Beyond the rolling hills and gentle floor of Rockshell Valley, past the formations that sheltered the creche, a woman flew through the air a moderate distance into the wilds.

That woman was Imperial Agent Lurona. Unseen, save by herself, fields of air attuned qi pushed against the world, propelling her forward even as other fields shielded her from the force of the wind. She could go faster, if she abandoned her buffers of air and dignity, leaving her golden hair and yellow robes, trimmed with green, to whip and tangle against the alabaster grey of her skin. That grey and the almost metallic sheen of her hair would be enough to denote spirit, or more rarely, beast heritage mixed into her lineage for any who saw her.

She was long past the point where the force of her flight could harm her, her body was suffused with qi sufficient to protect her from such minor force. Even her eyes, a blue so deep it was almost black, which covered up enough eye that only small sections of white sclera peaked around the edges, would fail to do so much as water. That force might bruise and begin to abrade the skin of a mortal, were they caught in the impact of such a flight.

It was not, however, mere dignity which stayed her hand, and kept her from a headlong flight forward. Her flight was not merely idle pleasure, or routine, but instead the result of a call that she could not ignore. A call that could mean danger, though it likely wouldn’t be to her. Even so, a cultivator as experienced as she would hesitate to fly so fast that she outstripped her ability to sense and react.

Imperial Agent Lurona was not having a good day. To be fair, any day she was required to execute the grimmer aspects of her office, she considered a bad one. A fact that may be considered to her credit. And today, she was almost certain, her role as enforcer would be necessary.

She was both fair, and thoughtful, enough, to consider the faint possibility that she was wrong. She found herself considering the other possibilities, nurturing that small hope.

A qi signature radiated out from an isolated building ahead, which stayed within her perception for almost a minute before her could see it between the trees. As she descended from the air, she hoped it could turn out to be something innocuous. Perhaps some researchers were looking into an obscure aspect of qi manipulation, or someone had discovered a new way to trip the dimensional sensors. If so, the monitoring array would be adjusted and new schematics would be sent out throughout the Empire. The thought wasn’t mere wishful thinking, as every decade or so a slight modification would get sent out, but she knew it wasn’t likely.

As she would shortly confirm, that was not the case.

No, the more likely cause was also the truth. Below, hidden within the building, a group was using dimensional magic. If she, and they, had been lucky, they would have no idea what they were doing. If they had been messing with a technique from an old scroll they had found in a ruin, or were practicing some secret technique, not realizing what it was, then Lurona would not need to act quite so decisively. If that had been true, the technique would be confiscated and examined. A sufficiently harmless technique would either use an imperial token to designate registered users, or be added directly to the monitoring arrays to be ignored. If it was something truly new, the culprit would either be assisted in developing it, or forbidden from practicing it.

However, she didn’t think she was that lucky, and whatever the reality of her luck, that was not the case. The level of power present in the building was carefully shielded from the outside, and formations carved into the walls together formed an array that dulled the senses of those who tried to sense within. It was not enough to completely prevent her gaze now, though from a distance it had proven sufficient. There were multiple people within.

Unfortunately, this made her almost certain they knew exactly what they were doing, and that meant people would die today. And, unless an expert at a level far beyond what she could sense was present, it wouldn’t be her.

Her face hardened as she landed on the ground. Her green boots, of practical design, and made spiritual beast leather, settled noiselessly into the soft loam of the forest floor. Her robes were still as she moved forward, every inch of them suffused with her qi, allowing no noise to ripple out as she advanced.

An archway lay ahead of her, with twin doors set into it. They were alight with barriers and a glowing seal; it disintegrated with but a whisper of her qi. Divine fire, her primary Dao, turned them into less than ash. The arrays, that might have protected against another intruder, were useless before her. Save, of course, as a warning, and a pulse of qi rushed out from where the doors had been destroyed, though her qi and their destruction was sufficient to alert those inside as the seal dropped.

Lurona heard no shouts, no running feet, felt no presence of incoming qi. Those within were not rushing out to greet her.

Instead, they had redoubled their efforts, already sure that anything less would result in their death. A moment later, the faint humming of qi from within the building built into a torrent.

She rushed forward, certain that her opponent’s goal was being enacted. While those she could sense within the building were not a threat, something brought from outside this world could be. It was only a moment more when she entered a large room, her speed blindingly swift for such a minuscule distance.

Runes covered the floor, intricate geometric designs that were carved into the stone and studded with crystallized qi power sources. Even stones of ziu were embedded with utmost care into the combined array, individual formations dedicated to each stone filtering out the taint of demonic energy. Power ran through the entire array, and it glowed with shimmering light. An outer circle, demarcating the outer bounds of the array, surrounded a group of cultivators. Qi flowed out of each of them, and combined in the array below.

Lurona was uncertain of the array’s purpose, but the cultivators ignored her entirely, their qi the only sign they were not meditating.

And, though some of the cultivator’s did sense her presence, they gave no sign. Her cultivation was so far beyond them, they were no more than gnats against a bonfire.

Lurona unsheathed her sword and brought it down against the outer ring in a smooth motion, intent on stopping the ritual from reaching its conclusion. The thin silvery blade was suffused with a faint impression of golden fire.

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By the barest of margins, she was too late. And, of such tiny moments, is fate made. Fate qi, unseen by any present, swirled around the room in gossamer wisps. It acted as such qi almost always does, in swirls that both were, and were not present.

Of course, the stranger who would shortly appear, would eventually call fate qi by another name.

A moment before her sword touched the line, all the power that had spiraled into the center of the room vanished. The array broke under her blade, but it was unneeded now. The instructions contained in the various formations had already suffused the gathered power, and it sucked into the middle and formed into a dimensional tear.

For a moment, everything was still. The power of the tear ripped through space, and time, and dream, and all the barriers that are whisper thin between the world and the Eldritch were broken. The sheer strangeness that pervaded from it was enough to halt the function of her mind. The others in the room were similarly stunned, their minds unable to handle a place where the rules of reality broke down. Up became down, in was out, and all the world became a strange and foreign wasteland with no sense and no reason. Her spiritual senses were no less confused, an impression of a thousand impossible shapes and conflicting qi signatures overwhelmed her.

And the Eldritch was all of those things, and none, and both, for assigning barriers of meaning to that which defines them is meaningless.

And then it was over, and in the very center of the circle, a man from a distant world lay in clothes she found unfamiliar.

A demon?

She didn’t take the chance. A swipe of her blade, infused with divine fire, blasted through the room like the wrath of the divine it was meant to emulate.

It ripped out ahead of her, and the cultivators in the way were blown away like so much chaff. They burned for an instant before they were only the suggestion of ashes on the wind. The floor beneath their feet burned away; the carefully laid runes, and walls, and ceiling, were shattered and blasted into fragments. Everything was destroyed.

Everything... except where she had been aiming.

The center of the circle was untouched and the burning qi of her attack was spiraling in toward the man who looked at the world with only the vaguest recognition. A man who was already screaming, tears flowing out of the his eyes as his lungs attempted to express his agony. They failed, the volume insufficient to convey the depth of suffering.

This was no demon, and Lurona now recognized it. If it was a demon, qi would be flowing out from the man, not be drawn in. If a demon had survived her attack she would have expected the attack to be deflected or eroded by the volume of qi and ziu. She wasn’t sure what would draw in her attack like that.

Dimly, she could sense the presence of ziu, acting as a dark mirror to the qi, flowing into the man as well. In fact… that was the only qi and ziu she could sense from him.

Taken from another world, he had less power in his body than a new born child would possess here.

The world sought to rectify the imbalance.

The man did his best to continue screaming, though his breath had begun to run out, as the energy of the heavens and earth continued to push its way into his body.

Who is this stranger?

It was a relevant question, and one that she could afford now that she knew he wasn’t a demon. She didn’t think he was anything eldritch, either.

She looked around with minor regret, ignoring the man for the moment, as he continued to gasp. It would have been good to keep some of the now destroyed cultists alive for questioning. The odds were not particularly good that they would have talked, but it rankled against her professionalism that she was unable to even try.

A larger concern was the mostly destroyed array. Understanding exactly who they had brought through, and possibly why, was possible if the array had specified certain characteristics. The only part that had survived was what was protected by the world’s swirl of flowing power as it drained into the gap of the man’s emptiness.

She examined the area, keeping the vortex of qi and ziu under the close eye of her spiritual sense. Nothing else had survived; no artifacts, or rings, no jade slips or talismans. That substantially lowered the odds that the group had found out how to perform the ritual and array from an ancient inheritance. Those objects tended to be tough.

The energies surrounding the man on the ground were gradually dying down.

She approached, taking a closer look at him.

His hair was short and dark, a glossy cross between black and deep brown. She couldn’t see his eyes; they were squeezed shut with tear streaks running across his face. He had a naturally tan complexion, though his face was pallid, his skin damp and clammy. He wasn’t screaming any longer, but twitches and shivers showed he was still conscious. His hands clenched, and unclenched, his body occasionally tensing in residual trembling shivers of echoed pain. And, he was tall, almost ridiculously so to her eyes. His body was defined with faint lines of muscle obvious beneath thin sheaths of fat, a sign bearing no hint of want or deprivation.

She studied his foreign clothes. He wore a loose shirt, a snowy white, with a colorful pattern on the front. Below that were blue pants of a thicker cloth. The blue was not a type she had seen before, the threads infused with a mixture of blue and white. However, it didn’t look like a poor dye attempt, but rather an intentional choice, evenly spread across the entire garment. The pattern proved to be composed of separate threads, which she noticed when she looked closer. The pants were finished with a golden yellow thread, the color perfectly even, further reinforcing the intentional design. The perfectly tooled metal button and strange interlocking lines of bronze below added to it. She found his shoes the oddest of all, a mixture of cloth and plastic. The shoes were laced with stained white laces. However, the white of the shirt and the laces were both exceptionally white.

Overall, she found the figure odd. She didn’t know anyone, or anywhere, that dressed this way.

The vortex finally died down and the stranger slumped down, unconscious as soon as the pain died down enough for his mind to escape.

Lurona finished her approach. She lifted the stranger with her qi, carefully holding him up and supporting his body. He was painfully weak, his qi and ziu had only just stabilized. He was as weak as a newborn. She couldn’t even detect a dantian. There was no organization to his qi or ziu, and what she could sense of his meridians was completely empty.

He is nothing but sand.

If she had simply sensed him on the street, she would have assumed he was one of the many crippled who couldn’t cultivate at all. He might still be, but it was as if he had never been exposed to qi before at all. Which was impossible, life couldn’t exist without qi.

For a brief moment, she considered if he could be from another empire, or another of increasingly unlikely possibilities, but she already knew better. There was only one place that would make sense.

He could have been pulled out of some inter-dimensional prison, and that had been her first guess, but who would lock away a cripple? If he had ever cultivated, there would be traces, but there was nothing. She would have felt at least a little guilty if the cult had saved some innocent from being locked away forever. Still, that didn’t really make sense, and it wasn’t the truth.

She looked below him, reading the seals his body had concealed.

Her lips twitched and then she began to laugh, the magnitude of a divine joke laid manifest before her.

No doubt, she thought, the cultists had intended to draw in some awesome power to assist them, someone mighty beyond all reason. However, if that was their purpose, they had made a mistake.

There, plainly laid out in the runes, was the purpose of the array.

Lurona shook her head.

Surely, they had meant to ask for someone from ‘beyond the heavens?’ Someone whose power rivaled the Emperor. The same characters, however, could mean something far different. And if you didn’t even understand what it would mean… well, you could make a crucial mistake.

She looked down at the stranger held up with streams of gossamer qi. This poor man, was obviously from the Sealed Lands, and had been pulled here by a simple error.

The runes, below her and empty of even the faintest bits of energy, spelled it out clearly.

It asked for someone from ‘outside the heavens,’ and its wish had been granted.

If Lurona had known what the rest of the array had spelled out, her reaction would have been far more intense. Whether it would have been laughter, tears, fear, rage, or something else, was left to some alternate world.

Here and now, Lurona delicately took the man toward her distant home.

Behind her, in the ruins, wisps of fate qi, what little remained after the consumption of the man’s vast emptiness, drifted apart and disappeared like they had never been.