Chapter Three: Gatekeepers in the City

By the sixth hour after his awakening, Lin Yan had learned three things. First, he did not change gravity itself. Within a radius of roughly twelve meters, he changed the direction in which objects followed the curvature of spacetime. The larger the field, the greater the error. Second, living things resisted more than dead matter. Consciousness appeared to take part in the vote that defined down. Third, after seven consecutive uses, he lost spatial orientation completely. An eighth attempt would make him believe he was falling into the sky even while lying on the floor. Su Mi recorded the findings on paper, never in an electronic file.