The rot reached his front legs on the third morning.

  He'd been tracking it the way you'd track water damage in a ceiling. First the discoloration, dark patches spreading forward through the scales at the compression line. Then the softening, the flesh beneath the scales going pulpy where the decay enzymes had outpaced the crude qi channels' ability to hold them back. Then the smell, sweet and wrong, layering over the pine-and-ozone air of the Basin until every breath tasted like something you'd find under a porch in August.

  He didn't remember August. He knew what rot smelled like in heat.

  The left middle leg stopped responding at dawn.

  Not gradually. One step it worked, the next it didn't. The crude qi channel feeding the limb simply ran dry, the energy rerouting to the organs it could still protect. Triage. The body was performing its own triage, shutting down the periphery to preserve the core. Smart. Efficient. Exactly what he'd been doing manually for two days, except now the body was doing it without his input, which meant the situation had moved past "manageable decline" into "automated emergency protocols."

  He had hours. Not days. Hours.

  The cliff ledge where he'd been sheltering offered a clear view of the valley below. The river with its dual-flowing current. The tree line. The route where he'd watched the cultivator group pass two days ago.

  No one was on the route today.

  He ate the last of the cross-layer moss he'd stockpiled, grinding it with jaws that moved slower than yesterday. The qi trickle from the dissolved Surface-portions was barely detectable now. His channels were too degraded to process it efficiently. Fuel into a cracked body.

  Something moved in the Echo.

  He went still. The Brown-Tooth's vibration-sense, running on its last reserves, picked up the tremor through the stone ledge. Deep. Rhythmic. The same signature as the thing that had tracked him two days ago. The one that had pressed against the thin spot from below and tested the barrier with the patience of something that didn't need to rush.

  It was back.

  Closer. The tremors came through clearer on exposed rock than they had through the forest floor. The thing was directly below the cliff, moving through the Echo layer's offset geography, following a trail he couldn't see but knew he'd left. Two days of dragging a rotting half-body across stone had deposited biological waste into every thin spot and fold he'd crossed.

  He'd moved to the cliff to stop leaking into the Echo. But the old trail was still there. And the thing below had been patient enough to follow it to its end.

  The stone beneath him vibrated harder.

  A thin spot, fifteen feet to his right, began to shimmer.

  Not the slow bulge from before. This was different. The spatial boundary went from stable to translucent in seconds. Something dark pressed against it from below, and this time it pressed with intent. The membrane between layers stretched upward, thinned, and tore.

  A head emerged.

  Eyeless. Scaled in patterns that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. The snout was flat and wide, nostrils that could have fit his entire body inside one of them, flaring open to pull air from the Surface layer. Tasting it. Tasting him.

  The thing had the proportions of a salamander built by someone who hated proportions. Body longer than three Brown-Tooths end to end, limbs squat and powerful, claws that hooked into the rock where the Surface and Echo layers met and held the creature half-in, half-out of reality. Its back half was still in the Echo, still below, visible only as a shadow through the thinning spatial boundary.

  It pulled itself further through the thin spot. The boundary tore wider. Rock cracked where the claws gripped.

  He couldn't run. One working front leg and one partially functional middle leg. The back half was dead weight connected to his living front by three inches of tissue that was actively decaying.

  The creature's nostrils flared again. Its head turned toward him.

  Twenty feet away.

  The Brown-Tooth's body locked into prey-freeze. Every remaining muscle rigid. Every crude qi channel shut down to reduce spiritual emissions. The body's last evolutionary gift, when you can't run, disappear. Be still. Be nothing. Be a rock that smells like a rock, and maybe the thing with no eyes will move on.

  The creature didn't move on.

  It pulled another three feet of itself through the thin spot. The front claws released the torn rock and reached forward, dragging the body across the ledge with a wet scraping sound that was, horribly, almost identical to the sound his own rotting back half made when he crawled.

  It was smelling. Following. The trail of decay he'd left on this ledge for two days was a highway marker pointing directly at the hollow where he'd been sleeping.

  Ten feet.

  His jaw clicked. The threat call. Involuntary, stupid, the Brown-Tooth's panic reflex broadcasting his position to anything within earshot.

  The creature's head snapped toward the sound.

  He ran.

  "Ran" was generous. He lurched off the ledge with his one working front leg and threw the Brown-Tooth's body weight forward over the rock's edge. The cliff dropped six feet to a lower shelf. He hit it, rolled, felt something in the compression zone tear further, and kept moving.

  Not away from the creature. Toward the spatial fold.

  The crease in reality where the Brown-Tooth had originally died. The compression fold between the boulders. Still there. Still shimmering faintly where Layer One and the Echo pinched together.

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  He didn't have a plan. He had an observation that the creature was half in the Echo and half on the Surface. It existed in both layers simultaneously while pushing through a thin spot. The fold ahead compressed both layers together into a seam.

  If the creature entered the fold while split between layers, both halves would be compressed into the same seam.

  He didn't know if that would kill it. He didn't know if the fold was strong enough to hold something that size. He was a dying lizard running toward a crack in reality and hoping the crack was sharper than the thing behind him.

  The creature followed. Fast. Four legs on the Surface now, the back half dragging free of the torn thin spot with a sound like wet canvas ripping. It was fully through. Class 2, maybe Class 3. The Brown-Tooth's limited spiritual sense couldn't measure accurately, but the pressure of the beast's qi pushed against his fading channels hard enough to make the body's remaining leg buckle.

  Twenty feet to the fold. The creature covered ground three times faster than he could.

  Fifteen feet.

  Ten.

  He could feel the fold now. The compression zone's distortion pulled at his body, the same force that had killed the original Brown-Tooth, tugging at the seam where his living half met his dead half.

  Five feet.

  He threw himself between the boulders.

  The fold caught him. The compression squeezed his body at the seam, the spatial boundary pinching tighter around the already-ruined midsection. Something tore. Something final. The last connective tissue between front and back separated.

  The back half dropped into the Echo. Dead weight falling through a spatial crease into the layer below. Gone.

  The front half, freed of the drag, tumbled through the gap between the boulders and out the other side. One front leg. Half a torso. A head with brown teeth and one working eye.

  Behind him, the creature hit the fold.

  The compression caught it mid-stride. The spatial boundary that had pinched a lizard-sized creature into two halves now clamped down on something the size of a large dog. The fold wasn't strong enough to cut it, but it was strong enough to HOLD it. The creature's front legs were on one side of the compression, its back legs on the other, and the seam between them tightened like a belt cinching around its midsection.

  It thrashed. The boulders cracked. The fold shimmered violently, the spatial boundary fluctuating under the strain of containing something with actual spiritual energy.

  He didn't wait to see if it held.

  He dragged what was left of himself away from the boulders, one leg clawing dirt, half a body's length per stroke. Twenty feet. Thirty. Behind him, the creature's thrashing sent vibrations through the ground that made his remaining organs shudder.

  The fold wouldn't hold it long. The beast had qi. It could force the compression open. Minutes, maybe less.

  He reached the cliff edge. Below, the forest. The route. The river.

  The body was done.

  Not dying. Done. The front half, freed from the anchor of the decaying back, was losing qi faster than the channels could circulate. The single front leg was already weakening. The eye was dimming. The Brown-Tooth's limited consciousness, whatever animal awareness had been running underneath his occupation, was shutting down system by system.

  Get out.

  The imperative hit harder than the first time, in the forest, with the Brown-Tooth's corpse fresh and the channels still holding. This time it was desperate. The body wasn't a dying house. It was a house on fire.

  Get OUT.

  He didn't know how. The first time, entering had been instinct. Pushing through the membrane, finding the channels, flooding in. Leaving should be the reverse. Push out. Find the boundary where his awareness ended and the body's began. Pull free.

  He tried.

  Nothing. He was integrated. Three days of occupying the Brown-Tooth's spiritual architecture, crude as it was, had woven his form into the channels and pathways. Leaving wasn't pulling free of a glove. It was pulling free of skin that had grown over stitches.

  Behind him, the creature's thrashing changed pitch. The spatial fold was losing cohesion. Seconds.

  He pushed harder. Found the seam between himself and the body. Not physical. Spiritual. The place where his blue-white glow met the Brown-Tooth's fading qi and the two had tangled together over seventy-two hours of shared survival.

  He tore.

  Pain. The first real pain he'd experienced in this world, not the dull ache of a decaying body but the sharp, white-hot sensation of something alive being separated from something it had grown into. The Brown-Tooth's remaining channels collapsed as he pulled free, the body's last qi dissipating in a rush of warmth that he absorbed involuntarily on the way out.

  He was free.

  He was nothing.

  A blue-white smear, dimmer than three days ago, hovering an inch above the body of a dead half-lizard on a cliff edge in the Basin's outer ring. No weight. No smell. No warmth. No gravity telling him which way was down. No eyes, but a perception that took in everything in a flat, gray, dimensionless sweep.

  The body below him twitched once. Residual nerve signal. Then it was still. Just meat. Just scales and teeth and one brown eye that stared at the layered sky without seeing it.

  Something in him reached toward it.

  Not strategic. Not practical. The body was gone, used up, worthless. But it had been HIS. For three days it had been the only physical thing in this world that belonged to him, and now it was cooling on a rock and he was formless again and the void was pressing in from every side and the absence of weight, the absence of HAVING A BODY, was so total and so sudden that the grief response fired from the residue before he could stop it.

  He'd felt this before. The warm stone. The NICU. The specific shape of losing something small.

  Then the fold behind him shattered.

  The creature tore free. The boulders split apart. The spatial compression released with a shockwave that he perceived as a ripple in the spiritual dimension, a distortion that washed over his exposed form and sent him tumbling through air he couldn't feel.

  The creature's head swung toward the dead Brown-Tooth. Nostrils flared. It found the body, sniffed it, pressed its flat snout against the cooling scales.

  Then it paused.

  The nostrils worked. Pulling scent. But the scent was wrong now. The rot-trail it had followed for two days ended here, at this body, but the body didn't smell like what it was tracking. The decay was there. The biological waste was there. But the OTHER thing, the warm thing, the thing that had been living inside the decay and leaving a spiritual signature mixed with the physical trail, was gone.

  The creature circled the body. Sniffed the rock. Circled again.

  It couldn't find him.

  He was formless. He had no body to emit scent, no qi channels to leak spiritual energy, no physical presence to detect. A Míng Chóng outside a host was invisible to anything below Nascent Soul perception. The creature, for all its size and patience and hunting instinct, was Class 2 or 3 at best. A rat-eater. A scavenger of the Echo layer. It couldn't see him any more than it could see the wind.

  It ate the Brown-Tooth's remains. Efficient, thorough, cracking the skull between flat jaws for the marrow. Then it slid back through the shattered fold into the Echo and was gone.

  He hung in the air above the cliff.

  Alone. Formless. Fading.

  The body was gone. Every piece of it. Eaten. The creature had consumed the Brown-Tooth's last remains and left nothing but a smear on rock.

  His first host. Three days. A shed with no plumbing. Gone.

  The glow that was his existence pulsed weaker. Without a host, the survival clock was running again. Hours. He had hours before the form lost cohesion and he dissolved into the Basin's ambient qi like salt into an ocean.

  He needed a body.

  The river below. The route. The cultivators he'd watched passing two days ago. People traveled these paths. People died on these paths.

  He drifted off the cliff.

  Below him, in the Echo, something moved through the river's sub-surface. Thin, pale, serpentine. Not the predator. Smaller. Dozens of them, slipping through the offset water in a group of translucent bodies that glowed faintly with consumed spiritual energy.

  They were converging on a point upstream. All of them, moving with purpose, drawn by something he couldn't see from this distance.

  Where those things gathered, something had recently died. He didn't know how he knew that. The instinct, fully awake now, fully his, read their movement the way a vulture reads the circles of other vultures.

  Something dead upstream. Something with a body worth entering.

  He followed the pale shapes in the Echo.

  The clock counted down.

  The Basin stretched out beneath him, vast and golden and broken, and he had no body and no name and no time and one chance to find a corpse before he became one.