The Great Migration of Ten Thousand Cities

The cities in this world can starve to death. Earth-breath constantly flows deep beneath the land. If a city stays in one place too long, the soil gradually withers. So humanity built homes, schools, hospitals, factories, and city walls atop mobile city platforms. When the earth-breath runs low, the whole city is dismantled and follows a migration route to the next habitable stretch of land. The City of Resting Lights had been here for twenty-three years. Everyone thought it could stay at least two more. Then a routine inspection produced a new result: In eighty days, the earth-breath would fall below the critical threshold. Worse still, none of the four migration routes planned for the City of Resting Lights could be used anymore. One hundred and twenty thousand people had nowhere to go. But Ji Heng, a twenty-one-year-old apprentice migration architect, discovered a route marker buried beneath the old district. It had been there for three hundred years. It bore just three words: The Road of No Return. Every map said there was no road there. Ji Heng asked only one question: “Then why did someone walk this way before?”