was not like teleportation as modern spatial mechanics described it, wrapped in a Qi bubble that moved the person through space. This was more like a folding. Reality folded around him like paper, the walls of his apartment creasing inward, the ceiling and floor trading places, dimensions compressing and expanding in ways his spatial perception could register but his brain could not process. For a fraction of a second he existed in both places simultaneously—his body on his bed in Yongcheng and his body on the hillside under two moons—and then the fold completed and there was only one of him, and he was here.

Here. In the place with two moons, on the same hillside, under the same star-dense sky. But this time it was early morning.

A single sun, which somehow made the dual moons more unsettling in retrospect. The forest he had seen as a dark mass in his first visit was a cathedral of colour in daylight. Trees with bark of silver and copper and deep red, canopies in shades of green he had no names for, leaves shimmering with faint iridescence as they caught the light. The stream he had glimpsed now sparkled with an impossible clarity, and when a breeze carried its mist toward him, his skin tingled with the Qi suspended in the water.

He was physically here. Again. Deliberately.

Shen Wei checked himself. He was wearing the clothes he had lain down in. The pendant was in his hand, warm but no longer glowing. His body felt the same immediate impact of the dense Qi environment—his meridians opening, his dantian surging—but this time he was braced for it, and the sensation was exhilarating rather than overwhelming. Unlike last time, he had time to cycle the foreign Qi and absorb it consciously.

He stood still for five minutes, breathing, adjusting, cataloging. Then he knelt and pressed his palm against the ground. Soil. Rock beneath the soil. Root systems threading through both. Real. Tangible. Material.

He broke a twig from a nearby bush. It snapped with a clean crack and left sap on his fingers—sticky, faintly luminous, absorbed on contact with a rush of energy through his hand. Even the plants here were saturated with Qi.

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He pinched his own forearm, hard. Pain. Brief and sharp and completely convincing.

“Another world,” he said aloud, and the words sounded absurd in the open air.

The analytical part of his mind had been racing since the moment he arrived, and now it surfaced with its first urgent demand: How do I get back?

The pendant. It had to be the pendant. He gripped it tightly and willed himself home. He thought of his apartment, his bed, the stale air and thin walls and flickering corridor lights.

Nothing happened.