EVERYTHING THAT EXISTED SOMEWHERE ELSE FIRST
A directory of original work, and the worlds in the Atlas that grew out of it.
What this is
99 Worlds did not start from nothing. Part of it comes from work the author had already written: a stage musical, several works of fiction, essays and poems, a body of hand-painted illustration, and years of notebooks. This page lists them by form and by year, and says which world in the Atlas grew out of which.
Not all of it is here. Private material involving living people — family history, journals, unpublished drafts — is not listed and will not be published. The worlds that grew from that material are wholly invented and stand on their own.
Stage musical
《東歸蓮花傳》The Eastward Lotus — first draft 2017, second draft 2018, world-bible and script 2026. Six acts and a precor. Three languages share one stage and are never translated for each other, and that failure of translation is the play.
- Became → World 001, The Eastward Lotus, the only world in the Atlas with a livery of its own.
Fiction
- 《西夏拓撲學：關於遺忘的編年史》, serialised 2026. An architect walks a seven-layer labyrinth to erase his love for a machine; erasure never deletes, it only makes another version. Became → World 037, The Versioning Clinic
- 《米亞的無時之旅》. A winged guide leads a traveller through cities on the eve of their loss; at dawn the guide dissolves and one object remains. Became → World 036, The Dawn Salvage
- 《十三封未寄信》. Thirteen letters that were written and never sent. Became → World 035, The Thirteen-Year Post
Essays
- The Synthetic Tao, January 2026. Cultivation read as compute: qi is bandwidth, ascension is migration, and heaven is a data centre nobody has seen. Became → World 046, The Server Sect
- On the sirens, from the notebooks. What they sing is not the future but everything you failed to keep. Became → World 042, The Song of What Was Not Kept
- On Borges and artificial intelligence, April 2026. Sampling temperature as the forking paths; the circular ruins as nested agents.
- Building your own system of artistic metaphor, January 2026.
Poems and short prose
- 「所有路徑的盡頭」 — At the end of all paths
- 《羅馬萬神殿》 — one opening in the roof, and nothing else.
Painting
All sixteen plates for World 001 are watercolour and ink on paper: a four-panel hero, four character scrolls, two cast plates, four places, two house banners and three peoples. No image on that world is machine-generated.
Notebooks
Years of notebooks: concepts, childhood fantasies, settings begun and abandoned. In September 2026, sixteen of them became worlds. Five of those are listed above under fiction and essays; the rest are here. They share one move: turn a private ache into a public institution.
- 032 九歲之約 The Ninth Birthday
- 033 需薪 The Needing Wage
- 034 回禮 The Return Gift
- 038 景權 The Sightholders
- 039 長刻 The Long Hour
- 040 探親週 The Visiting Week
- 041 聽者為準 The Hearer's Law
- 043 會死的機器 The Mortal Machines
- 044 遺膳 The Last Table
- 045 三日帳 The Three-Day Tent
- 047 命牌 The Dealt Hand
Two earlier ones come from the same notebooks, written in childhood:
- 002 樓上城 The City Upstairs
- 003 萬孔 The Ten Thousand Bores
The rest of the Atlas
The other worlds do not come from earlier work. They were written for the Atlas itself: one premise, followed all the way down. The method and the rules are on the about page.