He fretted yet again over the fate of his friends. Did they survive? Did they know he’d revived in his own world? While he had discussed the World-Phoenix token in broad terms with some of them, he had played that particular card close to his chest. In any case, even he hadn’t known the specifics. Only Knowledge had the full truth and Jason would make no prediction about what the goddess would do.
Those concerns were only peripheral compared to what he had to deal with immediately. He had no idea what his situation would be now that he was home. Did people think he was dead? How was he going to explain everything? How much did he even need to explain? For all he knew, time moved at different paces between worlds. He might have been gone for a week or for ten years.
Then there were his arrangements going forward. Whatever his circumstances, he wasn’t going to go back to the stationery store to ask for his job back. He had a pile of solid gold in his inventory, but that wasn’t the same as having money he could spend.
“I can’t just rock up to the royal mint with thirty million worth of gold bullion and no explanation of where it came from. They’ll think I’m a drug dealer.”
Jason didn’t know much about the gold trade in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, but he did know there was an amount of regulation. A scrap gold buyer might go overlooked, but if he dropped an unmarked ten-kilo bar at a booth in a shopping centre, they would probably call the police.
The larger gold exchanges were watched more carefully. A retail store employee who went missing, only to show up a year and a half later with a bunch of gold bars he couldn’t explain, would quickly find himself in a room with federal officers. Maybe he could find a shady one willing to make a backroom deal, but Jason’s ignorance would make any such attempt a dangerous endeavour.
Jason could have used a sounding board, but his familiar, Shade, was locked away within his soul. All three of his familiars were connected to his soul, but their vessels were no longer present in his body. This allowed him to draw certain conclusions.
Jason had come a long way in his understanding of magic, with Clive guiding his studies. His focus, like Clive’s, had been on astral magic, but he still had a solid grounding in general magical theories. This gave him a better understanding of the processes involved with his summoned familiars.
His familiars’ vessels hadn’t been literally contained in his blood, shadow, and aura. Jason’s magical body, like that of anyone iron-rank or above, was composed of the biomass that made it up and the magical matrix that governed that biomass. The magical matrix was responsible for the ways in which the body interacted with both the world around it and the soul within it.
A familiar’s vessel, on being summoned, was anchored to physical reality by attaching itself to aspects of the summoner’s matrix, rather than the biomass. This was the reason that summoned familiars gave enhanced abilities when their vessels were subsumed, as they enhanced the capabilities of the aspect to which they were attached.
That knowledge allowed him to make a deduction about his current situation. Since the spirits of his familiars were ensconced comfortably within his soul but their vessels were gone, his revival had been in a whole new body. He had no idea if that was a function of the World-Phoenix token or just of his returning to his world. Any soul entering a world would build a new body for itself, as Jason’s had when he first became an outworlder.
If it was because of being an outworlder, building a body hadn’t changed his racial gifts the way it had the first time. His soul had already been affected by passing through the astral, unconsciously reshaping itself to acquire the tools it would need to survive. His racial gifts remained as they were, aside from the one that had just undergone a transfiguration.
Jason was still standing in front of the window he’d smashed open, the rain coming in to wet the floor. He pulled a chair out of his inventory and sat down, since it was time to formulate a plan that went beyond pants. He went back to his original questions.
“What do I need and how do I get it?”
He needed information. If nothing had gone wonky with any interdimensional time-streams that might or might not exist, it should be somewhere near the start of winter. The rain pounding down outside the broken window let in a damp cold that certainly fit that guess, but he would need to be more accurate than that. He enjoyed the bleak cold coming in through the window, having spent the last year and a half roaming scorching desert, sweltering delta and hot, wet jungle.
He also needed to know what his status had become. Did the world think he was missing or dead? Was his outworlder self some kind of magical clone, with his original still living his life, oblivious to what had happened?
A lot of those answers could be had with an internet connection. Unfortunately, he had no phone, no money and no transport. He was hesitant to call on family to get them, at least until he had a better understanding of his circumstances. Then he remembered a certain member of his family and reconsidered.
Jason had two uncles, one of which was estranged from the family. Hiro Asano was the family’s black sheep due to his hopefully minor involvement with organised crime. Hiro might simultaneously be a useful source of information and a method to convert some of his gold into cash. He would get well-below market rates for an illegal gold sale, but Jason only needed enough money to get by, at least for a while.
The only problem was that Hiro was in Sydney, hundreds of kilometres to the south. In theory, Jason could portal his way south, reaching Sydney in a few hops. He knew from Clive that all portal powers had the same range of around forty kilometres per rank at bronze, including rank zero. Fortunately, Jason’s Path of Shadows ability was one of his highest rank powers, giving him a range of roughly two hundred kilometres. His only concern was if the power would work at all in the barren magic of his own world.
Normally, portal abilities would take someone to any place they had been. Jason had never thought to ask if that included places they had been before they gained the power, or before they were even an essence user. It was something he would need to test.
That, at least, gave Jason a tentative plan: Test his portal ability, cash up, and get the lay of the land. It would do for his immediate, practical concerns. That left the more magical concerns, so he turned back to looking through the system windows.
You have been reborn.
He wondered why he had appeared in the abandoned hospital. It had been closed for years, since the new regional hospital opened in Castle Reach. Was it random? If so, that would be quite the coincidence, arriving in the same hospital he had been born in.
Something occurred to him and he backtracked to the room he had arrived in. On the outside of the room was a faded sign. MATERNITY THEATRE.
Jason pushed the doors open and went through. He hadn’t arrived on the floor, but in the air, where he immediately fell to the floor. He guessed the height was about right for a hospital bed.
“Was I reborn in the exact same place I was born the first time?”
2
TIME TO FRONT UP