The walkway had no railing.
That was the first thing Zhao Wei noticed. The second was how far down the clouds were—not above him, but below. The entire bridge (if one could even call it that) was more like a spine of ancient stone balanced between two points that had no business being connected. It stretched out above nothing, suspended in a sky that extended in every direction at once. There was no ground visible. There hadn't been for a while.
"Dang." He pressed himself a little closer to the centre of the path. "If I fell from here, not even my bones would be in one piece."
"Well," Bai Feng said cheerfully from behind him, waddling along without any apparent concern for the lethal drop on either side, "it's magic. So there's nothing to worry about."
"Right. Magic."
"Kid." Bai Feng's voice shifted into something closer to sincerity. "This is a special region. No one can save you if you fall. So perhaps don't lean out over the edge like that."
Zhao Wei straightened up very quickly.
"…Is that the case?"
"That is the case."
He kept walking. The sky around them was enormous and pale. Somewhere ahead, the bridge ended at a wide circular platform that floated in the middle of all that open air like something that had decided the rules of physics were merely suggestions. It was made of flat, spiral-patterned stone, and at its edges were the beginnings of what looked almost like additional floating platforms—as though an entire school campus had been built at impossible altitude by people who had never heard of safety codes or gravity.
Zhao Wei stared at it, then glanced at Xue Lian walking beside him. She moved as if the drop did not exist, her dark hair trailing behind her in the cold wind that swept across the bridge.
"Is that it?" he asked. "Onus?"
She glanced at him once but said nothing. Which he was beginning to understand meant yes.
He looked back at the platform. Something was already moving on it—a small, bouncy, energetic shape making its way toward the end of the bridge to meet them.
The girl had a tremendous amount of hair.
It was pale and curly and seemed to have a mind of its own, piled high under an elaborate hat that also appeared to have opinions. She was crouching at the end of the bridge when they arrived, peering at Zhao Wei with the undisguised curiosity of someone who had been waiting for something interesting to happen and had just decided it had.
"Ooo~!" Her eyes lit up. "Could this be Zhao Wei? And Lady Xue Lian of the Demon Clan!" She popped to her feet, clasping her hands together. "I just got the call. My name is Luqi. I've been waiting for you."
Zhao Wei blinked at her energy. "H… hi."
Luqi beamed at him and then turned to usher them forward across the platform with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done this many times and still found it delightful every single time. "Welcome to Onus! From here on, you'll have to follow the registration rules and get your magic level measured."
"Magic level," Zhao Wei repeated. "How do you—"
"Okay~!" Luqi spun around and pointed to her left with absolute cheerfulness. "You'll have to put your hand in this baby's mouth."
"…Baby?"
He followed the direction of her finger.
What he saw was not a baby.
It was large. Very, very large. It had a face like something assembled by a committee of creatures that had never agreed on what faces were for. Its mouth hung permanently open—not in greeting, but as if it had decided that staying open required less effort. Several teeth that Zhao Wei considered excessive under any reasonable metric gleamed inside.
"Where," he said carefully, "is the baby?"
Luqi patted the creature with fond authority. "Into baby Fenrir's mouth. Here—the mouth~"
Zhao Wei turned to Bai Feng with the specific expression of someone who needed independent confirmation that what he was seeing was real.
Bai Feng shrugged. "Beyond Realm is a strange place. I must've lost my senses somewhere along the way. Sorry."
Then, before Zhao Wei could form any kind of workable response, Bai Feng placed both hands on his shoulders and shoved him forward with considerable force.
"Like this!"
The world tipped. Zhao Wei's face came extremely close to the inside of the creature's—Fenrir's—mouth.
"UUUUAAAAHHHH!!"
It hurt. It hurt in a very specific way, as though something were reading his bones from the inside out. He was not quiet about it. For a long moment, the sound of his objections echoed across the floating platform and out into the wide open sky of Beyond Realm.
When it was finally over—when Fenrir had finished measuring him—he staggered back several steps and stood with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.
"Weird," Luqi said thoughtfully. "It's not supposed to hurt~"
"It hurt," Zhao Wei said.
"It really doesn't for most people."
"I am aware," he replied, "that I am apparently not most people."
Bai Feng appeared at his elbow, looking suddenly worried in a way that had nothing to do with the pain. "Hey. It really doesn't hurt? Hmm…" He was watching Fenrir. The creature had gone quiet in the particular way things do when they have something significant to say and are figuring out how to say it.
Luqi tilted her head. "Your turn, Fenrir." Her voice had lost a little of its brightness. "What's his magic potential?"
Fenrir opened its mouth again. A low, deliberate sound emerged. Luqi leaned in to listen, and her expression went on an interesting journey—starting at mild curiosity, passing through confusion, and landing somewhere between disbelief and outrage.
"How much is that?" Bai Feng asked.
Luqi looked at Zhao Wei, then back at Fenrir, then at Zhao Wei again.
"Zhao Wei's magic potential is…" She swallowed. "Five Yugen."
Silence.
"Five," the servant repeated.
"Five Yugen."
"Not fifty."
"Five."
A beat.
"LIES!!" Bai Feng's composure evaporated completely. His face turned an impressive shade of red. "Not even fifty—five?! How could you give a number like that to a necromancer Lady Xue Lian made herself?! Five Yugen! The only things with lower numbers than that are the bugs crawling around Onus!!"
"Fenrirs are exact," Luqi said, with the patience of someone reciting a policy she had repeated many times. "Their measurement of magic potential is more accurate than anything else. To suggest that Lady Xue Lian's necromancer is that worthless—"
The air changed.
Not dramatically. Not with sound or a flash of light. It simply changed, the way a room changes when someone inside it has decided something.
Xue Lian had not moved. She stood exactly where she had been standing, arms at her sides, her expression precisely what it always was. Yet something in the quality of the stillness around her was different, and both Luqi and Bai Feng registered it in the same half-second.
"Luqi," the servant said quietly.
Luqi cleared her throat. Her voice dropped to something respectful. "…Are you sure there is no mistake?"
Fenrir made a sound. Luqi listened, then looked up.
"There is none."
She clapped her hands together, returning to professional brightness with visible effort. "Examination for registration is complete! This is the badge for Onus." She extended a small, flat token marked with a symbol that Zhao Wei didn't recognise. "Now you can go to the principal's office and get assigned to a teacher. Bye~"
A small explosion of dark smoke accompanied her exit. When it cleared, she was gone.
Bai Feng exhaled a long, deeply personal sigh.
Zhao Wei looked down at the badge in his hand. It was lightweight and looked, despite everything, perfectly ordinary.
Five Yugen. He turned the words over in his mind the way one does when trying to decide whether they should hurt. Lower than the bugs.
He thought about Zhao Ming's face. He thought about the promise he had made on a rooftop above Beijing, with the city spread out grey and enormous beneath him.
He closed his fingers around the badge and slipped it into his pocket.
"Right," he said. "Where's the principal's office?"
The grounds of Onus were not what he had expected.
He had expected something that matched the Gate—the chains, the dark sky, the feeling of weight, age, and power that had pressed down on everything since he arrived in Beyond Realm. Instead, past the registration platform and down through a wide passage that smelled of cold stone and something green, he found trees.
Not ordinary trees. These had trunks the diameter of houses, with bark that had been growing so long it had developed its own geography. Roots erupted from the earth and bridged their way across the path like architectural features. The leaves were so dark and heavy they barely moved in the wind, and light filtered through them in long, pale shafts that made everything look like the inside of somewhere ancient and deeply considered.
Zhao Wei stopped walking for a moment and simply stared.
"…So lush," he said to nobody in particular.
Bai Feng gave a wheeze that might have been agreement.
"Hey," Zhao Wei said, falling back into step. "How much further?"
"We're already in the school," Xue Lian said.
He looked around. The path continued through the enormous trees in both directions. There were no buildings visible—no classrooms, no halls, nothing that looked like what he understood a school to be. Just the trees, the roots, and the pale filtered light.
"There's nothing here," he said. "No buildings or anything. Wait, is it—"
He stopped.
Something small and round was sitting in the path ahead of them.
Small was relative. It was the size of a boulder. But compared to what Beyond Realm had shown him so far, it was compact. It had enormous, round eyes and a smooth, featureless face, and it sat in the middle of the path with the serene immovability of something that had been there for a very long time and saw no reason to change.
"What's this?" Zhao Wei leaned forward, charmed despite himself. "It's surprisingly cute."
"Don't pay it any mind, kid," Bai Feng said quickly. "Those are the guards of Onus."
Zhao Wei looked at it more carefully. It looked back at him with those enormous blank eyes. It did not move.
"A guard," he repeated. "This small, cute thing is a guard."
"Yes."
A pause.
The Guard of Onus continued to look at him.
"…Okay," Zhao Wei said finally, and stepped around it.