**THE ARCHITECT, NOT THE DEMOLITION**
Phase Three began with silence.
Chen Lao moved Gene from the docks to an office that shouldn't exist—a room perched between the 23rd and 24th floors of a building that only had twenty. The space had windows on three walls, each showing a different version of New Shanghai: the art deco original, the neon-soaked present, and one that hadn't been built yet, where towers twisted upward like DNA strands.
"Your new job," Chen Lao said, gesturing to a desk that held nothing but a single sheet of paper. "Design a boundary monitoring system that doesn't require navigators to lose their minds. Build something that holds without cracking."
Gene stared at the empty paper. "You want me to create?"
"You've spent six months tearing things apart. Your parents' expectations. The Potter's anchors. Your own sanity." Chen Lao poured tea that smelled like rain on concrete. "Now we see what you put in the empty spaces."
Gene sat. The chair felt wrong—too soft, designed for someone who didn't carry the weight of dead timelines in his bones. He touched the paper. It was warm, alive with faint dimensional residue.
"This is Potter-made," he said.
"Yes. We confiscated it from a collapsed territory. It's the only material that can hold multiple reality signatures without disintegrating." Chen Lao watched him carefully. "Your first test: turn a weapon into a tool. Build something that saves instead of destroys."
Gene's fingers tingled. The paper wanted to become something. A map. A cage. A coil that could trap a memory and keep it safe.
He started drawing. Not blueprints. Schematics of emotion—how grief could be channeled, how rage could be converted into stability, how the part of him that had wanted to be normal could be repurposed into a foundation. His marker moved without thought, tracing patterns that made sense to the part of his brain that had learned to see between.
Hours passed. The paper grew thick with lines that were also sentences, diagrams that were also apologies. When he finally stopped, he had designed a network of boundary sensors that ran on human emotion—the exact thing the Potter used as fuel, but inverted. Instead of collapsing worlds, it would reinforce them.
Chen Lao studied the design for a long time. "This could work."
"Should I be proud or terrified?"
"Both. That's how you know it's real."
---
**ZHAO XIAN**
Zhao Xian found him at midnight, still in the impossible office, redrawing the same line over and over. She didn't knock. She just leaned against the doorframe, watching him work with the same intensity she watched everything.
"The Potter knows," she said.
Gene's marker stopped. "Knows what?"
"That you severed his anchor. He's not reacting with rage. He's adapting." She dropped a coil on his desk—not the neutralized one from last night, but something new. It pulsed with a sickly green light. "He sent a message. Not to you. To me."
She activated it. A memory unfolded, but it wasn't Gene's. It was hers.
A younger Zhao Xian, maybe sixteen, standing in this same office. Her father before her, saying: "Your brother died in a collapsed timeline. The Potter took him. You will not make the same mistakes he did."
The memory looped. Her father's voice, again and again: *You will not make the same mistakes.*
Zhao Xian crushed the coil in her fist. The memory screamed, then died. "He's showing me that he knows my weakness. That I'm fighting him because I'm afraid I'll become him."
"Become who?"
"My brother." She looked at Gene, and for the first time, her shell cracked. Just a hairline fracture, visible only if you knew where to look. "He was like you. A navigator. He tried to stop the Potter five years ago. He fell. Now he's one of the anchors."
Gene's stomach dropped. "Your brother is the Potter's next target?"
"My brother *is* the Potter's next move." She sat down, suddenly tired. "The anchor you severed last night was practice. The real one is in the timeline where my brother still exists. Still thinks he's alive. Still thinks he can win."
"Where is it?"
She pulled out a photograph. Same warehouse. Same blue light. But in this one, a figure stood in the doorway, watching them. The figure was Zhao Xian. But not. Her face was softer. Her shoulders weren't carrying the weight of an empire.
"That's his world," Zhao Xian said. "Where I'm not my father's heir. Where I'm just a girl who lost her brother and never got him back."
Gene understood. The Potter didn't build traps from your worst fears. He built them from your most secret wants.
"You're going to ask me to sever her," Gene said. Not a question.
"I'm going to ask you to sever the part of me that wishes I could be her." Zhao Xian met his eyes. "That's the price of Phase Three. You don't just build things. You break the people who wish they didn't have to build them."
---
**THE PAYMENT**
At 2 AM, Gene stood on the roof of the warehouse from the photograph. The blue light pulsed, welcoming. He could see her inside—a Zhao Xian who hadn't learned to weaponize her grief, who hadn't built a shell so thick it could hold worlds.
His bone tuning fork hummed in his hand. One strike would sever the tether. One strike would kill the last piece of her that wanted to be normal.
Behind him, the real Zhao Xian's voice was quiet. "Do it."
Gene raised the fork.
The door behind him opened.
Chen Lao stepped through, but his face was wrong. It was shifting, morphing, becoming someone else. Someone Gene knew from a timeline he'd tried to forget.
"Don't," the figure said. It was Morrison's voice now. Dr. Morrison from Irvine. The man who'd promised to fix him. "If you strike, you prove you were broken all along. You prove the medication was right."
Gene's hand shook. The tuning fork's hum turned discordant.
Then another voice, from inside the warehouse: "Gene? Is that you?"
It was his mother. Not his dead parents. Not the constructs. His *mother*. The one alive in Irvine, right now, probably asleep in her bed, dreaming of her son who'd gone to Shanghai for business and called every Sunday like a good boy.
The Potter hadn't just learned Zhao Xian's weakness.
He'd learned Gene's.
The tuning fork was aimed at the wrong target.
Gene turned to Zhao Xian, but she was already fading, her edges blurring as the boundary between real and constructed collapsed.
The last thing he heard before the world split was Morrison's voice, now so perfectly his mother's: *We just want you to come home, baobei.*
Gene's hand dropped.
The choice was no longer build or break.
It was which version of reality he could survive believing in.