Click.

Derivan watched curiously as they were brought to a new place within the Void. There was nothing here, technically—nothing except a small pedestal built into the ground. Not that there was any ground here either. A visible gear poked out of a slot on the pedestal, clicking periodically as some sort of internal mechanism shifted within and caused it to rotate.

Or Shifted within. He could feel it, the subtle changes in reality as it moved through one layer to another.

“What is it?” he asked.

Sev walked up to it, brushing his fingers over the grooves in the matte-metallic surface, then over to the gear. He pulled his fingers back before they could get caught in the next click, then sighed. “Hard to describe,” he said. “I’m not sure I knew what I was doing when I was building this. I think I was desperate. Scared.”

“...It’s not going to attack us, is it?” Misa asked, lifting her mace warily and eyeing the pedestal as if it was going to attack them. Sev snorted.

“No,” he said. Then he paused, considering the question. “Well...”

“Sev,” Misa warned.

“No, I’m just kidding,” he said, a ghost of a smile crossing his expression. “It’s harmless. It’s basically... it’s one of those things I made because I didn’t trust myself. It’s basically a computer.”

“The hell’s a computer?” Misa frowned.

“It’s... Anderstahl tech, isn’t it?” Vex asked, eyeing the pedestal. “It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in the books, though.”

“It wouldn’t,” Sev said. “It’s made to hook into the system and use it as a display, though I’m willing to bet most of that functionality’s been degraded by now.”

“It has,” Derivan confirmed. He felt around with Patch—he could feel where the pedestal was supposed to connect to the system, only those connections had been frayed and eroded. The only thing was... “It is recent, however.”

“Recent?” Sev’s brows furrowed, puzzled. “I would’ve expected it to break ages ago.”

“It appears that the Prime Anchor was able to connect to it,” Derivan said. He could feel the remnants of that connection, frayed though they were. Sev had built it to attach to the nearest living person’s system—but evidently, the Prime Anchor had managed to reach out to it on its own.

“...Huh. I guess that would explain a lot.” Sev frowned in thought. “It’s supposed to be a possibility engine. Searches through everything that’s possible, makes an informed guess on what our best options are. Makes sense that the Anderstahl Prime Anchor was so... intentional about things.”

Derivan’s eyes widened slightly within his helmet. Every click of the gear gave him a strange, fuzzy feeling through the Shift stat. He’d assumed it was just an artifact of their presence in the Void, and that each Shift he felt within the pedestal was just the movement of the “computer” going from one layer of reality to the next.

But no. Now that Sev had explained it, he understood the feeling.

It wasn’t moving through one layer of reality. It was moving through hundreds of thousands of them. Sorting through infinite possibilities.

“I gave up on it because... well, it was kind of a flawed concept,” Sev admitted. Derivan noted that despite his words, he didn’t seem like he’d given up hope—on the contrary, he seemed animated and energetic.

He was glad, Derivan thought. Sev’s difficulties with leadership hadn’t gone unnoticed, but it seemed like he was finally embracing the role.

“The system already does what this thing does,” Sev continued. “It just doesn’t look as far as this can. The farther you try to Shift, the more expensive it is—I’m sure you’ve noticed this, Derivan.”

“It takes more power to Shift farther away,” Derivan agreed. “The divine planes are near-impossible to reach, though I feel I might be able to reach them if I were to pull sufficient power from the Slime stat.”

Sev stared at him for a moment. “...Okay, we’ll unpack that later,” he decided, muttering something to himself about the absurdities his friends were capable of. “Actually, it might be helpful. This thing searches possibilities too far away from baseline reality for the system to be able to Shift it into being. I was going to suggest combining your capabilities with the system’s, but the Prime Anchor is barely functional right now.”

“There is a possibility you wish to Shift into reality?” Derivan questioned. He rarely used the stat in that particular way—not the way the system did it, anyway.

“Yes.” Sev nodded. “I’m going to need you to connect our systems to this thing so we can search for it, and then I need you to bring it here. Or, well, not here—back where everyone else is.”

“You wanna tell us what the plan is?” Misa said, raising an eyebrow. “Because it sounds like you’ve got a plan.”

“I do.” Sev’s expression settled into something serious, and he took a deep breath. “We’re not going to bring back all of Obreve like this. We could try to just bring back the dungeon—enough for us to be able to harvest more Soulblooms—but I felt how much it was straining our Anchors just to maintain that amount of land.”Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“I did, too,” Misa said, frowning.

“It’s too much,” Vex said. “We could maybe maintain Anderstahl if we pushed it, but Anderstahl can’t handle the amount of people we’ve brought back, and... it’d be a small world.”

“Right,” Sev said. “We’re not going to make everyone live in a world with one city and a few plains outside of it. I hate to say it, but Obreve is dead. I don’t think there was ever a way to bring it back. Not to what we had before. So we’re not going to try.”

“What do you want to do instead?” Vex asked.

“Go somewhere new.” Sev shrugged. “This isn’t the only universe out there. We’ve been trying to save the world, but it’s like you said to the king of Enkiros, Vex—it’s not the world that’s important. It’s the people.”

Misa was silent for a moment. “You want us to leave Obreve behind,” she said. There was something sad in her voice, and yet... she didn’t argue.

Neither did Vex. “Where are we going to go?” he asked softly.

“That’s where you come in,” Sev said, glancing to Derivan, who had remained silent until now. Derivan inclined his head in a slight nod—whatever Sev needed, he was ready. “If you can get this connected with our systems, we’ll be able to get it to start a new search. I want you to find something that will bring us to a new universe, Derivan. All of us. And I want you to choose that universe.”

“Me?” Derivan blinked, the lights in his helmet flickering.

“I should have made a fourth Grand Anchor,” Sev said. “I think I would’ve named it the Grand Anchor of Life. It would’ve been perfect for you.”

“But I am...” Not alive, he wanted to say. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. Sev shook his head before he could finish.

“You’ve spent your entire life trying to understand us,” Sev said. “Trying to understand people that are fundamentally very different from you. You have an entire stat that defines it as a part of who you are as a person.” He gestured broadly, as if pointing to all the different forms of life they’d met thus far—and they had met a variety of different life forms, from elemental beings to organic creatures to magical entities to living concepts. “This computer can help us find a layer of reality where someone’s invented something that will take us to a new universe. We’ll probably have to keep it stable with our Grand Anchors. But we need someone to find a universe that can accommodate all of us, and the rest of us grew up with all manner of preconceptions and biases about life. You, Derivan? You didn’t.”

“I... did not.” He’d always been curious about the different forms of life. He remembered how fascinated he was by the world the first time he’d been allowed out of his dungeon. “I am willing. But how will we do this?”

Sev shrugged and glanced at the pedestal again. “Let’s find out,” he said.

Derivan nodded, reached out with Patch, and made the connection. Sev tapped into his system interface, glancing back occasionally at the others; Derivan sensed that he was privately making sure they were all still there, that all this was real.

He offered Sev a small smile, and the priest seemed grateful for it. He tapped in a final command.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Clickclickclickclick—

“Found it,” Sev said, at the same time Derivan felt the possibility blooming within this... “computer.” It was a large one, but it was surprisingly distant—there were countless realities where they tried to save the world they were in and failed, and far fewer where they had simply tried to leave. More than that, in many of the ones where they tried to leave, they failed.

But there was one where they succeeded in building something that could traverse the Void.

“Can you bring it here?” Sev asked.

“Yes,” Derivan said, with more confidence than he felt. Vex’s hand wrapped around his own. “I can.”

Slimes in Obreve were essentially cultivators of mana. His growth of that stat had meant much the same thing—he now had a mana pool rivaling Vex’s. And while Shift didn’t necessarily draw on his mana pool, he was fundamentally a being that was only alive thanks to mana-driven enchantments engraved within his armor; the energy it pulled from him came from the same source.

Alone, he wasn’t that confident. But with Vex’s help...

“Let’s get back to the others, first,” Derivan said.

Misa reached out and offered him a bit of Reality, and he used it to Shift a portal into existence. The four of them stepped through. All of Obreve was milling about on an empty plane of land—Derivan was almost surprised that no fighting had broken out yet, but he supposed the rather chilling reality of the situation was enough to make most people focus.

He ignored them for now, focusing instead on the spark within himself that allowed him to see between the layers of reality and pull them into focus. He borrowed from that power within himself, fed it all the mana he had, and felt Vex’s strength flow into him.

He found the layer of reality that matched what he’d felt and then performed his largest Shift yet.

A massive ship slipped into existence, hovering just above them. It was made of gleaming metal, with massive sails that would’ve blocked out the sun if they still had one.

Misa stared.

“Seriously?” she said. “That’s... that’s just a really big boat.”

Before Derivan could respond, however, all three of them—Sev, Vex, and Misa—staggered. Misa in particular winced, her breathing heavy. “Holy shit, never mind. Guess that’s not just a boat. That thing is heavy. Metaphorically speaking. It’s weighing on my Anchor.”

“We can handle it,” Sev said. “But I think I might’ve been wrong about us being able to maintain Anderstahl. That’s... This is probably going to be our limit.”

“We could try to get a soulbloom garden going on the ship,” Vex suggested. “I think we’re going to need one.”

Sev winced again, then nodded. “You’re probably right about that,” he agreed. “Tinsel should be around here somewhere. I really hope it saved some soulbloom seeds...”

He sighed, then began to walk forward, toward the ship. “But first, let’s get everyone on the boat,” he said. “It’s going to be a long day.”

Derivan followed, his mind already lingering on the choice he would have to make. He would have to find them a new universe to live in.

What an interesting thought.