The pipe was winning.
Ryu had been lying on his back under the sink for twenty minutes, wrench locked onto a fitting that refused to cooperate, knuckles already bleeding from the second time he'd slipped. The water had been shut off at the main. The basement smelled like rust and mildew and forty years of his father's sweat soaked into the concrete.
"Ryu." His father's voice came down the stairs without its owner. "Client's calling again."
"Tell him it's done."
"Is it done?"
The fitting groaned. Ryu torqued the wrench another quarter turn and felt something give, not the joint he was targeting but something deeper, something behind the wall. A low vibration moved through the floor, traveled up his spine, and settled in his back teeth.
That's not normal.
He pressed his palm flat against the pipe. The vibration was rhythmic. Almost breathing.
"Dad."
No answer. He could hear his father upstairs, talking on the phone, laughing at something. The sound felt very far away.
The wall cracked.
Not the plaster, not the pipe. The air itself. A seam opened in the space between the hot water line and the cold, a vertical split that gave off no light but somehow made the darkness behind it visible, deep and humming and warm. Ryu stared at it. His wrench was still in his hand. His brain produced exactly one useful thought.
I am not getting paid enough for this.
The seam pulled. Not violently, not like a vacuum. More like standing too close to a current in a river, the subtle insistence of moving water finding the path of least resistance. Ryu had spent his entire professional life understanding exactly that kind of force.
He understood, two seconds too late, that he was the path.
The basement disappeared.
He landed face-down in mud.
Real mud. Deep, organic, fragrant with decay and wet grass and something underneath that smelled like mineral springs. He lay still for a moment, cataloguing damage. Nothing broken. Wrench still in hand. Toolbox gone. Dignity: pending assessment.
He pushed himself up.
The sky was the wrong color, a pale amber where it should have been overcast grey, and the sun sat too large on the horizon, throwing long copper shadows across a landscape that had no business existing forty feet below a residential basement in Osaka. Rolling hills. Dense forest at the edges. A cluster of low buildings maybe half a kilometer away, smoke rising from cooking fires.
Ryu sat in the mud and breathed for a moment.
Portal, he thought. Obviously a portal. Father always said the old pipes would cause trouble eventually.
He stood, assessed his inventory. Work clothes: steel-toed boots, canvas pants, long-sleeved shirt, tool belt. Contents of tool belt: adjustable wrench, tape measure, two lengths of copper fitting, a stub of plumber's putty, one compression coupler, and a folded invoice for a job he would now never submit. Phone: present, no signal, battery at sixty percent. Wallet: present, contents useless. Water bottle: clipped to his belt, half full.
He looked at the village.
He looked at the sky.
He started walking.
The village was called Mizutani, according to the wooden marker at its entrance, which was the first thing about this place that felt like a deliberate joke at his expense. The kanji were wrong, stylized in a way he didn't recognize, but the sound was right. Water valley. He filed this information and kept moving.
The smell hit him at the gate.
He'd worked in old buildings. He'd cleared drains full of things that had no names. He had a professional tolerance for bad smells that most people would consider pathological. This smell defeated him. He stopped walking, breathed through his mouth, and looked at the people moving through the market street with new eyes.
They were dirty. Not casually dirty, not end-of-a-workday dirty. Layered dirty, the kind that accumulates over weeks, over months, that becomes part of the texture of a person's skin. Women in rough cloth wraps, hair matted and tied back. Men in leather and wool that had never been washed. Children running barefoot through a street where the drainage was a shallow trench carved into the mud.
A man bumped into Ryu's shoulder and glared at him.
Ryu realized, belatedly, that he probably smelled strange to them too. Clean was foreign here.
He found the market stalls and spent ten minutes learning prices by pointing at things and watching the vendor's reactions. Bread. Dried meat. Something that might have been cheese. He had no local currency but his wedding ring, which he was no longer using for its original purpose, bought him enough food for two days and left the vendor looking confused and suspicious. Gold, apparently, was gold everywhere.
He ate standing up, watching the village work.
His professional brain, the part that had been running quietly since he landed, finally surfaced with a report.
There is no plumbing here. There is no organized sanitation. That trench is the sewer. Those barrels collect rainwater. The well is shared and the rope on the bucket is rotting.
He looked toward the hills at the edge of the village, where the copper afternoon light caught a thin curl of steam rising from the ground.
That, his professional brain said, with sudden and absolute certainty, is a geothermal vent.
Ryu finished his bread.
He thought about the portal, which had not reopened behind him. He thought about the invoice in his pocket, made out to a client who was currently waiting for a sink repair in a world that no longer contained Mizushima Ryu. He thought about his father's voice, laughing on the phone, growing distant.
He thought about forty years of accumulated water knowledge and the precise gap between what this village had and what it needed.
One month, he decided. I'll give it one month. By then someone will have figured out how to send me back, or I'll have figured it out myself.
He picked up his wrench and walked toward the steam.
The ground under his boots changed as he climbed, the mud drying to clay drying to pale stone shot through with mineral deposits. The steam was rising from a natural fissure, maybe three meters long, warm enough that he could feel it on his face from five paces away. He crouched and pressed his palm to the stone.
Hot. Not scalding. Consistent. Sustained by something deep and reliable.
He pulled out his tape measure. Measured the fissure. Looked at the slope of the terrain, the natural fall of the land toward the village, the cluster of large flat stones that a competent person could use as a foundation.
A voice said, directly behind him: "What are you doing?"
He turned.
A young woman was standing at the edge of the flat ground, holding a basket of dried herbs against her hip and looking at him with an expression that balanced equal parts suspicion and curiosity. Her clothes were the cleanest he'd seen since arriving. Her hair was pulled back in a severe knot. She had the look of someone who had once worked in a house where standards existed and had not forgotten what they felt like.
"Measuring," Ryu said.
"This land belongs to no one."
"Then it belongs to whoever builds on it first." He stood, tape measure clicking back into its case. "Do you know what's under this ground?"
She looked at the steam vent. "Heat."
"Hot water. A natural spring, deep enough to be reliable, hot enough to be useful." He looked back at the village, at the smoke, at the distant glint of the inadequate well. "This village has a water problem."
"The village has survived."
"Surviving and living aren't the same thing." He looked at her. "What's your name?"
A pause. "Kasuri Aine."
"Mizushima Ryu." He held out his hand. She looked at it without moving. He lowered it. "Do you want a job, Kasuri-san?"
"I don't know what you're building."
"Neither do I yet. But it starts with pipes and ends with hot water, and I promise it will be the most useful thing anyone has built in this valley in living memory." He tucked the tape measure back on his belt. "I'll need someone who knows where to source materials, who the difficult people in this village are, and how to manage other workers."
"You haven't said what it is."
Ryu looked at the steam vent. Looked at the village. Felt the familiar weight of a job that was too big and had to be done anyway.
"A bathhouse," he said.
Aine's expression shifted. Not toward enthusiasm. Toward something more complicated, the look of a person who understands immediately why an idea is both excellent and catastrophic.
"Lord Karashima controls the water rights in this district," she said.
"I know."
"You don't know yet. He has men. He has lawyers. He has the kind of patience that outlasts opposition."
"I have copper fittings and a compression coupler." Ryu picked up his wrench. "I've fixed worse situations with less."
She looked at him for a long moment. The steam drifted between them. Below, the village went about its fragrant business, unaware that its relationship with water was about to become complicated.
"Forty percent of the door revenue," Aine said.
"Twenty."
"Thirty-five, and I handle every noble client personally so you don't insult anyone important by accident."
Ryu considered this. "Deal."
She shifted the herb basket on her hip. "You're going to cause an enormous amount of trouble."
"Probably." He started measuring again. "The first course of stone should go here. Can you find a mason before tomorrow morning?"
She was already walking back toward the village.
Ryu turned back to the vent, pressed his palm to the warm stone one more time, and felt the deep reliable pulse of water moving through the earth below him.
One month, he reminded himself.
The stone hummed under his hand, steady and patient and completely unconvinced.