The appointed hour found Michael not in his rented room, but navigating the potholed access road to Shizhu Mountain in the borrowed, wheezing Isuzu flatbed. The moon was a shard of bone in a sky the color of worn velvet, and the headlights of the truck—one slightly dimmer than the other—cut twin, swaying tunnels through the absolute blackness. A strange, electric impatience hummed in his veins, less about the mission itself and more about the cold, hard arithmetic ticking behind his eyes. The numbers—tonnage, price per ton, potential profit—danced in his head, a siren song of necessity that drowned out pride.
He parked in the familiar clearing, the truck's engine ticking as it cooled. The silence here was profound, a physical presence that pressed in on the ears. Perfect,he thought, a flicker of smug satisfaction cutting through his anxiety. This place, with its local reputation for hauntings and strangeness, was his private airlock, costing him nothing. He scanned the tree line, the shadows between the boulders, the usual ritual of paranoia. Seeing nothing but the patient, indifferent dark, he nodded to himself. Cross-dimensional travel safety first.
He closed his eyes, not in prayer, but in focus. He reached for that new, internal sense, the cool, silent knot of potential nestled in his consciousness. He willed it forth.
With a sound like a distant, deep inhalation, the emerald vortex bloomed into existence before the truck's grille. It was more vibrant at night, a swirling, impossible depth of color that painted the rusted tires and weeds in its otherworldly light. Without a backward glance—there was nothing to look back for—Michael clambered into the cab, fired the reluctant engine, and drove straight into the heart of the light.
The world dissolved into the familiar, stomach-churning twist. He was gone.
He did not see, therefore, the procession that arrived at the mountain's base less than a minute later. Not ghosts, but something almost as fickle and loud: twenty-three souped-up mopeds, their engines a synchronized, angry hornet-swarm. They carried their own illumination—underglow kits in violent pinks and electric blues—and their own soundtrack: the shrieks of young women and the boasting shouts of young men fueled by cheap liquor and cheaper courage. This was their unofficial racetrack, their rebellion against the city's order, drawn here by the mountain's seclusion and its dangerous curves.
One of them, a lanky boy with hair the color of a chemical fire, happened to glance up the slope as he killed his engine. His jaw went slack.
"Oi! You see that? Up there! A green flash! Like… proper bright!"
His companions followed his pointing finger, squinting at the now-dark and empty crest. Laughter, raucous and derisive, erupted.
"Seen too many vids, mate!"
"Your eyes are fried!"
"It's the Shizhu ghost come to race you! Bet you a pint it's faster!"
Emboldened by the mockery and the collective bravado of the pack, the decision was made. With a chorus of revved engines that shattered the mountain's silence, the swarm of 'ghost riders' began to ascend, their lights painting the twisted pines in frantic, strobing patterns. They found the clearing. They found tire tracks. They found nothing else. The anomaly, if it had ever existed, was gone. Disappointed, they channeled their energy into the reason they'd come: tearing up the narrow road in a festival of noise and reckless speed, the supposed green flash already relegated to the night's mythology, another story for the mountain to keep.
Back in Cinder Town, the hour was late, but sleep was a forgotten luxury. The Wasteland's version of midnight was a time of deep chill and deeper quiet, broken only by the sigh of the wind over broken walls. When the grumble of an engine and the crunch of tires on grit announced the Lord's return, it stirred the settlement like a stone dropped into a stagnant pool.
Old Gimpy was first at the gate, his face pinched with a worry that melted into transparent relief as the flatbed—a vehicle even more bizarre and imposing than the van—lurched to a halt. The math of their survival had been a ticking clock in all their minds; the Master's arrival was the stopping of the hand mere seconds from midnight.
The unloading was a ceremony of silent efficiency. Fifty sacks, each a promise, were hauled into the basement strongroom. John the Minotaur made a spectacle of it, hefting four sacks at once—over three hundred pounds—with a grunt of effort that spoke of strain, but not impossibility. The changes wrought in Michael's own body were mirrored here, in the raw, desperate strength of those who had known nothing but hardship.
When the last sack was stacked, Gimpy, with a look of reverence usually reserved for religious texts, used a rusty knife to slit open the top of one. He plunged a hand in, letting the grains stream through his knotted fingers in the smoky light of a kerosene lantern. He raised a fistful, peering at it. His breath hitched.
"My Lord…" The words were a bare whisper, thick with an emotion Michael couldn't place. "This… this is it? The true grain? The… the rice?"
Michael braced himself, the guilt over the quality a cold stone in his gut. "The real thing," he confirmed, forcing conviction into his voice. He consciously ignored the faint, almost poetic movement of a pale larva making its way across a grain. Protein. It's just extra protein.
But Gimpy wasn't looking at the larvae. He was staring at the grains as if they were diamonds. A choked sound escaped him, and he buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook.
Oh, for crying out loud,Michael thought, bewildered and slightly defensive. It's not that bad. We've all eaten worse this week.
It was Faye who gently explained, her voice soft. "His grandfather… he spoke of it often. A dish from the World Before. 'Fried rice.' He said it was the taste of heaven itself. Gimpy… he used to say that to taste it just once, to know that taste was real… a man could die happy after."
The pieces clicked into place with a quiet, profound shock. This wasn't about sustenance. This was about memory. About a thread, however faint, connecting this broken, dusty now to a lost world of abundance. The sack of bug-ridden, stale grain wasn't just food; it was a relic, a sacrament.
A strange tenderness, utterly unexpected, washed over Michael. "Right then," he said, his voice rough. "Faye, my dear. Eggs. Do we have any? Any kind of egg?"
"Lizard eggs," she replied promptly. "We have a store. They're… strong."
"They'll do. Fetch them. All of them. And whatever fat you've got. It's time someone around here learned what a proper egg-fried rice is supposed to be."
The meal that followed, cooked in a vast, blackened pan over a reluctant fire, was by any gourmet standard a travesty. The rice was dry, the lizard eggs rubbery and pungent, the 'oil' a rendered fat of dubious origin. Seasoning was a precious pinch of coarse salt. Yet, as he served it out, watching his followers—John, Gimpy, Lynda, Faye, the other guards—eat with a focused, almost spiritual intensity, he understood. It wasn't about the flavor. It was about the act. The sharing of a myth made real. He could practically see the invisible meters above their heads ticking upward: Loyalty: 90%. The last ten percent, he suspected, was reserved for acts of sheer, impossible legend.
Later, as the settlement finally slept, its belly fuller than it had been in years, Michael called John to him. "In a few days, when I return to my… people, I'll need to take something back. Steel. Rebar. The twisted rods from the old skeletons. At least five tons. Can it be done?"
John, still savoring the memory of the strange, wonderful 'fried rice,' sobered instantly. He gazed into the middle distance, calculating. "West. Ten kilometers. A fallen tower-place. The bones are there. Give me fifty workers… five days. The steel will be ready, Master."
Michael nodded, then a new thought, sparked by the evening's alchemy of memory and meal, surfaced. "The skins. In Andrew's strongbox. The ones with the marks. What are they for?"
John's eyes widened slightly. "The scrolls? Bull's Strength. Cat's Grace.They hold a spark, Lord. A temporary blessing. Andrew hoarded them. Too valuable to use, he said."
Magic scrolls. The words should have felt silly. But in a world with Ogres, battle-qi, and portals in his mind, they felt inevitable. A thrilling, dangerous curiosity ignited in him. A secret weapon, just waiting to be unfurled.
Six days later, as the first watery light of dawn touched Cinder Town, its residents witnessed another departure. Lord Harry Potter Michael, a figure of increasing mystery, guided his loaded flatbed—now stacked with a small mountain of rust-scabbed, twisted rebar—towards the wastes. The truck, groaning under its illicit cargo, struggled on the incline out of town. Behind it, planted firmly in the dirt and straining with all his might, Zach the Ogre pushed, his massive muscles corded, a low growl of effort rumbling in his chest. He shoved the steel-laden truck up and over the rise, where it vanished from sight, carrying not just scrap metal, but the hopes, the full bellies, and the burgeoning, fragile legend of the man who drove it.