Chapter 1 — The Day the Sky Split
The first sign wasn't light.It was silence.
At precisely 03:14 GMT, every radio wave across Earth's orbit stuttered. Communications satellites blinked, radar arrays froze, and the steady hum of background radiation dropped to zero. The universe, for a moment, held its breath.
Then the sky cracked open.
A rift—thousands of kilometers wide—tore through low Earth orbit, a wound of light and shadow swirling above the Pacific Ocean. It pulsed with colors no spectrum could name, expanding like an iris staring down upon the world. Gravitational sensors screamed as reality warped around the phenomenon.
Inside the Dimensional Defense Division, alarms echoed like a heartbeat. The lights turned red.
"Report!"Dr. Alex Grams slammed a hand on the edge of the main console. His voice was calm, but his pulse wasn't.
"Unidentified gravitational distortion detected across orbital plane three," replied Lt. Yara Chen, her hands flying across a translucent data pad. "We're registering negative-mass signatures—no, sir, that's not right. It's not mass, it's… energy. Unknown type."
Alex's eyes flickered over the holographic display hovering above the table. A shimmering sphere hovered over the digital Earth, slowly spreading outward. His reflection—silver hair streaked with stress, sharp blue eyes behind narrow glasses—stared back from the light.
"Open live feed from Hubble II," he ordered.
The image formed on the main screen. At first, it looked like aurora lights—green, gold, and violet swirling across the upper atmosphere. But then the lights bent. A fissure appeared in the void, its edges twisting like fabric caught in cosmic wind. Inside it, something shimmered—structures, shapes, moving patterns that looked almost… alive.
Alex's stomach turned. "That's not a storm," he murmured. "That's a breach."
"Breach of what, sir?" Yara asked.
He didn't answer. Because he didn't know.
By 04:00 GMT, the world had stopped pretending it understood physics.
Across Asia, auroras painted the skies above the Himalayas. Over California, satellites failed one after another. The Moon's orbit fluctuated by 0.002 degrees. And deep beneath Geneva, the Quantum Singularity Reactor automatically shut down after detecting "extradimensional interference."
Humanity's most advanced instruments whispered the same conclusion:Reality had developed a tear.
Inside the Division's Situation Room, a dozen world leaders flickered on holo-screens. The President of the United Earth Alliance leaned forward, her expression taut. "Dr. Grams. Is this an attack?"
Alex inhaled. "No, Madam President. It's not a weapon. It's… something else." He tapped the air, bringing up energy graphs. "The structure isn't radiating energy—it's absorbing it. We're observing massive flux in quantum vacuum density. Something's feeding from our dimension."
A long pause. "You mean it's alive?"
"Not in the biological sense," Alex said. "But something on the other side is maintaining it. That's intentional structure. It's not a natural phenomenon."
"What do we do?"
Alex looked up at the rift on the main feed. "We prepare," he said quietly. "Because whatever opened that—knows we're here."
At dawn, the first object emerged.
It wasn't a ship. It was a mountain.
The rift shimmered, and a massive stone structure—black as obsidian, carved with runes that glowed faint gold—drifted through like a ghost. Lightning crackled around it as it descended, stabilizing in midair over the Pacific.
"It's floating," Yara whispered. "Sir, that thing is the size of Manhattan."
Alex didn't answer. His mind was racing, pulling through decades of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and the classified files of Project Helios—the study of "dimensional resonance fields." Nothing matched this. Nothing.
And then the feed zoomed closer.
On the surface of the black monolith stood people.
Hundreds of them. Clad in robes that shimmered with threads of light, each holding weapons that looked forged from starlight and crystal. Their eyes glowed faintly, their presence distorting the air itself.
A cold silence filled the room.
"They're human," Yara breathed. "But… they can't be."
Alex zoomed in on one of the figures. A man, tall and calm, with hair white as snow and eyes like burning gold. He raised a hand, and the ocean below bent. Waves rose like walls, parting around the monolith.
"Gravity manipulation?" Yara whispered.
Alex shook his head. "No. That's not gravity."
"What is it, then?"
"Something older."
The broadcast went public three hours later.Social media erupted. News agencies called them "angels." Some called them "extraterrestrials." The world wanted explanations.
Alex gave none.
By afternoon, the floating structure drifted toward the coast of Japan. Earth's defense satellites tracked it, and when it crossed into restricted airspace, Protocol Zero was triggered. A plasma rail-cannon fired from orbit.
The projectile struck true.
For a heartbeat, the sky lit up brighter than the sun. The air split with thunder. And then, as the light faded… the monolith remained, unscathed.
The golden-eyed man raised his hand again.
In that moment, the ocean rose—and the rail-cannon melted in orbit.
"Impossible…" Alex whispered. "That energy output—it exceeds stellar fusion. He's rewriting molecular bonds."
Yara turned to him, voice trembling. "Sir, what do we do?"
Alex's jaw tightened. "We adapt. We don't understand it yet, but everything follows rules. Even this." He stared at the screen. "Get me Project Helios data—everything on quantum resonance fields. If they can bend reality, then reality can bend back."
That night, as cities trembled under auroras and the world teetered on panic, Alex stood alone in the observation deck of the Defense Division.
Beyond the glass, the rift pulsed like a heartbeat, painting the sky in shifting violet light. He pressed his palm against the reinforced glass, feeling the faint hum of dimensional interference.
"What are you?" he whispered to the sky.
The answer came not in words, but in presence.
For a split second, his vision blurred. He wasn't standing in the lab anymore—he was standing before endless mountains floating among clouds, rivers of golden light flowing through the air, and a massive palace suspended above a sun.
And in the distance, a voice echoed across eternity:
"Earth… has awakened again."
The vision snapped away. The rift flashed.
And for the first time in centuries, Heaven and Earth Qi flowed back into the human world.