"It is not speed that returns me to where I began. It is memory, curled into each breath"
— Unknown, unknown
*Richard POV*
The book sat heavy in my lap, even though I knew that it couldn't have weighed more than a kilogram. Something about it felt like it carried more than pages - like it had been soaked in memories and tears, before being pressed flat under the gravity of too many footsteps placed repeatedly on the same pages.
I traced the letters again with my eyes and fingers. English. Actual, honest-to-God English. Nothing like this world - no antique script, no symbolic placeholders, no runes, no nothing. Just serifed, gently slanted lines forming the language I'd forgotten I remembered.
And it wasn't just the language, but also the feeling.
Reading the book didn't feel like reading something new, but more remembering a song from my childhood. Like the warm tarmac in the sun, or the vibration of a bus window beneath my chin. Like watching the lights of a fridge turn off and on when opening the door, balancing it just enough to flicker the light at the gentlest of movements. All the little things that no one here could possibly have understood or experienced, all stitched silently into these words by someone who did.
I didn't know who wrote it, but they'd been where I'd been.
I wasn't the only one. I wasn't alone.
That was terrifying, but also comfortable.
I kept on reading long after Theo nodded off in the cushions and spoke to himself in his sleep. He was still clutching that piece of paper with the diagrams I drew - the map for his feet, he called it. A gift I could give him, and a distraction from the weight I couldn't share.
I opened the book back to the second half. This half wasn't about steps or breathing or balance.
It was about yearning.
Not in the direct way - it wasn't an on-the-nose "I miss Earth" or "I wish I could go home." That would have been too blatant for this cultivator, and cultivators were known for their flowery speech at times. The schematics for techniques were almost scientific at parts, but the philosophy itself was typical of this world. Clearly whoever wrote this had lived here for a long, long while.
> "Wind knows no speed but longing, for it always returns to where it was born"
> "Each forward step drags behind it the shadow of a place unwalked."
> "I do not run because I want to arrive. I run because standing still once shattered me."
I read those lines over and over again until I couldn't tell if the weight on my chest was grief or loneliness wrapping itself around my ribs.
The author missed home.
Dislocation.
That's what it reminded me of. The ache of waking up every day in a world that isn't yours, and learning to wear someone else's sky like it fits. Like it's normal.
That ache was mine, too.
I shared memories of that same sky - that sky on Earth.
I never told anyone how scared I was of forgetting. How even now I can't remember my sister's voice clearly, or what my schoolbag looked like. Or the taste of real, actual toothpaste. I had been in this world for a couple months, and was already forgetting home. I didn't want to forget it all.
And this impossible, inexplicable book is the first thing I've seen in this world that told me I'm not insane for wanting to remember.
The passage near the middle struck especially hard. I don't know why.
> When the leaves fell different, I knew I had passed through the world wrong.
That's how I felt every day here. Like I passed through the world wrong. Like some hinge on the door of fate swung too fast and slammed me in the nose. I passed through the world wrong in a body that wasn't mine, with a voice that wasn't mine, and a mind that's slowly losing the precious but ordinary memories of mine.
And then there's everyone around me, accepting the facade of a person I am to them. My family, I mean the family in this world, whom I've grown close enough to to occasionally mentally refer to them as mum and dad, and Theo, the one proper friend I've made. People who don't look at me differently. Even though I lie. Even though I withhold whole oceans of truth from each of them.
None of them know that I'm not from here. None of them know that I died.
That part's the worst, because I did die. I remember it - more of a feeling than a moment. A painful disintegration like going through a shredder multiple times in each direction. And that man. A man in robes - typical cultivator robes - who looked grateful to me and looked relieved.
And then I was gone.
And now I'm here.
And this book, written by someone else who knew - someone else who walked under the same impossible sky, had found its way into the hands of a child who couldn't even read it. A book not written for him, not really, but written for someone close to him. As if guided by fate to reach me.
Indeed, the final few words rang true.
"This text drifts only into the hands of those who share memories of the same sky I still miss"
I closed the book slowly and my hands were still shaking. Not out of fear or grief, but some sense of excitement. A tremor that comes when something clicks in your mind - when you find out you're not alone in the way you thought you were.
Someone else had stood where I stood. And they survived long enough to be some sort of mysterious cultivator.
And if they could survive long enough to write this... then maybe there really is a way back.
Maybe I haven't missed the last bus home - maybe there's still a way.
I looked back down at Theo, who stirred slightly in his sleep, one arm flopping to the side as the rolled-up "map" slipped from his fingers. I reached out and caught it before it hit the floor.
A single arrow looping back on itself.
Return Cadence.
The dance of looping in such a perfect circle that it looks like you never really left. Maybe that was my technique, too. Maybe I've been running this whole time - not forward, not away, but in a spiral. Trying to reach some point that will make it all make sense.
The book didn't promise an answer, nor did it promise hope. And yet, I found a trace of both pressed between the lines..
I leant back against the bookshelf and took a deep breath. My first breath of relief in this world - a breath of peace. The air smelt faintly of dust, pine, and a burnt out incense. The lantern down the hall still hummed. And the air felt good in my lungs.
I got up.
Not because I felt ready. Not because I was filled with certainty or fire or some cultivation epiphany.
I got up because the yearning had settled into my bones like restless wind - and it wouldn't let me sit still.
The room was dark except for the faint glow from the lantern down the hall. Theo stirred once and went still again. The house was quiet in that strange manner, where silence isn't ever empty - just made up of low things. The breath of trees outside. The creak of old floorboards exhaling slowly. Even the night had its own rhythm.
And I was part of it now.
I picked up the book once more, and flicked to the page outlining Return Cadence. I took a glimpse at the diagrams - the more complex version I hadn't shown Theo. They weren't that complicated, not really. Just strokes and loops arranged in a kind of dancing pattern. But something about them suggested depth - as though each step contained breath, and each arc was a forgotten truth.
There were no proper instructions - no voice telling me exactly how to move. Just lines and rhythm.
I took another breath, stepped into the centre of the room, and tried to follow them.
At first, it was a joke. My feet caught on nothing; my weight shifted awkwardly. I overcorrectd. I made shapes on the floor that looked more like clumsy scarecrow poses than any sort of mystical movement. And worst of all, I kept hesitating.
Because every step felt like something more than it was. Every slow circling motion reminded me of something I couldn't put into words.
No, reminded isn't the right word. It made me mourn.
Like the very act of moving this way tugged on my emotions. As if my muscles had never truly unlearnt the feeling of the London Underground, or of pavement cracks and school corridors. My body remembered sleepless nights spent texting close friends on my phone.
And now it was being asked to return.
"Breath is the first rhythm; memory is the second"
Each inhalation brought something in - a warm stream of Qi. A vibration, subtle, beneath the skin. The air didn't feel so still anymore, and my fingers tingled.
The first step fell from me like a sigh. The second followed like a memory. My arms moved like they were cradling something not-quite-there, something I hadn't held in a long, long time. And then, I saw it.
A golden line in the air behind me, tracing the arc of my movement. A curve, almost glowing. Like a trail left by a comet no one else had seen.
And then it faded.
The line didn't come back, but my body knew what it wanted now. My weight shifted from heel to toe in just the right way. The breath caught in my chest and flowed down. I didn't hold it - I let it hold me instead. The motion wasn't a sprint, or a leap, or a clash of power.
It was... returning.
And I understood then.
This wasn't a technique to get faster, not really. That was a side effect.
This was a movement that made the world remember your place in it. Like walking backwards into a room and seeing your own footprints already there.
A paradox.
A technique shaped like longing.
A technique shaped like me.
I smiled, for the first time in hours. It was a tired, crooked thing. Half a smile, really.
But it stayed.
I stayed there on the floor for a while. Breathing. Listening.
Maybe this is how it starts - not with lightning; not with flames. Not with roars or winds or cultivation realms.
But with aching, with breathing, and with remembering.
I was walking home.
One aching step at a time.