Margaret saw her granddaughter marching toward the wooden house and hurried after her.
As they drew closer, they realized the house stood inside a low wooden fence.
The rails were weathered silver-gray, and a small gate was latched with a simple wooden peg.
Neve stopped at the gate.
“Hello?” she called.
“Is anyone here?”
Silence.
“Hello?
We’re coming in!”
Nothing answered but the faint murmur of the spring behind them.
After calling several more times, Neve lifted the peg and pushed the gate open.
It swung inward without a creak.
The front door of the house was already standing open, as if someone had stepped out only a moment ago and meant to come right back.
Neve hesitated on the threshold for just a heartbeat.
Then she walked straight in.
Inside was a single large hall.
The air was cool and still and smelled faintly of old wood and something sweeter, like incense long since burned out.
In the very center of the room stood a long altar table of dark polished wood.
There was nothing on it, no candles, no offerings, no dust.
On the wall behind it hung a painting.
It showed an old man in flowing gray robes, seated on a mountain ledge among drifting clouds.
His beard was long and white, and his hands rested on his knees.
His eyes were half closed, calm and distant, as if he were looking at something very far away.
The brushwork was so fine that the robes almost seemed to stir.
A round meditation cushion sat on the floor before the altar.
Beside it stood two large wooden chests, bound in dark metal.
Margaret stepped forward slowly.
Then, to Neve’s surprise, she lowered herself onto the cushion and knelt.
She pressed her palms together and bowed deeply toward the painting.
“My granddaughter and I meant no offense by coming into your home,” she said quietly.
“We hope the Immortal will forgive our intrusion.”
Neve didn’t kneel.
But she didn’t stop her grandmother either.
Whoever the old man in the painting was, a little respect couldn’t hurt.
Instead, she turned to the doors.
There were six of them spaced around the walls of the main hall, each leading to a side room.
Neve went to the nearest one and pushed.
It didn’t budge.
She pushed harder, then threw her shoulder against it.
It didn’t move even a fraction of an inch.
She tried the next door, and the next.
It was the same with all six.
Not one of them would open.
Frowning, she ran her palm across the wall beside the last door.
The wood, if it even was wood, felt strange under her hand.
It was cool, almost cold, and perfectly smooth, like polished stone.
There were no seams between the planks, no knots, no gaps.
When she pressed her eye close to the edge of a door, she couldn’t see so much as a sliver of light or shadow beyond it.
It was like the rooms simply weren’t there yet.
With nothing else to try, Neve went back to the two chests.
She lifted the lid of the first one.
It was packed with small pouches, row upon row of them, each about the size of her palm and cinched shut with a thin cord.
At first she thought they were cloth.
But when she picked one up, it felt more like soft, supple leather, and its surface was covered in intricate carved patterns.
There were whorls and lines and tiny interlocking shapes she didn’t recognize.
She turned it over in her hands and couldn’t make sense of it.
So she set it back down and opened the second chest.
This one was full of small bottles, dozens and dozens of them, made of pale glazed porcelain and stoppered with wax.
She pulled one out and worked the stopper loose.
Inside were a handful of small round pills, pale gold in color.
A faint, pleasant fragrance drifted up from them, something like honey and pine and rain.
She examined the bottle from every side.
There wasn’t a single word on it.
There was no label, no mark, no instructions.
The same was true of the next bottle, and the one after that.
She had absolutely no idea what they were for.
And she certainly wasn’t about to swallow a mystery pill from a mystery house in a mystery space.
She pressed the stopper back in and returned the bottle carefully to its place.
She was lowering the lid when a thought struck her so suddenly that she froze.
Wait.
Those pouches.
Could they possibly be storage bags?
The kind from the cultivation novels, where a tiny pouch held a room’s worth of treasure?
Her heart began to pound.
She hurried back to the first chest and flung it open again.
It was huge, far bigger than it had seemed at first glance, and when she dug her hands in, the pouches went down and down.
There had to be hundreds of them.
If they really were storage bags…
Then everything would be so much easier.
Her family could carry supplies anywhere.
Everyone could have their own.
She wouldn’t have to be the only one who could hide things, the only target.
“Nana, wait here.
I’ll be right back!”
Before Margaret could ask what she meant, Neve vanished.
She reappeared in her bedroom, snatched up the little fruit knife from her desk, and was back in the space in less than a minute.
Without pausing, she nicked the tip of her finger and squeezed a bright drop of blood onto the nearest pouch.
“Neve!” Margaret was on her feet in an instant.
“What are you doing?
You’ve only just healed!”
“Nana, I think these are storage bags!” Neve’s eyes were shining.
“If they really are, that would be amazing.
Gathering supplies would be so much faster and so much easier.”
As she spoke, she watched the drop of blood sink into the carved leather.
It didn’t smear or stain.
It simply soaked in and disappeared, the way her blood had disappeared into the jade pendant.
She held her breath and turned her attention inward, toward the pouch, the same way she reached toward the space.
And there it was.
A space opened up in her mind.
It wasn’t as vast as the jade space, but it was large and clean and empty, like a huge, bare warehouse waiting to be filled.
“It works!” Neve almost shouted.
“Nana, it really is a storage bag!
And the space inside isn’t small at all!”
She pressed the knife into her grandmother’s hand.
“Quick, try one!
Do exactly what I did.
Drip your blood on it, then focus on looking inside.
You’ll see the space.”
Margaret looked down at the knife, then at her granddaughter’s eager face.
She sighed and did as she was told.
She made a tiny cut on the pad of her thumb.
Her hands were old and thin, the skin papery over the bones, and for a moment she worried there wouldn’t be enough blood.
But a small red bead welled up, and she let it fall onto one of the pouches.
It sank in.
She closed her eyes and tried to look inside.
A space opened before her.
It was empty, broad, and quiet, and she guessed it at four or five thousand square feet.
It was as big as the ground floor of a large house.
Margaret opened her eyes and stared at the little leather pouch lying in her palm.
“I never imagined anything like this could exist,” she whispered.
“Something this small, holding something that big.”
“Nana, with all these storage bags, we can stock up on supplies so much faster.” Neve was practically bouncing.
“And not just us.
Everyone we trust could carry their own.”