The fissure at the peak of Mount Jianzhou glowed the colour of the equation.

  Chen Xi stood before it with Wu Zheng on his left, Su Yiran on his right, and Little Abacus slightly behind all of them, scribbling in his notebook because the boy had apparently decided that ascending to a higher plane of reality was an experience worth documenting in real time.

  "Qi density at the fissure boundary: four hundred and twelve units per cubic metre," Little Abacus read from his measurements.

  "That's three hundred and ninety-seven more than Jianzhou baseline. The gradient is—"

  He ran out of page space, flipped to a new page, and kept writing.

  "The gradient is steep. Very steep. Like jumping into a river from a riverbank."

  "Apt metaphor," Chen Xi said.

  "I'm going to have to recalibrate everything on the other side, aren't I?"

  "Everything."

  "Excellent."

  Chen Xi turned to Wu Zheng.

  The old man was looking at the fissure with an expression Chen Xi had not seen before — not the cautious calculation of the survivor, not the bitter amusement of the exile.

  Something else. Something younger.

  "Seventy-three years," Wu Zheng said.

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  "And twenty-six thousand, six hundred and forty-five days," Chen Xi said. "I counted."

  "Of course you did." Wu Zheng straightened his shoulders. The rebuilt cultivation hummed in his chest — fragile, imperfect, alive.

  "The Azure Dust Sect threw me into a grave. A physicist pulled me out. A chestnut vendor saved my life. And now I'm standing on a mountain about to walk into another world."

  He looked at Chen Xi. "The universe has a terrible sense of humour."

  "The universe has no sense of humour. Humour is a pattern-recognition artefact of conscious—"

  "Shut up and let me have my moment."

  Chen Xi shut up.

  Su Yiran took his hand. Her grip was steady — she gripped things the way she measured things, with precision and confidence.

  "When we get to the other side," she said, "the first thing I'm doing is finding their equivalent of a monitoring station and auditing it."

  "That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."

  "I know."

  Little Abacus, still writing: "Are we going? Because I'm running out of pre-ascension data and I'd really like to start collecting post-ascension data."

  Chen Xi looked at the fissure. The light was beautiful — the same blue-white Cherenkov glow he had seen for 0.003 seconds in a particle accelerator at Stanford, a lifetime and a universe ago.

  Three terms of the equation burned in his memory. Thousands more waited somewhere in the Strata above, scattered and hidden and patient.

  He was carrying one notebook (full), one new notebook (empty), three spirit stones, the dead woman's manual, a correction to the Vortex Core that he had not yet implemented, and the knowledge that he was a danger to everyone around him until he did.

  He was also carrying, though he would not have expressed it this way, four people's trust.

  Wu Zheng's. Su Yiran's. Little Abacus's.

  And, somewhere back in Jianzhou, Li Wei's — fragile, conditional, offered with the wariness of a man handing a weapon to someone who might use it against him.

  Sixty-seven percent efficiency. A modern gas turbine on Earth achieved roughly the same.

  The bar, he reminded himself, was not Earth.

  The bar was three percent. And somewhere above him, through that glowing tear in reality, the bar was going to get a great deal higher.

  He stepped through.

  The light swallowed him whole.

  The coffee, at long last, was getting warm again.