By the time the mountains rose up around him, Xu Mingyue's phone had gone quiet.
No new messages or blinking notifications.
Just the steady, gray line of the battery icon and the winding provincial road ahead.
He left the phone face-down on the passenger seat.
The deeper he drove into Zhongcha Valley, the more the world narrowed into calm: terraced slopes, pine forest, the dull mirror of a reservoir catching the last of the evening light. The kind of landscape travel bloggers liked to label "untouched," as though people hadn't lived and died here for generations before the internet remembered it.
He eased off the accelerator as the road turned to gravel. The rental car complained over the ruts, but he didn't. He was tired in the quiet way that sank into bone rather than flaring in the mind.
The ancestral house appeared as he rounded the last bend: dark roofline, whitewashed walls gone soft with age, a low stone wall embracing a weed-choked courtyard. A carved wooden plaque still hung over the gate, the characters faded but intact.
He parked beside the old camphor tree and sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel, watching the house through the windshield.
He'd grown up hearing stories about this place. Summers spent here as a boy had been boiled down in memory to a handful of images: his grandmother's hands rolling dumpling skins, sunlight on the lake behind the house, the sharp, clean smell of drying herbs.
He hadn't realized until the last month how much his mind had been reaching back to those fragments.
It was either come here, or stay in the city watching his life shrink into a series of backlit rectangles: slides, screens, the glass of meeting rooms, the window of an apartment that had never managed to feel like home.
He turned off the engine.
Silence pressed in, softer than office air-conditioning, older than traffic.
When he stepped out, the evening cool wrapped around him. The air smelled of pine and damp earth, and under it, faintly, something like old paper and dried citrus.
The gate creaked when he pushed it open. The courtyard stones were uneven under his shoes, weeds pushing up between them. The house watched him with shuttered windows, patient, unhurried. Time hadn't shattered it. Time had simply settled on it like dust.
Inside, the air was dry and still, the faint musk of closed spaces and old wood. He found the fuse box by habit more than memory and flipped the main switch. A single ceiling light came alive in the entryway, its glow yellow and thin.
Bags down. Shoes off. The solidness of the floor under his bare feet was more comforting than it had any right to be.
He moved through the rooms slowly, not with nostalgia but with the methodical attention of someone logging inventory. Living room, kitchen, tatami room, the narrow side corridor that led to the back door. Everything smaller than he remembered. Everything exactly where it should be.
The tatami room would do.
He set to work: opening windows to let the mountain air crawl in, shaking dust from cushions, beating the old futon with more patience than force. He stripped the yellowed bedding and replaced it with fresh sheets he'd brought from the city, the modern white cotton oddly bright against the aged wood.
The work loosened something in his chest.
In the kitchen, he washed a porcelain teapot with the care usually reserved for delicate documents. The glaze was cracked, the pattern faint, but it held water well enough. He boiled water on the small induction cooker he'd hauled in and found the old tea tin still in the cupboard, long empty.
He'd brought his own.
Steam curled from the spout as he poured the first cup. The light caught on the surface of the tea and wobbled. His reflection in it looked unfamiliar: sharper cheekbones from recent weight loss, a certain stillness around the eyes you didn't get from good sleep.
He drank anyway. The warmth slid down his throat, and for the first time in weeks, his shoulders dropped a fraction.
It was quiet in this house. Not the anxious silence of soundproofed conference rooms. A different kind. A silence that didn't care whether he filled it or not.
When he lay down on the futon later, the mattress firm against his back, he let his mind drift without chasing anything. No presentations to rehearse. No numbers to optimize. No faces to manage.
He closed his eyes, and the darkness behind them felt less like an erasure and more like a door quietly drawn shut.
Sleep took him without argument.
The cold woke him.
Not bitter, teeth-chattering cold—just a flat, dry chill that seeped into the room as though someone had quietly removed something essential from the air.
Mingyue opened his eyes.
For a moment he wasn't sure why he felt the wrongness first in his skin instead of his thoughts. Then he realized: the soundscape had been cut.
No distant water.
No nocturnal insects.
No faint, muffled hum of life from the valley.
The room itself looked the same. Wooden beams overhead, faint light pooling along the edges of the paper window. His folded bag in the corner. The neatly stacked spare quilts.
He sat up slowly, the futon rustling softly beneath him.
It was the light that gave it away, he decided. Not the darkness. The color of it.
Dawn in the valley should have been cool and blue, touched with the gold of sun edging over the mountains. This was a dull, ashen gray, like light filtered through dust.
He slid his feet to the floor. The wood was colder than it should've been for late spring.
Mingyue crossed to the door, fingers resting lightly on the frame for a beat, then pushed it open.
The porch groaned under his weight. Beyond it, the world had ended.
Where the lake had once stretched in a long, calm curve behind the house, a wide bowl of cracked earth lay exposed, fissures running like black veins through its surface. The mud had dried, split, and sunk. A single fishing boat lay on its side in the hollow, ribs exposed, half buried.
The terraced fields beyond were no longer green but a patchwork of dull yellow and gray, ridges crumbling inward. Thin, colorless stalks clung in places, too stubborn to fall, too dead to matter.
The pines on the slopes had become skeletons of themselves—trunks standing, branches bare, bark stripped. Some had simply toppled, roots clawing at the open air.
No smoke, sound or movement.
Even the wind felt wrong. It brushed against his face and hair but carried no scent. No damp. No life.
He let his gaze travel slowly over the landscape, cataloguing details the way he had catalogued financial reports and boardroom expressions. A collapsed wooden cart, half-buried near the remnants of a field. A low wall, its stones caved inward. Thin lines in the dust where water had once run.
The house behind him remained untouched. The wood beneath his feet still warm with its own stored memory of sun and years. The narrow strip of earth along the foundation still held a scatter of hardy grass, a stubborn patchwork of green.
The contrast was almost obscene.
He stood there for a long moment, the dry air cooling the last traces of sleep from his skin. His heart beat a little faster than usual, but not enough to shake his voice when he finally spoke.
"This," he said under his breath, "is definitely not Jiuzhaigou."
Saying it out loud anchored it. Gave the unreality a shape.
He half-expected to wake up again.
He didn't.
He listened. Nothing answered. No rooster, no distant engine, no neighbor calling to another. Only the weight of a silence that had settled and decided to stay.
There were worse ways to lose your life than in a boardroom, he thought distantly. But this… this was new.
A faint prickle skated along the back of his neck.
He turned his head slightly. The feeling wasn't quite being watched; it was more like standing on a stage and realizing the lights were already on and someone, somewhere, had their hand on the controls.
Behind him, in the shadowed corner of the tatami room, the air shimmered.
At first, Mingyue thought it was a trick of his eyes—the brain insisting on movement in a world that had stilled. Then the shimmer condensed, the way light folds into itself when caught through crystal.
A figure resolved.
Lines before color, outline before detail: the suggestion of a woman's form, then the more precise impression of a long, simply-cut garment. Her features sharpened last, as though reality were hesitating before letting them fall into place.
She wasn't solid. The edges of her form blurred where the pale blue light thinned, like someone had sculpted her from thick smoke and forgotten to finish the job.
Her eyes opened.
They focused on him immediately.
"Good morning," she said.
The voice was… ordinary. Not metallic. Not mechanical. Just a low, clear female voice, carrying the unhurried cadence of someone accustomed to being listened to.
If Mingyue had been twenty, sleep-deprived, and fed on too much science fiction, he might have shouted. If he'd been ten years younger and more dramatic, he might at least have dropped something.
As it was, he simply turned fully toward her, one hand resting against the doorframe.
"You weren't here yesterday," he said.
"That is correct." Her response came without delay. "This projection was not yet initialized. Environmental and anchor parameters were incomplete."
"Anchor," he repeated. "That would be me."
Her gaze—a precise, assessing thing—swept over him once, from bare feet to uncombed hair, then returned to his face.
"Yes," she said. "Administrator candidate Xu Mingyue. Biological pattern, cognitive profile, and inheritance markers are compatible. Binding completed during your sleep period."
Something like a beam of pale light—so faint he almost missed it—moved briefly over his chest and head as she spoke, as if confirming what she'd just said.
The tiny hairs on his arms rose.
"Name?" he asked.
"MOI." The corners of her mouth didn't move, but the word felt almost like an introduction rather than a code string. "Operational Intelligence."
He watched her for another few seconds. The valley lay in ruins. His car, he noticed now, was simply gone—no tire marks, no metal, no broken glass. The road leading to the house ended abruptly at dust.
He could have chosen, here, to say any number of things. Why me. What is this. Send me back.
Instead he asked, "You're not from here, are you?"
"No." For the first time, something like the ghost of emphasis touched her tone. "Origin: higher-dimensional civilization, extrinsic to this multiversal cluster. This reality and those attached to it are… foreign."
He huffed a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Then we have that in common."
She regarded him in silence, head tilted slightly, as though re-evaluating some internal parameter.
"Clarification," she said. "You are native to one branch of this cluster."
He let that pass. One thing at a time.
"And where, exactly," he asked, "is 'here'?"
Her eyes shifted, and for a moment her attention seemed to move past him, outward through walls and soil and air. When she spoke again, the words were calm and clinical, at odds with the bleakness of their content.
"Current location: parallel dimension with pre-industrial societal structure. Environmental status: prolonged drought. Agricultural collapse: extensive. Famine severity: extreme. Population density: significantly reduced."
"So." He glanced back at the cracked lakebed. "We're in the middle of a famine world."
"Yes."
"Do you have a way to send me back?"
"Not at this time." No hesitation. No softening. "Dimensional transit in this system is currently unidirectional. Additional gates and return paths require structural upgrades and resource accumulation."
He let the weight of that settle. The air was very dry. His throat already felt it.
"Alright," he said.
The corners of MOI's eyes narrowed by a fraction. "Acceptance velocity is above projected median."
"Would panic help?" he asked mildly.
"No."
"Then it seems like a poor use of energy."
Another pause. If she had been human, he might have called it surprised.
"Noted," MOI said.
He stepped back into the room, gestured slightly toward the outside with a tilt of his chin.
"Can we survive here?" he asked. "Water, food, basic necessities. I assume you have an opinion."
"A preliminary survival assessment is possible," she said. "The house structure and attached pocket-space are currently stable. Internal resources are limited. External resources are degraded but not nonexistent."
"Pocket-space," he repeated, file-labeller part of his mind catching on the word. "That would be the… mansion?"
"Yes. This physical structure is connected to an anchored extradimensional complex. You have partial authority over its functions."
"And you," he said, "are part of that complex."
"Correct. I manage operations, defense, appraisal, and certain medical protocols."
The words should have sounded absurd. Instead they slotted neatly into the expanding framework of this morning, the way the concept of a board meeting, once upon a time, had slotted into the concept of adulthood.
"So," he said slowly. "You're the building's mind."
"A simplified but not inaccurate analogy."
He nodded.
The dryness was beginning to itch at the back of his throat now. His tongue felt heavy. He filed that input away and asked, "What do you recommend we do first?"
MOI's form flickered once, then steadied. Her gaze unfocused for half a second, as though reading data from a screen that didn't exist.
"Step one," she said. "Confirm available internal resources: water, preserved foods, usable tools."
"Reasonable."
"Step two: identify external water sources, if any remain within safe walking distance. Step three: locate nearby human population clusters. Even minimal contact will increase survival probabilities."
"Assuming they don't kill us out of desperation," he said.
"That is a variable," MOI acknowledged. "But probability models indicate that isolation carries greater long-term risk."
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the doorframe, feeling the fine layer of dust there. His fingerprint left a clean streak.
Outside, the gray light was brightening, revealing more of the broken fields. In the far distance, the faint outline of structures suggested a village, slumped into itself like someone had pressed down on it.
"Do you have any data yet," he asked quietly, "on that area?"
He angled his chin toward the distant cluster.
MOI's eyes flickered. For a moment, thin lines of pale light traced faint geometries in her irises.
"Partial scan completed," she said. "Structures: damaged. Crops: failed. Activity: minimal."
"Minimal is not none."
"Correct." She looked back at him. "Correction: life signs detected. Weak. Approximately one cluster, distance less than three li from current location."
Something under his sternum tightened; not fear, not quite hope. A recognition that the emptiness had a crack in it.
He closed his eyes briefly, opened them again.
"Then," he said, voice low but steady, "we start by making sure the house can keep us alive. After that, we go find them."
MOI inclined her head in something that was not quite a nod.
"Administrator," she said. "Survival protocol initialization is ready. On your command."
The wind moved across the dead fields and did nothing. The world outside had been stripped bare, left with nothing to offer a man who had come here looking for peace.
But the house behind him was still standing.
A foreign intelligence watched the broken land with calm, unblinking eyes.
And somewhere, not so far away, fragile human lives still flickered.
Xu Mingyue straightened his shoulders, turned from the dead horizon, and stepped fully back into the house.
"Then let's begin," he said.
Outside, the famine held its breath.