It was supposed to be last year. Then early this year. I lost count of how many times I chose to wait a little longer, because it was not ready. At some point, the counting stopped mattering, and the doing was the only thing left.

There is no triumphant feeling. What I feel, mostly, is that a thing that needed doing has been done. And immediately behind that feeling is the next one: the second book, the third, the fourth. The work does not pause to celebrate itself.

It is a little like laundry.

You finish one load, wait for it to dry, put it away. Within a few days the pile is building again, and you know it is almost time to start the machine over. That is what writing a series feels like from the inside.

Today is the second of two rare consecutive days off. Tomorrow the alarm goes off early. I need to prepare lunch for my family before I leave, and pack my own. The morning will be ordinary in every way except that somewhere, a book that did not exist two years ago is now available to anyone who wants to read it.

If that is you: thank you for being here.

The Unveiling Passage is available now.

Begin Here

That is where this story and I began: not at the beginning, but at the end. Most writers start by searching. I started by knowing where I needed to arrive, and then turned around to find the path back. It is less like writing a story than excavating one. The shape of it already exists somewhere. My job is to brush away what covers it, carefully, until something true becomes visible.

That is the agreement. I will follow where this leads. I will stay faithful to what I see, even when I am standing in territory I have never personally inhabited.

And there is a great deal of that territory.

I have never experienced the kind of awakening my characters move through. I have never lived in Shanghai. I have never played competitive games. My protagonist is a young man in his twenties, and I am neither young in that way nor a man. Every day I write, I am writing from outside my own direct experience.

But I have come to understand that this is not a limitation. It is, in a strange way, a condition.

Because I cannot rely on memory or assumption, I have to remain in a particular kind of attention. I have to invent the physical world around them with precision: which street they walk down, what they order on a sleepless night, the small nervous habits they carry without knowing it. None of this comes from the characters directly. It comes from me. But it has to be built to fit what they are, not what I prefer.

I watch them. They accompany me.

In the hours between shifts, or in the deep quiet of a night when the rest of the house has gone still, I push open that door into their world. It is a place where they are in charge, and I am the one trying to keep up.

I am not building their story so much as recording a fragment of it. This story holds centuries within it, from the Ming Dynasty philosopher whose ideas gave these people their way of seeing, to the distant years when the last of them will have grown old and gone. What I have agreed to write is seven years of that span, 2022 to 2028. That is my portion. That is the window I was shown.

So I made one promise: to follow where the story leads, even when I do not know the ground. To keep my hands steady. To not look away from what is difficult to see. And to walk, one book at a time, toward the ending I have been carrying since before I began.

The Unveiling Passage is the first step: Book 1 of The WAI Series.

It arrives on June 10.

That was the whole problem, at the beginning.

The people at the center of this series do exactly two things: they witness, and they illuminate. Simple enough. All I had to do was find the English words that matched, put an “and” between them, and see what the first letters spelled.

The first attempt was “observe” and “inspire”.

OAI. Or IAO, if I flipped the order.

I sat with both of them for a while. Neither worked. It wasn’t a meaning problem. The words themselves were accurate enough. It was a texture problem. Three vowels stacked against each other produced something soft and slightly sticky, the kind of sound that dissolves before it lands. This world I was building had a particular quality to it: cool, precise, unhurried. The name needed to carry that. OAI and IAO did not.

Then “witness” arrived, and everything shifted.

The moment it replaced “observe”, something clicked into place, not gradually, but all at once, the way a lens finds its focus. WAI. It stood up on the page. It had edges. It sounded right in English and in Mandarin both, and in a story that moves across different Chinese cities, that mattered.

Inspire gave way to “illuminate” shortly after. Not because “inspire” was wrong exactly, but because it carried a slight evangelical quality, suggesting someone being uplifted from above. “Illuminate” was quieter. More lateral. Closer to what these people actually do: not pushing light toward someone, but removing what obscures it.

Witness and Illuminate. Witnesses and Illuminators. WAI.

Yes, it is.

I thought the work of naming was done, but the word was not yet finished with me.

The name began to say things I hadn’t put into it.

In English, WAI lands a breath away from two of the oldest questions a person can carry. The Way, a term the Western world long ago borrowed from Chinese philosophy to translate 道 (Tao), represents the path, the underlying current of things, and the direction that cannot be forced. And Why, the question underneath all other questions, is the one that never resolves but only deepens.

A name that holds both of those at once. I hadn’t planned it. But once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it.

Then the Chinese layers began to surface. In Mandarin, wài (外) means outside, signifying what lies beyond the boundary and stands apart. The WAI exist precisely in this position: they move through ordinary life completely unseen, perpetually outside the frame of what most people notice. And yet the philosophy they live by is Wang Yangming’s school of mind: nothing exists outside the mind. They are the outsiders whose entire practice points inward. That tension, I think, is the whole story in a single character.

In Cantonese, wai (圍) carries a different resonance: encirclement, a protective boundary, the way people gather around something worth keeping. For Hong Kong readers, it echoes further still. There are places in the city with ‘wai’ in their names. The kind of coincidence that stops feeling like coincidence.

Farther out, in Thailand, wai is a gesture. Both palms pressed together at the chest, a slight bow of the head. No words. It is how people greet each other, thank each other, show respect — without touch, without force, without demand. When I learned this, I thought: that is exactly how the WAI move through the world. Hands at the chest. Present. Still. Not reaching.

And then, in the Māori language of New Zealand, wai simply means water.

I have carried water with me for a long time without knowing it.

My surname, 沈 (Shěn), is built around the radical for water. And for years, one passage from the Tao Te Ching has stayed closer to me than almost anything else I’ve read: the highest good is like water. Water benefits everything without competing. It flows toward the low places others avoid. It takes the shape of whatever holds it, without losing what it is.

I didn’t choose a name that meant water. But my name carries water, and the name I found carries water too, and the philosophy at the center of this whole series has always been, at its root, about learning to move the way water moves.

Some names you select. Some names recognize you first.

WAI is not just an acronym. It is, I’ve come to believe, a small proof of something the story has been trying to say all along: that meaning doesn’t have to be manufactured. Sometimes you only have to stay quiet long enough to hear what’s already there.

The Unveiling Passage, Book 1 of The WAI Series, is available now.

That story had lived on a Chinese platform, updated in installments, read by people who cared about it enough to leave comments I still think about. When the last chapter went up, I thought I was done. Then a reader asked about a moment that had happened before the story began, and I started turning that question over in my mind.

I began drafting an extra chapter. A coda, I told myself. Just a small thing.

It wouldn’t come. Not because I had nothing to write, but because what kept appearing on the page didn’t belong to that story anymore. The feeling was subtle at first, then impossible to ignore: the image I was reaching for existed outside the framework I had built everything inside. The spirit was familiar. The characters felt like people I knew. But the narrative had already overflowed the boundaries of that original world.

So I stopped. I let those two characters stay where they were, in that fictional summer, in that borrowed world. I closed the document and left them there.

They didn’t stay.

Over a year later, an image returned. Someone sitting quietly in a crowded place, watching the lives of strangers, belonging to a hidden community that existed just beneath the surface of the ordinary world. When it first arrived, I thought: perhaps the extra chapter has finally found its shape. Perhaps this is the continuation I couldn’t write before.

It wasn’t.

What I was looking at was something new. The two figures at its center resembled people I had known in my previous story, but only the way a person resembles their younger self in an old photograph. They were the same, and entirely different. They shared the same instincts, but they had grown entirely different bones. In this new world, they had their own faces. Their own histories. Their own way of moving through a city without being seen.

One book became the shape of what I was holding. Then another. Then the outline of a whole fantasy series, with cities I had to learn from the outside in: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, the coast near Ningbo. Ordinary streets, office buildings, late nights, takeout getting cold. And beneath all of it, a hidden current: a group called the WAI, who move through the world without interfering, who watch for the quiet moments when something in a life begins to shift.

Before I had written the first chapter in the first book, I already knew the last scene of the final book. What I had in front of me was not a mystery to solve, but a distance to walk, one book at a time, toward something I could already see waiting at the other end.

The Unveiling Passage is the first step of that walk. It is available now.

This Substack is where I write around the edges of that journey: the architecture behind the world, the questions the story keeps raising, the fragments that arrived too late or lived too far to the side to fit inside any chapter.

Those two characters, Husky and Fox, finally have a place that is entirely their own. This space belongs to them now, too.

If you’ve read the first book, some of what I write here will feel like a door left slightly open.

If you haven’t, it might feel like standing outside one.

Either way, you’re welcome to stay.

For every Why, there is a Way.

This is The WAI.

The WAI is where every Why unfolds into a Way.

If you are drawn to quiet perception, you are welcome here.