Space Gate

Your debit card account 2280 received yuan via interbank online banking on August 12. Balance after transaction: yuan.

Your debit card account 2280 paid out yuan online on August 12. Balance after transaction: 2,850 yuan.

Looking at the nearly 500,000 yuan in his WeChat Change account, Zhou Qi felt conflicted. An indescribable emotion lingered in his heart. He wanted to laugh, yet he also wanted to cry.

"Mr. Zhou?" Someone beside him handed over a sheet of paper. "Are you all right?"

"Uh, I'm fine, I'm fine. Just some dry eye."

"Would you like Dr. Sun, our resident physician, to take a look? Maybe prescribe some medicine?"

"That won't be necessary. It's an old problem."

"All right, then. Mr. Zhou, remember to come to Tongfu Hall if you get any good medicinal herbs. We'll offer you the best price..."

"Definitely, definitely!"

After leaving the pharmacy, Zhou Qi looked at his phone balance again, his feelings complicated.

Since graduating, he had worked in advertising, operations, and sales. He had been a streamer, a content creator, and a novelist. After failing miserably at that, he had gone to work in an electronics factory.

After more than five years of hard work, he had saved less than 40,000 yuan. Yet yesterday, all he had done was go out and pull a few dozen medicinal herbs from a garden, and he had traded them for 460,000 yuan...

Fortunately, he had been around the block and had strong psychological resilience. Otherwise, he might have turned into Fan Jin and gone completely mad.

Fan Jin at least had a wife and a father-in-law who could slap him back to his senses. Zhou Qi did not even have a girlfriend!

"Nearly 500,000 yuan... How am I supposed to spend it all?" For one brief moment, Zhou Qi had even considered dumping tens of thousands into a game and experiencing what it felt like to be a big spender.

Fortunately, his self-control was strong enough, and he had developed a habit of saving money over the years...

"I should send some money home first."

He had been away for five years and had rarely sent money home. Now that he had the chance, he actually felt an inexplicable sense of accomplishment.

He found his mother on WeChat, chose a transfer, and directly entered 200,000.

"Huh!" The system informed him that the daily transfer limit was 50,000...

Speechless. He had been poor for so many years that he had never even known that.

He changed it to 50,000 and made the transfer.

It was half past ten in the morning. His mother should still be at work and probably had no time to check WeChat, so she had not replied.

"Better than having to explain it." Zhou Qi shook his head, looked around, found a shady spot to sit down, then opened his phone again and downloaded a rental app.

He had wanted to move for ages. His current place was not only small, but poorly soundproofed. The neighbors were noisy, it was right beside a main road, and traffic roared past all day long. He could not sleep without earplugs.

"Seaside District, Beidun Community, 140 square meters, three bedrooms and one living room, fully furnished, move in with just a suitcase..."

The rent was 3,700 yuan a month, three times what he currently paid, but the place was five times bigger.

This one would do.

He called the number on the app, and the other side answered quickly.

"Hello, I'm calling about a rental. Is that 140-square-meter three-bedroom apartment in Beidun Community still available?"

"Yes, yes. May I ask your surname, sir? When can you come view the place?"

"I can come right now. I'm at the community entrance."

"Then could you wait for me outside Huimei Supermarket? I'll be there in five minutes!"

"Okay!"

After hanging up, he was in Jinsha District, not Seaside District. Whether by taxi or subway, it would take at least two hours.

Naturally, he could not get there in five minutes by normal means.

So Zhou Qi searched the map, found a public restroom within 150 meters, entered an empty stall, leaned back, and slipped into the Space Gate.

He emerged from a secluded alley in Beidun Community. He had worked and lived around here before, so he was quite familiar with the area.

That was why he could open a gate here.

If it were somewhere he had never been...

Then he would need to find a picture.

Half an hour later, the agent left with the contract, while Zhou Qi received all the keys to the apartment, the building access card, and the community entry pass.

He had finally moved into a larger place. Although it was not his own home yet, it was a good start!

He opened another portal in the room. On the other side was Zhou Qi's original rental.

It was only thirty square meters, with room for nothing but a bed, a desk, and a wardrobe.

A Huawei laptop sat on the desk, its screen lit up with an animated show paused on it.

Rick and Morty.

He had watched it to learn how to use a Space Gate, but later he discovered that his own Space Gate seemed much more useful than Rick's.

He placed the power strip, external keyboard, mouse, and mouse pad on top of the laptop, then carried everything through the portal to his new home.

The desk over there was not a computer desk either, but he was not picky. As long as it could hold a computer and work, that was enough.

Then came the bedding. He could have bought new ones, but taking the old ones downstairs to throw away was troublesome. He would have to go down and walk dozens of meters, and buying new ones was troublesome too.

He had been willing to walk before, but now that he had a portal, he could not be bothered to take even one extra step.

He could open a portal beside the dumpster, but there were surveillance cameras downstairs.

He would make do with them. Besides, he had only used them for half a year.

There were not many clothes in the wardrobe either.

Nanhai City was in the south, and winters were not particularly cold, so he only had clothes for spring, summer, and autumn.

Because he was poor, Zhou Qi rarely bought clothes. His oldest piece was from high school, while the most recent was an ERKE outfit he had bought during last year's Lunar New Year.

Half a box of unfinished instant noodles, an Erhu he had bought but never played, and a Longquan Sword he had bought online for 300 yuan.

There were also miscellaneous items like wind chimes, coffee mugs, and toiletries. One bucket was enough to pack them all.

Yes, the kind of bucket people carried when they packed up and ran.

An induction cooker, along with its matching pots, bowls, ladles, and utensils. He had bought them intending to cook for himself and save some money.

But later on, he found food outside tasted better.

"Hukou, you moving out?" His neighbor, Old Guo, heard the commotion and came over to watch.

Zhou Qi had not originally had a nickname. After The Wandering Earth came out, people started calling him Hukou because he shared the character Qi with the protagonist, copying the way Zhao Jinmai addressed him. Old Guo was merely following the trend.

"Yeah." Zhou Qi nodded. "I changed jobs."

"Why are you changing jobs again? Isn't your factory pretty good? I remember BYD's benefits are decent, right?" Old Guo asked. "If I weren't too old, I'd want to get in myself!"

Zhou Qi shook his head and ignored him. He stood up and shut the door.

Luckily, he had placed the portal around the corner behind the door, in a blind spot. Otherwise, it would have been seen.

That reminded him that he had possessed this superpower for too short a time. Although he had the awareness to keep it secret, he had not handled the details carefully enough. He needed to be more cautious.

"Right, that portal just now..." Thinking it over, he had traveled through the public restroom. Surely no pervert would install cameras in a men's restroom!

As for the community side, it was a storage area between buildings, with plenty of sand and gravel piled inside to block the view completely.

After moving everything, ending the lease, and calling his team leader to resign, it was already past three in the afternoon.

Zhou Qi lay on the sofa in his new home and rested for a while. Once his strength had fully recovered, he put aside his melancholy and finally had time to study his superpower.

He had no idea where this ability had come from. It had simply appeared while he was scrolling videos and watching movies.

With a thought, an oval-shaped doorway appeared before him.

It was not the kind of doorway from film and television, with blurry light filling the middle. It looked more like the portals used by mages in Marvel.

Only, there were no sparks around its edge. It was simply a clean, minimalist outline.

The outline was gray, as though someone had drawn a circle in the air with a gray pen. One side of the gate was where he stood, while the other side led somewhere else.

Through the gate, he could directly see the scene beyond it. One step through, and he would be in another world.

The medicinal herbs he had sold for money had been pulled from another world.

Yes, that was right. Another world.

The first Space Gate he had opened did not lead somewhere else on Earth. It led to another world. Nor was it some unfamiliar world. Based on his initial judgment, it should have been the One Piece World.

However, he heard human voices and, in his panic, fled immediately without lingering.

Afterward, he discovered that the Space Gate could not only lead to other worlds.

Any place he had been to or seen, he could open a Space Gate to it.

Seeing did not merely mean within his line of sight. Photos and videos worked too. However, if he was traveling around Earth, it had to be something that existed in reality.

For example, he had just opened a Marvel movie and wanted to visit an alien planet, but the gate failed to open. Even if it had opened successfully, it probably would have led to some Hollywood set.

For now, gates crossing worlds could only go to One Piece. He had not figured out how to travel to other worlds. Perhaps some condition had not been met?

Furthermore, seeing something was not without limits. He could see the sun, but that did not mean he could travel to it.

After some simple tests, he discovered that it was related to resolution. He needed to see a clear enough image to distinguish flowers, grass, and trees before he could open a gate there.

He enlarged publicly available satellite maps online again and again. Even when he could see blurry human figures on the streets, the gate would not open when he tried to travel there.

But high-definition photos taken by photographers or clear images captured on a phone worked fine. Even if the image had been edited, as long as it was not too outrageous, he could still go there.

As for the maximum distance at which he could open a gate, he had not tested it yet.

He had tried going from Nanhai City to Tianjin, a distance of 2,000 kilometers, and the gate opened as usual.

It was not that he could not test farther destinations. He simply did not know of any sufficiently secluded places. If he traveled into a crowded public area, his ability would be exposed.

There was actually another suitable destination: the moon. There were plenty of high-definition photos of the moon online, but unfortunately, he did not have a spacesuit.