“Something’s not right,” Jason said.
“You mean other than your idea to stake me out, covered in meat?”
“Still with this? It was an early stage of planning.”
The third and fourth villages were like the first two, with villagers barricaded inside. Nothing else demanded immediate action and they turned their minds to hunting the monster. They sat down in the shade of a large tree, Jason on a folding chair from his inventory, Clive on the shell of his rune tortoise familiar, Onslow.
“I understand the part about covering me with meat,” Clive said. “I don’t appreciate it, but I understand it. But tethering me to a stake? I’m not going to wander off.”
“You might,” Jason said. “I’m sensing resistance to the plan.”
“I could just pull out the stake.”
“See, this is the kind of resistance I’m talking about. It’s not my fault your world doesn’t have goats.”
“I still don’t know what goats are. I’m surprised you didn’t want to use Onslow as bait.”
“I’d never do that to him,” Jason said, reaching out to scratch the tortoise under the chin. “But when I said something’s not right, I meant about these monster attacks.”
“How so?”
“How fast is this mangrove snatcher thing?”
“They attack in short bursts of speed,” Clive explained, “but if you’re talking about overland speed, then no faster than a person.”
Realisation crossed Clive’s face.
“Every village reported daily attacks,” he said. “There’s no way one monster got around to every village in a day. There’s more than one monster.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“We need to know how many there are,” Clive said. “Given the distances, it’s at least three or four. It could be more than that. People don’t stop when they spot the first monster to check if it brought a friend.”
“Well, I don’t have a way to check how many there are,” Jason said. “But I should be able to tell once we’ve got them all.”
“Oh?”
“I told you about my quest system, right? I got a quest for this contract, the same as the others.”
Quest: [Contract: Mangrove Snatcher]
A number of villages have reported being attacked by a mangrove snatcher.
Objective: Eliminate the [Mangrove Snatcher] threat to the four villages 0/1.
“The objective is to end the mangrove snatcher threat. Once we get the last one, the quest should complete.”
“That’s good,” Clive said. “Otherwise we’d be waiting around for days, not knowing if we were finished or not.”
Like Jason, Clive had a dimensional space that could store objects. A magical circle appeared in the air, lines and runes glowing with golden light. In the middle was a murky darkness Clive reached into, pulling out a notebook and pencil.
“Your abilities all seem very practical,” Clive said as he took notes. “There is a theory that the unique outworlder racial gifts are an unconsciously derived mechanism of self-protection. Possibly as a reaction to the original body being annihilated.”
“I’m sorry, what now?” Jason asked, his gaze locking onto Clive. “What do mean by the body being annihilated?”
“You didn't know?” Clive asked. “It's one of the better-known aspects of outworlder knowledge, because of what we already know about the astral.”
“Didn’t know what? What annihilation?”
“How much do you know about the astral?” Clive asked. “The space between worlds.”
“I read a skill book of astral magic,” Jason said. “I took it from Landemere Vane.”
“So, basically nothing,” Clive said. “Those books are all practice, no theory. Alright, here we go. If you could encapsulate the cosmos, as in all of everything, your world, my world, the space in between, it would be like a bowl of dumpling soup.”
“Dumpling soup?”
“Do they not have dumpling soup on your world?” Clive asked. “Or do they not have analogies?”
“We have both,” Jason said. “We also have smart guys getting punched in the face for running their mouth.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
“I’m a ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ kind of guy,” Jason said. “You either keep your mouth shut or accept that someone's going to put a fist in it from time to time.”
Clive shook his head. “You’re a crazy person. Just listen up, alright? So, all the cosmos is a bowl of dumpling soup.”
Clive paused, tilting his head in thought.
“Now that I’m talking about it,” he said, “I really could go for some dumpling soup.”
“I know, right?” Jason said, nodding his agreement.
“I know a really good place back in the city.”
“We’ll go when we get back,” Jason said. “Annihilation, the cosmos is soup, remember.”
“Right. So, in this dumpling soup, each world, each physical reality, is a dumpling. Your world, a dumpling, my world, a dumpling, every world out there, a dumpling. The astral is the soup through which we are all the dumplings, all the worlds, are floating.”
“Alright,” Jason said. “With you so far.”
“The astral, the soup, is also the source of all magic,” Clive said. “That’s what it is, just magic. Pure, unadulterated; the most fundamental building blocks of reality. Every world, every dumpling, is swimming in it. Some dumplings soak up a lot of the soup, like this world. Our world soaks up the magic, which takes various forms as that magic gets shaped by our physical reality. That’s why we have essences, awakening stones, quintessence, monsters, all just appearing out of nowhere.”
“But my world doesn’t have any of that,” Jason said.
“That means your dumpling soaks up very little of the soup.”
“So, how did I end up here?”
“Alright, think of the soup kind of congealing around a dumpling. That’s how you get astral spaces, which are a sort of magical dimension attached to a world.”
“Like the one that produces all the water that makes this delta.”
“Exactly like that,” Clive said. “But not all that congealed magic is as stable as an astral space. It can kind of drift away, especially if someone goes and pokes a hole in the side of the dumpling.”
“Like a big summoning spell.”
“Precisely like a big summoning spell,” Clive said. “Some of that congealed magic can drift off the side of the world, like a tendril. And if it happens to touch another dumpling, a brief, unstable link is formed. In this case, that link was between a world very good at soaking up magic, and one that isn’t. So my world sucked in a part of yours through that magical link.”
“How big a part?”
“Tiny,” Clive said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been the only one to arrive. But that link was never established properly; it was a phenomenon created through random forces, which means a couple of things. One, the link would have collapsed, almost immediately.”
“So, no using it to get home,” Jason said.
“No. The other important thing is that the link wasn’t some purpose-built channel designed to transport physical material through the astral. I can’t even imagine the kind of astral magic that would take. Gold rank at the least, probably diamond.”
“So?”
“So, you were pulled straight through the deep astral,” Clive said. “And the thing about the deep astral is that it’s just magic. Only magic.”
“You said that.”
“Yes, but the point is, physical substance can only exist in a physical reality. I said your body was annihilated, but that wasn’t exactly accurate. Your body ceased to exist because it went somewhere where the physical substance it was made of cannot exist. That’s also why any physical material dragged into the link with you, didn’t arrive with you.”
“Ceased to exist? The goddess of knowledge said my body was changed.”
“Your body didn't change,” Clive said. “Your body is gone. Not melted away, not blasted into pieces too small to see, just gone. It stopped existing. You must have misunderstood what the goddess told you.”