Transmission

In the cracks between two worlds, time is not linear—it's like a painting soaked in water, where past and future bleed together on the same sheet of paper.

---

The moment the transmission pod door closed behind Lin Shen, the world turned blue.

Not the kind of engineering blue he had adjusted eight hundred times on CAD screens, but a living, flowing blue—like a thermal vent gushing from an underwater volcano. Lin Shen looked down at his hands and saw that his fingers were glowing too, faint streams of luminescence flowing beneath his skin, as if light were traveling along his veins. He raised his hand and waved it before his eyes; the light scattered into trailing streaks, then slowly gathered back into the outline of his fingers.

The sound in the channel was not sound at all—it was more like a vibration deep in the bones. He could hear his own heartbeat, amplified dozens of times, thumping, thumping, echoing through the empty blue light. Then another sound, fainter and farther away, as if someone were calling his name from underwater. He couldn't tell if it was a man's voice or a woman's, but the syllables were clear: Lin—Shen—

He closed his eyes.

His body was sinking, yet also rising. The sense of direction failed here; up and down, left and right all became extensions of the same direction. He felt like a sugar cube dropped into water, dissolving from the edges inward—from limbs to torso, from torso to consciousness. He recalled a line from Su Wan's diary—"If one day I disappear"—and suddenly he understood what that disappearance meant. Not death, but this dissolution—existence transforming from one thing into another, like ice melting into water. The water was still water, but the ice was no longer ice.

The channel suddenly narrowed.

The blue began to distort, shifting from the smoothness of fluid to torn, ragged cloth. He felt a force pressing in from all directions, a suffocating sensation like water filling his lungs. The light flickered—bright as noon one moment, dark as the deep sea the next. He heard other noises, not a heartbeat, not a call—a high-frequency metallic resonance, like two giant gears meshing with teeth misaligned, grinding against each other.

A-line Su Wan had said the channel was unstable.

When stable, passage took only twelve seconds—exactly the time for twelve heartbeats.

He had already counted. Twenty-one.

Something had gone wrong outside.

---

Control room.

A-line Su Wan stared at the three monitors on the console, her palms soaked with sweat. The waveform on the main display had already begun to fluctuate—the green curve was no longer a smooth sine wave but violent sawtooth edges, like an ECG right before cardiac arrest. The energy output readings beside it kept jumping, dropping from seventy to forty-five, then back up to sixty-eight, never stable at the target value for a single second.

She had been in the control room for forty minutes. Every stage of the channel preheating followed the parameters she had calculated, with errors never exceeding two-thousandths. Until thirty seconds ago—a pile of rubble crashed into the ceiling above the control room, the tremor traveling through the concrete into the equipment base's vibration dampers, the disturbance conducting into the energy coils, and then everything began to spiral out of control.

Jiang Fei's explosives had sealed the entrance, but they had also shaken the control room's mezzanine. The old hydroelectric station's structure was more fragile than she had imagined.

"Steady, steady..." she muttered to the console, her fingers sliding rapidly across the touchscreen, constantly fine-tuning the energy output phase.

But the waveform only grew more chaotic.

The control room door was suddenly pushed open. A-line Lin Shen burst in, his face and arms covered in gray cement dust.

"The entrance is sealed. Jiang Fei is fine."

A-line Su Wan didn't turn around. "The channel is collapsing."

A-line Lin Shen walked to the console and saw the waveform on the monitor. He wasn't a physicist, but he was an architectural designer—he could tell when a structural beam was about to break. The trend of that waveform curve looked exactly like a steel bar twisted to its limit.

"Can you fix it?" he asked.

"The channel is already open. There's no way to stop it." Her voice was taut. "I can only maintain it manually. But if the energy drops below forty percent, the transmission layer will collapse."

"Collapse means?"

"It means he can't get out." A-line Su Wan turned to look at him; there were bloodshot veins in her eyes behind her glasses. "From either side. He'll be trapped in the crack."

Another tremor hit the control room. Dust and small bits of limestone fell from the ceiling, scattering across the console. A-line Su Wan reached out to shield the screen and didn't let go until the shaking subsided.

"How long?"

"I don't know," she said. "It depends on how long the channel itself can hold. If the energy can stay above fifty, he should make it to the Holding Point. Once at the Holding Point, the path back is different from the path here—that segment is more stable."

"What if it drops below fifty?"

A-line Su Wan didn't answer.

---

Inside the channel, Lin Shen felt the temperature dropping sharply.

At the start of the transmission, the blue had been warm—like seawater soaked in the summer evening sun. But now it was cold, as if he were under an ice sheet; his fingertips were going numb. He could see his own breath—each exhalation condensed into a small puff of white mist before being rapidly dispersed by the blue light.

Then he heard Su Wan's voice.

"Why did you come—"

Not a whisper, not an auditory hallucination. The voice was clear, as if someone were whispering right into his ear. He spun his head around—there was nothing in the blue light but his own elongated shadow, twisted into strange geometric shapes.

"—you shouldn't have come..."

The voice circled three times in the channel before drilling into his ears.

"Su Wan!" he shouted.

The words shattered the moment they left his mouth, like glass hitting the ground. But his heart suddenly raced—not from fear, but because he had heard her. Su Wan's voice, Su Wan's tone, the way she always softened the last syllable of each word. She was right ahead.

The blue light suddenly tore open a fissure, like a flash of overexposure in the sky.

---

The Holding Point was not a place.

When Lin Shen arrived, it took him a full seven seconds to realize this.

The feeling under his feet was wrong—not ground, not a deck, not any solid surface. It was more like stepping onto a very thick layer of jelly, sinking slightly, then bouncing back. The surrounding light was no longer blue but an indescribable color—like the sum of all colors, or the absence of all colors.

He saw Su Wan.

She stood three steps away, her body translucent.

She was thinner than in the photos. She wore the same light gray sweater he had seen her in the last time, sleeves still too long, covering her hands. Her hair hung messily over her shoulders, a few strands sticking to her cheek. At the corner of her left eye, that small teardrop mole was still there—like a drop of ink that could never be wiped away.

She was crying.

"Why did you come—"

She said it again, her voice squeezing out of her throat. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, fell onto the indescribable floor of the Holding Point, bounced once like dewdrops on a lotus leaf, then spread into small ripples.

"You shouldn't have come..."

Lin Shen took a step forward. The jelly-like sensation underfoot made him stumble, but he steadied himself and took another step forward.

Su Wan stepped back.

"Don't come closer..." She shook her head, her hair swaying with the motion. "The channel is collapsing. Don't you know that? You can't come in. You won't be able to get out."

"I know," Lin Shen said.

His voice was flat—the same flat tone he used when presenting proposals to clients at the company. But in his clenched fist, his nails were digging into his palm.

"I know," he said again. "I came anyway."

Su Wan looked at him.

Across this nonexistent space, across three steps of distance.

Her body was translucent—her edges blurry, like an overexposed negative. He could see the light behind her passing through her silhouette, scattering into soft, indistinct borders. She was dissipating. Not the erasure of the Correctors, but the channel's interstice energy consuming her existence. She had been waiting here too long, using her own life to maintain the stability of this Holding Point.

She had chosen to anchor herself here because if she dissipated too, the channel would close completely. He would never find the way here again.

"You idiot..." she said, tears still flowing.

"Mm." Lin Shen reached out his hand.

His hand passed through the light, through time, through all the gaps and boundaries between two worlds.

And then he touched her hand.

It was cold. Not the temperature of the living, but not the coldness of the dead either. It was a temperature somewhere in between—like ice that had just begun to melt halfway. His fingers passed through the translucent outline of her hand, but the palm—the palm touched something solid. Her bones were still there, her shape was still there, she hadn't completely vanished yet.

"I've come to take you home," he said.

Su Wan lowered her head, looking at their hands. Her fingers were in his palm, slowly turning from transparent back to opaque, outlines growing back from the edges. It wasn't the channel recovering—it was his existence stabilizing hers. Between two worlds, a Lin Shen belonging to this world and a Su Wan from another world happened to form a pair.

When they overlapped, the mass was exactly conserved.

"Transmission initiated." A-line Su Wan's voice came from some direction, very distant, as if through several layers of water. "You have thirty-two seconds. Follow the blue light. Don't let go."

The Holding Point began to shake. The indescribable light around them began to contract inward, forming a spinning halo beneath their feet. The halo grew brighter and faster, like an accelerating top.

"Don't let go," Lin Shen said.

He gripped Su Wan's hand. She could feel the warmth of his palm—thirty-seven degrees, as constant as his habit of squeezing toothpaste for her every morning, never changing.

Su Wan looked up at him. Her lips moved, as if she wanted to say something, but in the end, she said nothing. She just held his hand, gripping it tightly. Like that day on the street when someone bumped into her, sending her blueprints flying everywhere, and he crouched down to help her pick them up—when their fingers touched, she had held on just like this.

The halo swelled to its maximum brightness.

Blue light surged from the halo, swallowing everything.

Thirty-two seconds.

Lin Shen's vision was filled with blue light, but he knew Su Wan was right beside him. He could feel the bones of her fingers, one by one, pressing clearly against his palm.

One, two, three, four—the counter in his mind rang twelve times.

The light began to fade from blue to pale white, to the familiar color of fluorescent lamps. The sensation under his feet shifted from jelly to hard ground—cement floor, wet with water stains.

At the moment the transmission ended, he heard the last sound in the channel.

It was his own heartbeat.

---

A-line hydroelectric station.

The control room had collapsed. Not figuratively—it had literally caved in. A third of the ceiling had fallen, smashing the left main console. Rubble and rebar formed a half-person-high pile of debris. A-line Su Wan had been knocked to the ground, the corner of her forehead hitting the edge of the console, blood streaming down and smearing half of her glasses.

But when she saw the last line of the log, she smiled.

"Transmission complete."

A-line Lin Shen helped her up. "Did it succeed?"

"Transmission succeeded," she said, then paused. "But the target coordinates... are off."

"A-line coordinates or original line coordinates?"

A-line Su Wan took off her glasses, wiped the blood off the lenses with her sleeve, and was silent for a long time.

"Original line," she said. "But it's the output end of the original line hydro station—not the input end. The transmission pod probably hasn't been repaired yet."

A-line Lin Shen's expression changed.

They both understood in their hearts: at the original line's hydro station control room, Lu Yan had once set an ambush there. And now Lu Yan was also in the A-line. Who was guarding the original line? No one knew.

---

The lights in the original line hydro station control room were off.

The transmission pod door burst open with a harsh screech of metal. Lin Shen stumbled out with Su Wan in his arms, his knees hitting the concrete floor hard. Ignoring the pain, his first reaction was to look down at the person in his arms.

Su Wan lay in his arms, her body no longer translucent.

Her chest rose and fell faintly. Her eyes were closed, her lashes casting tiny shadows on her cheeks. Her breathing was shallow—but she was breathing.

She was alive.

Lin Shen knelt on the ground, trembling all over. He raised his hand to check her breath, but he was shaking so badly that it took three tries before his fingers touched her lips.

There was warmth. There was breath. She had come back.He lifted her, moving her from the metal floor of the teleportation pod onto his lap, letting her lean against his chest. Her heartbeat was slow but steady, the vibrations reaching him through her half-melted bones, just half a beat off from his own. Like a duet not yet written.

The rain outside had stopped. The hydroelectric plant was so quiet that everything felt unreal.

Then he heard a sound.

Footsteps.

Soft, but steady. Leather shoes on the cement floor, step by step, approaching from the end of the corridor.

Lin Shen looked up.

At the control room door, a silver-haired figure stood still.

Lu Yan.

He didn't look like he had just been through an explosion—his suit was still crisp, the knot of his tie in its precise place. But the burn scar on the back of his right hand was starkly conspicuous in the dim light.

He glanced at Su Wan in Lin Shen's arms, then at the teleportation pod, and slowly pulled a gun from his pocket.

"You're back," he said.

His tone was as casual as making small talk.

Lin Shen shifted Su Wan behind him. His knees were scraped raw against the cement floor, but he didn't stand up. He had no gun, no weapon, nothing to stop that bullet.

But he didn't move aside.

Lu Yan raised the gun. The muzzle aimed at Lin Shen's chest. His finger on the trigger paused for a second.

Then he lowered the muzzle slightly, shifting it toward Su Wan.

"You know," he said, his voice soft, "I wasn't planning to let her come back."

Lin Shen stared at him. His eyes were deep brown, like two burned coals in the dim light. No fear, no pleading—just watching Lu Yan like that.

The finger twitched slightly.

The gunshot rang out.