Zichen stared at the mirror for seventeen minutes by the factory clock on their nightstand. He knew because he counted every tick, waiting for the glass to shimmer again, for his wife to step back through wearing that slightly embarrassed smile she got when she realized she'd done something impulsive.
The mirror remained stubbornly reflective.
At minute eighteen, he stood and pressed his palm against the glass. Cold. Solid. Completely ordinary except for the way it had swallowed his pregnant wife like she was made of morning mist.
The radio crackled, Teresa Teng's voice dissolving into static, then reforming as something else entirely. Not music—voices speaking in a dialect that sounded almost like Mandarin but felt older, the syllables rounded by centuries of use. He'd heard similar variations in the mountains around Guiyang, but this carried undertones that made his teeth ache.
"—shipment of Cloud Bamboo pills arrived this morning. Third-grade quality, acceptable for outer disciples—"
Zichen fumbled for the tuning dial, but the signal faded before he could lock onto it. More static, then the familiar buzz of the Hong Kong pop station. He switched off the radio entirely and sat heavily on their bed.
Think. Think like an engineer, not a panicked husband.
First premise: his wife had somehow passed through a mirror as if it were a doorway. Impossible, but he'd watched it happen. Second premise: she was pregnant, which could affect everything from brain chemistry to sensory perception. Third premise: he was a radio technician who specialized in coaxing signals from empty air, so maybe his equipment was picking up transmissions from wherever she'd gone.
The logical conclusion was that he'd suffered some kind of breakdown and was hallucinating elaborate explanations for why Wenyue had left him.
The illogical conclusion was that magic was real and his wife had found a door to somewhere else.
He chose the second option because it was the only one that offered hope.
Zichen pulled the radio closer and began making modifications. If signals could cross between worlds, maybe other things could too. He had a roll of copper wire thin as hair, the kind used for inductance coils. Working by muscle memory, he began wrapping delicate spirals around the radio's internal antenna, following patterns he'd learned from smuggled electronics magazines.
His fingers moved with unusual steadiness. Normally this kind of precision work would have his hands cramping after ten minutes, but tonight they felt stronger, more dexterous. Like his body was adapting to demands he hadn't known he was making.
By three in the morning, he'd rebuilt the radio's entire reception array. The new configuration looked like something between a technical diagram and a piece of abstract art—copper spirals nested inside copper spirals, each one tuned to a different harmonic frequency.
He powered it on and began sweeping through bands that didn't officially exist.
Static. More static. A fragment of what might have been music played on instruments he couldn't identify. Then, clear as if she were standing beside him:
"—walked toward the mouth of the alley, Wenyue felt that strange warm current pulse stronger in her chest—"
His own name, spoken in his wife's voice.
Zichen's hand flew to the volume control, but the signal was already fading. He caught fragments—something about bells, about a child's hand, about destiny written in unknown script—before it dissolved back into static.
Not a conversation. Not even a transmission in any technical sense. It was like listening to someone's thoughts, perfectly clear but impossible to hold onto.
He spent the rest of the night chasing those phantom signals, learning the rhythm of their appearance. Every forty-seven minutes, like clockwork, her voice would emerge from the static. Sometimes just a word or two. Sometimes entire sentences that painted pictures of a world that couldn't exist.
At dawn, he finally accepted that he wasn't going insane.
His wife had found a door to another world, and somehow the connection was being kept open.
The girl—who still hadn't shared her name, assuming she had one—led Wenyue through streets that seemed to shift when she wasn't looking directly at them. Not dramatically, just small changes. A doorway that had been painted red became blue between one glance and the next. A vendor's stall selling what looked like crystallised fruit developed additional wares that glowed faintly in the lantern light.
"Is this normal?" Wenyue asked, gesturing at a building that was definitely three stories tall now instead of the two it had been when they'd passed it going the other direction.
The girl followed her gaze and shrugged with the resignation of someone accustomed to a world that didn't follow consistent rules.
They emerged into a square dominated by a massive pagoda whose bells provided the soundtrack Wenyue had been hearing since her arrival. The structure rose into darkness, its upper levels lost in what might have been clouds or simply distance that refused to behave properly. People moved through the square with the purposeful stride of those who belonged here—men and women in robes that seemed to catch light differently than normal fabric, children who moved with the fluid grace of dancers or martial artists.
None of them looked twice at a pregnant woman in obviously foreign clothes being led around by a mute street child.
Either they were very polite or very used to strange sights.
"Excuse me," Wenyue called to a passing woman whose robes were embroidered with tiny silver threads that seemed to move on their own. "Could you tell me where we are?"
The woman paused, tilting her head as if listening to something Wenyue couldn't hear. When she spoke, her voice had the same rounded quality as the transmissions Zichen's radio had picked up.
"You stand in the Outer Precincts of Cloud-Bound Jun, honored stranger. Are you here for the morning distributions?"
"Distributions?"
"Food for the worthy poor. The Temporal Pavilion provides charity to those who cannot provide for themselves." The woman's eyes flicked to Wenyue's companion with something that might have been pity. "Though I should warn you—the tests for worthiness have grown more... stringent recently."
"Tests?"
But the woman was already moving away, her robes billowing as if stirred by winds Wenyue couldn't feel.
The girl tugged on Wenyue's sleeve and pointed toward a line of people forming near the pagoda's base. Most looked like her companion—thin, poorly dressed, marked by the particular desperation of those who'd learned not to expect kindness. But they stood patiently, some holding wooden tokens or slips of paper.
"You need one of those?" Wenyue asked. The girl nodded and pulled a small, carved disc from her pocket. It was worn smooth by handling, and Wenyue could just make out what might once have been writing on its surface.
They joined the line. Wenyue used the wait to observe, her accountant's mind cataloguing patterns. The people ahead of them weren't just poor—they moved with the careful precision of those accustomed to being tested, evaluated, found wanting. When they reached the front of the line, each person presented their token to a man in blue robes seated behind a low table.
Some were waved through immediately. Others were asked questions, their answers determining whether they proceeded or turned away. A few—very few—were subjected to what looked like small displays of... something. They would hold out their hands, and the examiner would touch them with a small crystal that glowed briefly before darkening.
"What is he testing for?" Wenyue murmured.
The girl pulled a scrap of paper from her other pocket and showed it to her. On it, in careful characters, was written a single word: spirit.
Not spiritual worthiness. Spirit, as in something measurable. Something that could be tested with crystals and found lacking.
They were three people from the front when Wenyue felt that warm current pulse again, stronger this time. The sensation was becoming familiar, like learning to recognize the sound of her own heartbeat. But now it seemed to be responding to proximity to the examiner's crystal.
The girl noticed her reaction and looked up with sudden concern, pointing at Wenyue's chest and then at the testing station with obvious worry.
"You think I might test positive for whatever he's looking for?" Wenyue whispered.
The girl nodded emphatically, then made a slashing gesture across her throat.
Apparently testing positive was not necessarily a good thing.
They reached the front of the line before Wenyue could decide whether to run. The examiner—a middle-aged man with the soft build of someone who'd never missed a meal—looked up at them with the bored expression of a bureaucrat processing routine paperwork.
"Token," he said.
The girl stepped forward and placed her worn disc on the table. The man picked it up, examined it briefly, and nodded.
"Weekly ration for one. Next."
Wenyue realized he was looking at her expectantly. "I don't have a token."
"First time applicant?" His tone suggested this was mildly annoying but not unprecedented. "Name and sponsorship?"
"Li Wenyue. I'm... new here. I don't understand the sponsorship system yet."
"Hmm." He pulled out a ledger and made a note. "Place of origin?"
She took a breath. "Very far away."
"Obviously. I can see the Foreign Qi signature from here." He picked up his testing crystal. "This is just a formality for record-keeping purposes. Hold out your hand."
The warm current in her chest suddenly felt like molten metal. Wenyue extended her hand anyway, partly from curiosity and partly because backing down now would cause more problems than facing whatever was about to happen.
The examiner pressed the crystal against her palm.
Light exploded from the contact point—not the gentle glow she'd seen with other applicants, but a brilliant flare that made everyone in the square stop and stare. The crystal grew so hot that the examiner dropped it with a curse, and even after it hit the ground it continued to pulse like a tiny sun.
In the sudden silence, Wenyue could hear the bells in the pagoda's upper reaches changing their rhythm, as if responding to her presence.
The examiner stared at her with an expression caught between awe and terror.
"Blessed ancestors," he whispered. "What are you?"
Before she could answer, the girl grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the table, threading between the stunned onlookers with the desperate speed of someone who understood exactly how dangerous this situation had become.
As they ran, Wenyue caught fragments of excited conversation:
"—never seen a reading like that—"
"—certainly Foundation level, possibly higher—"
"—inform the Pavilion Masters immediately—"
They'd made it three blocks before the pursuit began in earnest.