Plenty of pedestrians passed by the building, but none of them so much as glanced at it.
The official Sanctum line was that magic was woven into the structure itself. Even if a regular civilian did see the building, the spell would scrub it from their memory. Without a specific marker, no ordinary person ever walked through that door.
Doesn't feel like Earth's dimension… Daisy gave it a careful read. The Sanctum's frequency was completely different from everything around it. If she had to force a description, it sat at a slightly higher dimensional layer than the rest of the city—how much higher, she couldn't say, but the gap was just enough that the average human brain couldn't register the signal.
What she didn't realize was that her exchanges with Dark Phoenix were also a cross-dimensional phenomenon. The difference: one was unreachably high, the other was merely near the upper end of what she could tolerate. That was all.
Self-satisfied that she'd cracked the so-called "magic," she turned her attention to the building itself.
From outside, it looked like a perfectly ordinary three-story townhouse. The exterior walls were a little weathered, the doors and windows shut tight. But the giant State Grid logo on the third floor told Daisy she had the right address.
She climbed the front steps and gave the door a light knock. Inside two seconds, both wooden panels swung slowly inward.
She stepped into the main hall. The room ran maybe three hundred square meters and sat in dim half-light, but the aged furnishings had been arranged with care—murals, porcelain vases, all of it adding warmth rather than dust. Every two meters along the walls, an oil lamp burned in a soft yellow glow that seemed to flicker in time with the visitor's breathing.
Daisy held her breath for a few seconds. The flames steadied. She inhaled—they trembled.
Motion-sensor lamps? Pretty advanced. The Sanctum's founder had really committed to the mystique.
The fat sorcerer she'd met once before seemed to have known exactly when she'd arrive. He was already waiting in the hall. Seeing her open her mouth, he cut her off.
"We'll talk upstairs. Come with me."
Today he wasn't in robes—he was wearing what looked like ancient peasant garb, a coarse hemp tunic that bared two thick arms, a cloth belt at the waist. The man could time-travel to feudal China, pick up a hoe, and start farming without a wardrobe change.
Still, that outfit, paired with his slab of a face and his thick barrel waist—throw a pair of short axes in his hands, and he'd look more intimidating than the robes ever did.
"Wong." The fat sorcerer pointed at himself, in case she'd missed it. That's my name.
"We're not the bad guys." Walking ahead of her, Wong tossed it off in English. Yeah? Daisy thought, I'm currently absorbing HYDRA. I'm not exactly the good guys either.
She'd long since pegged him. Ancient One dies—this guy lives. Doctor Strange dies—this guy still lives. Not the strongest, but absurdly lucky.
She gave her own name, and the two of them headed up the stairs to the second floor. They passed several robed, hooded sorcerers along the way. None of them acknowledged the pair, and Wong made no introductions. Both sides pretended the other didn't exist.
The mutual mistrust was thick. They were just hiding it from her, the outsider.
Conflict's pretty sharp, she thought, half-amused. Politics, everywhere you go. She followed Wong up to the third floor.
The left side of the third floor was the chamber of relics. They were headed for the parlor on the right.
Out of the corner of her eye, Daisy caught the spread of magical artifacts inside the chamber, including the cloak that would one day belong to Doctor Strange. She tilted her head for a better look—and felt nothing. She and the magical objects had no chemistry. They sat there inert, dead-quiet, not a single resonance.
Wong, walking ahead, took it all in without changing expression.
Together they'd climbed ninety-nine steps from the ground floor to the third, and now they stood in the parlor, looking out through the State Grid logo at half a city block.
"How much does Ms. Johnson know about this world?" Wong asked, in Chinese.
Daisy paused for a beat. His Chinese was good—standard, much better than Madame Gao's, the diction crisp, very close to standard Mandarin.
She had an Asian face. She was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. No reason to feign ignorance. Looking at the room's antique aesthetic, she pitched her voice in a faux-classical register, not quite offering a cupped-fist salute. "Pray, do tell."
Wong almost choked on his own saliva. Luckily he had a thick neck—he forced the swallow down.
He coughed. "Ms. Johnson's Chinese is excellent. You must have put in serious work. What I mean to say is—there are dangers in this world that ordinary people can't see. Things even your S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't know about."
"Speakest thou in earnest?"
"…Ahem. I do, I do. Are you familiar with magic?"
"I would hear thy tale." Daisy sketched a very masculine cupped-fist salute.
Wong's slab of a face twitched. He held it for two beats and finally couldn't take it anymore. "Let's just—talk normally. There are a lot of words I can't really get across." He switched to English.
Daisy gave a short, curious "Oh," and waited.
"This is…" Cut off twice in a row, Wong didn't quite know how to start.
"What a spiritually attuned young woman. Allow me." Just then, a wash of golden light rippled through the air a few meters behind them, and a bald woman in a bright yellow robe stepped through it.
"Master!" Wong half-bowed with visible emotion. The bald woman waved him off—you can go.
Daisy had been half-expecting the Ancient One. After all, Daisy had saved Wong; by both sentiment and reason, the Ancient One had to appear and say a few words.
But the Ancient One's energy made Daisy's chest tighten. She'd assumed it would feel something like the Mandarin's. Looking at it now, the two were fundamentally different.
One was a surging river. The other was an unimaginably wide ocean. To a mortal eye, both were beyond description, but the substance was on different scales—the quality might be similar, but the quantity wasn't even close.
What's more, the Ancient One's energy carried a faint, pent-up violence that she was holding down by sheer will.
In Daisy's perception, the Ancient One was a walking superpowered energy core. Her body radiated golden lines in every direction; every second, she pushed out waves of overwhelming power. A single lift of her hand, a single step forward, sent shockwaves rippling through Daisy's frequency-sense. Daisy, who navigated the world by frequency, found it physically painful. She quickly pulled her senses inward, narrowed her eyes, and turned her head to the side.
"Show some respect to the Master!" Wong snapped, furious. He read the head-turn as rude, and was already regretting having dragged the Master in.
"It's fine. That's a normal reaction. Let her adjust. You go on—bring us two cups of tea." The Ancient One's face was lean and severe, her clothing plain. She sat in a chair and slowly, deliberately reined in her overflowing magic.