In the spaces where transformation had not spread, where humanity maintained its original form, existence had become something like living in a museum. The Preservation Zones were not prisons, though some of the humans trapped within them viewed them that way. They were carefully maintained spaces where the old rules of reality still applied. Where time flowed in a single direction. Where individual identity remained absolute and separate from all other identity.
Elena Vasquez had been one of the first to refuse the transformation. She was a cultivator, but not one of the high-level practitioners who had been distributed across the barrier points. She was a middle-tier cultivator who had spent her life in South America, training students, maintaining the knowledge of the cultivation arts,
