Shadows swallowed the world. High above, the moon glowed silver — what was left of it. It looked like something had blown through it, scattering it into a ring that dominated the horizon. Spinning rocks filled the stratosphere, reflecting silver light through a sky choked with dust. Where the stars were visible, they glowed through a cloak of dark blue, like someone had dragged a blanket over the sky, full of visible ripples.

The ground crunched under my feet, a dirt path of crushed stone overgrown with creeping mosses and molds, and I rose to my full height.

“Kim?” I asked, quietly. Then I shouted louder. “Kim!”

There was no response.

I looked around.

A forest of towering black trees lined either edge of the road, silver leaves dead still and silent in a windless world. Luminescent silver moss spotted the trees in a patchwork, visibly crawling around the trunk of the tree. Beyond the treeline, it dimmed, and I cycled Qi to my eyes, glowing silver to see in the darkened world painted in a hundred shades of blue.

The only sound in all of it was my own breathing and running water somewhere beyond the treeline.

Then finally, I turned behind myself to the gate — or where it had been.

It was gone.

On the ground was an array formed of bricks intricately laid into the ground, surrounded on either side by two towering pillars, like someone had crafted a gate to a small world and left it here.

But that made little sense. Why would a gate open to a small world?

I looked back down the road, making a quick set of assumptions.

The first was that whoever built this place had knowledge of cultivation. They had built an array — a structure to manipulate Qi, like a technique formed outside of the body. It was probably some kind of holy ground for cultivation — the sort of place you got the honor of entering through merit.

The second was that this place had long since been abandoned, at least by the clan that created it. There was no one here guarding this entrance. There could be more than one entrance as well, scattering groups that entered to make the place more defensible. Kim could be at one of those. And they could be miles away.

My third assumption was that something terrible happened here. Otherwise, this place wouldn’t be abandoned.

Those kinds of things happened all the time. A world full of Qi and treasures, filled with juniors who spent most of their life competing? It was a recipe for disaster. How many times did we open our own small worlds just for no one to come out?

That said, in my sect, we also filled our small worlds with dangerous monsters to test our youth. My face twitched.

The roles have been reversed.

I ran, gravel crunching under my feet, treeline blurring around me.

Blue grass and blue bushes covered the road, and the side of it, variegated with silver. The ground was invisible beneath them, but I could follow the road by the sound of it crunching beneath my feet and the lack of trees impeding me. It seemed to go on forever, never intersecting with another road, and only mildly changing direction, curving left or right. The landscape blurred together.

By the time the forest broke into a clearing, I was already panting.

Squat houses of gray brick surrounded a well. Silver streaked every brick, pulsing dimly with arcane light, and the Qi was so thick it tingled my skin.

Sitting cross-legged in front of the well was — a creature. Silver light pooled around it, flooding down its side and puddling in the town square. It was a gross facsimile of a man, an approximation of humanity, covered in silver fur with high pointed ears that twitched as I approached. When I stopped and stood still, it rose, keeping its back to me.

It turned towards me, eyes glowing silver. It said something then, an attempt to communicate in a high-pitched noise — almost a squeak. Its face ended in a snout, mouth opening to sharp teeth, face screwing up into a confused expression. Ill-fitting leather draped from its body, a motley robe of stitched together leather, stapled with metal. It rested a clawed hand on the hilt of the saber at its side.

It could talk and think. It was a person — a spirit beast of a high enough realm to manipulate itself to look like a human, or a descendant of one. I rose my hands to broker peace.

It snarled, spitting out an attempt at a language we both understood. It clearly wasn’t native to the language, or maybe the local dialect differed from where it was from. I recognized it all the same.

“Hu man.” It spat the words, as if they hurt to speak, alien and strange in its mouth. Its expression didn’t change.

With a grimace, my hand fell to my knife, gripping the hilt. That was all the invitation it needed. It fell. Leaning forward, it sunk to the ground before kicking off, speeding at me and drawing the saber all in one motion.

Our blades rang when they clashed, the sound of metal on metal echoing through the forest — although my blade appeared to be made of bone.

The slash had come at me from down and to the left — my knife scraped along the blade, pushing it to my side rather than trying to stop it entirely — that would have been stupid. The cheap, pitted blade the fox-man wielded had no crossguard.

It howled in rage, fingers flying free of its hand, dropping to the forest floor. For just a second, it paused. I felt its saber graze my arm, a bright white head spreading from the cut.

It was stronger than me. Faster than me, too. But neither of those things mattered right now; I was already inside of its guard, blade in hand, and it hesitated, flinching from the pain.

I knew better than to do the same. I stabbed upwards into his neck, parting the flesh, and pushed, stepping past him.

In a few seconds, our first and only exchange ended. Its body hit the ground. I looked up, seeing if the noise had attracted anything else — there could be god knows how many more in these houses.

I waited, tense. But nothing came. Qi burned into my body from the fox-man I killed. His Qi entered me the same as any monsters, racing around my body with burning power. I ignored it for just a moment, the feeling stronger than anything else I had killed. My skin was already heating, my insides burning to absorb it, itching to cultivate. There was something more important.

“Kim?” I said. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted. But there was no response. Maybe she had beaten me here, somehow, ending up in this town.

Or maybe she was miles away, lost and alone in an alien world.