After five long years, humanity had finally returned to Earth.

When they were first transported, confusion and fear spread like wildfire. Being divided into 193 sectors meant that relatives, friends, anyone who had any kind of long-distance relationship with someone in another country instantly lost all means of contact. It did not matter whether they had been abroad for work, vacation, or medical treatment. One moment there was connection, the next there was nothing, not even a way to confirm the other person was still alive.

Then the angels appeared across each sector, spreading out far and wide, delivering the same message to all of them.

Some outright refused to believe it. Some were confused at first, then caught up in the excitement of a fantasy made real. Many were simply terrified at the idea of fighting off beings they had never heard of for a planet they had always assumed was theirs by default.

(For the next five years, no one can enter this space and no one will leave it. Created out of space, you exist nowhere but in time. Any attempt at escape is futile.)

The message was short.

The place itself was a flat, smooth surface, colored off-white, stretching endlessly in every direction. The ground gave off a soft light, enough to navigate by without straining the eyes if kept open for long periods. The sky above was pitch black, making the ground the only source of light in either direction.

(Food and essentials, which your body so desperately depended on before, will not be required here as they were on your planet.)

The angels did not raise their voices and yet each word landed directly in every ear, as if spoken to each person individually.

(For now, take whatever time you need to grow accustomed to this space. I will return.)

They were told they could spread out as far as they wanted, form groups or communities if they chose to.

Some could not take it at face value. They broke away from the crowd and kept walking in a single direction until the whole group behind them shrank to a speck. The land kept going. Days passed and still no end came. Their journey stretched into weeks, possible only because they never grew hungry or thirsty.

Eventually they turned back.

The return, which they had quietly been dreading, expecting it to take as long as the outward journey, was nothing like that.

A few steps in the direction they had come from and the speck was already visible again.

They convinced themselves it was their eyes playing tricks, that they were hallucinating from the weeks of walking. They ran toward it anyway. The speck grew, and when they reached it, it was exactly the same group they had left behind, only more spread out.

They accused the crowd of following them. The crowd insisted they had not moved more than a few meters at most.

In the second month, a group of scientists from sector 23 put forward the first theory that held together.

Since the space they were occupying did not technically exist as a location, any area beyond the range of their vision simply ceased to be. There was no space to cross because the space was not there until you looked at it. That was the source of the disparity, the trip out taking weeks while the return took minutes.

Other sectors developed their own explanations in different words, but the underlying principle was the same.

Space had been removed from the equation. Without distance, there was no cost of travel, and without cost, a being was simply something that existed with nowhere to be.

...

In the third month the angels returned with an offer.

(A slight miscalculation was made in accounting for those who should have been deemed unfit but were not. This is, however, hardly a problem.)

They were referring to the elderly, children who had not yet reached adolescence, pregnant women, the sick, and those with disabilities severe enough to make the environment difficult to bear.

The space itself had no temperature to speak of, no dirt, no dust, no bacteria or pathogens capable of spreading disease. The air they breathed was not oxygen but diluted crystals dispersed in gas form, not moving around, just suspended there.

Infectious diseases that needed pathogens to do damage had effectively been paused, since there was nothing here to carry them. Non-infectious conditions, diabetes, physical disabilities, and the like, persisted unchanged.

In the months prior, hundreds of deaths had been recorded, all of them people who had been sick before the transmigration. With no medical supplies, they simply died. Beyond those cases, not a single new illness had emerged.

(Anyone who considers themselves unfit for the simulation may rest in a capsule, where you will continue to age but remain unconscious for the duration of the five years. You will be kept safe from any immediate danger, and when the time is up you will be woken and returned to Earth alongside those who remain outside.)

(All you have to do is imagine yourself at rest.)

For most people that sounded like the obvious choice. The majority of the population took it. Nearly all the elderly, all the young children, and a large share of teenagers and adults chose to be encapsulated.

Two weeks after the offer was made, most of the population had been swallowed into the ground, leaving only a small fraction of people still standing on the surface.

...

Two full hours had passed since humanity's return to Earth.

Those who had been encapsulated woke from their sleep moments before the return. When they came back and looked at the people around them, the change in appearance stopped everyone cold.

The last thing they remembered was being wrapped in blue mist rising from the ground before losing consciousness. Everything else they recalled clearly. But half a decade inside those capsules had felt like a fifteen-minute nap, and the faces around them told a different story than their memories did.

Unlike the frozen state Hou Yi had endured, the capsules had only shielded the people inside from the world, not from time. Everyone looked older. Wrinkles had set in. Some had grown taller, some had stayed the same height, and looking at each other, both sides were equally thrown off by what they saw.

Five years had still taken what they were owed from people's flesh.

One thing had not changed. Hair volume, facial hair, nails, skin tone, all the surface details were exactly as they had been at the moment of encapsulation. Only the deeper, living tissue had aged without them noticing.

The oldest among them, those already past 85, began dying shortly after the capsules opened. Most had been close to the edge of their natural lifespan even before the transmigration. Clouded eyes, hunched backs, hair gone fully white. The capsule had been the only thing keeping them upright, and it had not stopped their aging, only sheltered them from everything else. Without it, they had nothing left to hold on to.

But in the scale of what was happening, a handful of deaths among the elderly barely registered.

(Mortals, the simulation has ended.)

The angels called out from above.

(Preparations have been made. Your fate is now in your hands. Blessings be upon you.)

A short announcement and then they were gone again.

"Are we going home?"

"Is it over?"

"We're really going back?"

People let the relief in, freely and without embarrassment. Nobody was thinking about the invasion that was supposedly five years away. That was a problem for another time.

...

When they were sent back they were placed in the exact spot they had been standing when the transmigration happened, and with them came a brief but sharp instinct, a few seconds of heightened reflex to adjust to the physical world again.

This was partly to prevent anyone from convincing themselves it had all been a mass hallucination, and partly to reduce casualties during the transition.

Some accidents were unavoidable. Heavy machinery left running, vehicles mid-motion, people returning mid-step in dangerous places. But the instinct dampened most of it and the damage stayed minimal.

Not all of it could be helped. A commercial plane crossing the Bay of Bengal came down, killing everyone on board. The pilot had been carrying undiagnosed lung cancer. With no treatment possible in the space they had occupied, he had died there, leaving the aircraft unmanned on its return.

Cases like that were the exception. For most, the return was manageable.

The first thing people did once they were back was reach out to anyone they knew who had been abroad. After that they went home and tried to process everything else.

...

In the corner of a school compound, Hou Yi found himself on all fours, wearing the same uniform from twenty-five years ago, palms and knees pressed against cold, hard concrete.

"We're back! We're actually back!"

One of the boys shouted, and the others jumped with him.

Same uniforms, same backpacks, cigarettes still between their fingers and phones still in hand.

"That really happened right? Holy shit, it felt so unreal knowing all that time passed but now I'm back, it's like we all went back in time."

Another boy said, shaking his head.

"Wang, what are you talking about? We barely spent a few months in there. If anyone has the right to say that, it's my brother Shin here, brave enough to skip the capsule and stay the whole five years without us."

Wu Chen said, clapping Shin Tao firmly on the shoulder as he said it. He had always been the calculating type, and he was not about to waste an opportunity.

The way the world was reshaping itself, Chi users were going to sit at the top of whatever came next. That much was obvious. And getting in early with one, before everyone else started trying, was exactly the kind of move Wu Chen excelled at. Former friends would stop treating each other as equals soon enough. Families from poor backgrounds would find themselves rising. The social order was already tilting and only a fool would not notice.

Wang watched Wu Chen work and felt something close to admiration, the man had not paused for even a second before laying on the flattery. Shin Tao, for his part, was completely oblivious to the calculation behind it, and was just pleased someone had noticed his choice.

Shin had never been the sharpest. His strength was really all he had ever had going for him, and even that had its limits. But now he had Chi, and he had plans for it, and Wu Chen's words felt like a good start.

"Hey, is that Lee Hou Yi?"

One of the guys called out.

In the middle of all their noise, Hou Yi was quietly getting back to his feet.