Gene woke up in a hospital bed for the third time in two months.
But this time felt different.
His head was clear. Really clear. Not the fake clarity where you think you're thinking straight but the words coming out sound crazy to everyone else. Real clarity.
He looked at his hands—no shaking. He looked at the window—just glass, not a portal between dimensions. He looked at the clock on the wall—time moved forward, one second after another. Linear. Normal.
"You're back," Dr. Morrison said from the doorway. "Really back this time. I can tell."
Gene nodded. "What happened?"
"Severe psychotic break triggered by fever and stress. You spent six weeks convinced you were living in multiple timelines. Your parents brought you here after you tried to walk to the airport in your pajamas." Dr. Morrison sat down. "The medication worked. Your brain chemistry stabilized. The delusions resolved."
"They felt so real."
"They always do. That's what makes psychosis so terrifying."
Gene was released two days later. His parents picked him up. His mother cried the entire drive home. His father drove in silence, knuckles white on the steering wheel.
At home, Gene went to his room and looked at the notebooks he'd filled with ramblings about timelines and Shanghai and Wei Zhang. The handwriting got progressively worse, more erratic. By the end, barely legible.
He threw them all away.
But that night, when sleep finally came, the dreams returned.
-----
In the dream, Gene stood in a vast emptiness that wasn't quite darkness and wasn't quite light. A void that pressed against him from all sides.
His parents appeared before him, but they weren't quite his parents. They looked younger, healthier, but their eyes held something ancient and knowing.
"You can't go forward carrying us," his mother said, her voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "The weight of what we've given you, what we've expected—it's too heavy for where you need to go."
"I don't understand."
His father stepped closer. "You've been trying to live two lives. The one we built for you and the one you want for yourself. You have to choose."
"I don't want to lose you."
"You already have," his mother said gently. "The versions of us you're carrying—the ones who need you to validate their sacrifices, who need you to be grateful forever—they're killing the person you're trying to become."
Gene felt his chest tighten. "So what do I do?"
"You let us go."
The void around them began to pulse with light—not warm, but sharp, clinical, like an operating theater. Gene felt something inside him begin to tear, a psychic hemorrhage that should have been agony but felt more like…relief.
His parents began to fade, but as they did, Gene saw them differently. Not disappearing, but fragmenting. Their souls—if that's what they were—broke into a thousand glittering shards that spun around him like a galaxy.
"What's happening?" Gene's voice cracked.
"We're becoming fuel," his father said, his form already translucent. "The crossing requires sacrifice. Not blood. Not pain. Just…letting go of who you thought you had to be."
The shards began to spin faster, creating a vortex. Gene felt himself being pulled apart, atom by atom. His consciousness stretched like taffy, extending in directions that didn't exist in three-dimensional space.
He saw his aunts, his uncles, his grandparents—every family member who had ever placed expectations on him, who had ever said "we sacrificed so much for you to have this chance." They were all there in the void, all fragmenting into light.
"I'm killing you," Gene whispered, horror and liberation warring in his chest.
"No," his grandmother's voice echoed from everywhere. "We've been dead for years. You just kept us alive by trying to live the life we wanted for you. Now you're setting us free."
The vortex consumed them all. Their souls—their expectations, their dreams for him, their sacrifices—all of it shattered and became energy. Pure, crackling energy that wrapped around Gene like a cocoon.
And then the crossing began.
Space folded. Time bent. Gene felt himself moving through dimensions that human language couldn't describe. He saw all possible versions of himself simultaneously—the one who stayed in Irvine and became an accountant, the one who overdosed at twenty-three, the one who never left his parents' house, the one who became exactly what they wanted.
He saw them all die as he moved past them.
The fabric of reality peeled back in layers. Gene flew through tunnels of light that were also tunnels of sound, that were also tunnels of pure information. He heard the Big Bang. He saw the heat death of the universe. He experienced a thousand years in a heartbeat and a heartbeat that lasted a thousand years.
His family's souls—now just energy, just fuel—propelled him forward. Through membranes between realities. Through the spaces between spaces.
He saw New Shanghai before he arrived there. A city that existed in the cracks between dimensions, built by people who learned how to navigate the boundaries when reality was young and flexible. A place where the rules were still being written.
The crossing lasted forever and no time at all.
When Gene finally landed—if "landed" was even the right word—he was standing in an abandoned warehouse in Oakland. The door with the blue glow stood before him.
His parents were dead. Not physically—they were probably at home in Irvine right now, worrying about him—but the versions he'd carried, the ghosts he'd been trying to appease, they were gone. Truly gone.
He'd killed them in his dreams to get here.
And somehow, impossibly, that felt right.
-----
The woman who stepped through the glowing archway was maybe fifty, elegant, wearing clothes that looked simultaneously ancient and futuristic.
"Gene Eu. Your father's son. You're expected." Her English had an accent Gene couldn't place. "Follow me. Keep your arms close during the crossing. Don't look directly at the boundary. Some people's brains can't process it properly."
"The boundary to what?"
She smiled. "New Shanghai. Welcome to the real world."
Gene stepped through.
The sensation was like being turned inside out and then right-side in again, except it happened so fast his brain barely registered it. One moment he was in Oakland. The next—
"Holy shit," Gene whispered.
The city stretched before him like something out of a fever dream. Buildings that defied physics, curving up and around themselves. Sky-bridges connecting towers that shouldn't be able to stand. Vehicles that moved through the air like fish through water. The light was wrong—not quite sunset, not quite noon, like the sun was in two places at once.
"New Shanghai," the woman said. "Built in 1842 by refugees from your world's Shanghai when they discovered the boundary weak point. Now the largest commercial hub in the connected territories. Population twenty million. Don't drink the water unless it's been processed. Don't eat street food unless you want to grow a second stomach. And don't make deals you can't keep. Business here is bound by physics, not just law."
Gene stared. "This is real. This is actually real."
"More real than your world, some would say. Your universe is young. Still figuring out its rules. Here, the rules have been settled for thousands of years." She started walking. "Chen Lao is waiting. Try not to embarrass your father."
They walked through streets that made Gene's head hurt. The architecture followed patterns his brain couldn't quite parse. The people—humans, mostly, but not all—moved with purpose through markets selling things Gene couldn't identify.
"Your father told Chen Lao you'd had some mental health issues," the woman said casually. "Psychosis, wasn't it? Thought you were living in multiple timelines?"
Gene's face burned. "Yes. I was sick."
"Interesting. Most people from your world have that response the first time they sense the boundary. Your brain was picking up on something real, just interpreting it wrong. You weren't living in multiple timelines. You were sensing that they exist."
She led him to a building that looked like a mansion and a fortress had a baby. Inside, antique furniture mixed with technology Gene couldn't comprehend. Screens floated in air. Doors led to rooms that shouldn't fit in the building's physical space.
Chen Lao sat in a study that felt transplanted from 1920s Shanghai. Elderly, thin, wearing traditional robes that probably cost more than Gene's parents' house.
"Mr. Eu. Sit." His English was perfect, accent British-educated. "Your father spoke highly of you. Before your illness."
Gene sat. "I'm recovered now. Fully."
"Are you? Or are you simply medicated into ignoring what your brain was trying to tell you?"
"I don't understand."
"You sensed the boundaries between worlds. Your consciousness tried to navigate them. But without training, without guidance, your mind interpreted it as delusion." Chen Lao poured tea. "Some people have this sensitivity. Most never develop it. Those who do either go mad or learn to control it. You went mad. But you survived. That makes you potentially useful."
"Useful how?"
"I run a merchant house. We trade across seventeen connected territories. Goods, information, sometimes people. It requires people who can sense boundaries, who can navigate between worlds without losing themselves." Chen Lao studied him. "Your father thinks you can be trained. I'm less certain. The fact that you broke suggests weakness."
Gene felt anger flash through him. "I broke because nobody told me what was happening. If someone had explained—"
"If you'd been strong enough, you would have figured it out yourself."
They stared at each other.
"I'm willing to try," Gene said finally. "If you're willing to teach."
"Not teach. Test. You'll work for me for six months. Lowest position. Errand boy. Grunt work. If you can handle that without breaking again, we'll discuss actual training." Chen Lao sipped his tea. "I don't tolerate weakness. I don't tolerate excuses. And I don't tolerate failure. Understood?"
"Yes sir."
"Good. You start tomorrow. Six AM. Building C, dock forty-seven. Wear clothes you don't mind ruining. You'll be loading shipments."
After Gene left, the woman who'd brought him appeared beside Chen Lao.
"You were harsh with him," she said in Shanghai dialect.
"His father asked me to break him or make him stronger. The boy has potential but he's soft. American-raised. Too comfortable." Chen Lao set down his tea. "Six months loading dock work will either kill his spirit or forge it. We'll see which."
-----
Gene's first day in New Shanghai was a disaster.
He showed up at 6 AM. Got assigned to a loading crew. Twelve hours of hauling crates that weighed more than they should, organizing goods he didn't recognize, taking orders from a foreman who barely spoke English.
He made mistakes. Dropped a crate. Put things in the wrong section. Took too long on every task.
The other workers laughed at him. The soft American boy playing at real work.
But he came back the next day.
And the next.
And the next.
That night, back in his mediocre apartment, Gene dreamed of his parents again. They stood in the void, but they were smiling now. Proud, maybe. Or just…free.
"You did it," his mother said.
"Did what? I'm hauling boxes for twelve hours a day."
"You chose yourself," his father said. "That's all we ever really wanted. For you to stop living for us and start living for you."
"I killed you to get here."
"No," his mother said gently. "You killed the versions of us that were already dead. The ones built from guilt and obligation and fear. We're still here. We're just…different now."
They faded, but this time it didn't hurt.
Gene woke up with the sunrise, his back screaming from yesterday's work, and got ready to do it all again.
He was choosing this. Every day, he was choosing it.
And that made all the difference.