“When the hammer fell I had only been in the Imperial capital two weeks. Even though I only possessed the mental faculties of a five year old child, I knew that it was time to make myself scarce. It’s been two hundred years and I haven’t seen another interloper since.”
Willow and Leopold sat at a low wooden table in a candle-lit cave. It didn’t really feel like a cave, although it certainly was one. At some point over the last two centuries the interloper cultivator who’d come to their rescue had smoothed and polished the walls. Candlelight bounced from every surface, multiplying until even the few guttering tongues of flame illuminated the entire space.
The man returned from another small room in the cave with an iron teapot and a tray of cups. He sat them down and began to pour, then handed one to Leopold and one to Willow.
“So…,” Leopold said, clearly out of his depth. The way the man had talked so casually about waking up from what he called ‘an unfortunate meeting with a semi-truck’ in the body of a terminally ill five-year-old—his memories not only intact but also possessing a passable knowledge of the local language—had shocked even Willow to her core, and she’d seen a lot weirder stuff than Leopold had.
“What’s your name,” Willow asked, mercifully saving Leopold from gaping like a fish out of water. He squeezed her leg under the table.
“I’ve long forgotten the name this body had. When I was inducted into the inner court my mentor told me to use my old name. Jeremy Johnson. My friends called me JJ.”
“And how is it you know English,” Leopold asked.
“I’m from America. Unless you’re Brits, you are too.”
“I’m from Bridgewater,” Willow said.
“Barrowhaven,” Leopold said.
“Not your town. The country.”
Leopold and Willow shared a look of confusion and Jeremy sighed.
“Look, this whole area is one big governmental entity. It’s all part of the empire, not just little towns scattered here and there. What’s the governing entity where you come from?”
“People just sort of left the towns alone,” Willow said. “But the nearest walled-city was Durum.”
“Durham,” Jeremy said and smiled. “Christ I haven’t heard that name in a while.”
“You’re saying it wrong,” Leopold said. “I don’t think its the same place you think. Raly’s about thirty miles away.”
“No, you’re saying it wrong. Durham and Raleigh are cities in the state of North Carolina, although I guess that’s gone the way of electricity and Starbucks now. Well, its good to know the old tarheel state still exists in some form or another.”
“If you woke up knowing this language, whatever it is—“
“Imperial,” Jeremy said, and motioned for Willow to continue.
“—then how do you speak English still?”
“Had to relearn it, which was a bitch. I had to do it all by myself too in this very cave. You run out of things to do after a couple of decades cultivating. I relearned English, tried figuring calculus from first principles, basically reconstructed everything I remembered from high school. Not much is useful here except knowing where certain things are or used to be.”
“So you really did come from the past, and not from, say, another reality,” Leopold asked.
Jeremy nodded. “This country was called China where I came from. I’m sure they had their own name for it here in Chinese, although I don’t know what it was. The language is Imperial, but if I concentrate while listening it sounds a lot like how I remember Chinese sounding. All that and… there are certain things interlopers are still sought for even now. Knowledge of technology, weapons, and locations.”
“What sorts of locations,” Leopold asked. Jeremy looked at the polished wall as the small cup steamed in his hand.
“I didn’t hide well, my first time. I fled the inner court but I tried to disguise myself as a gutter rat. I stayed to try and figure out what happened to my compatriots in time. I didn’t know much about this new world and I certainly didn’t know how to conceal the qi that was even then growing in my body at such an unnatural speed. It’s what makes us interlopers so powerful—some kind of effect from transferring from the past.
“I was eating a rat, I distinctly remember that, when I saw a shape in the mouth of the alley. I dropped it and prepared to fight, even though I knew that with my young body and no cultivation I wouldn’t stand a chance. But it wasn’t any enemy, but one of my mentor’s friends. A guy named Daniel from the year 2100. That would be about a thousand years before now.
“I didn’t recognize him at first. He was missing teeth, an eye, and half the fingers on his left hand. He staggered into the alley and fell face-first into the refuse. I dragged him away from the light of the street and made him as comfortable as I could.
“He’d been tortured. After that conniving weasel had orchestrated his little coup and taken the throne, he’d had as many of the interlopers captured as he could. There were thousands of cultivators—more than we’d ever known—and they’d been training in secret for this moment. Daniel only escaped by using the last of his qi, secreted away in his soul, to blast a hole through the dungeon wall after they were through working him over.
“He told me they were after technology. And if the interloper in question didn’t show knowledge of advanced technology after a couple of their fingers were removed, then they went after locations. Locations of power in the old world. The graveyards of our greatest sin.”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“What sin,” Willow asked, drawn into the story. She’d forgotten entirely about her own steaming cup of tea. Leopold was also staring.
“They were called nuclear waste repositories. Storage sites for weapons that could level a city—and spent reactor fuel. They were supposed to be around forever because that waste is dangerous forever, so they’re still here all over the world. The emperor wanted to know where they were.”
“Are they weapons,” Willow breathed. “Could they be used to—”
“Not in the way you think,” Jeremy waved her off. “You people have middle-ages technology here and no practical knowledge whatsoever that would enable you to reconstruct one of those bombs. It took somewhere around fifteen hundred years or so for people to progress from this technology level to the nuclear age the first time around. I’d say you can expect the same, maybe even longer.”
“They didn’t have interlopers,” Willow asked. “Did they?”
“Not that I knew of,” Jeremy said.
“Then what does this emperor need them for,” Leopold asked.
Jeremy let out a breath. “Have you ever heard of pills?”
Willow and Leopold shook their heads.
“I suppose your magic works a little differently. Here, when a cultivator needs to progress and they can’t break through themselves, or they’re just lazy, they can take a pill and circulate it through their system. Some pills are incredibly powerful. Some pills are incredibly dangerous. Most are made from rare spiritual plants and even rarer mundane elements.”
Jeremy rubbed the surface of the low wooden table absentmindedly.
“Uranium was one of the rarest elements on earth in my time,” he said. “Rarer than gold. Rarer than platinum. And dangerous too. You could die if you got too close. If you breathed or ate it… forget about it, you’re gone. Locked within that element was the power to kill millions and bring countries to their knees. A war was ended and a superpower destroyed within fifty years because of that element. If it was made into a pill…”
“Do you think the emperor has already made it,” Leopold asked. Jeremy’s eyes were very far away.
“It’s been two hundred years. I guarantee he has.”
🜛
The thin light from the mouth of the cave dimmed to gold, then darkened. They’d passed the day with the hidden master within, who was effectively the only person they could speak to in the whole country unless they found another surviving interloper from America.
Willow told him about Sun Lin and Sun Geon and his face darkened.
“I remember him,” Jeremy said. “He was there the day I fled the inner court. What I wouldn’t give to wrap my hands around that worm’s throat.”
“She’s done you one better,” Leopold said, and Willow cast her eyes down. “I don’t know if he’s dead or not, but he’s certainly in a much worse place.”
“You defeated him in single combat,” Jeremy asked her.
“I tricked him,” Willow said. “It was a cheap trick, but I played it because he was going to kill me and then tear through our cities. Why one of you people hasn’t crossed the sea to take our land is beyond me.”
“Oh trust me, it isn’t easy. It’s not like you can take a nimbus cloud and shoot off across the ocean like in dragonball. Those things run on qi, and they run down quickly. Maybe if I knew shipbuilding like the Tahitians and knew where Hawaii was I could make it, but I wouldn’t bet on myself.”
“What’s a dragon ball,” Leopold asked, and Jeremy rolled his eyes.
“Nevermind. What was your trick?”
“Those portals we open—they get unstable if too much essence is pushed into them. The first one we opened to this country destabilized in a couple of minutes. I manually canceled the one we came through last night to prevent the same. When Sun Geon had me by the throat I dumped unconcepted essence into the portal behind him.”
“A portal back here?”
Willow shook her head. “This was from another city-state that had joined in the battle. There were three opened to destroy myself and the magical creatures that followed me.”
“You sound like a badass.”
She shook her head. “When they destabilize… something changes in them. They go from ellipses to rectangles. They turn black. Then there’s a sound… like a door opening. It drives you to your knees. Something watches. From the other side.”
Jeremy was staring at her with such an intensity that it felt almost physical. Leopold grunted and Willow squirmed under his gaze, until he caught himself and the pressure relented.
“Doorways in the night,” Jeremy whispered.
“Do you know what they are,” Jeremy asked. “Do they have them here?”
“No, not here. Not yet.”
“What are they,” Willow asked. “What’s on the other side?”
Jeremy checked the iron teapot, long emptied, and rose to go into the kitchen. Willow jumped up and followed him, throwing aside the curtain separating the two cave rooms.
“Do you know what they are,” Willow asked again. Jeremy was filling the teapot from a polished trough that collected seeping cave water. He paused, setting the pot on the cut basin.
“I’ve heard of them, but in a story,” he said. “In the time I came from there were stories about this place. About China, but a fantastical and mystical China where men and sometimes women cultivated themselves and challenged the gods. People had been writing these stories for hundreds of years. Imagine how surprised I was when I awoke to that very existence.”
He turned to Willow.
“I’m certain there is some interplay between past and future. People from the past dreamed of this future, or maybe they saw visions, or maybe they thought it was just the creative process. They saw this place and the people here and they wrote their own stories of what could happen in such a land. There were also stories of a time much distant in the future, even from now. A darker time, when the sun had gone out. Of all the stories that might be true in the world, I would pray that that one be the fancy of one crazed, doomed man.
“It appears as if it is not.”
“What happens in this story,” Willow asked. Jeremy clenched his jaw and shook his head. A creaking sound from beside him announced the handle of the teapot had just been bent.
Jeremy straightened it with his fingers and passed Leopold as he went through to the dining chamber.
“The only thing I can say,” his voice sounded from the table. “Is that this future must not be allowed to start prematurely.”