The shift was not marked by the roar of heavenly thunder or the tearing of human flesh.
It was marked by a total, terrifying absence of sense input. When Lin Tao forced his eyelids open, there was no sky, no stone, no wind, and no horizon. There was only a blinding, uniform soft glow that filled every side of his vision with flat, unshadowed white. It was the sterile light of an unrendered void, a blank canvas where shape had not yet been assigned texture.
Lin Tao lay flat on his back, his heavy linen traveling coat spread beneath him against an unbending, featureless plane.
His chest rose and fell in ragged, shallow gasps. The air entering his lungs was clean, dry, and room-heat, exactly twenty-one degrees. But it carried none of the familiar scents of damp earth, spark-charged ozone, or pine smoke from the liberated southern valleys. It possessed the man-made neutrality of filtered cold air-oxygen gas pumped through an airtight cleanroom, devoid of organic dust or surrounding moisture.
Beside his right hip, his fingers curled slowly against the smooth floor.
There was no grain in the stone. There were no chisel marks, no tiny pits, and no veins of quartz. His fingertips glided across the surface as though touching polished frosted quartz, yet it didn’t feel cold to the touch. It didn’t absorb his body heat, nor did it radiate warmth back into his chilled flesh. It simply existed as a total boundary, offering neither comfort nor pushback…
