I slowed from a run to a jog following the road. It stretched out for what felt like another hour before opening into a second clearing. This one showed signs of recent activity; scraps of cloth in the entrance to a house, the bucket to the well raised to the top, footprints around it carved into the earth.

The hunts were empty. They were empty of furniture, empty of light, and empty of people. Silence permeated the little village of stone huts, devoid of the thick Qi that filled the rest of the world. Something felt… off. Even if there wasn’t a well here acting as a fountain of Qi, Qi should have still suffused the world. It should have evened out until it was the same everywhere.

Which meant something was drawing the Qi away from here, like another formation. An exit, maybe, but it wouldn’t make sense to use this place as a cultivation resource if it originally powered the exit array. Unless this place originally wasn’t a cultivation resource and the array did something completely different.

I approached the well, blade in hand, eyes jumping between the path that led away from the town and the well. Then I leaned over the edge, staring down into the bottom. I saw… a black pit. But I felt Qi pouring over the lip of the well and down inside of it. I pulled my phone out, turning the flashlight on and staring down into the hole.

Dim, stagnant black water swirled inside; muddy water from the bottom of a forest filled with leaves and debris.

I moved on.

The road curved ever so slightly left, a gigantic curving circle. The broken moon was static, hanging in the sky and visible in the break between the silver treeline.

I stopped dead in the middle of the road, turning left, estimating the curve of the circle. The road sometimes adjusted to the right, but even adjusting for that, the road was a gigantic circle. Which would make each of the wells and rest stop points in the formation. I tried to estimate how quickly the road was curving. It was likely that the entrance points, and the small arrays there that captured people entering this world spatially, would be on opposite sides or opposite corners.

And judging by how slowly the road curved, this place was miles from one end to the other.

I stared off into the dark unknown of the woods, orienting myself. The shattered moon was exactly in the direction I was heading, hanging static in the sky.

Pushing off the path and into the woods, I felt the air move strangely. Out of the corner of my eyes, it seemed like the plants were warping and bending. Everything in my peripheral vision seemed to move in a blur, like I was rushing forward much faster than I was.

The ground was harsh and uneven, pitted with holes and covered with gigantic black roots. Foliage rose to as high as my waist, the Qi in the air growing thin once again. I tore through brambles, cycling the Qi in me from the one kill I had.

It only took a few minutes before I was well and truly lost. The sounds of running water around me grew loud and then quiet again, like a river was coming close before fading away. Around me, the forest moved strangely. The farther away something was, the faster it moved. The surrounding space compressed until it felt like I was running on a boat that was speeding through an ocean of woodland. Distantly, I thought I saw mountains in the horizon's blur, appearing for a blink before disappearing.

Images of craters would appear in the break between trees before disappearing, and at one point, I saw a copy of the entire sky, before realizing it was a massive sea, dead calm and reflecting the shattered moon above.

I thought I saw a mountain now, approaching me from the side of my vision, huge and looming, and I slowed down. Silver light bloomed away from it, and I realized with a jolt that it wasn’t a mountain at all.

A gigantic fox, the size of a bus, stepping out of the treeline, which still bent and distorted like an image at the edges of a telescope. Silver hair bristled on its body, and it whipped three massive, thin tails as it sniffed at the ground.

Qi radiated around it — a sign that it was in at least Dantian Ignition realm. I doubted it had stopped there though — a spirit beast of this size was an apex predator. It looked directly at me, sniffing the air, before stepping towards me. I readied the knife, waiting for its lunge as it came closer and closer.

It came within feet of me without noticing. Was it blind? I swung first, my knife arcing through the air, glinting with silver light — and the world expanded.

Suddenly it was a hundred feet away, and its head snapped up, making eye contact with me.

When the arc of my swing ended, the monster blinked, head snapping left and right. It made a screeching noise as reality compressed again, like a rubber band collapsing, until it was a few feet in front of me.

I stepped forward through the plants, observing the creature. If that was its technique, it wouldn’t have looked so confused. When they built this formation, they split the space in the small world in two. Even though it seemed like we were in the same place, we weren’t. I was moving through the formation while the fox was in the forest outside of it. I stepped closer to it, even though it seemed to only be a foot away. The fox seemed to open up, warping around me, and even though I only took a single step towards it, I stood 50 feet away. It was behind me now, confirming my suspicions.

I turned to examine it again. It held its nose in the air, sniffing, before turning to look my direction.

I didn’t belong to its world. I had one foot here in the forest and one in a completely separate plane of existence. And I didn’t really belong in either.

I turned, continuing towards the center of the formation.