A split egg lay beside him on the moss—not a chicken's, not a dragon's, but metallic, a seed that had brought him into this world, covered in a fine web of cracks. It was already starting to darken and crumble, as if its mission had ended the moment he opened his eyes. He didn't know how it worked. Didn't remember how he had agreed to this journey. But there were scraps of memory:
"You, as one of the creators, have been given a special offer," said the chief AI, an old man in holographic form on the table. Something about the latest development… about the fact that time between worlds is non-linear… "Communication will be very difficult… This isn't a simulation, so you won't be able to come back."
He sat up. The tunic on his body was simple, unadorned, gray. The body itself wasn't the same as before. A teenager's, about fourteen. Lin Yu studied his reflection in the stream: short black hair, a plain face, but without any real flaws.
His body felt light, as if he could jump a couple of meters without effort. His eyes were unnaturally sharp: he could see an ant ten paces away as clearly as if it were right in front of him. He jumped down from a tree, catching his balance in the air like a cat. Even when he leapt from a great height, he didn't get hurt at all. Lin Yu remembered that, according to the old-man AI, this body was supposed to be an ordinary human one. But could this really be called "ordinary"? What kind of people lived in this world?
He didn't know what to do. In his previous world, an ordinary human could no longer create anything: robots the size of poppy seeds colonized planets, and AIs discovered new laws faster than people could even comprehend them. Most humans played in memory-erasing simulations, living other lives to escape reality. He had chosen a new, real world instead. Even if it turned out to be deadly.
Days passed in quiet observation.
He sat in the branches like a forest spirit.
What surprised him was that animals didn't fear him at all—deer came close, birds landed on his shoulders.
But the predators stayed cautious. Especially the black cats with barely visible stripes; their fur was sleek, they looked like shadows, lethal ones. Once he saw one of them hunt: a bird took off—and the cat "flared," as if lightning snaked through the air, and in the next instant it already had the prey in its jaws. The bird screamed in agony.
What was that? he thought. Was that some kind of magic?
This world was nothing like the previous one.
He began to doubt: what if this was a simulation after all? But then he remembered the old man's words: "You won't return." And that gave every leaf, every drop of dew the weight of something truly real.
He had no idea what awaited him ahead.
Somewhere in the depths of the sky, the first drops of rain he had not yet noticed were beginning to gather.
The forest gradually gave way to trails. Not the broad roads of armies, not caravan paths, but narrow animal tracks that led toward a faint plume of smoke above a mountain. There, in a ravine, pressed against the rock, lay a tiny village—no more than a dozen houses of rough wood and stone; the roofs were covered with moss, as if the earth itself were trying to hide them.
For now he didn't want to approach. He just watched.
He sat in a tall tree, as always: his tunic blended with the bark, his eyes with the light between the leaves.
He saw children playing by the stream, women drying herbs, an elder sitting by the hearth with a notebook—six rings were burned into its cover. No visible danger.
One morning he woke up in a willow leaning over the water. A pair of birds took off and vanished into the leaves—that was what woke him.
At that very moment he saw them: an old man and a boy—grandfather and grandson, most likely. They were carrying baskets of herbs.
They had noticed him before he woke. He stretched, squinting down at them like a suzerain at his subjects.
The old man fell to his knees, dragging the boy down with him.
"Shen!" he whispered. "Forest spirit!"
Lin Yu said nothing. He only raised an eyebrow.
The locals had obviously gotten something wrong, which didn't surprise him, given how primitive they were. Moreover, a week later he found a small wooden shrine at the foot of that tree. Crude work, roughly carved. In the center—a statue in a tunic with a bird on its arm. At the base—rice cakes, wild berries, a jug of water.
Lin Yu muttered:
"So they think I'm a god or something?"
He decided to let it be; if they wanted to believe, let them keep believing.
For a while, he went back into the depths of the forest, to where the cats hunted and the wind sang in the ravines.
One way or another, later he decided to establish contact with humans—starting with the language. If the adults were too superstitious, the children were different.
They played closer and closer to the shrine—whether out of curiosity, or simply without thinking of consequences. He decided to stay on the other side of the stream.
One day he carved a figurine of one of those cats from a branch—the very kind that "flashed" when moving—and left it at the edge of the clearing.
By morning it was gone. And that afternoon he saw a boy poking at it with a finger, while a girl babbled:
"The forest spirit gives us toys!"
Soon the children started playing hide-and-seek near the shrine. He kept carving toys, using just sharp stones he found in the stream. Then he would leave the toys at the shrine in place of offerings—as if paying for the offerings left to him.
When he finally stepped out into the open—slowly, without sudden movements—the children didn't get scared. Maybe he had been overcautious.
One of them even came closer:
"Can… you talk?" the boy asked.
Lin Yu didn't understand him at all.
"Lin Yu," he said, tapping his own chest.
He took out a little bird figurine, pointed at it, and then looked at the children questioningly. And then he started listening. The language was musical, but foreign. He learned it the way a small child learns a language. His memory responded well, and things went smoothly. The children liked his toys and the games he showed them.
The village remained superstitious, wild, closed off.
But the children were a bridge to the human world.
And through them, for the first time, he wasn't just observing people—he began to hear them. A couple of months passed like that. The children often played at the shrine, and Lin Yu asked them about everything in the village that came to his mind.
He learned that people in this world could become stronger through cultivation. The village elder was at the sixth stage of qi cultivation. Lin Yu was curious what exactly this "cultivation" was.
And above the village, at night, the fine drizzle still fell.
No one connected it to him.
He didn't either—yet.
It all started with a conversation at the well.
The children were playing as usual, but now—together with him. He was squatting, teaching them to arrange leaves into patterns, and they repeated the words after him. Slowly. Patiently.
And then one day the boy who had first approached him said:
"Tomorrow Uncle Luo will take my older brother to the Great Gathering. There will be teachers from the Sect. He's already at the third stage. They say if you have the right talent, they'll take you as a disciple. And if not… they bring you back with a sack of rice."
"Where is this Gathering?" Lin Yu asked.
"On Blue Mountain. Three days' journey. But you…" the boy hesitated, glanced at the shrine, at the bird, at Lin Yu himself, "…you're not human. You don't need it."
But Lin Yu had already decided.
Not because he wanted power.
Not because he dreamed of glory.
But because for the first time in all this time there was somewhere to go—a place where he would meet something truly new, unknown.
He gathered a little food, water in a bamboo flask.
At night, he left the forest.
The village slept. The shrine was empty.
The road was long, but not difficult.
He walked barefoot on stones—which didn't hurt him at all.
Sleep overtook him under trees—and always with rain, even if the sky was clear.
He began to notice: when he fell asleep, the first drops started to fall.
When he got angry, the clouds thickened.
When he was calm, mist spread over the ground like breath.
Am I really some kind of spirit? he wondered. What sort of body is this? Or is it not about the body at all?
On the third day he saw Blue Mountain—not named for its color, but for the mist hanging over it like a veil.
At its foot lay a camp. Tents, fires, hundreds of teenagers in simple clothes.
Everyone was tense: some trained, some repeated spells, some simply sat, mumbling under their breath.
He didn't stand out, just stood at the edge of the crowd and watched, as if all this were a dream. The weather began to respond with an unpleasant drizzle.
The examination started at dawn.
Three platforms with three gates, as the judge explained: those who passed the screening by cultivation level would, by stepping through the gate, enter a formation where they would undergo various trials.
"Combat—jumps, strikes, enduring a barrage of stones;
"Creators—disassembling an artifact, reading symbols, choosing the 'living' item out of ten dead ones;
"Scholars—a maze of forms: every door is an illusion; you must solve problems to escape."
But Lin Yu wouldn't even understand the conditions of those problems, since he didn't know the language well enough. When his turn came…
He found himself at the entrance to the combat platform.
The guard at the gate pointed to a stone used to determine cultivation level.
"Village boy?"
"Yes."
"Do you have any qi at all?" The man peered at him, clearly not understanding something.
"I don't know."
"Step up to the stone. Show what you've got."
Lin Yu reached out to touch the stone. He'd seen symbols light up on it for others. For him, as expected, nothing happened. There were snorts from the crowd. Lin Yu tensed when the stone under his hand began to tremble. Overhead, the clouds seemed to thicken.
Suddenly, a quiet voice beside him:
"Stop."
He turned.
An old woman stood there with no marks of rank on her robe. Her face was calm, her eyes like those of a hunting bird: they saw everything.
"You don't need this. Come with me."
Lin Yu didn't ask why—obviously, he had failed the exam before even starting it. He simply nodded. The guard froze in a deep bow to the woman, full of respect.
The old woman led him to a large flying artifact-boat. She said something to the man by the gangway; he looked at Lin Yu in surprise, then nodded.
Later, sitting among the new disciples on the flying boat, he thought:
Did I… pass? But how?
The boat rose smoothly into the air. Then it hovered for a moment, jolted, and picked up speed, gliding over forests and meadows. With his vision he could even make out peasants down below, staring up at the sky in astonishment at the unexpected object. All he could do was gaze with interest at the towns and villages drifting past beneath them.