Destinies : Connected by Fate✔️

Chapter 1

'What is happening?' It's the first thought that crosses Zhang's mind as soon as he opens his eyes. 

Soon after he had made his last call to the General, his father, he had lost control of his ship. The ship's power had gone out, and he had felt his ship being pulled into the black mass of nothingness. 

That is all Zhang remembers when he wakes up on the floor of the ship's main deck, right next to the floorboards of the control panel. He slowly sits up and looks around, he notices a few things right off the bat. First, that he was not dead. 'Thank the almighty Buddha.'  Second, the ship's power was back, and it was in perfect condition, at least, according to the preliminary examination. 'Maybe it was not a wormhole, after all.'

It is when Zhang switches on the navigation panel that he spots the first issue. 'This doesn't make a lick of sense.' he whispers.

The system tells him that he was about five minutes away from Earth. 

As a man of science, Zhang didn't believe in coincidence. He was sure that he had left his solar system far behind when he and his crew had encountered the wormhole. So he couldn't be just five minutes away from home. He wonders what might have happened to the wormhole and how long had he been unconscious?

With all these questions swimming in his mind, he opens the shades of the window. 

What he sees is indeed Earth. His Earth... But his mind tells him that it couldn't be that. Surely he must be imagining the blue globe in front of him. 

He runs to the tiny medical bay of the ship and checks his vitals. 

Yep, he was in perfect physical condition. 

That meant that what his eyes were witnessing was indeed not a hallucination. He sprints back to the main deck and checks the fuel tank. 

As luck would have it, the tank has just enough fuel to make it to Earth. 

Without a second thought, he charts a course for his home. 

Of course, in his excitement, he fails to notice that the oceans on 'this Earth' were not as blue, that the continents were a little differently shaped, and that a translucent layer covered the huge blue masses that occupied almost eighty percent of the planet's surface. 

*****

The closer Zhang gets, the clearer the picture in front of him becomes. He can clearly see the translucent layer. This close, they looked like a thin layer of clouds. 

As the ship enters the planet's atmosphere, it jerks a little, as if it had bumped into something. But Zhang tells himself that it might just be the thrusters malfunctioning for a second.

Of course, at that time, Zhang doesn't realize that the thrusters were perfectly fine, and what he had bumped into was not something but someone.

When he descends further, he slows down to observe what lay under the thin layer of clouds. 

'The hell is this.' He thinks, looking at the giant, magnificent palaces and tourism-worthy gardens suspended over what was supposed to be the East China Sea! 

He decides to hover near the area and take a closer look at it. He cloaks his ship, making it invisible, and tries to get closer, but a force field stops him from entering the place that he could only describe as paradise. 

The more he observes, the more it amazes him. Then he witnesses something that takes his breath away: humans- at least, these beings looked human- flying on swords, dressed in ancient Han Dynasty costumes. 

'I must be dreaming.' Zhang reckons, shaking his head in disbelief. He moves to the control panel once more and commands it to give readings of the entire planet, all the while thinking that he should have done it before setting the course for the said planet. 

The first thing that the reading shows is that it was the year 2420. 

'That can't be right. The panel must be broken.' He concludes and continues to observe, only to find that there were many more things he had failed to analyze. 

The planet had five continents, not seven, like his Earth had. Also, though these continents looked similar to Earth's continents from afar, now that he was paying attention, they were not that similar at all. 

 The air density and gravity on land were the same as on his planet, but the gravity and air density were a little different on the masses floating on the seas... Yes, there was more than one. 

The one that is in front of him is the larger of the two. It is like a cluster of islands sprinkled over the entire eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans. 
 He observes that each landmass could be described as an island, connected to the other with bridges. The island in front of him is the biggest one. It was attached to almost ten similar, albeit smaller islands, through these bridges suspended in the air just like the landmasses. 

The other set of clusters is suspended over the Atlantic Ocean, in a similar pattern, right in between where North America and Europe would have been on his home planet. 

It is then that he comes to the stark realization that the planet he had set a course for was not his Earth at all. 

{Author's Note:- Word count 913

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