A door. What was a door? A door was an object placed in a barrier that allowed passage between one place and another. A house door was a door, a township gate was a door; even lifting a carriage curtain could count as a door.1

Following that logic, perhaps any threshold at all might have been considered a door. If you entered some new place, be it a cave or even a closet, you had effectively stepped through a door.0

Yet no matter which door you crossed, you never arrived at your intended destination; you ended up in the carpenter’s workshop instead.0

And the carpenter had work to do. That work was you. He was waiting for you.0

Li Yuan and Pang Yuanhua were not fools. Both of them realized that this carpenter’s workshop represented a terrifying curse.0

Unless they did something, they would have had to live in the open, avoiding anywhere with doors. They would even have had to watch out for twisted branches in a forest that might have arched together to form a door.0

They’d have had no choice but to live in a place so vast that there was no chance of crossing any kind of threshold.0

But would that really have guaranteed their safety?0

They knew too little about the carpenter’s wo...0