I jolted awake.

  No gradual stirring. No cottony haze where you wonder if you actually turned off your alarm.

  No. Just a click in my skull, like someone had plugged a cable directly into my visual cortex.

  The sky was a sickly blue—not saturated, but washed out, like bleach diluted too much. Gray streaks marred the azure, like celestial scars.

  I blinked. The sensation didn’t fade.

  — Fuck.

  My voice sounded wrong. Too high-pitched. The air vibrated differently here, warping sounds before they hit my eardrums.

  I tried to sit up. My arms trembled. Not from fatigue—no, it was like my muscles resisted, as if they had to fight an invisible force just to obey my brain. The earth beneath my palms was damp, but not the usual organic dampness. It was soft, almost spongy.

  I forced my legs to hold me.

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

  Then, a reflex, almost forgotten: I reached into the inner pocket of my jacket.

  The fabric was torn, but the notebook was there. Stiff, protected by a waterproof plastic sleeve. My thick lab notebook, filled with useless neutron diffraction schematics. And tucked into the spiral binding, a pen with a built-in flashlight. Because in my old life, you never went into unstable terrain without writing tools.

  I swayed.

  My balance was off—not like after three beers. Gravity felt slightly misaligned. The ground tilted imperceptibly to the left. I raised a hand to steady myself against the oak’s bark.

  That’s when I felt it.

  A hum.

  Not in my ears. In my bones.

  I pulled my hand away from the trunk.

  The tree’s outline shimmered. Not a sturdy oak, but a stunted specimen, its branches twisted like arthritic fingers. The bark peeled away in patches, revealing lumpy wood covered in resinous pustules.

  Reality had two overlapping layers: the first, normal, the one everyone sees—the rough bark, the green leaves, the gnarled branches.

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  And the second… that one was a network of glowing points connected by golden filaments, like a giant spiderweb, but in three dimensions, gently oscillating.

  Just like in the mine. I thought I’d dreamed it, but it was still here.

  I blinked. Once. Twice. Nothing changed.

  I reached for a dead leaf resting on a half-buried root. My fingers brushed its surface—

  And passed right through.

  It was immaterial. No. It was like trying to grab smoke: my hand went through, but I felt resistance. The leaf was made of unstable gel. A slippery, almost oily sensation lingered on my skin.

  I took a step back. My foot struck a rock. I looked down.

  The rock was there. Gray, ordinary, covered in lichen.

  But when I squinted, I saw the other layer: a cluster of atoms bound together by golden threads, vibrating slightly, each molecule a tiny captive sun. And between them… something flowed. A pale mist, nearly transparent, clinging to the atomic bonds before vanishing.

  — Ether?…

  The word came to me without knowing why. As if part of my brain had always known it.

  My teeth felt too present in my mouth. I could sense each one, their nerves, their roots, their microfractures.

  — I’m going to wake up…

  I took a breath. The air filled my lungs with unnatural precision. I felt each alveolus expand, each capillary activate. It was too much. Too much information. Too many details.

  — It’s like looking at the world through a giant microscope on an acid trip.

  I closed my eyes.

  The hum in my bones didn’t stop.

  My pockets.

  I plunged my hands in, frantically searching. My wallet was there—empty, of course, because of course. My phone too, but the screen was cracked, and when I tried to turn it on, nothing. Not even the startup logo. Just a dead reflection.

  — Great.

  Then my fingers brushed something smooth. I remembered.

  The quartz.

  The raw chunk, thumb-sized, that I’d been carrying since I arrived in the mine.

  I grabbed it and pulled it out.

  The light—the normal light—struck its surface, and for the first time since waking up, I remembered its strange property. Solid. Stable. I could already feel it pulling me out of this world that seemed made of jelly and live wires.

  I clenched it tighter in my palm, increasing the contact.

  Pain.

  Not a burn. Not a sting. A pressure, like someone had driven a red-hot nail into my forehead. I groaned, my knees buckling, nearly collapsing. But I didn’t let go of the crystal.

  Then…

  The chaos slowed.

  Not gone. No. It was like turning down the volume on the atomic noise saturating my perception. The golden filaments were still there, but they no longer danced frantically. They breathed, slowly, less oppressive.

  I opened my eyes again.

  The forest was still there.

  But now, I saw it differently.

  The trees were no longer blurry masses overlaid with their atomic structure—no, it was as if the two layers had merged.

  I saw both the oak and its molecular network, as if someone had drawn the blueprints of its structure directly onto its surface. The bark was rough, yes, but now I understood why—the grooves matched areas where ether pooled, like miniature rivers flowing along the trunk.

  I raised my free hand.

  It was there. Really there. Not an illusion, not a ghost. My fingers, my veins, my ragged nails—everything was solid. But overlaid on that image was the other: my cells, my atoms, my chemical bonds… and between them, that pale mist pulsing faintly.

  — Okay. I can reverse the process.

  I’ll have to find more quartz, test them.

  This crystal translated the chaos into something comprehensible.

  — I can see the invisible.