The first sign came during third period.
Elias sat in the back of his urban mythology class, half-listening as the teacher droned about ancient symbols found etched in sewer systems beneath the city. Most students were scrolling through their phones, but Elias couldn't stop watching the flickering projector light. It kept stuttering—every seventh flash dimmed for a moment too long, like it was hesitating.
When he blinked, he saw shapes layered into the light. Spirals. Threads. A doorway, drawn in the same fractured angles Jamie had sketched the night before.
His heart thumped once—too loud. The floor shifted beneath him, and for a second, the classroom dissolved into static. Then it was gone. Just desks and pencil shavings again.
He didn't tell anyone. He left school early.
---
That afternoon, he returned to the park alone. Jamie was elsewhere, and Mira, if she was watching, didn't show herself.
Elias sat by the fountain again, notebook open, sketching. He didn't know why, only that the urge felt urgent.
The page filled with spirals, feathers, and a repeating sigil—a looping glyph that seemed to draw itself. As his pencil moved, the air around him thickened. The city faded.
Then the feather reappeared.
Same as before, pale and faintly glowing, but this time… it didn't drift. It hung in the air, motionless. Vibrating.
Elias stood, heart pounding. He reached out, but before he could touch it, the wind died.
Everything died.
No sound. No motion. Just stillness.
And in that stillness, a pressure. Not physical—something inside him, some inner thread pulled tight. Like his breath had weight. Like his thoughts were being sorted, sifted, measured.
He fell to his knees.
His hand brushed the stone rim of the fountain—and there it was. A second pulse. Not a heartbeat. A rhythm. An echo.
The moment he felt it, something inside him clicked.
He wasn't thinking. His body moved without instruction. He pressed his palm flat to the stone and exhaled—not a normal breath, but a slow release from somewhere deeper, somewhere below the lungs.
His vision blurred. The world dipped.
And for a moment, he saw beneath it.
Not metaphor. Not dream.
The world beneath the world.
Glowing threads crisscrossed the space between things. The fountain. The feather. Himself. Everything was connected. Breathing. Listening.
Elias felt it—the movement of internal energy. Not dramatic. Barely a whisper. But it was there.
Qi.
His first breath of cultivation.
He gasped and the vision vanished.
The feather dropped to the ground.
The wind returned.
---
Later, walking home in a daze, Elias couldn't stop replaying the moment.
He didn't understand it. He couldn't explain it. But he knew one thing:
He'd felt something real.
And now that he'd found it, he couldn't go back.