The call ended abruptly.
Luo Binhan put his phone down in despair and looked at the ground from the car window. He often flew internationally to see his mother, so he was highly sensitive to altitude. By a conservative estimate, he was currently about eight hundred meters up. The wind made him shudder, but it wasn’t cold enough to send a chill through his entire body.
He kicked the driver’s seat in front of him.
"Hey, Jing Huang, where the hell are you taking me?"
Jing Huang, sitting in the driver’s seat, turned his head. Luo Binhan noticed his hands weren’t on the steering wheel at all, though by now, that no longer scared him.
"First, we’ll rendezvous with Yalei and the others, then head to Gate City," Jing Huang said. "I’ll let you come back after the heat dies down."
"So where the hell is Gate City?"
Jing Huang frowned, slightly annoyed. "On a Neutral Star Layer at the Alliance’s border, near the Wuyuan Domain."
"So where the fuck is that? Andromeda? Sagittarius?"
"I already told you, it’s not on your Star Layer."
Luo Binhan didn’t fully grasp it, but he summarized it in his own way: "An Otherworld?"
"...You can think of it that way."
"Does everyone there have Superpowers?" Luo Binhan asked on a whim.
"...It depends."
"You like playing with fire, right? Can everyone there do that too?"
"...Do you eat grass?"
"Huh?"
Jing Huang said coldly, "You don’t eat grass, so what right do you have to live on the same planet as horses?"
Luo Binhan wanted to ask more, but just then the car’s cabin began to dissolve—he couldn’t find a better word for it. The entire chassis squirmed and re-formed like melting chocolate, eventually becoming a completely sealed, cylindrical space.
Jing Huang looked up toward a black ring above them—it had originally been a gourd-shaped charm hanging in Luo Binhan’s sports car.
"Yalei, I’ve brought someone up. Take control of the pod."
A few seconds after the boy spoke, Luo Binhan was hit by a powerful sense of gravitational distortion. Although the sports car’s windows had vanished during the earlier dissolution, he instantly knew they were ascending. How high, he couldn’t tell. Once the acceleration ceased, he lost all sensation of movement. ’Is this really my car? Did a four-cylinder gasoline engine just carry us into the sky?’
He couldn’t stop his mind from racing, but to be honest, he wasn’t all that panicked. That was thanks to a strange incident he’d experienced several months prior.
It sounded like a cheap urban legend, the kind he couldn’t even tell his own family. But it had been Luo Binhan’s own experience, plain and simple—he’d been abducted by two giant flies in a UFO and had come close to leaving his home planet for good. To this day, he still didn’t understand the full story of that incident. But it was because of that bizarre encounter that he had met the boy named Jing Huang, who had then lived with him for a time.
The time they’d spent together had been decidedly unpleasant, but when Jing Huang suddenly vanished, Luo Binhan couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret. At the time, however, he was focusing more on his hospitalized friend, Zhou Yu, so he hadn’t paid much mind to Jing Huang’s disappearance.
A slight sense of weightlessness created a tickling sensation inside him. The rising cylindrical container seemed to be decelerating. Luo Binhan started to feel nauseous. He stole a glance at Jing Huang and saw the boy looked like he was dozing off.
’Regarding Jing Huang, I can’t say I know him very well. During the time I took him in, his favorite thing to do was sprawl on the sofa and watch TV. He watched all sorts of shows whose very existence baffled me—Korean romance dramas, Qing dynasty court dramas, teen idol shows...
From morning till night, Jing Huang would watch these shows with a blank expression. I have no idea what enjoyment he got out of them. I always felt like he was watching them the way you’d watch a nature documentary. And whenever I tried to recommend my favorite sci-fi movies, he’d just stare at the ceiling, completely bored.
What was even harder to deal with was his destructive effect on electronics. In the first week we knew each other, I lost my kitchen light, refrigerator, and microwave, and to this day I still have no idea how he managed to break them.
Luo Binhan was born into a vast family. Within the sprawling, complex Luo Clan, his father hailed from the eldest branch, which held the most authority, and also controlled an enviable fortune. Luo Binhan—despite having numerous siblings, both legitimate and illegitimate—was his father’s legitimate eldest son and the publicly designated heir to the family’s businesses. This had a complex effect on his life, for better and for worse, but one aspect was undeniably enviable—he was never short on money.
So he replaced the kitchen light, refrigerator, and microwave in the apartment where he lived alone, and even bought a small TV for his bedroom. This afforded him a certain degree of peace during the days he lived with Jing Huang.
But was that the extent of Jing Huang’s weirdness? No, no, not by a long shot.
In the few short months I spent with him, I saw him do at least three extraordinary things: he used some kind of green flame to burn a man who looked identical to him to cinders; he could summon typhoon-force gales indoors; and he once used a melody played on a leaf to command birds and beasts.
When he first came to my house, the way he spoke was also very strange. He could understand what I said and reply in the same language, but aside from being unnaturally fluent with profanity, his normal conversation was tinged with a bafflingly archaic accent. He could write traditional characters with a brush, though his characters were always full of mistakes, and he could predict the next day’s weather just by looking at the clouds and the night sky.
I’ve often thought that if an outsider—someone familiar with modern pop culture—were suddenly dropped into my home and saw all of Jing Huang’s strange antics, they would naturally come to one conclusion: Jing Huang was a Cultivation Daoist who’d come down from some remote mountain.
But that was just an illusion. Jing Huang didn’t come from any remote mountain forests. He came from Beyond the Heavens, from beyond the stars, from a distance farther than the sun and moon. Just how far away that was, I had absolutely no idea.’
The iron barrel began to vibrate slightly, as if moving through a perfectly-sized tube, before squeezing into some kind of groove with a CLICK.
The top hatch slid open, and an intense light flooded in from outside. Jing Huang stood up first, leaping effortlessly out of the opening. Luo Binhan, however, had to clamber out with some difficulty, hoisting himself over the edge.
The space outside was so bright it dazzled him, and for a moment he couldn’t see his surroundings clearly. He heard Jing Huang’s voice angrily shouting something.
"Ju Xieqi? He yi! Zhi xie!"
Luo Binhan couldn’t understand what the boy was saying, but the language wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. With its unique and complex tonal fluctuations, it sounded at first like someone singing in a particularly obscure dialect.
"Sorry, sorry! Please forgive me. I was just so happy..."
The second voice that rang out belonged to a cheerful young man. Luo Binhan understood his words without any trouble. As soon as the young man finished speaking, the dazzling light all around them dimmed.
Luo Binhan opened his eyes.
He stood in a long, narrow hall. Several people—or at least, humanoid creatures—were in the room. Jing Huang was in a fury, yanking a young man by the hair and berating him, forcing the tall man to stoop over and offer a placating apology.
The scene was bizarre, but Luo Binhan paid it no mind. His gaze, like an iron filing drawn to a magnet, was fixed firmly on the nearby window.
Its frame was inlaid with strips of cold blue light; it was a window with no sharp corners.
Beyond the window, the night sky glittered with stars. In the center of that sparse yet beautiful starfield, Luo Binhan saw an enormous, azure planet. It floated silently in his field of view, rotating slowly. Through the milky-white, ethereal clouds, Luo Binhan could even make out his home country and continent—but all of that belonged to the past. As for what would happen now, he had no answer.
This was the secret of the boy named Jing Huang, the thing that set him apart from ordinary people. In the past, Luo Binhan had encountered cults that performed human sacrifices, ancient tomes that recorded Secret Ceremonies, and even a strange dog that would grin at people. But none of that could compare to Jing Huang’s secret.
’He’s an alien.’