Li Fan kept moving long after the sounds of the fight had faded, cutting a wide, careful path through the undergrowth until the ground began to slope upward beneath his boots. Rock replaced soil underfoot, and the trees thinned just enough for him to see a pale limestone cliff rising ahead, streaked gray and white in the dim light filtering down through the canopy.
At its base, tucked back beneath an overhang, he found a narrow stone alcove — barely deep enough to sit in, but enough to put solid rock at his back. He ducked inside and dropped to the ground, his legs finally giving out from under him.
The air in the alcove was different from the forest outside. Cold and dry, carrying the mineral smell of stone that had never seen rain, mixed with a faint layer of dust that hadn't been disturbed in a long time. He pulled his knees up and pressed his back against the rock wall, letting the chill of it seep through his jacket.
For a while he just sat there, listening to his own heartbeat slow down, one ragged breath at a time.
He was alone. Not lost-in-the-woods alone — actually alone, on a world that wasn't his, with a sky that didn't match anything he'd ever slept under. No phone, no bag, no way to call anyone. He let that settle into his chest without trying to push it away. Better to face it now, sitting still, than to keep running on panic until his legs gave out somewhere worse than this.
Slowly, his breathing evened out.
Once his heart stopped hammering, his mind drifted back to the clearing — to the tiger's jaws locked around the scorpion's tail, the spray of dark blood across churned dirt, the bitter sting of venom in the air. He'd been ten feet from something that could have ended him without noticing he existed.
And he hadn't panicked. Not really.
He replayed it in his head, trying to make sense of it. The fear had been there — his hands had shaken, his heart had slammed against his ribs — but underneath all of that, something else had taken over. A cold, exact focus that told him exactly where to step and exactly where not to. He hadn't decided to feel that way. It had simply arrived, fully formed, and he'd used it without question.
That wasn't him. Not the him he knew, anyway. Back on Blue Star, he'd frozen once when a scaffold plank cracked under his coworker's foot — stood there uselessly for two full seconds before his body caught up with his brain. He wasn't built for calm under that kind of pressure. Nobody was.
So where had it come from?
He sat with the question, turning it over, and as he did, he became aware of something else — a presence, faint but unmistakable, sitting somewhere deep in his mind, well beneath conscious thought. It wasn't a memory. It wasn't a feeling. It was just there, heavy and still, like a stone dropped into water long enough ago that the ripples had gone flat.
The moment he noticed it, he tried to look at it directly.
His vision — even with his eyes shut — split open.
Darkness split apart. A single golden character flared to life in the black behind his eyelids. Then another beside it. Then a third.
Then thousands, tearing into existence all at once, dense columns unrolling faster than his eyes could have ever tracked them if he'd been trying to read normally. He wasn't reading them in the usual sense at all. They simply arrived, whole, understanding attaching itself to each line the instant it appeared, the way a word makes sense the moment you hear it spoken in your own language.
The columns slowed, then locked into place, anchoring themselves at the front of his mind like something bolted down. At the head of it all sat a single title, burned into place above everything else:
The Primordial Dao Origin Sutra
Li Fan didn't move. He sat frozen against the cold stone, eyes shut, staring at words that had no business existing inside his own skull. He had no memory of learning this. No memory of writing it, hearing it, dreaming it. It was simply there now, as solid and permanent as his own name.
He forced himself to keep still and let his focus settle on the text instead of the fact of its existence. Panicking about it wouldn't make it go away, and if it was already inside him, he needed to understand what it was.
The first section peeled itself forward, distinct from the rest, labeled in the same burning gold:
Level One — The Primordial Stances
Beneath the title, a complete sequence unfolded — stances, breathing patterns, the exact tension required in each muscle group, laid out with a level of precision no ordinary manual could have managed. It read like a physical template, a map for tempering a human body from the skin inward: how to hold the shoulders, how to root the feet, how to draw breath down past the chest and let it settle low in the gut.
Li Fan opened his eyes.
The alcove was exactly as he'd left it — cold stone, dry dust, gray light bleeding in from outside. Nothing around him had changed. But something inside him had, and for the first time since he'd fallen through that crack in the dig site floor, he had something to hold onto besides fear.
He flexed his fingers, testing the reality of what he'd just seen, then closed his eyes again and began to read. 3: The Source Revealed
Stolen story; please report.
Li Fan kept moving long after the sounds of the fight had faded, cutting a wide, careful path through the undergrowth until the ground began to slope upward beneath his boots. Rock replaced soil underfoot, and the trees thinned just enough for him to see a pale limestone cliff rising ahead, streaked gray and white in the dim light filtering down through the canopy.
At its base, tucked back beneath an overhang, he found a narrow stone alcove — barely deep enough to sit in, but enough to put solid rock at his back. He ducked inside and dropped to the ground, his legs finally giving out from under him.
The air in the alcove was different from the forest outside. Cold and dry, carrying the mineral smell of stone that had never seen rain, mixed with a faint layer of dust that hadn't been disturbed in a long time. He pulled his knees up and pressed his back against the rock wall, letting the chill of it seep through his jacket.
For a while he just sat there, listening to his own heartbeat slow down, one ragged breath at a time.
He was alone. Not lost-in-the-woods alone — actually alone, on a world that wasn't his, with a sky that didn't match anything he'd ever slept under. No phone, no bag, no way to call anyone. He let that settle into his chest without trying to push it away. Better to face it now, sitting still, than to keep running on panic until his legs gave out somewhere worse than this.
Slowly, his breathing evened out.
Once his heart stopped hammering, his mind drifted back to the clearing — to the tiger's jaws locked around the scorpion's tail, the spray of dark blood across churned dirt, the bitter sting of venom in the air. He'd been ten feet from something that could have ended him without noticing he existed.
And he hadn't panicked. Not really.
He replayed it in his head, trying to make sense of it. The fear had been there — his hands had shaken, his heart had slammed against his ribs — but underneath all of that, something else had taken over. A cold, exact focus that told him exactly where to step and exactly where not to. He hadn't decided to feel that way. It had simply arrived, fully formed, and he'd used it without question.
That wasn't him. Not the him he knew, anyway. Back on Blue Star, he'd frozen once when a scaffold plank cracked under his coworker's foot — stood there uselessly for two full seconds before his body caught up with his brain. He wasn't built for calm under that kind of pressure. Nobody was.
So where had it come from?
He sat with the question, turning it over, and as he did, he became aware of something else — a presence, faint but unmistakable, sitting somewhere deep in his mind, well beneath conscious thought. It wasn't a memory. It wasn't a feeling. It was just there, heavy and still, like a stone dropped into water long enough ago that the ripples had gone flat.
The moment he noticed it, he tried to look at it directly.
His vision — even with his eyes shut — split open.
Darkness split apart. A single golden character flared to life in the black behind his eyelids. Then another beside it. Then a third.
Then thousands, tearing into existence all at once, dense columns unrolling faster than his eyes could have ever tracked them if he'd been trying to read normally. He wasn't reading them in the usual sense at all. They simply arrived, whole, understanding attaching itself to each line the instant it appeared, the way a word makes sense the moment you hear it spoken in your own language.
The columns slowed, then locked into place, anchoring themselves at the front of his mind like something bolted down. At the head of it all sat a single title, burned into place above everything else:
The Primordial Dao Origin Sutra
Li Fan didn't move. He sat frozen against the cold stone, eyes shut, staring at words that had no business existing inside his own skull. He had no memory of learning this. No memory of writing it, hearing it, dreaming it. It was simply there now, as solid and permanent as his own name.
He forced himself to keep still and let his focus settle on the text instead of the fact of its existence. Panicking about it wouldn't make it go away, and if it was already inside him, he needed to understand what it was.
The first section peeled itself forward, distinct from the rest, labeled in the same burning gold:
Level One — The Primordial Stances
Beneath the title, a complete sequence unfolded — stances, breathing patterns, the exact tension required in each muscle group, laid out with a level of precision no ordinary manual could have managed. It read like a physical template, a map for tempering a human body from the skin inward: how to hold the shoulders, how to root the feet, how to draw breath down past the chest and let it settle low in the gut.
Li Fan opened his eyes.
The alcove was exactly as he'd left it — cold stone, dry dust, gray light bleeding in from outside. Nothing around him had changed. But something inside him had, and for the first time since he'd fallen through that crack in the dig site floor, he had something to hold onto besides fear.
He flexed his fingers, testing the reality of what he'd just seen, then closed his eyes again and began to read.