Kim walked on the path away from the gate, spear extended and watching carefully for any more monsters that could step out of reality. She watched the treeline and her forward path with care, following along the road in a slow and gentle curve.

When the treeline broke to reveal what was in front of her, she stopped.

She was facing right back towards the gate area she had come from, complete with the monster corpse. Did the gate just reset with her in it?

No, that wouldn’t make sense. Then the monster wouldn’t be dead. And she wouldn’t feel like shit. She rubbed the back of her head before turning around, trying to head down the path again. She rarely got turned around or lost. Especially while following a road.

But to her surprise, only minutes later, she was back in front of the gate. Her brow furrowed.

She walked down the path, this time walking slowly and extending her spear like a guiding stick, trying to find the invisible wall the monster exited from. She held the spear straight forward, following behind it… and ended up in the clearing again.

For her 4th try, she dragged the spear into the road next to her, carving a line of dirt as she circled around again, reaching the entrance.

Then she turned around, following the line backwards. She had carved two gouges in the dirt side by side; one from where she departed on the path, and one from where she fell back into it. She followed the path backwards until it curved suddenly off the side and directly into a tree.

She wondered if the tree was incorporeal; an illusion magic that sprung up behind her and in front of her, causing her to loop down the path. Her suspicions were confirmed when she stabbed at the tree.

Her spear didn’t phase into the tree; instead, it seemed to retreat away from her, like a rainbow on a horizon, never changing size or shape but simply appearing to be more distant. The feeling gave her vertigo, and she continued forward, chasing the image of that one tree and the gouge on the ground.

She found herself staring at the entrance where she started. Somehow, the tree had moved, looping back along the road.

She screwed her face up in concentration. There had to be a way out of this. That’s why the monster appeared to step out of midair — there was an illusory wall, or the entire environment was shifting, or something. Just not for Kim.

Kim dug through the monster’s pockets, looking for some kind of key or answer, pulling out all the junk from its pockets and bringing it with her. She cringed at the feeling of bird skulls and shells, and then she dug through the book, cringing at the poorly made anatomy renders.

The book was full of pages and pages of movements, looking for all the world like a martial arts manual, superimposed with various images that belonged more to alternative medicine magazines. Kim tried going back down the path, hoping that simply holding the book was enough, but it wasn’t. Despite the fact she was clearly curving back to the entrance, the gouge on the road was straight the entire time she followed it. She never turned at any point.

Sighing, she sat down, hoping she could clean some information or trick from the book, but it was written in a language she didn’t recognize. Made of foreign logograms, it didn’t look like Japanese or Mandarin or anything else she would recognize. The script was incredibly ornate, written almost as if from a modern printer. She did a double take at the monster — a fox, she realized, before shaking the head away.

Assuming that it was a cultivator, and that this was some kind of cultivator world — hell, maybe even the world that Rain said he lived in — this could have been a cultivation guide. Did Rain live here? He said nothing about being so… furry. Kim shook away the thought.

She had a different thought instead; maybe she wasn’t opening the front of the book, maybe she was opening the back.

She opened the last page. A diagram of eyes — not quite human eyes — filled the page, painted with arrows and lines. Instructions for… instructions for Qi flow, Kim realised.

Could you do that? She did have a meridian of Qi running up… she felt out where it was. She had never bothered to, or to question the meaning of doing it. It was just a way to get to Bronze to her then. But she realized now that maybe it was a lot more than that. The line of Qi flowed up her spine, up her brain stem, down near her ocular nerve, and then back down through her body and returned to the dantian.

She placed her spear on her lap, sitting Criss Cross apple sauce. A phrase that annoyed Rain to no end, but he was coming around to the term. The note he had left for her was the first time he used the phrase. It was odd to leave a note reminding her to cultivate and ‘work diligently’, but kind of sweet in Rain’s strange way. Half a smile crept on her face before she remembered the situation she was presently in.

Trapped by alien illusion magic in a horrific, mis-ranked gate.

She pulled forward just a tiny little string of Qi, leading it towards her eye, matching the diagram in the book as closely as she could. She had an odd, gut feeling that this would work. Just like the one she had about Rain.

Slowly, the strand of Qi entered her eye — and then backfired. She shouted, flinching as it felt like her right eye was on fire. Panicking, she blinked, relief flooding her as she realized she could still see.

Well. Maybe it wouldn’t work after all.