Li Fan opened his eyes to the smell of wet soil and rotting wood, thick and heavy in his throat. His vision swam, a blur of dark shapes and dim gray light. He blinked hard, again and again, until the shapes started to sharpen.
He was lying on his side in a bed of damp leaves. When he tried to push himself up, his arms shook, muscles stiff and sore in a way that had nothing to do with the shoveling. The freezing air bit into the bare skin of his neck the moment he sat upright, sharp enough that he sucked in a breath through his teeth.
He patted down his jacket pockets. Empty. His phone was gone. So was the cloth bag his mother had packed — no dumplings, no water bottle, nothing but the clothes on his back and his boots, caked in dried mud that hadn't been there before.
He sat still for a moment, listening.
That was when it hit him. The rumble was gone.
For six hours that morning, the diesel generators had droned on without pause, a sound so constant he'd stopped noticing it. Now there was nothing. No engines, no distant voices, no scrape of shovels against gravel. Just silence — a thick, pressing silence that seemed to fill every inch of space around him, broken only by his own breathing.
Li Fan got to his feet slowly, legs unsteady beneath him, and looked up.
The trees around him weren't right. Their trunks rose thick and dark, wider than the buses that ran down his street back home, bark ridged and gnarled in patterns he didn't recognize. He tilted his head back further, tracking one trunk up through a canopy so dense it swallowed most of the light — and where it broke, high above, he caught a glimpse of sky.
He stared for several long seconds, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
They never did.
It wasn't blue.
A deep, dark violet stretched between the gaps in the leaves, and scattered across it were stars — not the small, distant pinpricks he'd grown up under, but massive points of light, closer and brighter than anything he'd ever seen, some of them large enough that he could make out faint color at their edges.
His stomach dropped.
He turned in a slow circle, taking in the size of the trunks, the strange violet dark overhead, the total absence of any machine sound. There was no version of this that was Earth. Whatever had happened at the dig site — the crack in the floor, the pull of the fissure, the fall into black silence — it had put him somewhere else entirely.
His hands were trembling. He pressed them flat against his thighs and forced himself to breathe, slow and even, the way his father used to tell him to when he got worked up as a kid. Panicking wouldn't get him anywhere. He needed to find people. A road. A power line. A chimney. Anything that meant people.
He picked a direction and started walking.
The undergrowth was thick, ferns and roots tangling underfoot, and Li Fan kept his eyes down, scanning for any sign that another person had passed this way. Twigs snapped under his boots. Somewhere off to his left, something rustled through the brush and went quiet again before he could turn his head.
He'd been walking for what felt like an hour when the ground shook.
It wasn't subtle. A heavy crash rolled through the earth, hard enough that he felt it through the soles of his boots, followed immediately by a sound he'd never heard before — a wet, tearing noise, like something being ripped open, layered under a deep, guttural roar. A sharp, chemical smell drifted through the trees a second later, bitter and stinging at the back of his throat.
Li Fan froze.
He crouched low and crept toward a thick stand of ferns ahead, each frond taller than he was, and eased two of them apart just enough to see through.
His breath caught.
In the clearing beyond, a tiger the size of a delivery truck had its jaws locked around the segmented tail of something that shouldn't exist — a scorpion, easily as large as the tiger itself, its curved stinger dripping a pale, viscous fluid onto the churned dirt. Blood, dark and glistening, coated patches of the tiger's fur where the scorpion's claws had torn through hide and muscle. The ground around them was shredded, gouged deep by claws and the scorpion's segmented legs, the air thick with the copper smell of blood mixing with that sharp venom stink.
The tiger wrenched its head sideways and the scorpion's tail cracked like a whip, slamming into a tree trunk hard enough to splinter bark and send chunks of wood flying.
Li Fan's whole body went rigid. Cold sweat broke out across his forehead, and his hands shook against the fern stalks. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to run — to turn and bolt back the way he'd come and not stop until his lungs gave out. His heart pounded so hard he could feel it in his throat.
And then, just as fast, something in his mind went quiet.
He didn't understand it. One second his thoughts were a scramble of raw panic, and the next, a cold, clear focus dropped over everything, sharp and absolute. The fear didn't disappear — his heart was still hammering, his skin still crawling — but underneath it, his mind had gone still and precise, cataloguing the ground in front of him without being asked to: the dry twigs to his right that would snap under weight, the soft patch of moss to his left that wouldn't, the angle of the wind carrying his scent away from the clearing rather than toward it.
He moved on that clarity without questioning where it came from.
Li Fan eased back from the ferns, keeping low, and shifted his weight onto the moss before easing off it again, one careful step at a time. He kept the thick trunks of the giant trees between himself and the clearing, moving in a slow, wide arc away from the sound of tearing flesh and the guttural snarls behind him. Each footfall landed soft, testing the ground before he committed his weight, avoiding every dry branch and loose stone in his path.
Behind him, the roar of the tiger rose again, followed by another crack of the scorpion's tail against wood. Li Fan didn't look back. He kept moving, slow and steady, deeper into the trees, until the sounds of the battle faded into the same heavy silence that had greeted him when he first opened his eyes.
Only then did his legs start shaking again.