Novak waved toward one of the doors, and a man stepped out holding a tablet. Brown jumpsuit, fourth-stage insignia on the colr.No armour — probably technical staff.

  “Two to Bck Lotus, sir?” he asked, already typing something on the tablet.

  “Three. Master Mendoza’s coming for a stroll with us.”

  The technician raised an eyebrow. Clearly not impressed by the word ‘stroll.’

  I had no idea how much a portal transfer cost or what kind of resources it consumed, but it was obvious he didn’t approve of using the ring for sightseeing.

  Though honestly, the thing looked cheap — like an oversized training chakram made of pstic. No markings, no decorations, no exposed modules or wiring.

  The technician finished inputting data and turned to the ring.

  I first felt the surge of Space Qi, and then saw it. A star of absolute bck was born in the centre of the gate. Bck like a hole cut out of reality. Like a pce where light didn’t enter, and nothing came back out. A bck hole radiating unfamiliar pressure as it consumed space and expanded until it covered the entire inner surface of the ring.

  I stared at the portal’s surface, struck by a strange sensation: my eyes slid across it but couldn’t hold on. No focus, no depth. It was as if my brain refused to accept that such a thing could even exist.

  The technician checked the visual output against the readings on his tablet.

  “Connection stable, sir. Safe travels.”

  Novak gave a nod and stepped forward without hesitation. For him, this clearly wasn’t an event anymore.

  “Armour!” I blurted.

  I’d assumed we’d be flying out on the Queen. I figured I’d be given time to suit up before the flight. Even Novak always wore his for travel.

  Apparently, for portal transit, it wasn’t necessary, or didn’t make a difference.

  A theory resurfaced in my head, one I’d come to while studying Space techniques in the shop. A particurly nasty one: that armour didn’t protect you from your guts being turned inside out.

  Novak waved me off without even turning around.

  “They’ll ship it ter with the regur cargo.”

  I blinked.

  Regur?

  That meant the portal wasn’t new. This wasn’t an experiment or a one-off trick. The logistics were already running on a regur schedule.

  The knot of anxiety in my gut loosened. I looked at the ring again, now with a different perspective.

  The pedestal was clean. Too clean. No scuff marks, no signs of heavy use, though there were a few scratches. Even those looked fresh. The pstic, or composite, around the ring wasn’t dull or worn the way it gets with constant operation. The entire structure, the whole room, still smelled of new.

  How was that possible?

  I was absolutely certain that less than a month ago, humanity didn’t have portals…

  Well, alright. I was sure this portal hadn’t existed here a month ago. And if humanity had any portals elsewhere, they were experimental at best, not operational, not scable.

  Had the politicians accepted the demons’ offer?

  I threw a suspicious gnce at Novak’s back, straight as a steel pte.

  No… not if he’d had a say in it. And I hoped he had. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be in such a cheerful mood.

  More likely, he and his team had wrung every st scrap of valuable info out of the demons.

  Still, none of it added up.

  The demons who made the decisions during the st invasion, the ones who left behind observation teams, they wouldn’t just leave a specialist like this on Verdise.

  The speed with which humanity had assembled a working portal was mind-boggling. Shocking. It raised a thousand questions, and that in itself was unsettling.

  The portal radiated emptiness, and distances that could only be measured in light-years. But this wasn’t quite the Space Qi I knew. There was something else. A second Qi. One I couldn’t identify.

  Novak stepped up to the light-devouring surface and, without breaking stride, walked straight through it.

  A chill settled in my gut. The fear of being torn apart between entry and exit points returned.

  Mendoza followed him through, and I couldn’t afford to wait any longer.

  Does cultivation level help you survive a portal jump?

  I took a few more steps, and entered the darkness, instinctively closing my eyes. My foot met solid ground, just where it should have been. I pced it down, shifted my weight, moved the other forward, and had to open my eyes to see where I was stepping.

  The portal was behind me now.

  I took another step. Then one more. Only then did I let myself fully turn around.

  The ring on this side looked the same as the one on the other. Even the room was nearly identical.

  The technician, though, was different. He stood to the side of the gate, marking something on a tablet. Same insignia identifying him as Stage Four, but this time a bck jumpsuit.

  Bck Lotus. Home.

  For all the torment this pce had brought me, it still felt like home.

  Novak exchanged a few words with the technician, and we headed for the exit. He and Mendoza began discussing dinner pns, but my thoughts were suddenly elsewhere.

  Bao.

  I missed the little bastard. Missed our lunches at the café, and hell, even missed Zo. I needed to call them as soon as Novak let me go.

  Still, a gnce at my interface warned me against it. It was still very early morning here. Most cadets not tied up in something specialised were probably still asleep.

  Reunions could wait.

  Novak led us past the security zone, we descended into the metro, and he let me go almost immediately.

  “Recover. Reacclimate,” he said. “I’ll be expecting you this evening. We’ve got a lot to talk about. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of questions. I’ll answer them. But for now — rest.”

  Mendoza and Novak boarded the same nearly empty train. I waited for a different one heading toward my dorm.

  Here in the Lotus, my yellow jumpsuit stood out just as much as the grey one had when I first arrived at Yellow Pine.

  Still, there weren’t many people to notice. Just a few cadets on the ptform, and a few more in the train. I barely paid attention to them. Instead, I noticed myself automatically adjusting my gait, my breathing, my pace. Even the train swayed differently than the ones back in the Pine.

  My body remembered this pce, and welcomed the return.

  The ride to the dorm passed almost without notice. No events, no conversations, no thoughts that wanted to stay longer than a few seconds, and even those were mostly nostalgia. As if my brain, having received the signal ‘we’re home,’ simply shut down active processes and switched everything into standby mode.

  The room greeted me with silence. Nothing had changed, and yet everything felt just familiar enough to remind me of Yellow Pine, and that was mildly irritating.

  I took off the yellow jumpsuit, folded it, and set it aside. It felt out of pce here. I changed into my grey uniform.

  The trophy sword from my spatial pocket? I set it down in the corner — again. I really needed to get a proper stand for it. Or mount it on the wall. It was a trophy, after all. And it’d give the room some character.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. Then y down. Just like that, nothing to do, closed my eyes… and woke up well past local noon.

  Unexpected.

  First thing I did was message Bao. Short and to the point: I’m back. Then I sent the same to Zo. She replied first. Less than a minute ter, a call came through.

  “How long?” she asked, no preamble.

  “Since morning.”

  “So you haven’t seen Bao yet?” she said with a curious tone.

  “No. I’ve only seen Novak, and maybe a few passers-by. What’s going on with him?”

  A twinge of unease fred in my gut.

  “Nothing major, just clinical idiocy,” she said. “You’ll see. I’m in a raid right now, can’t talk. We move out in ten. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  “What the hell happened to Bao?” I asked.

  “You’ll see!” she ughed.

  The ugh was light enough to unsettle me without really scaring me. I tried calling him.

  Bao was out of range, and stayed out until the evening.

  I was even tempted to call his master. We had a decent rapport… but that would’ve been too much. If anything serious had happened, Zo would’ve told me.

  Besides, I had other things to prepare for. There was going to be tea again that evening, but not the gift-giving kind. This one would be serious. Novak had promised answers. And I was preparing my questions.

  The tea at Novak’s pce was pin. Just simple green, no sugar.

  After I’d mastered the Thousand Sparks of Awareness, he stopped serving me Pure Thoughts.

  He let me take a few sips before speaking, but we skipped the ceremonial scenes like at Mendoza’s. He pced a box with the Rhino Horn on the table but didn’t make a show of it.

  “You want to ask about the portals,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Of course.”

  “The theory’s been around for a long time,” he said. “But for years, the prevailing opinion was that the risks were too high. Too many variables, and the potential consequences too severe. For context, both Space gardens are located in zones of warped space — residue from the first teleportation experiment.”

  “The experiment was reopened thanks to the demons,” I guessed.

  “Back then, the tests risked cracking Verdis in half, which could have damaged Earth as well. But compared to the total annihition of all Earthlings, that threat no longer seemed quite so critical.”

  “The results are impressive,” I said.

  “The results are insane,” Novak agreed. “So much so that I’m still a little skeptical.”

  “Demons?”

  “No. One man,” Novak shook his head. “The same man who led the first experiment. Fifth Stage. And his entire team is Fourth or higher.”

  “So… everything’s fine?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

  At least I thought so.

  “The project’s being scaled up. We need young cultivators willing to walk the Path of Space.”

  I nearly ughed.

  Cssic Novak. Every conversation a pitch, every word a hook.

  “Before you offer me some breakthrough material aligned with the Celestial Root of Space, mind if we take a step back?” I asked. “The Lotus demons, the ones from Yellow Pine, and whoever else we’ve gathered by now, what about them?”

  “I only have access to a few from Lotus and Pine,” Novak said. “They didn’t give us anything radically new. Just confirmed what we suspected, and added some detail. And as they say, the devil’s in the details…”

  He tried to gather his thoughts and I pointed them.

  “Wormholes. You’re thinking about scaling the portals into full-blown wormholes?”

  Novak shook his head.

  “No. This isn’t wormhole tech,” he said. “But it’s a step in that direction.

  “The Federation and the Alliance have been using portals not just for pnetary travel, but within entire star systems,” he added. “Portals — for pnets. Space portals — for star systems. Wormholes — those are for interstelr jumps.

  “Once we pce a ring near a wormhole, the distance from Earth to it stops mattering.”

  “That definitely sounds like something the demons didn’t intend to share with us,” I said.

  “Possibly,” Novak agreed. “Maybe their pn was to cross the wormhole and destroy the gate behind them. By the time we build another one, they’d be lost somewhere deep in Federation space.”

  “System-level portals can be destroyed too,” I pointed out.

  “They’re not megastructures like wormhole gates,” Novak waved that off. “I’ve seen them set up a school portal. If we have pre-made components, setting one up near a wormhole could take hours. A few more days for the wormhole gate itself.”

  “I get the sense there’s something bothering you,” I said.

  Novak smiled and wagged a finger. Approvingly, like he was proud of me for noticing.

  “As far as I know, the demon behind the entire pn, the one from Yellow Pine, we still haven’t caught him.”

  MaksymPachesiuk