The stars didn't blink.
They just hung there — vast, indifferent, pinned against a sky so dark it read less like night and more like the absence of everything Ling Hao had ever known.
He lay still. Chest rising and falling. Dew-soaked grass cold against the back of his neck. The ground beneath him smelled of soil and something wild going quietly to rot.
He sat up.
Forest on every side — dense, ancient, trunks rising like the columns of a cathedral nobody had actually meant to build. Where the canopy broke, moonlight came down in pale, shifting bars, sliding across the leaf litter each time the wind moved. Shadows lengthened and pulled back with every gust. Somewhere in the treeline, something called out. Low. Hollow. Too far off to name.
Ling Hao said nothing. He just looked.
Then he looked down at his hands.
Clean knuckles. Dark cuffs — dried blood, stiff against the fabric. He traced the stain up his sleeve, across his chest, until his fingers found the hole. Just below the left ribs. The cloth around it blackened and frayed inward, like something had punched straight through. His jacket hung open. When he pressed his palm flat to the spot, he felt it.
Not pain, exactly.
More like pain's memory — some deep wrongness his body hadn't caught up to registering properly yet. He pulled the jacket aside, lifted the shirt hem. The wound sat there, crusted at the edges, uglier than anything should be allowed to look on a living person. He stared at it the way you'd stare at a bill you genuinely cannot pay: fully understood, fully rejected.
His first instinct was the reasonable one.
Hidden cameras. Practical effects. Somebody with too much free time and a cruel sense of humor.
He turned in a slow circle, scanning the treeline, jaw tight, breathing measured — composure held together for an audience, because surely there had to be one. No other explanation kept the world upright.
The forest gave him nothing back. No crew. No cables in the underbrush. No badly-muffled laugh behind a pine. Just wind, leaves, dark, and that same hollow call somewhere out past the trees.
Then the cold hit him.
Not the regular chill of a night forest — this was different, starting at the wound and threading outward through his ribs like wire drawn slowly tight. His shirt clung, damp. When he tried to stand, his legs shook, and the shaking had nothing to do with nerves.
He stood anyway.
A prank. Just a prank.
He started walking.
The ground fought him the whole way — roots at his ankles, stones shifting under his dress shoes, every step costing more than it should have. He moved toward the gap where the moonlight pooled brightest, following no path because there wasn't one. Just the instinct that forward beat standing still. Overhead, the canopy swayed, leaves flashing silver like scattered coins.
He walked long enough that time stopped meaning anything specific.
The ache in his side stopped being memory and became present tense — weight, texture, a fact his body had decided to stop arguing about. His breath went short and shallow, and something in him recognized it immediately, a familiar wrongness he couldn't place the source of.
He pressed a hand to his side and kept moving.
The trees thinned. He aimed for the clearing with one flat, stubborn thought behind it: not here. Not in this suit, in this forest, in front of no one.
He was almost there when it hit.
Not pain. Not pressure.
Cold — total, absolute, starting at his throat and ending —
Grass. Under his palms.
The moonlight still churned overhead, indifferent, unbothered, exactly as it had been. His body was present again: the dew, the ache, the chill of the earth coming back all at once.
But something was missing. A sliver of time that simply wasn't there. No darkness, no transition, no last thought before it — just walking, then ground, and nothing at all in between. His mind kept reaching back for the gap the way a tongue keeps finding an empty socket. Finding only absence.
He lay there several seconds. Didn't move.
Then he turned his head, and his face went perfectly, uselessly blank.
His own body stood three feet away.
Off-balance. One arm half-raised, mid-gesture, like something had interrupted him mid-sentence. Same suit. Same shoes. Same dried blood on the same cuffs.
Where the neck should have started, nothing did.
He looked at it and felt nothing arrive to meet the sight — no scream building, no horror. Something in him had simply reached a limit and gone quiet, shutting off whatever wasn't strictly necessary.
He didn't scream.
He couldn't have said why not.
The wind moved through the clearing. The headless shape stood there in the dark, asking a question with no available answer.
Then — between one blink and the next — stars again.
Same sky. Same cold light, same arrangement, indifferent and permanent in the way only things with nothing at stake in you can afford to be.
His back was against the ground. Grass at his neck. That same smell — soil, and something going quietly, endlessly to rot.
He pressed both palms flat to the earth. Real. Cold. There.
He sat up.
Suit intact. No hole. No blood on the cuffs. He pulled the jacket open anyway, lifted the shirt — smooth skin underneath, like the wound had happened to somebody else, in a story he'd only heard secondhand.
His throat was whole. He checked twice.
The forest held steady around him. Moonlight still moved through the canopy in long, slow pulses. Somewhere out past the trees, the hollow thing called again.
He sat there a long time.
His own breathing was the only sound he could be sure belonged to him — in through the nose, out through the mouth, the kind of rhythm you fall back on when nothing else makes sense anymore.
He was alive. His body said so plainly enough: the ache from lying on uneven ground, the dry mouth of mild dehydration, his eyes slowly finding their way in the dark the way real eyes do. Alive, whole, and sitting in a forest he'd never seen before, under a sky with too many stars in it.
Twice now. Same position. Same sky. Unhurt both times.
He turned that fact over slowly, in no hurry to press on it too hard.
The wind shifted. The canopy heaved with it, every leaf catching light at once in one long silver sweep, and for a second the whole forest seemed to breathe out.
He looked up at it.
Then down at his hands. Clean. Steady. No blood anywhere.
"...What the f#ck," he said. Quiet.
Not really a question. More a flag planted at the edge of what he could still reasonably explain. Past that edge: a dark forest, too many stars, and a life that apparently refused to end cleanly on schedule.
He sat there a moment longer.
Then, because there was nothing else worth doing, he stood, brushed the wet grass from his suit, and looked toward the gap where the moonlight still pooled brightest.
He started walking.