The circular room was dim, the only light emanating from the massive dome ceiling above. Rows of empty seats, angled sharply backward, were arranged in concentric circles. In the center of the room, a large, intricate projector was aimed upwards. Above, the stars moved with epic slowness across the deep, uninterrupted blackness of the projected night sky. The faint hum of the projection equipment was the only sound in the empty space.
I sat down on one of the center seats, pulling Prince Baiyu down beside me. The seat was surprisingly comfortable, as though it was made for me. I noticed that Prince Baiyu hardly fit in his.
“Let’s just watch.” Something about the planetarium’s atmosphere made me whisper it even though we were alone.
He nodded, and we both looked up, waiting for the show to start.
The stars above us flickered, and then they were wiped away, leaving total darkness behind. A dark circle edged in white flared to life on the dome. To my surprise, the familiar strains of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sunrise, by Richard Strauss erupted from hidden speakers as a smaller, yellow circle emerged from behind the dark circle. I suppose it was literally showing a sunrise.
“Incredible music,” murmured Prince Baiyu from beside me, his eyes never leaving the sky projected above us.
I yawned. The combination of the darkness and the comfortable reclined seats was making me feel drowsy. Through heavy lids, I watched as the camera moved away from the sunrise and flew through Earth’s solar system and then into deep space.
The camera drifted through what seemed like an endless expanse of nothingness occasionally punctuated by the appearance of a star system, nebula, black hole, etc.
It was very pretty but also quite monotonous. I was mildly entertained by the music, which moved on from Strauss to various instrumental music. I recognized a few popular tunes, such as the Moonlight Sonata, the Ride of the Valkyries, and, bizarrely, the main theme from Star Wars.
We silently and patiently watched as the galaxies began to recede, dwindling into nothingness until an almost total void consumed the screen. It wasn't entirely empty, though. Here and there, almost imperceptibly, specks of matter, individual atoms, stray photons, drifted through the vast emptiness. The camera followed one such speck, a particle of space dust. It began a long journey drifting through space, occasionally colliding with and absorbing other stray particles, a single atom here, a molecule of gas there. Each accretion was infinitesimally small, yet over an unimaginably vast timescale, the dust grain grew. It became a pebble, then a tiny rock, no bigger than a pea.
Wait, how was I understanding what was happening when all I could really see were tiny specks of light in a vast darkness?
Looking around me in confusion, I suddenly realized that the other chairs were gone, and so were the walls. The dome above us now extended to the white marble floor, and the room was empty except for the projector and our two chairs.
I grabbed my boyfriend and whispered, “Hey… this is...”
He patted my hand. “Yes, the room has changed, but I don’t sense any danger. I believe this is a mental transcendental skill formation of some kind.”
“A what?”
“Do you remember the illusions at the Fox clan’s festival?”
“Right…” I let him go and sat back on my extremely comfortable chair. “Okay. I guess it’s just showing us the answers. Do you think this is the story of the creation of your world?”
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“Maybe.” He looked up and smiled. “It’s very interesting.”
Of course, this must be absolutely riveting to someone like him who wasn’t used to watching films, TV shows, and short-form videos.
I took out some vending machine junk food and drinks to share with him. We continued watching as I drank soda and munched on popcorn, cookies, and candy bars.
The pea-sized rock became bigger and bigger with glacial speed. Now that Prince Baiyu had explained that it was a mental illusion of some sort, I realized that apart from seeing the movie, there was also information or commentary about the show that I was somehow absorbing from who knew where.
The dome screen flickered, and I understood that the rock, through a mysterious mechanism beyond my comprehension, had gained a rudimentary sentience. Where before it had been randomly caroming around the screen gathering space dust, it was now purposefully seeking out more particles and absorbing them.
Even though this wasn’t shown on the screen, I could tell that it was now also absorbing something else. Something that I could never see: qi. The mental illusion was telling me that it was drawing primordial qi into itself. This wasn't physical matter, but an ethereal energy, the foundational essence of existence, and its absorption further fueled the rock's emerging consciousness and control over its surroundings.
This once again took quite a lot of time, and I kept on yawning, so I was forced to drink more soda to stay awake.
Things picked up a little bit when it encountered other life forms for the first time. They were voidlings like the rock, beings made of space dust and gas, but they were not as conscious as it was. They repelled its attempts to communicate by telling it in no uncertain terms to get out of their territories.
“They have zidan even in deep space,” Prince Baiyu whispered to me.
I made a soft sound of agreement and continued to watch.
Eventually, its travels took it to a planet that was teeming with organic life. They were only single-celled microorganisms, but the rock found the transitory nature of their life quite fascinating.
I almost choked on a potato chip. “How do I know what this stone is feeling?”
Prince Baiyu chuckled. “This is a masterful illusion.”
“Rocks have thoughts and feelings now…”
The next part made me sit up straight in my chair, junk food forgotten, as the space stone encountered numerous beings, from many different planets.
I turned out to be very right in saying that, since what followed was a fast montage of the rock exploring other planets that had basic life forms like trilobites, fish, fungi, and then, amazingly, dinosaur-like creatures.
Then it encountered even more interesting life forms in its travels. There were singing crystals who cast complex light and sound spells at him, amorphous gas aliens, and even reptilian people in a spaceship. It later discovered a species of sentient, telepathic fungi that communicated through pulsating bioluminescence, and colossal, deep-space leviathans whose bodies were living nebulae. It also saw microscopic, self-replicating nanobots that formed vast, intelligent swarms capable of terraforming entire planets.
“Slow down!” I yelled up at the screen. Turning to Prince Baiyu, I said, “It's going super fast now, but it spent hours on the nothingness of space!”
“Amazing.” His eyes never left the images projected on the dome. “Keep watching, there must be a point to showing us all of this.”
Rather than slowing down as I wished, the movie sped up even faster until it was now more like a slideshow of photos shown for mere seconds each time. Each quick picture showed something new and weird.
I tried to mentally note them down for future reference.
A person made entirely of living shadow.
A coral creature at the edges of a large island.
A shimmery, blob-like thing that kept changing its inner light.
A spindly, plant-like alien with feathery tendrils.
A creature that looked like a giant, floating brain with many small, darting eyes.
Then, just as my brain was about to be overloaded by too much information, it sped up even faster so that images were now flashing by in mere milliseconds, too fast for me to really see.
“Oh-”
The camera then stopped at a closeup shot of the rock. It was now a smooth, polished deep blue stone the size of a person. The screen went dark for a second, then the shot zoomed out and showed deep space before slowly zooming into a solar system that I recognized and then to a blue planet I was intimately familiar with.
It didn’t stop there. It went down the atmosphere into the land and to a place that I had never been, but had seen pictures of many times.
I jumped out of my seat, packets of potato chips and cookies dropping from my lap and onto the floor, forgotten, and screamed, “No way! It can’t be!”
“What is it?” Prince Baiyu was alarmed and embraced me as though to protect me from an unknown source of danger.
I pointed at text overlaid on the picture on the screen above us, making incoherent sounds of denial.
“Calm down. Take deep breaths. Tell me what you see.”
With great effort, I managed to speak a sentence before words failed me again. “That… the illusion is telling me that’s GodIAm!”
Author's Note:
Fragment of the deleted Earth portal path: