A mine.

  Not just any mine.

  One of those abandoned tunnels where the air reeks of damp rot, rusted iron, and that sharp, chemical bite—like a lab accident left to fester.

  Silence? Yeah, but the wrong kind. Not the quiet of empty space. A silence too thick. Like the air itself was holding its breath.

  I blinked.

  Nothing.

  No darkness. No light. Just… visual noise. Not static. Not snow on a dead TV. More like when you press your palms into your eyes and the photons smear into jagged patterns—except I wasn’t pressing. My eyes were wide open. And the noise wasn’t going away. It pulsed. A CRT monitor on its last legs, but worse.

  Because it wasn’t in front of my eyes.

  It was inside them.

  — Fuck.

  My voice echoed back, but wrong.

  Too flat. Too dry. Sound waves hitting something invisible before they reached my eardrums.

  I coughed. Dust—if that’s what it was—didn’t scratch my throat. It slid down my trachea, smooth and cold, like mercury.

  I raised a hand.

  Nothing.

  Well, not nothing. Something. A blurry shadow, edges refusing to stay put.

  My fingers moved—I felt the tendons flex under skin—but the silhouette in front of me stayed approximate, like a half-erased sketch.

  I clenched my fist. The shadow followed, a beat too late.

  — OK. So… blind? No. Not blind. Broken. Like my eyes were picking up wavelengths that shouldn’t exist.

  Or maybe… maybe I’d broken something. Something fundamental. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but the "what if we just yeeted it out the window?" version.

  I sat down on what might’ve been dirt. Or a rock ledge. Hard to tell. Under my palms, the surface was both rough and smooth, like two textures overlaid but refusing to merge.

  I tapped my fingers. A click. Not an echo.

  A click—sharp, like I’d pressed a keyboard key.

  — Great. Spacetime consistency error. Just what I needed.

  I took a breath. Air went in fine, but came out sluggish, like it had to navigate obstacles I couldn’t see. My exhale formed a cloud—or what should’ve been one—but instead of dissolving, it lingered, suspended like ink in water.

  — Alright. Hypothesis one: I’m dead. Verification—

  I pinched my arm. Pain hit, sharp and immediate.

  — Nope. Not dead. Hypothesis two: mass hallucination. Except I’m alone. Hypothesis three: dream. But I’ve never dreamed with this much useless detail.

  I groaned.

  — Hypothesis four: I fucked up. Badly.

  Silence. Then:

  — Really badly.

  At first, it was just a glow.

  Not light—no, photons I knew. They were polite. Obedient. Predictable.

  This was something else. A distortion. A hole in the visual noise, and behind it, something breathing.

  I crawled toward it.

  Not toward it. Toward him. Because the closer I got, the clearer it became: this wasn’t a light source. It was a structure.

  Tall—at least two meters—vaguely conical, with facets reflecting… what, exactly?

  Not the yellowed lamplight from the research mines in Romania. Not the blue glow of lab screens.

  No. These reflections moved.

  Not like flames. Like algorithms. Patterns reconfiguring in real time, as if the crystal’s surface was a screen displaying reality’s source code.

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  — OK…

  I stopped a meter away. Close enough to see details, far enough to avoid getting my face melted off by whatever-the-hell-this-was.

  The crystal—quartz, obviously, though its structure was too perfect to be natural—hummed deep in my bones.

  Not through my ears. Through my sternum. Like a subwoofer pressed against my ribs.

  I reached out.

  Hesitated.

  — If I die to this, I’m gonna be pissed.

  My fingers brushed the surface.

  Cold. Freezing. But not like ice. Like… a chunk of mineral carved from vacuum itself.

  Under my skin, nerve endings fired—not from cold, but from data.

  Because suddenly, my brain was flooded with schematics—angles, atomic bonds flickering like faulty neon signs.

  I yanked my hand back.

  — Holy shit.

  The quartz hadn’t shocked me. It had… recalibrated me.

  Because now, I saw.

  Not like before. Not like a normal human. Now, I saw both:

  The mine: striated walls, dark veins of ore, the damp seeping through cracks, the smell of wet stone and oxidized metal.

  The other mine: a 3D grid of bright points connected by trembling filaments—atoms and their bonds, but stripped bare, like someone had flayed the world’s skin to expose its wiring.

  And then… it.

  That inconsistent cloud?!

  It was everywhere. Not like gas. Not like liquid. Like golden foam seeping between atoms, filling voids, breathing in time with them. In places, it pooled into vibrating nodes—knots, maybe?—that seemed to… wait for me.

  — So… I see atoms. Great. Except—I swallowed—except I shouldn’t. Not like this. Not without a scanning tunneling microscope. Not without…

  My voice died.

  Without having broken physics.

  I put my hand back on the quartz.

  This time, I didn’t pull away.

  — Guess we’re getting to know each other, you and me.

  The crystal let out a chink—almost a laugh. Or maybe that was just my sanity shattering into neat little pieces.

  — Perfect. My first friend in this mess is a rock.

  Leaning against the quartz, fingers dug into cold dust, I let my head fall back. The rock was hard, uneven—the only fixed point in this chaos. The crystal pulsed faintly under my palm. A mechanical heart, or an overheating quantum sensor.

  Flash.

  My lab. The smell of microwaved coffee, the blue glow of screens casting diffraction patterns on the walls. Colleagues in white coats, eyebrows raised.

  — Paul, you left graphite samples all over the bench again. Looks like a crime scene after a failed experiment.

  — That’s because it is.

  A smirk. They shook their heads, but they smiled too. Because, hell, sometimes it worked.

  Flash.

  The sensor. That jury-rigged prototype—scavenged parts, a shoestring budget, three sleepless nights. Cables snaking like veins, the red laser cutting through the vacuum chamber. My reflection in the reinforced glass: dark circles under my eyes, hands trembling just a little.

  — You sure this is a good idea?

  Léa’s voice, skeptical but fascinated.

  — No. But it’s the only idea I’ve got.

  A click. A low hum. Then—

  Flash.

  Reality unzipping.

  Not like fabric. Like an equation solving itself backward. Walls turned translucent, streaked with golden filaments. People—Léa, the others—faded, replaced by clouds of light points, probabilities refusing to collapse. Their voices became distorted echoes, like radio transmissions caught between dimensions.

  — Fuck…

  I closed my eyes. Too late. The image was burned in.

  I opened them slowly. The mine was still there. The quartz too. And me, sitting like an idiot, talking to myself in the dark.

  — Alright. Recap. I messed with a quantum sensor. I literally broke Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—because of course that’s the problem when you try to measure and modify at the same time—. And now I’m stuck in a mine that probably doesn’t exist, seeing atoms with my naked eyes, and my only buddy is a crystal that vibrates when I touch it.

  Fantastic.

  I pulled a quartz shard from my pocket—I always carried some now—and started scratching equations into the dirt wall. The tip scraped, leaving shaky white lines.

  — Hypothesis 1: What I’m seeing looks like the old "Ether" legends. Though it’s more like an unstable interatomic cohesion force. A kind of quantum glue holding the world together…

  — Hypothesis 2: It—Ether—reacts to conscious intent. Like a magnetic field, but for thoughts. Except I’m not a magnet. Then again… maybe I am.

  — Experiment: Locally alter a crystal’s structure—this quartz, say—and see how it reacts.

  — Expected result: Either I learn something, or I blow up the mine. Both equally likely.

  I stepped back, eyeing my work. The symbols seemed to float, overlaid with their own atomic lattice. Like a double exposure.

  — Well. At least I’m not bored.

  The narrow shaft leading… somewhere.

  I got up, joints cracking like the Ether had seeped into my tendons. Or maybe I’d just been crouched too long.

  I rubbed my hands on my cargo pants—stained with dirt and white streaks, probably gypsum—and took a hesitant step forward.

  The tunnel was low, damp, striated with mineral veins that glowed faintly under the Ether’s golden haze.

  In places, stalactites hung like rotten teeth. Others gleamed, packed with quartz or calcite, filtering the strange light into blue halos.

  I reached for one. My fingers brushed the smooth surface.

  — If I get electrocuted by a magic stalactite, I’m gonna be so pissed.

  Nothing happened. Just a faint tingling in my fingertips, like static.

  — So… not magic. Just weird.

  I kept going.

  The ground was uneven, littered with rock debris and broken crystals that crunched under my boots. Each step sent ripples through the Ether around me, like walking through an invisible spiderweb. Sometimes, a vibration traveled up my calves, resonated in my bones.

  Maybe it’s just exhaustion.

  Or maybe the Ether was reacting to me. Like a curious animal.

  I stopped dead.

  Ahead, the tunnel opened into a small cavern. At its center: a rock formation shaped like an arch, studded with black and gold crystals. The Ether swirled there, coiling like smoke in a draft.

  — Oh. Hey.

  Not an exit. Not exactly.

  But it was something.

  I approached, fingers twitching. The arch wasn’t natural. Well—technically, it was made of rock. But the crystals were arranged in precise geometric patterns—nested hexagons, logarithmic spirals. Like someone had sculpted the Ether into shape.

  Or like the Ether had sculpted the rock.

  — So… either a door or a trap.

  I reached out.

  My palm grazed the crystalline surface.

  A clang rang inside my skull—not in my ears. A gong inside my cranium.

  I jerked back, tripped over a rock, landed on my ass.

  — What the—

  The cavern was gone.

  In its place: a forest.

  — Breathe.

  Hit by sudden exhaustion, I passed out at the foot of a tree.