Chapter 78: Where am I?

The morning training session on Whitecloud Peak ran the same way it always ran.

Two hours before sunrise. Sword forms first, then breath work, then the spiritual energy circulation sequence their master had drilled into them since they were old enough to hold a stance without falling over.

Yun Wei completed the third sequence and moved directly into the fourth. Beside her, her sister completed the third sequence and stopped.

"Nothing ever happens here," Yun Rui said.

"Do not say that," Wei said, moving through the fourth.

"I am stating an observation."

"You are inviting consequence."

Yun Rui dropped into the lower stance and ran the fourth sequence. The spiritual energy of the island moved through the form the way it always moved — clean, cooperative, the cultivation environment their sect had maintained for three generations responding to practitioners who had been trained in it since they could hold a sword.

They were identical in the way twins were identical when they had trained the same forms for the same years under the same master. Same height, same build, same cultivation foundation. Wei’s forms were precise where Rui’s were fluid. Wei completed sequences and Rui found the gaps in them. Wei moved through problems and Rui sat down and looked at them from different angles until the problem rearranged itself.

The sky above the cloud sea was doing something unusual.

Wei noticed it first because Wei noticed everything first.

She held her sword at the completion of the fifth sequence and looked up.

A point of brightness approximately three hundred meters above them, increasing in intensity. The cultivation island maintained its own atmospheric stability as a matter of fundamental array architecture. Whatever this was, it was not weather.

"Wei," Rui said.

"I see it," Wei said.

The brightness resolved into a vertical split in the air. Two meters tall, the edges dark, the interior showing light from a different source than the sky around it — warm, gold at the edges, the specific quality of a sun that was not their sun.

It held for three seconds.

Then something fell out of it.

A person. Falling with the specific uncontrolled quality of someone who had not expected to be falling — arms out, body angled wrong, no spiritual energy deployed to arrest the descent, no sign of any intention to manage the fall at all.

The rift closed.

The person kept falling.

"Wei," Rui said.

Wei was already moving.

She caught him at forty meters above the training ground.

Spiritual energy extended, the deceleration distributed across a field rather than a point, the technique their master had taught them for injured practitioners. She brought him down slowly and set him on the training ground stone and stepped back.

He was unconscious before she reached him.

She crouched and looked at him.

Rui arrived beside her, slightly out of breath from running across the training ground.

They looked at him together.

"He fell from the sky," Rui said.

"Yes," Wei said.

"From a rift."

Wei nodded.

"His spiritual roots," Rui said. "They are absent."

"Absent as in not there," Wei said. "Not sealed."

"That is impossible," Rui said.

"I know," Wei said.

They both looked at him.

He was dressed wrong for any sect or region either of them recognized. The clothing was functional, the construction style entirely unfamiliar. His hands, resting loose at his sides, had the specific callus distribution of someone who had done sustained physical training — but the pattern did not match any weapon discipline Wei could place.

"We cannot leave him on the training ground," Rui said.

"No," Wei said.

She stood and gathered spiritual energy and lifted him with a carrying technique and began walking toward the summit hall. Rui walked beside her.

After a moment Rui said: "The rift opened here deliberately."

"Yes," Wei said.

"To us specifically."

Wei did not answer.

The cloud sea moved below the island in the slow way it always moved. The sky above it was the sky it had always been. The summit hall was a ten-minute walk from the training ground and neither of them said anything else for the first seven minutes.

Then Rui said: "Nothing ever happens here."

Wei looked at the unconscious man they were carrying up the mountain.

"You did it again," Wei said.

"I did it first," Rui said. "This is the consequence."

They kept walking.

They put him in the hall’s side room, which was used for storage and occasional visiting practitioners.

Wei stood at the door.

Rui sat on the storage chest beside his sleeping mat and looked at him.

"No spiritual roots," she said. "But he survived the transit."

"Something processed it for him," Wei said.

Rui looked at his hands. The callus pattern.

"He has been training," she said. "Whatever he has been training in, it has changed his body at the physical level. The muscle structure is different from standard cultivation training." She tilted her head. "It is also different from standard non-cultivation physical training."

"How do you know what standard non-cultivation physical training looks like," Wei said.

"I read," Rui said.

Wei came to stand beside her and looked at the unconscious man.

"When he wakes," Wei said. "We ask questions."

"Yes," Rui said.

"We do not tell him anything about ourselves until we know why he was sent here."

Rui nodded.

"And we do not let him leave the hall until we have answers."

"Agreed," Rui said.

She looked at Wei.

"You are going to stand at the door all day," she said.

"Yes," Wei said.

"I will get tea," Rui said.

She got up from the chest and went toward the hall’s main room. At the door she stopped.

"Wei," she said.

"What."

"He is going to wake up in an unfamiliar room on an unfamiliar island in what is, for him, an unfamiliar world," she said. "Try to look slightly less like someone conducting an interrogation when he opens his eyes."

Wei looked at her.

"I always look like this," she said.

"I know," Rui said. "That is what I said."

She went to get tea.