My knees hit the grass before I realized I was falling.

Air rushed out of my lungs like I’d been punched from the inside.
My heart hammered wildly,
each beat landing in the most fragile part of my chest.

The edges of my vision twitched—
frames dropping,
as if reality couldn’t load fast enough.

“…Damn… that was too hard…”

I pressed both palms against the ground,
feeling the faint tremor running through the soil.
It wasn’t the wind.

It was the pull again.
Sharper.
Hungrier.

I swallowed and forced myself upright.

All I wanted this morning
was to confirm one thing:

Whether I was actually getting stronger,
or if yesterday’s feeling was just adrenaline lying to me.

I wasn’t chosen.
I wasn’t the protagonist of some destiny.

Back in Taiwan,
I was just that ERP support guy in the corner of an office—
the invisible cog that gets ignored until something breaks.

Now?

Now space trembled when I breathed wrong.

I exhaled slowly.

The delay surfaced—
a thin veil slipping over the world,
distorting the frame for just a fraction of a second.

(0.18 seconds.)
Longer than yesterday.

The air thickened around me,
pressing in from all sides
like the atmosphere was trying to decide whether to hold or release me.

A symbol flashed in front of my eyes.

Clear.
Angular.
Alive.

Not a hallucination.
Not a glitch.

A language
trying to finish loading.

My fingers twitched toward it.

The symbol responded,
brightening for a heartbeat—
then shattering into thin static.

Space snapped back.

My body nearly buckled again.
I grabbed the bench beside me
and forced my breathing into rhythm.

Patch emerged from behind a bush,
tail flicking with visible irritation—
the kind reserved for humans doing very stupid things.

“Yeah,” I muttered between breaths.
“I know. I pushed too far.”

Patch didn’t deny it.

The pull inside my chest pulsed once more—
not as an attack,
but like a rope tightening,
reminding me it was still there.

Still connected.

Still waiting.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

Getting stronger wasn’t the question anymore.

The real question was:

Stronger toward what?

And why did it feel like something out there
was pulling the same thread from the other side?