Astral Apostle

Zhou Jing gets home from another failed job interview and finds his whole family sitting there waiting for him, quiet in a way that immediately feels wrong, and that's how he finds out their household got picked for compulsory interstellar immigration, a policy that ships people off to new colony planets whenever the government can't hit its voluntary migration numbers. Only one person from the family actually has to go, and by the time he sits down, they've already decided it's him.Nobody in that room is pretending it's a fair pick. His older brothers have jobs and lives they're not giving up, his younger siblings are too young to even be an option, and his dad's already talking about how this could actually help his career, like Zhou Jing leaving is a convenient favor to the family rather than a life getting upended. "You don't have anything keeping you here anyway," his father says, and Zhou Jing doesn't even have a real argument against it, because on paper, that's true.So he goes, and that's supposed to be the whole story, an unemployed graduate getting shipped off because his family ran the numbers and he came up expendable. Except once he's out there, he ends up with access to strange vessels that can move between entirely different realms, and suddenly he's not just relocating, he's living as someone else entirely in worlds that shouldn't have anything to do with the one he left.The strange part is how those worlds keep circling back to the civilization he got kicked out of, like his old life wasn't as small and ordinary as everyone at home assumed, more like the starting point of something nobody saw coming, least of all him.