Later that night Strange opened a package the overly optimistic physical therapist had sent him. He didn’t believe there would be anything useful in it. The guy was probably just telling him stories to motivate him. When he pulled the folder out of the envelope, the first thing he saw was a sticky note: Told you so!

He started reading the file. Then he read it again. Then he realized that if he were the kind of person who apologized, he would owe the therapist an apology. Instead, he went looking for the patient from the file. It wasn’t easy to find him—​Strange wasn’t a detective by any means, and one person in a city of millions could be hard to find.

Finally, Stephen found the patient playing basketball at a public court near the river. He was running, jumping, even talking trash to the other players. “Come on, man! Where is the competition?” He laughed.

Stephen called out to him from the other side of the fence surrounding the court. “Jonathan Pangborn,” he said. The tall man with dark hair and a short but unkempt beard turned to look at him, puzzled to hear a stranger calling his name. “C7–​C8 spinal cord injury, complete,” Strange added.

“Who are you?” Pangborn asked.

Strange kept talking, mostly because he couldn’t believe this was the same person he’d read about.

“Paralyzed from the mid-​chest down. Partial paralysis of both hands.”

“I don’t know you,” Pangborn said.

“I’m Stephen Strange. I’m a neurosurgeon. Was a neurosurgeon,” he corrected himself.

“Actually, you know what, man?” Pangborn came close to the fence. “I think I know you. I came to your office once. You refused to see me. I never got past your assistant.”

“You were untreatable.”

Pangborn smirked. “No glory for you in that, right?”

“You came back from a place there is no way back from! I...​I’m trying to find my own way back.” He held up his hands so Pangborn could see them and understand.

Pangborn paused, considering. “Hey, Pangborn, you in or out?” one of the other players called. He waved for the next game to go on and walked around the fence to meet Strange.

“All right,” he said. “I’d given up on my body. I thought my mind was the only thing I had left. I should at least try to elevate that. So I sat with gurus and sacred women. Strangers carried me to mountaintops to see holy men. And finally, I found my teacher.” He spoke with the quiet intensity of a man who has been through something remarkable—​something he thinks no one will believe, and doesn’t care if they do. “And my mind was elevated. And my spirit deepened. And somehow...”

“Your body healed,” Strange finished. It was an incredible story, unbelievable. Nothing in medicine or science said it was possible. And yet there was Jonathan Pangborn, walking.

“Yes,” Pangborn said. “And there were deeper secrets to learn then, but I did not have the strength to receive them. I chose to settle for my miracle, and I came back home.” He looked away over the river, then quietly made a decision. “The place you’re looking for is called Kamar-​Taj. But the cost is high.”

“How much?” Strange didn’t care. He would sell everything he had to make it happen.

“I’m not talking about money,” Pangborn said. He gave Strange a mocking smile. “Good luck.” Then he walked away to rejoin the game.

A week later, Strange was in Nepal. He’d found mentions of Kamar-​Taj in different books on mysticism, the kind of thing he would never have read before. But he’d seen Jonathan Pangborn walk and run and jump, and if the books said Kamar-​Taj was in Kathmandu, Strange decided he was going to Kathmandu. He would find Kamar-​Taj no matter what.

So he walked the teeming streets of Kathmandu, disheveled and bearded, his hair matted to his head and wilder than ever before, occasionally stopping someone to ask about Kamar-​Taj. Most of them just shook their heads. Sometimes he would get vague directions. He did this for days. Walking through one of the temple complexes, he was pointed down a small side street. Tired and footsore, Strange kept going. He would knock on every door in Kathmandu if that’s what it took.

The side street was deserted, and as soon as Strange was halfway down it, he noticed someone following him. Then a man stepped out of a doorway in front of him. “Okay,” he said. He knew what was happening.

He turned so he could see all the men. There were four of them. “Guys, I don’t have any money.”

“Your watch,” one of them said. At least they spoke English, Strange thought. Maybe he could talk his way out of this.

“No, please. It’s all I have left.”

The mugger didn’t care. “Your watch,” he repeated.

“All right.” Strange reached for his wrist like he was going to take his watch off. Then something snapped inside him. No. He wasn’t going to give them his watch. He wasn’t going to be robbed in an alley like some stupid tourist. As the mugger reached for the watch, Strange wound up and punched him in the face.

His attack didn’t do much, and the pain from his hand was incredible. For a moment it blocked out everything else. Then one of the other muggers knocked him down and all four started kicking and beating him. He tried to stand but he couldn’t. One of them kicked him in the head and he curled up, trying to avoid being badly hurt. He took their abuse for what seemed like an eternity, and they only stopped when he wasn’t moving anymore.

He felt one of them jerk the watch from his wrist.

Then, out of nowhere, another man appeared. He charged into the group of muggers, green-​and-​black hooded cloak flying out behind him as he took on all four of them. Like something out of a movie, he dodged all their attacks and beat them to the ground in the time it took Strange to regain his senses. When all four of the muggers were incapacitated, the stranger bent down and picked something up from the street. He walked to Strange, who was just getting to his feet. He was battered, but he didn’t think anything was broken.

The stranger held out his watch. The face was shattered. Strange took it and nodded to thank him. He pulled back his hood. He was a young man, with short hair and a long scar that stood out on his dark forehead. When he spoke, he had an accent Strange didn’t recognize. “You’re looking for Kamar-​Taj?”

All Strange could do was nod. Had this guy been following him? Had he heard Strange asking someone else about Kamar-​Taj?

The stranger nodded back and started walking. Strange followed, cradling his right arm. Now that he’d had a chance to settle down a little and let the adrenaline wear off, he was feeling the pain more acutely.

Winding through the streets of Kathmandu, the stranger passed a temple and led Strange into a cramped square. He nodded toward a simple wooden door set into a brick wall. “Really? Are you sure you got the right place?” Strange asked. Looking back at the temple, he added, “That one looks a little more...​Kamar-​Taj‑y.”

Deadly serious, Strange’s rescuer looked him in the eye. “I once stood in your place. And I too was...​disrespectful. So might I offer you some advice?” Strange stared at him, nodding. “Forget everything you think you know.”

“Uh...​all right.” This is all a bunch of hocus-​pocus, Strange thought. But what choice did he have? He needed answers.

Inside, incense burned and the sun filtered through screened walls. “The sanctuary of our teacher,” his rescuer said. “The Ancient One.”

“The Ancient One?” Strange echoed. “What’s his real name?”

The other man just looked at him.

“Right,” Strange said. “Forget everything I think I know. I’m sorry.” He stepped farther into the room. An older Asian man sat reading. Strange nodded at him. “Thank you for...​oh!” Two women appeared from nowhere and took off his coat. “Okay, that’s, uh...​a thing,” he said. “Thank you. Hello.”

A white-​robed woman with a shaved head brought him tea. “Thank you,” he said again to her. Then he looked back to the seated man. “Uh, thank you, Ancient One...​for seeing me.”

“You’re very welcome,” answered the woman in the white robe.

Confused, Strange looked back at his rescuer. “The Ancient One,” he said.

“Thank you, Master Mordo,” she said to him. So that was his name. “Thank you, Master Hamir!” she added to the seated man. Everyone spent a lot of time thanking one another here.

She turned back to him. “Mister Strange.”

“Doctor, actually,” he said, and sipped his tea.

“Well, no. Not anymore, surely.” She smiled at him. “Isn’t that why you’re here? You’ve undergone many procedures. Seven, right?”

How did she know that? “Yeah,” he said. Feeling like he should say something else, maybe something thankful, he added, “Good tea.”

She went to a low table and began to make more tea. Strange decided to get to the point. “Did you heal a man named Pangborn? A paralyzed man.”

“In a way,” she said. Mordo watched the conversation with a quiet intentness from a few feet away.

“You helped him to walk again.”

She kept smiling. “Yes.”

Impossible , Strange thought. But he was here, so he kept asking questions. “How do you correct a complete C7–​C8 spinal cord injury?”

“Oh, I didn’t correct it,” she said, as though he had chosen the wrong word. “He couldn’t walk; I convinced him that he could.”

“You’re not suggesting it was psychosomatic?” Strange had seen the images. Pangborn’s spinal cord was completely severed.

“When you reattach a severed nerve, is it you who heals it back together or the body?”

“It’s the cells,” Strange said.

She nodded as if he were a bright student giving an expected answer. “And the cells are only programmed to put themselves together in very specific ways.”

“That’s right.”

“What if I told you that your own body could be convinced to put itself back together in all sorts of ways?” she asked.

Now they were getting somewhere. “You’re talking about cellular regeneration,” Strange said. “That’s...​bleeding-​edge medical tech. Is that why you’re working here, without a governing medical board?” He wanted to see her lab, read her research. “I mean...​just how experimental is your treatment?”

With an even broader smile, she said simply, “Quite.”

“So, you figured out a way to reprogram nerve cells to self-​heal?” Strange couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This was Nobel Prize-​level innovation, if it was real.

“No, Mister Strange,” she said, suddenly serious. “I know how to reorient the spirit to better heal the body.”

“Spirit...​to heal the body.” So it was hocus‑pocus. But...​he’d seen the results with his own eyes. He’d seen Pangborn playing basketball. He had to give this a chance even though it went against everything he had ever learned. “Huh. All...​all right. How do we do that? Where do we start?”

The Ancient One held an open book up in front of him, displaying an image of the human body with its chakras, mystical energy points. Strange stared, trying to keep his shock in check, at least to start. “Don’t like that map?” she asked when she saw his skeptical expression.

“Oh...​no,” he said. “It’s...​it’s very good. It’s just...​you know, I’ve seen it before. In gift shops.” Strange thought chakras were one of the goofy ideas scam artists used to separate sick people from their money.

She laughed and turned the page to another diagram. “And what about this one?”

“Acupuncture, great.” Another scam as far as Strange could tell.

“Yeah? What about...​that one?” She turned the page and Strange couldn’t help it. He rolled his eyes. “You’re showing me an MRI scan? I cannot believe this.” If this “Ancient One” believed that magnetic resonance imaging was the same as chakras and acupuncture, Strange was wasting his time.

“Each of those maps was drawn up by someone who could see in part, but not the whole,” she said.

The whole show was too much. Strange was tired, desperate, not to mention still frightened and in pain from the mugging. He started to raise his voice, letting all pretense of respect fall. “I spent my last dollar getting here on a one-​way ticket, and you’re talking to me about healing through belief?”

“You’re a man who’s looking at the world through a keyhole, and you spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole,” she answered, her tone still level and calm. “To see more, know more. And now, on hearing that it can be widened in ways you can’t imagine, you reject the possibility?”

“No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras or energy or the power of belief,” he sneered. “There is no such thing as spirit! We are made of matter, and nothing more. We’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe.”

She still didn’t seem bothered by his insulting tone. “You think too little of yourself,” she said.

“Oh, you think you see through me, do you? Well, you don’t. But I see through you!” Furious, he stabbed a finger at her...​and then she did react.

She caught his wrist, turned his arm, and thrust a palm into the center of his chest. Something happened. He felt a wrenching sense of dislocation, and for a moment he was outside himself, looking at his own body from across the room. He held up his hands and saw a strange glow around them, trailing wisps of light. The Ancient One held her hand still for a moment, then curled her fingers. Strange felt a tug, and a moment later the vision had passed. He twitched, feeling his body again. “What did you just do to me?”

“I pushed your astral form out of your physical form,” she said, as if it was a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

She’d drugged him. That was it. That was part of their game here. “What’s in that tea? Psilocybin? LSD?”

“Just tea,” she said calmly. “With a little honey.”

He couldn’t help himself. He believed her. Or at least he was starting to. Was there some truth to all this mumbo jumbo? He’d felt it. He’d felt himself outside his body. “What just happened?”

“For a moment, you entered the Astral Dimension,” she explained. “A place where the soul exists apart from the body.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Strange asked. He didn’t care about Astral Dimensions. He wanted his hands back.

“To show you just how much you don’t know,” she said. “Open your eye.”

For a moment he thought she was just giving him more mystical advice, but then everything around him changed. Strange was hurled up and out of Kamar-​Taj, into the sky, above the clouds. He screamed, terrified by what he saw around him. He could see the curve of Earth and the bright-​blue layer of the atmosphere against the infinite black of space. “This isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t—” Suddenly, in front of him, there was a butterfly. A beautiful monarch, wings gently working. Transfixed, Strange reached to touch it...​then he was flung away again, down some kind of wormhole. Colors and swirls of energy whirlpooled around him. The world was coming apart in his head.

Somewhere in his mind, Strange heard Mordo’s voice. “His heart rate is getting dangerously high.”

Then he fell back into his body to find The Ancient One studying his face and putting a calming hand on his shoulder. “He looks all right to me,” she said. Panting, Strange started to feel relieved that it was over. Then she took her hand and everything splintered again.

“You think you know how the world works?” She spoke in his mind as Strange tumbled through a shifting landscape of incredible shapes and colors. Were those cells? Were they worlds? He could not tell. He felt his body come apart and come back together, once, twice, a thousand times in the blink of an eye. “You think that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence, mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality.” Everything shifted again as he fell through a giant, staring eye into a vast space filled with crystal structures. Far away he saw other versions of himself, staring and frightened. “This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end. Some benevolent and life-​giving...” He began to fall toward one world. “Others filled with malice and hunger. Dark places, where powers older than time lie, ravenous...​and waiting.” The world was not a world. It was a face, with eyes full of power and hate. Strange started to scream as it saw him...​and then it was gone. Light surrounded him; he blazed across the emptiness again, faster and faster. “Who are you in this vast Multiverse, Mister Strange?”

He crashed back into the world. Actually crashed, falling from the ceiling of the Kamar-​Taj sanctuary and smashing a chair. “Have you seen that before in a gift shop?” The Ancient One asked as he trembled on the floor. Her voice was gentle, but her meaning was clear.

Slowly, Strange got himself up to his knees. He held his hands out to her, shaking and overwhelmed. Now he believed. He had seen it. He had felt it. Mordo was right. He was ready to forget what he had thought he knew. “Teach me,” he begged.

For a long moment she looked at him.

Then, softly, she said, “No.”

Mordo dragged Strange to the door and threw him out into the street. The door shut. Strange banged on it, not caring about the searing pain in his hands. “No! No, no, no! Open the door! Please!”

But no one answered. 5T/aj42pGhL4RBUgMKg4mWlJgkJxZjP+W2vT8JeJEivkYR8KHOmsMSCbJTVJ5Tv8