The misting rain never stopped.

  Cade had been walking for what felt like hours, and the fine droplets continued their endless fall, coating everything in a perpetual sheen of moisture. The massive fungal stalks rose around him like the pillars of some ancient cathedral, their caps disappearing into the gray-white haze above. It was the same view he'd had since leaving the Coordinator's structure. The same stalks, the same mist, the same gray-green moss underfoot. Only the density of tiny people had changed.

  He glanced up at the distant glow of the core, this world’s sun, burning at the center of everything. It hadn't moved. It never moved. There was no arc across the sky, no creeping shadows to mark the hours. Just that constant pale radiance, unchanging.

  And yet he knew it had been about four hours since he'd started walking.

  The certainty of it caught him off guard. He stopped, frowning at the light. How did he know that? There was no watch on his wrist, no position of the sun to read. But the number sat in his mind with quiet confidence, ticking forward even as he stood there.

  He tested it against his Earth instincts and found they aligned perfectly,whatever internal clock this body came with, it translated effortlessly into the units he'd grown up using. Hours, minutes, seconds. As natural as breathing had once been.

  Distance too, he realized. He'd walked roughly eleven miles. He hadn't been counting steps or measuring landmarks, but he knew, the same way he knew how long he'd been walking. Some part of his Kindred body was simply keeping track, converting its native measurements into something his Earth-born mind could parse.

  Useful. Designed that way, probably. Hard to coordinate anything in a world without day cycles if no one can agree on how much time has passed.

  The misting rain continued its endless fall. Cade kept walking.

  And the density of tiny people kept changing.

  Near the spawning pools, the ground had been crowded with life. Newly emerged souls wiping slime from their eyes, established residents going about their business, clusters of curious onlookers following him like he was a parade float. But as he walked, that density thinned. First gradually, then noticeably, until he could go ten minutes without seeing a single figure emerge from the earth.

  The spawning pools clustered at the top of the Outer Ring, he realized. As far from the tier-one territories as possible. That made a certain kind of sense. If you were reborn at your most vulnerable, you'd want to do it in the safest place available. The gentle end of the world, where the gravity was light and the predators were few.

  With the lower density came a new kind of freedom.

  Cade found himself walking faster, then faster still. At first, he'd been moving at a crawl, scanning every inch of ground before each step, terrified of another accident. But as the crowds thinned and the moss stretched empty ahead of him, he allowed himself to pick up the pace. His strides lengthened. His eyes still swept the ground—he wasn't stupid enough to stop watching entirely—but the frantic hypervigilance began to ease.

  He still had followers, of course. They trailed behind him in a loose cluster, maintaining what they probably considered a safe distance. The group fluctuated constantly, he'd look back and count perhaps fifty, then check again an hour later and find over a hundred, then watch as half of them peeled off to return to wherever they'd come from. New faces appeared to replace them, drawn by curiosity or boredom or whatever passed for entertainment in the Outer Ring.

  The colors shifted too. When he'd first started walking, his followers had been predominantly cool tones—blues and greens and purples, with a few warmer accents scattered through. But as individuals dropped away and others joined, the palette changed. For a while, the group skewed orange and red, like a sunset trailing in his wake. Then a wave of pale pastels arrived, soft pinks and lavenders and mint greens. Later still, a cluster of deep jewel tones—emerald, sapphire, amethyst—that made the group look almost coordinated, like they'd planned it.

  They hadn't, obviously. The colors were random, assigned by whatever process governed the spawning pools. But watching the patterns shift over time became a strange kind of entertainment, a way to mark the passage of hours in a world where the light never changed.

  His body, meanwhile, was revealing new surprises.

  He hadn't taken a single breath since he'd arrived in this world. His chest never rose or fell. And yet he felt fine. Better than fine. There was no burning in his lungs, no desperate gasping after exertion. His body simply took what it needed from the mist itself, a constant low-level sustenance that required no effort on his part.

  He hadn't felt thirsty either. Not once. The moisture in the air seemed to handle that too.

  And he had never once needed to use the restroom.

  That realization crept up on him slowly. Back on Earth, a week of walking would have meant regular stops, finding discrete spots behind rocks or trees, dealing with the logistics that came with being a biological organism. Here? Nothing. Whatever he ate seemed to convert entirely into energy, leaving nothing behind. No waste. No awkward moments trying to find privacy from his tiny audience.

  Convenient, he supposed. Very convenient. One less thing to worry about.

  And then there were his knees.

  Cade had developed mild arthritis there for some reason, despite being quite young. Nothing debilitating, just a stiffness that showed up after sitting at a desk all day. He'd learned to lean into it, warming up carefully, mobility exercises along with his strength training.

  But now? Nothing. He'd been walking for days, and his knees felt like they had when he was fifteen. Better, maybe. No stiffness, no aching, no grinding sensation when he bent down. Whatever this world had done to his body, it had apparently fixed that too.

  Small mercies.

  Speaking of food.

  The lower density of Kindred meant fewer hands to help gather nodules, but Cade had discovered something useful. The nodules stuck to his fingers.

  He'd noticed it by accident, reaching out to touch one of the smaller stalks as he passed. The nodules were attached loosely, held to the fungal surface by some kind of weak adhesive. When his fingertip brushed against one, it transferred easily, clinging to his skin with surprising tenacity.

  He'd stared at the tiny nodule stuck to his finger, smaller than a grain of sand from his perspective, and experimentally put his finger in his mouth.

  The warmth spread through him immediately. One nodule, delivered directly. No need to wait for helpers.

  After that, he developed a rhythm. Walk for a while, keeping the light ahead and the ground clear of Kindred. When hunger stirred in his belly, pause near a smaller stalk and gently press his fingers against the clusters. A dozen nodules would stick to each fingertip, and he'd suck them off one finger at a time, feeling the satisfaction spread through his stomach in small waves.

  He considered, briefly, putting his face directly against the stalks. Just pressing his lips to the surface and licking up the nodules in one efficient motion. It would be faster. More thorough.

  But he didn't know enough about this world to be sure that it was safe. The nodules were food—he'd seen the Kindred eat them freely, but the stalks themselves? The fungal material they grew from? That might be poisonous for all he knew. Toxic to the touch, or corrosive to the tongue, or simply indigestible in a way that would cause problems later.

  The finger method worked. He'd stick with what worked.

  The boredom was the hardest part.

  Back on Earth, Cade never went anywhere without entertainment. Audiobooks for driving, workouts. Music for lifting when the mood struck, and while working. Games on his phone for waiting rooms. He'd built his life around constant stimulation, filling every quiet moment with something to keep his mind occupied.

  Here? Nothing.

  Just the mist, and the stalks, and the endless sameness of the landscape stretching out in every direction. He had the same view an hour ago. The same view he'd have an hour from now. An endless gray-green monotony broken only by the occasional cluster of Kindred or the shifting color palette of his followers.

  He could feel his mind starting to itch.

  At first it was manageable. He practiced moving anima, feeling it shift sluggishly through his body. He experimented with the tail, failing spectacularly and repeatedly. He worked on his voice, finding stolen moments when his followers fell far enough back that they wouldn't hear him crack into a boom. All of it useful. All of it occupying the surface of his attention.

  But the deeper layers wouldn't stay quiet.

  That was the thing about boredom—it didn't just leave empty space. It filled it. With whatever you'd been avoiding, whatever you'd shoved into the back corners, whatever thoughts you'd been outrunning since the moment you arrived in a world that demanded every scrap of your focus just to avoid killing someone.

  The focus was gone now. The walking was routine. His feet knew what they were doing. And his mind, finally unburdened, turned inward with the enthusiasm of a dog let off its leash.

  The libido was the first thing it found.

  It had been there since he woke up. That was what disturbed him most.

  Looking back, Cade realized he'd been half-hard when he crawled out of the spawning pool. He'd been too disoriented to notice at the time—too busy choking up slime and trying to understand where he was—but the arousal had been present from his first conscious moment in this world. A low hum beneath everything else, like background noise he'd learned to tune out.

  He hadn't tuned it out. He'd just been too overwhelmed to register it.

  Now, walking through the fungal forest with nothing to distract him, he couldn't ignore it anymore.

  It wasn't like anything he'd experienced on Earth. Back home, arousal came and went. It built from something—a thought, a memory, an attractive stranger on the subway—and it faded when attention moved elsewhere. A wave with a beginning and an end.

  This didn't fade.

  The intensity varied, sure. Sometimes it was a whisper, easy to push aside. Sometimes it roared up without warning, flooding his body with heat that had no source he could identify. But it never actually stopped. Even at its quietest, the ember remained, ready to flare at the slightest shift in... what? He couldn't figure out the pattern.

  Was it stress? Some kind of adrenaline response to being stranded in an alien world? His body pumping out hormones to encourage him to reproduce before he died? That almost made sense, except he wasn't actually stressed most of the time. Walking through the forest was boring, not threatening.

  Was it his transformed body? The pool had changed so much else—given him a tail, rewired his breathing, done something to his anatomy that he was still refusing to examine closely. Maybe it had also cranked up his baseline drive, optimized him for some purpose he didn't understand.

  That theory felt closer to the truth. But it didn't help him deal with it.

  The worst was when his mind tried to justify it.

  He'd be walking, the pressure building toward one of its unpredictable peaks, his thoughts scattered by the heat coursing through him—and then Sarah would surface. Not because he'd been thinking about her. Because his brain needed something to explain what his body was doing. Some anchor, some familiar framework to wrap around this alien sensation.

  Three months ago. The kitchen of the apartment they'd shared since graduation, the one they'd picked out with room for a nursery that became a home office that became the room neither of them talked about.

  She'd made dinner. That should have been his first clue—Sarah never cooked on weeknights, not anymore, not since the resentment had settled into something quieter and more permanent. But she'd made his favorite, the mushroom risotto she'd learned to perfect back when accommodating his diet had felt like love instead of obligation, and she'd waited until he'd finished eating to tell him about the job offer.

  It's in a startup not too far away, she'd said. I start in six weeks.

  Not I got an offer. Not what do you think. She'd already decided. She'd been planning this for months, he realized later—sending out applications, doing interviews, building an escape route while he'd been content to let them coast on momentum toward nothing.

  They'd known it was coming for years, really. Since junior year of college, when he'd started reading Peter Singer and stopped eating meat. Since senior year, when he'd gone fully vegan and she'd had to explain to her parents why her boyfriend wouldn't touch her mother's famous brisket. Since he'd sat her down at twenty-two and told her he'd been thinking about vasectomies, and watched something fracture behind her eyes that never fully healed.

  You're twenty-two, she'd said. No doctor is going to—

  I found one. In Cleveland.

  She'd cried then, too. The first of many times.

  He'd gotten the procedure at twenty-three, after six months of jumping through hoops—therapy sessions to prove he was of sound mind, waiting periods to ensure he wouldn't change his mind, doctors who looked at his age and his girlfriend and asked are you sure in tones that suggested they thought he was making the worst mistake of his life. He'd been sure. He was still sure.

  But being sure hadn't made the aftermath easier.

  They'd tried to make it work. Three years of trying, of riding momentum, of loving each other too much to admit that love wasn't enough. Three years of her hoping he'd reverse it—it was reversible, technically, some of the time—and him knowing he never would. Three years of holidays with her family where he'd see the way her mother looked at them, calculating ages, wondering when the grandchildren would come.

  They'd both gotten jobs at Rouche straight out of school, top of their respective programs, their pick of offers. It had seemed perfect at the time—building a life together, two incomes, a shared commute where they'd sit in comfortable silence and pretend the silences weren't getting longer.

  He would have kept pretending. That was the thing. He would have ridden that momentum forever, letting the relationship slowly hollow out rather than face the pain of ending it. Sarah had always been braver than him about the hard things. She'd done the math, seen that the equation would never balance, and made the choice he couldn't make.

  The kitchen conversation had been quiet. Almost gentle. Two people who'd known each other since they were sixteen, finally admitting that the people they'd become at twenty-six couldn't walk the same path anymore.

  I still love you, she'd said.

  I know. I love you too.

  That's what makes this so hard.

  Three weeks later, she was gone. A new job, a new apartment, a new life that didn't include the man who'd chosen principles over the future she'd wanted. He'd helped her pack, because that was the kind of thing you did when you still loved someone. He'd held it together until her car disappeared around the corner, and then he'd gone back inside and sat in the kitchen for three hours, staring at the spot where she'd told him it was over.

  The memory didn't arouse him. If anything, it was the opposite—a cold weight in his chest, the particular grief of losing someone who was still alive, still present, still right there but no longer his. But his body didn't care about emotional logic. His body was already aroused, had been aroused since before he started thinking about anything, and Sarah was just his mind's attempt to construct a narrative around sensations that had no story.

  That was what made it feel like betrayal. Not the arousal itself, but the way his own brain collaborated with it. Dredging up memories, spinning explanations, trying to make the inexplicable feel normal when nothing about it was normal at all.

  He looked down, checking himself reflexively, and felt his face burn.

  His followers were watching. Dozens of four-inch-tall people, staring up at him, seeing everything.

  And what were they seeing?

  The thought cracked through his denial before he could stop it. He'd been so careful not to look, not to examine, not to acknowledge the wrongness he'd felt during his advancement when his body scan had passed over that region and found something different. He'd catalogued the other changes clinically—closed throat, retractable tail, skin that absorbed moisture from the air—but when he'd reached his pelvic floor, he'd skipped past it like a reader flinching away from a gruesome passage.

  Now, with his body reacting in ways he couldn't control, he couldn't avoid the sensations anymore.

  The arousal felt wrong. Not painful, not unpleasant, but wrong in the way a limb falling asleep felt wrong—signals coming from places they shouldn't, responses happening in configurations he didn't recognize. There was heat where he expected heat, yes, but also elsewhere. A heaviness, a swelling, a sense of opening that made his stomach clench with something between confusion and horror.

  He'd seen the Kindred. Seen the ones who'd emerged from the pools alongside him, bare and unselfconscious, their bodies on full display. He'd noticed—tried not to notice, failed not to notice—that their anatomy didn't match his expectations. The feminine figures with their curves and their configurations that included both. The masculine figures who were built the same way beneath their different proportions.

  All of them the same, at the core. All of them equipped with equipment he'd never possessed.

  Until now.

  Don't look. Don't think about it. Don't—

  But he could feel it. The arousal wasn't just affecting what he remembered having. It was affecting what he'd gained. Parts of him he'd never possessed were responding to stimulus, engorging, sensitizing, making themselves known through sheer insistence even as his mind scrambled to reject the information.

  His hands wanted to investigate. To map the territory, to understand what he was working with, to confirm or deny the horrifying suspicion forming in the back of his mind. He kept them rigidly at his sides.

  Not here. Not with them watching. Not ever, if I can help it.

  He didn't know what the Kindred saw when they looked at him. Whether his Earth-born build—the broad shoulders, the narrow hips, the muscle mass he'd spent years cultivating—read as masculine to them the way it would on Earth. Whether the anatomy beneath contradicted that reading in ways they found confusing, or amusing, or utterly unremarkable.

  He didn't want to know.

  What he wanted was to go back to a body he understood. A body that responded in predictable ways to predictable stimuli. A body that didn't feel like a stranger's house he'd been forced to live in, full of rooms he was afraid to enter and furniture he didn't recognize.

  That body was gone. If it had ever existed here at all.

  Cade stopped walking and turned away from his followers, willing the arousal to subside. It resisted—actually resisted, like a separate force with its own agenda—before finally retreating to that persistent background hum. Not gone. Never gone. Just quieter.

  For now.

  What he really wanted was privacy. Just an hour alone. Somewhere without dozens of tiny eyes watching his every move. Somewhere he could deal with this in the most straightforward way possible—clear his head, reset whatever needed resetting—and maybe, finally, bring himself to look at what he'd become.

  But there was no privacy here. His followers maintained their distance when he slept, but they never fully left. And the arousal never fully left either—two constants in a world full of things he didn't understand.

  Denial, he told himself, forcing his gaze to the horizon, forcing his thoughts away from the sensations still pulsing through unfamiliar territory. Denial is a perfectly valid coping mechanism.

  He repeated it like a mantra, trying very hard not to think about the wetness he could feel that had no business being there at all.

  It wasn't a permanent solution. But it got him through.

  And it got him moving again. Faster now. Harder. Throwing himself into the walking with a ferocity that had nothing to do with reaching tier-two territory and everything to do with keeping the quiet at bay.

  So he filled the silence.

  Every waking hour that wasn't spent walking or eating, Cade trained. Not the surface-level dabbling he'd managed during the first days, snatching minutes between bouts of anxiety. This was deliberate. Methodical. The kind of structured approach he'd built his life around on Earth, redirected toward everything this world demanded he learn.

  He started with the anima.

  The warm pressure behind his sternum—the power that marked his advancement to tier one—had been sluggish and resistant during his early attempts to move it. Cold honey that didn't want to be stirred. But with nothing else to do, he could push against that resistance for hours, feeling the anima inch grudgingly through his body, learning how it moved and where it liked to settle.

  By the third day, he could shift it from his chest to his shoulder with reasonable reliability. By the fifth, he could push it all the way down to his hand and hold it there for almost a minute before it slipped back to its natural resting place.

  Progress. Slow, but real.

  The tail was next.

  It had taken him two days to work up the courage to extend it fully. Even after his initial discovery during the advancement—the bizarre sensation of something long and thin uncoiling from within his spine—he'd kept it retracted, unwilling to deal with the strangeness of it.

  But idle hands were dangerous now. Idle anything was dangerous.

  The first time he let it out deliberately, it emerged slowly from the opening at his lower back, unfurling like a serpent waking from sleep. It was longer than he'd expected—longer than his arm—and thin, maybe the width of his thumb at its base, tapering to a point that looked almost delicate.

  Looks were deceiving. When he flicked it experimentally, trying to make it move like a whip, it lashed sideways with enough force to nearly throw him off balance. The strength packed into that slender appendage was absurd, completely out of proportion to its size.

  Controlling it was another story.

  He tried to curl it around his hand. It twitched in three different directions and smacked him in the thigh.

  He tried to point it straight out behind him. It wobbled like a drunk trying to walk a line, then collapsed against his lower back.

  He tried to wave it back and forth. It spasmed once and went limp.

  It was like learning to write with a new limb—a limb he'd never had before, with no muscle memory to draw on, no instinct for how it was supposed to move. Every motion had to be consciously directed, and his conscious directions were apparently terrible.

  But he had time. Miles and miles of time. And every minute spent wrestling with the tail was a minute his mind couldn't wander back to places he didn't want it to go.

  By the end of the first week, he could extend and retract it reliably. He could hold it straight out behind him for about thirty seconds before it started wobbling. He could make it curl in a rough approximation of a spiral, though it looked more like a corkscrew with a drinking problem.

  It was something.

  And the voice.

  He practiced that too, when he was sure his followers were far enough back not to hear his failures. The soul voice came easier now than it had those first hours—he could hold it for minutes at a stretch, carry full conversations without slipping into physical sound. But the distant quality remained. Every word he spoke arrived with that slight echo, that sense of transmission across some vast space.

  He'd discovered, at least, that the soul voice could do everything his old voice had done. Sigh when he was frustrated. Laugh when something struck him as absurd. Gasp in surprise, though the reflex felt strange without actual breath behind it. The emotional content traveled with the words, independent of any physical mechanism.

  It was like learning to write with his non-dominant hand. Functional. Getting better. But obviously not native.

  And then there were the exercises.

  The realization hit him somewhere around day four. He missed working out. His body felt fine—better than fine with his newly upgraded strength and the complete absence of joint pain—but his mind missed the ritual of it. The structured movement, the progressive challenge, the satisfaction of pushing against resistance.

  More than that: he needed it. The way an addict needs a fix, except what he was addicted to was exhaustion. The state of being too tired to think, too spent to feel anything except the pleasant ache of muscles pushed to their limit. On Earth, that had been a healthy outlet. Here, it was survival.

  Here, there was no gym. No weights. No equipment of any kind.

  But he had his tail.

  It took some experimentation, but he figured out that he could use the tail as a kind of resistance band for some of the more awkward accessory motions. Hook it around another body part or pull back behind his head or shoulder against his hand. The tail was strong enough to provide real resistance, and flexible enough to allow a decent range of motion. He enjoyed the feeling of working muscles that were completely new to him, and at the same time, the tail got stronger as well.

  It wasn't perfect. He could only work one arm at a time, for one thing—the angles were wrong for bilateral movements. And the resistance varied depending on how hard the tail was gripping, which he couldn't fully control yet.

  But it was something. Something that filled the hours and quieted the noise.

  He developed a routine. Tail-assisted accessory work, stopping for a minute to lever himself between a giant fungal stalk and the ground, trying to uproot it in various angles, and bodyweight work.

  The bodyweight work was easier. Pistol squats, which had always been a challenge back on Earth, felt almost trivially easy with the reduced gravity and his enhanced strength. He started doing them by the dozen, alternating legs, dropping down and standing up with a fluidity that would have made his old self jealous. Lunges across the moss. Walking lunges. Jumping lunges.

  He hated high reps. Always had. The mental monotony of counting over fifteen grated against him more than heavy weights ever did. But here, with nothing else to occupy his mind, the counting became almost meditative. Just numbers, ticking upward, marking the passage of time. Filling the space where unwanted thoughts might otherwise settle.

  And that was when it hit him.

  The strength in his legs—the power coiled in his thighs and calves, the explosive force that let him launch himself into the air and stick landings that would have shattered his old knees—he hadn't earned any of it.

  Back on Earth, every pound on the barbell represented weeks of progressive overload. Every personal record was the culmination of months of disciplined work—the early mornings, the careful nutrition, the deliberate recovery, the patient accumulation of adaptation on top of adaptation. He'd spent years building what he'd built, and the building was the point. The strength was almost secondary to the process of becoming strong.

  Here? He'd killed three probably good people. Accidentally, unwillingly, one of them engineered specifically to happen despite his protests. And in return, his body had been... upgraded. Handed strength like a participation trophy. Tier one: congratulations on your murders.

  He did another pistol squat and felt the muscles fire with beautiful efficiency, and hated how good it felt.

  This wasn't him. This strength, this body, this power thrumming in his bones—it belonged to someone who had taken lives. It was built on a foundation of death, not discipline. Every time he moved, he was benefiting from what Kern and Pell and Tormina had given him. Using gifts he'd never wanted and couldn't refuse.

  He pushed harder, seeking exhaustion, seeking the burn that would remind him what real effort felt like.

  The tier-one advancement itself had been... seductive. That was the worst part. When the power had unfolded inside him, integrating with his body, reshaping him from the inside out—it had felt good. Not just physically, though that too. It had felt right, like coming home to a house he'd never lived in, like remembering a song he'd never heard. His body had known what to do even when his mind was screaming that this was wrong, that he hadn't earned it, that three people were dead and he was enjoying the result.

  He'd wanted more. In that moment, freshly advanced, he'd felt the hunger for additional anima and it had taken genuine effort to let that hunger fade rather than act on it.

  What kind of person did that make him?

  He didn't have an answer. So he kept moving. Kept counting reps. Kept filling every available moment with motion and effort and the simple mathematics of physical exertion.

  And then there were the acrobatics.

  Cade hadn't done a backflip in ten years. Not since high school, when he'd been young and stupid and convinced that injuries only happened to other people. The fear had crept in gradually as he'd aged—an awareness of how fragile the human body was, how easily things could go wrong, how much harder recovery got with every passing year, missing workouts.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  But here? In this reduced gravity, with this enhanced body?

  He experimented by performing a handstand, and jumping from his hands, gaining significant height. He progressed towards actually seeing what happened when he landed on his head after small falls, finally determining that even the most awkward of impacts were no threat to him. Finally, confidence bolstered, he tried a standing backflip on day three. Launched himself into the air, tucked, rotated, and—

  Landed on his ass.

  Despite the hard ground, his new body shrugged off the impact like it was nothing. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the eternal gray clouds, and laughed.

  Then he got up and tried again.

  It took him about twenty attempts to land one cleanly. But by the end of the week, he could string together backflips, front flips, aerials, layouts—movements he'd only ever seen on YouTube, translated into clumsy reality through sheer repetition and the forgiveness of low gravity.

  His followers watched from a safe distance, occasionally murmuring to each other in voices too quiet for him to catch. He wondered what they made of the giant stranger flipping through the air, landing badly, picking himself up, and trying again. Comedy, probably. Entertainment.

  He didn't mind. It kept him occupied.

  And it kept other things at bay.

  The journey stretched on.

  Days passed—or what Cade assumed were days. The light never changed, the mist never stopped, and without any external markers of time, he could only guess based on his own fatigue cycles. Sleep, walk, eat, exercise, walk, sleep. Over and over, the rhythm becoming almost meditative.

  The terrain sloped gently downward, always downward, and Cade had learned to use the dim glow on the horizon as his guide. Through breaks in the clouds and mist, he could see it—not quite a sun, more like the memory of one, a diffuse brightness that sat low in the sky and never seemed to move. He was walking toward it, and as long as he kept it ahead of him, he knew he was heading in the right direction.

  The water worked too, technically. Every stream and trickle flowed the same way he was walking. But the water meandered, curving around obstacles and pooling in low spots before continuing on its way. The light was more reliable. He wondered why Hyude hadn't mentioned it.

  Maybe it was obvious to everyone who'd grown up here. Maybe it was like telling someone on Earth to follow the sun—so basic it didn't need saying. Maybe Hyude wanted him to meander. Or maybe the Kindred didn't look up much. They were so small that the ground demanded most of their attention.

  He guessed the first leg took about a week. Seven cycles of sleeping and waking, seven long periods of walking toward that dim light on the horizon. His pace varied—sometimes pushing hard when the ground was clear and his energy was high, sometimes slowing to navigate around clusters of Kindred or more challenging terrain—but he covered ground steadily. Three hundred miles, maybe. Perhaps more.

  Over this time, something else changed.

  Some of his followers were larger.

  Not dramatically so. Not the massive size difference between himself and the four-inch tier-zeros. But instead of uniformly tiny figures, he was seeing some that stood perhaps seven inches tall. Nearly twice the height of the newborns he'd first encountered.

  They moved differently too. More confident, more deliberate. They didn't cluster as tightly with the smaller Kindred, often walking slightly apart, observing rather than participating in the constant whispered conversations that rippled through the group.

  Tier-ones, he realized. They had to be. People who had advanced, who had grown, who were closer to his own stage of development even if they were still tiny by his standards.

  Which meant he probably wouldn't be losing his following anytime soon. Even when he reached the tier-one territories—even when the people around him grew larger—there would still be curious souls trailing after him, watching to see what he'd do next.

  So much for blending in.

  On what he thought was the seventh day, everything changed.

  It happened so gradually that he almost missed it. The fungal stalks had been growing sparser for the last few hours, the spaces between them wider, the ceiling of caps overhead less continuous. More light filtered through—not brighter, exactly, but less diffused. He could see further ahead than he'd been able to since arriving.

  And then, between one step and the next, the fungal forest ended.

  Cade stopped at the edge and stared.

  Before him stretched a jungle.

  Not a fungal jungle—a proper jungle, with trees that had trunks and branches and leaves. The transition was abrupt, almost artificial in its sharpness. Behind him, the massive fungal stalks rose like gray-brown pillars. Ahead, verdant green exploded in every direction, a riot of growth that looked almost Earth-like in its familiarity.

  Almost. But not quite.

  The trees were shaped wrong. Their trunks spiraled slightly, corkscrewing toward the sky instead of growing straight. Their leaves were too uniform, too perfectly arranged, like someone had designed them for maximum efficiency rather than letting evolution do its messy work. And the colors, while predominantly green, had undertones that didn't quite match anything he'd seen before—hints of teal and chartreuse that made the whole scene feel slightly alien despite its superficial familiarity.

  But it was the food that caught his attention.

  Bushes clustered at the base of the trees, their branches heavy with berries. They looked like raspberries—the same clustered structure, the same dimpled surface—but they were bright yellow, almost golden, glowing against the green leaves like tiny suns.

  And the trees themselves bore fruit.

  On one, he saw what looked like oranges. The same round shape, the same pebbled skin. But they were violet, a deep purple that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it. On another tree, what looked like pea pods hung in clusters, their surfaces a familiar pale green.

  The variety. After a week of nothing but miniature nodules to eat—nutritious, yes, but monotonous—the sight of actual recognizable food felt like coming home.

  The fruits were still tiny, of course. Nothing in this world was scaled for him. The yellow raspberries were about the size of peas from his perspective, the violet oranges maybe the size of small grapes. But that was still vastly larger than the grain-of-sand nodules he'd been sucking off his fingers for the past week.

  Improvement. Definite improvement.

  He turned back to look at his followers, still clustered at the edge of the fungal forest. Most of them had stopped too, staring at the jungle with expressions he couldn't quite read. The color palette of the group had shifted again over the past few hours—mostly warm tones now, oranges and reds and yellows, with a few cooler accents scattered through.

  He didn't recognize any individual faces. They'd all blurred together over the week of walking, a constantly shifting parade of tiny colorful people. But he needed information, and they were the only source available.

  "Is all of this edible?" he called down. "The berries? The fruits?"

  The response was immediate: laughter.

  Dozens of tiny voices, tittering and chuckling, the sound rising up from the crowd like wind through leaves. Cade felt his face heat. He'd asked a reasonable question, hadn't he? In a world this strange, assuming anything was safe seemed foolish.

  But they were laughing at him.

  "Only the labyrinth would ever provide anything poisonous," someone called out. A new voice, one he didn't recognize. He looked down and saw a figure stepping forward from the crowd—a deep burgundy color, maybe seven inches tall, a tier-one. "I'm Porri. And you should feel free to try anything you see."

  More whispers rippled through the crowd. Cade caught fragments—"...see if he tries the leaves..." and "...bark would be funny..." and "...technically won't hurt him..."—and felt his suspicion spike.

  They were setting him up for something. He didn't know what, exactly, but the whispering made it clear enough.

  "Anything I see?" he repeated carefully. "Or anything that's actually meant to be eaten?"

  Porri's expression flickered—disappointment, maybe, or just surprise that he'd caught on so quickly. "The fruits and berries are food. The rest is... not."

  "Not poisonous. But not food either."

  "Correct."

  Cade nodded slowly. "Good to know."

  He turned away from the crowd and studied the jungle more carefully. Fruits, yes. Berries, yes. But also—

  Vines.

  Thick, ropy vines hanging from the spiraling trees, their surfaces covered with broad leaves. The leaves were surprisingly large—as big as his hand, some of them—and when he reached out to touch one experimentally, he found the texture rough and sturdy. Not delicate at all.

  An idea began to form.

  He'd been naked for a week. Naked and exposed and acutely aware of every pair of tiny eyes watching him from below. The exercise helped with the libido issues, but it didn't help with the fundamental vulnerability of having no covering at all.

  But if the leaves were strong enough...

  It took him about an hour to figure out a workable design. The leaves had a natural abrasiveness that let them catch against each other, almost like velcro, and the vines could be stripped into thin fibers for additional binding. He wove and folded and tied, working with fingers that felt clumsy at this scale but got the job done eventually.

  The result was... crude. Very crude. A loincloth, basically, if you were being generous. A bundle of leaves held together by vine fibers and determination, wrapped around his waist and hanging down far enough to cover what needed covering.

  But it was coverage. From the front, at least.

  The view from below was trickier—his followers were all looking up at him from ground level, after all. But with some creative layering, he managed to create enough overlap to block that angle too.

  It wasn't comfortable. The leaves were scratchy against his skin, and the vine fibers dug into his waist if he moved too quickly. But it was something. A barrier between himself and the world. A small reclamation of dignity.

  When he looked down at his followers again, he thought he saw disappointment on some of their tiny faces.

  Good.

  The tier-one jungle stretched on for what felt like forever.

  Cade walked and climbed and occasionally leaped, his crude loincloth rustling with every movement. The violet oranges turned out to be sweet, almost cloyingly so. The yellow raspberries were tart, with a faint citrus undertone that reminded him of lemonade. The green peas tasted like peas, which was somehow the most surprising thing of all.

  And the sustenance they provided was remarkable.

  A single piece of fruit—tiny as it was from his perspective—could keep him satisfied for half a day. Compared to the dozens of nodules he'd needed to feel full in the fungal forest, this was a dramatic improvement. The anima density, apparently, scaled with the tier of the environment.

  Good to know. It made the journey feel less desperate, somehow. Less like survival, more like exploration.

  He still hadn't seen any sign of civilization.

  No buildings. No roads. No organized structures of any kind. Just the endless jungle, the spiraling trees, the fruits and berries and vines. Other Kindred moved through the undergrowth—he caught glimpses of them occasionally, small figures going about their own business—but they showed no more signs of settlement than the tier-zeros had.

  Maybe this was a transition area. The thought occurred to him around the fourth day in the jungle, as he was doing pistol squats on a particularly flat section of stone. If everyone started at tier-zero and worked their way up, then the lower tiers would naturally be more transient. People passing through on their way to somewhere else, rather than settling down to build lives.

  That would explain the lack of towns. Why build something permanent in a place you were planning to leave?

  It would also explain why he kept seeing familiar faces.

  Or... possibly familiar faces. It was hard to tell, honestly. At seven inches tall, the tier-ones were more distinguishable than the tier-zeros had been—he could make out individual features now, the shape of a nose or the set of a jaw—but there were still dozens of them, and they all moved with that same fluid confidence that made tracking individuals difficult.

  Still. He was pretty sure some of them had been following him since the fungal forest. The proportions were right. The colors matched.

  They were growing along with him. Advancing through the tiers as they traveled, fueled by whatever anima sources this world provided, probably why they were leaving and coming back. Which meant that even as he moved toward people his own size, the crowd behind him would keep pace.

  Wonderful.

  Speaking of the crowd.

  The tier-one Kindred had started acquiring clothes.

  Not all of them, and not consistently. But here and there, he'd spot a figure wearing something more than bare skin—a draped piece of fabric, a woven belt, something that looked almost like a hat. The materials were natural, similar to what he'd used for his own loincloth, but the construction was far more sophisticated. Actual seams. Actual design.

  He watched, curious, trying to figure out where it was coming from. Were they making it? Finding it? Trading with others?

  The answer seemed to be "yes to all of the above." He caught glimpses of Kindred weaving fibers together while they walked, their small fingers moving with practiced speed. He saw others exchanging items in brief transactions, handing over fruits or crafted objects in return for pieces of clothing. The economy of it was informal but real.

  Interesting. This world had trade, then. Commerce of a sort.

  What struck him as odd was what they chose to cover.

  His loincloth—crude as it was—prioritized the obvious areas. The parts of his body that Earth culture had taught him to hide, the zones that felt most vulnerable exposed. But the Kindred didn't seem to share those priorities. Their clothing choices were almost random: a wrap around one arm here, a decorative drape across the shoulders there, a complex arrangement that covered everything except what Cade would have considered the important bits.

  It was fashion, he realized. Not modesty. They were dressing for aesthetic effect, not privacy.

  Which made sense, in a way. If everyone here shared the same basic anatomy—whatever that anatomy might be—then there was nothing unusual to hide. Nothing that would attract special attention by being exposed. Clothing wasn't about covering; it was about expressing.

  He thought back to the moment he'd finished his loincloth, the disappointment he'd seen on some of his followers' tiny faces. At the time, he'd assumed they were upset about losing the view—frustrated that their giant curiosity had covered up the parts they'd been gawking at.

  Now he wasn't so sure.

  Maybe they'd been disappointed in his fashion sense. His crude leaf-and-vine construction, prioritizing coverage over aesthetics, function over form. To them, it probably looked like he'd wrapped himself in garbage and called it clothing.

  He glanced down at his loincloth—scratchy, lopsided, held together more by hope than craftsmanship—and felt a flicker of self-consciousness that had nothing to do with nudity.

  Great. He was the worst-dressed person in a world where most people were naked.

  He filed that observation away and tried not to think too hard about the "same basic anatomy" part.

  The tier-one Kindred were larger, which meant he could see more detail. And some of that detail was...

  Confusing.

  He'd noticed feminine shapes, first. As the Kindred grew from four inches to seven, the differences between body types became more apparent. Some had curves that read as feminine to his Earth-trained eye—wider hips, narrower waists, proportions that suggested one end of the human gender spectrum.

  But when he looked more closely—when his eye was drawn, despite his best efforts, to the areas his loincloth was specifically designed to cover—he saw...

  Something else. Something that didn't match his expectations.

  He looked away quickly. Focused on the path ahead. Tried to think about anything else.

  It didn't work.

  The shapes he'd glimpsed stayed in his mind, refusing to be ignored. Feminine curves, yes. But the anatomy at the center was... different. Not what he expected from a feminine body. Not what he expected from a masculine body either, honestly. Something in between, or beyond, or entirely orthogonal to the categories he knew.

  The same basic anatomy, shared across all Kindred regardless of other characteristics.

  The same anatomy that his own body now possessed.

  Cade pushed harder, walking faster, channeling the confused energy into movement. He wasn't going to think about it. He wasn't going to examine himself. He was going to keep his loincloth firmly in place and pretend that everything below his waist was exactly what it had always been.

  Denial was a perfectly valid coping mechanism.

  By the end of the first week in tier-one territory, Cade had started to relax.

  Not completely. He still watched his feet, still kept an eye on the Kindred that moved around him. But the constant terror of accidentally killing someone had faded to a background hum rather than a screaming alarm. The tier-ones were larger, faster, more aware. They got out of his way without being asked. And even the tier-zeros who still followed him seemed to have learned his patterns, giving him wide berth when he moved.

  And the jungle? The jungle was a playground.

  He'd been doing acrobatics back in the fungal forest, sure. Backflips on the spongy ground, tumbling across the moss. But the fungi had offered limited options—smooth stalks with nothing to grab, caps too high to reach, surfaces that were either too hard or too soft with nothing in between.

  The trees were different.

  The spiral trunks had texture, bark that his fingers could dig into, branches at varied heights that invited climbing. He'd scale thirty feet in seconds, find a thick limb, and perch there surveying the landscape before launching himself to the next tree. The handholds were everywhere. The options were endless.

  And the vines—the vines were a revelation.

  Back on Earth, he'd paid good money for resistance bands and cable machines. Here, the jungle provided them for free. He started experimenting on the second day, looping vines over sturdy branches and using them as pulleys. Hang from one end, pull down on the other, and suddenly he had a functional lat pulldown station. Thread a vine through a fork in a tree, grab both ends, and he could do cable flies that actually felt like work.

  It wasn't perfect. The resistance varied depending on friction and vine thickness. The "weights" were his own body, which limited how heavy he could go. But it was infinitely better than the tail-only exercises he'd been stuck with in tier-zero.

  He got creative.

  Fallen logs became implements. He'd find one roughly his size—they were everywhere, remnants of trees that had lost their battles with gravity or age—and drag it behind him as he walked. The resistance was real, the burn in his legs and back and shoulders satisfying in a way nothing had been since he'd arrived. When dragging got boring, he'd hoist the log overhead and carry it that way, or balance it across his shoulders for squats, or use it as a counterweight for single-leg work.

  His followers watched from a safe distance, whispering to each other. He wondered what they made of it—the giant stranger hauling timber through the jungle for no apparent reason, grunting with effort, setting the log down only to pick it up again and keep walking.

  Probably thought he was insane. He didn't care.

  The climbing scratched an itch the fungal forest never could. The stalks had been too smooth, too uniform, too boring. But the spiral trees offered variety—rough sections and smooth sections, dense branches and sparse ones, routes that required actual problem-solving to navigate. He'd find a particularly challenging tree and work it like a climbing wall, testing different paths to the top, seeing how fast he could ascend and descend.

  And the acrobatics translated beautifully. He could launch off a high branch, flip through the air, and catch himself on a vine or a lower limb. He could swing from tree to tree, building momentum, covering distances that would have been impossible on the ground. The reduced gravity extended his airtime; his enhanced body made the catches feel almost casual.

  He felt, for the first time since arriving, like he was actually training again. Not just moving to pass the time or burn off unwanted energy, but building something. Getting stronger. Getting better.

  It was intoxicating.

  And probably, he reminded himself, going to get him killed if he got too cocky.

  But in the moment, swinging between trees with a fallen log strapped across his back just to make it harder, it was difficult to remember caution.

  At the end of the second week, he asked about distances.

  He'd been wondering for a while, tracking his progress against some internal map that didn't have nearly enough reference points. The fungal forest—tier-zero—had taken a week. The jungle—tier one—was taking at least that long, maybe longer.

  How much further?

  "How far is it to tier-two?" he called down to his followers.

  A ripple of motion passed through the crowd. The tier-one Kindred—there were more of them now, the group having accumulated higher-tier individuals as they traveled through higher-tier territory—exchanged glances and shrugs.

  One of them stepped forward. A figure in pale blue, maybe seven inches tall, with a piece of woven fabric draped across one shoulder. "We only get our memories back up to the tier at which we died," they said. "And most of us haven't died as tier-one or zero having travelled past tier-one yet."

  "So you don't know how far it is?"

  "We are creating new memories along with you for our future tier-zero and one journeys to have this knowledge. This is not something we normally do, travelling like this." The blue Kindred shrugged. "We know the earlier parts of the journey because we've died there before. But beyond that?" Another shrug. "We’ll all find out when we get there."

  Cade nodded slowly. It made a certain kind of sense. If death was temporary and memories persisted, then the Kindred would only have knowledge of places they'd actually died at in previous lives, with their other memories locked away until they attain that same level. The further they pushed, the more collective wisdom the group would have.

  He was on his own, then. Or at least no better informed than his followers.

  "Guess we keep walking," he said.

  Tier-two turned out to be about twice as far as tier-one.

  Once again, the transition was like stepping into a new world all at once. The jungle just flattened suddenly. And then, between one step and the next, he was wading.

  The water came up to his knees at its deepest point, warm and murky, filled with floating debris that brushed against his legs as he moved. It was shallower in some places, deeper in others, an endless maze of channels and pools and barely submerged roots.

  A swamp. Or a floodplain. Something between the two, maybe—the kind of transitional wetland that existed in the spaces between biomes.

  Mangroves grew here, or something like them. Trees with thick, twisted root systems that rose out of the water like grasping fingers, their canopies spreading broad and low. The food grew underwater now—fruits and berries submerged just below the surface, requiring him to reach down and pluck them from their stems.

  They were larger. About the size of cherries, roughly, which was yet another improvement. And the taste had improved too—more complex, more varied, flavors he couldn't quite name but that spoke of some deeper sophistication.

  His followers struggled here.

  The tier-ones, seven inches tall, found themselves wading through water that came up to their chests, themselves starting to jump from mangrove to mangrove where possible. The tier-zeros who still trailed at the back of the group had it even worse—for them, this was genuinely deep water, requiring swimming or desperate paddling to keep pace.

  Cade found himself feeling almost guilty about how much he was enjoying it.

  The resistance of the water against his legs in the deeper sections—that was real exercise. The first real workout his lower body had gotten since arriving. He could run through the shallower sections, feeling the burn in his thighs, or push through the deeper areas and feel his calves straining. And jumping? Jumping was incredible. Launching himself up out of the water, feeling the spray kick up around him, the airtime extended by the reduced gravity.

  For the first time, his legs felt like they were actually working instead of being limited to static holds.

  He pushed harder, running when he could, sprint-dragging this feet through deeper channels. Behind him, his followers fell progressively farther back—the tier-ones struggling to keep pace, the tier-zeros abandoning the chase entirely.

  Good, he thought, and then felt bad for thinking it.

  But also: good.

  And then he saw the city.

  It rose out of the swamp like a dream, or a hallucination, or something his exhausted mind had conjured up to torment him. But the closer he got, the more real it became, until he stood at the edge of it and understood that he was finally looking at something built.

  The mangroves here had been... shaped. There was no other word for it. Their roots curved and intertwined in patterns that were clearly intentional, forming walls and platforms and walkways. The trees themselves bent in impossible angles, their branches meeting to create canopies that served as roofs, dozens of feet off the ground. The whole structure flowed together, organic and architectural at once, a city grown rather than constructed.

  Except that wasn't quite right either.

  Cade looked closer and saw the armatures beneath the living wood. Thin strands of something metallic, gleaming faintly in the diffused light, running through the roots and branches like veins. The trees had been trained around these frames, their growth guided and directed by the metal scaffolding within.

  The stone, he realized. The same seamless stone that formed the floor of this entire world—someone had shaped it, extracted it, formed it into the delicate frameworks that the mangroves embraced.

  The city sprawled across a wide section of the swamp, elevated platforms connected by root-bridges, buildings that were half-tree and half-architecture, spaces that served purposes he couldn't guess from the outside. And people—larger people, people who stood perhaps about a foot tall, going about their business on those platforms and bridges.

  The first true settlement he'd encountered since arriving in this world.

  He'd been walking for over three weeks. Three hundred miles of fungal forest, another six hundred miles of jungle, now endless swamp and wetland. His following had dwindled to a handful of dedicated tier-ones stubborn or curious enough to keep swimming.

  And now, he was somewhere that felt intentional.

  Cade stood at the edge of the city, the water lapping at his knees, and hesitated.

  He could see figures on the nearest platforms noticing him. A few had stopped what they were doing, turning to look in his direction. From this distance, they probably couldn't tell much about him, just another large figure wading through the swamp, presumably a higher-tier traveler passing through. They'd assume he was tier-four, maybe tier-five. Someone whose size matched their expectations.

  But if he got closer? If they got a good look at him, talked to him, realized that he was only tier-one despite his impossible size?

  Word would spread. It always did. The Coordinator had warned him about attention, about powerful beings who might view him as a threat or a curiosity or a challenge. A city like this—a real settlement with trade connections and information networks—could pinpoint him. Could send word out to whoever was listening for unusual news.

  He thought about the stories that were probably already circulating. Strange giant, weird advancement, shrank back to spawn size. Basic information, maybe, but information, nonetheless. Every person who learned about him was another potential thread leading back to wherever he tried to hide.

  On the other hand, he'd been craving civilization since he arrived. Answers. Context. Some understanding of this world beyond what he could piece together from cryptic comments and his own observations.

  And privacy. Gods, he wanted privacy. But a city of foot-tall people wasn't going to provide that. He'd still be the giant. Still be the spectacle. Still be surrounded by tiny eyes watching his every move.

  Maybe there was another option.

  He turned to look at his remaining followers, a ragged group of perhaps fifteen, mostly tier-ones now, treading water or clinging to exposed roots. They looked exhausted. The swamp had not been kind to beings their size.

  "I have some questions," Cade said, crouching down to bring himself closer to their level. The water rose to his chest, but it was worth it to not have to shout. "Before I decide what to do next."

  The group exchanged glances. A figure near the front—pale yellow, about eight inches tall, someone he didn't recognize—shrugged. "Ask, then."

  “If someone—someone powerful—decided I was a threat and came after me, how would I defend myself? How do I get stronger, faster than just... exercise and killing other people?"

  This question got a more serious response. The yellow Kindred—he really needed to start learning names—leaned forward with something like interest.

  "Your best bet is the labyrinth," they said. "Through the portals. You go in, you clear what's inside, you come out with anima. More anima than you'd get any other way, concentrated and pure. That's the fastest path to advancement."

  "Clear what's inside?"

  "It's different every time. Sometimes it's a fight—creatures, challenges, things that want to kill you. Sometimes it's a puzzle. Sometimes it's..." The yellow Kindred waved a hand vaguely. "Scenarios. Situations you must navigate. Like a game, almost. Quick ones, long ones. You never know until you're inside."

  "And when you finish?"

  "The labyrinth goes quiet. You feel it settle around you—the anima flowing in, your advancement solidifying. Most people tier up inside, if they've gathered enough." The Kindred paused. "And then you can exit wherever you want."

  Cade blinked. "Wherever I want?"

  "Within reason. As you absorb the rewards, one way or another, and only if you tier up, you think of tier, a type of location or person, and the labyrinth opens a way out. That's how people travel long distances quickly—enter a portal here, exit from one two tiers away. Faster than walking. Or the next labyrinth challenge, of course."

  That explained some things. How information might spread faster than feet could carry it. How the world could function with settlements scattered across such vast distances.

  It also explained how someone might catch up to him, if they were determined enough.

  "I've seen the portals," he said. "The tier-zero one was too small for me to fit through."

  "They scale with the tier. A tier-two portal would be larger. Maybe large enough." The yellow Kindred looked him up and down appraisingly. "Maybe."

  "And the anima I'd get—it just makes me stronger? Helps me advance to the next tier?"

  "That, and more." Another Kindred spoke up—this one a deep forest green, one of the larger ones in the group. "The labyrinth gives you essence types. Different kinds, with different properties. You can infuse them, gain abilities beyond just raw advancement."

  Cade's interest sharpened. "Abilities? What kind of abilities?"

  "Depends on the essence type. It can make your body weird, different. Elemental manipulation. Sensory enhancement. Dozens of varieties, maybe hundreds. The labyrinth provides."

  This was news. Significant news. "I haven't seen anyone use abilities like that. Not once, in three weeks of traveling."

  The green Kindred made a sound that might have been a snort. "Because we're not stupid enough to waste them at these tiers. You only get three per life. Three infusions, three abilities, and then you're locked until you die and respawn." A gesture that encompassed the group. "Most of us save them for the higher tiers, when advancement actually gets dangerous. No point burning an essence type at tier-two when you'll need it at tier-six or seven."

  "When does it get dangerous?"

  "Tier-five is when most people start using them," the yellow one said. "The advancement trials get harder. You're not just compressing anima anymore, you're facing opposition. Fighting for the right to grow."

  "Fighting what?"

  The group went quiet. The yellow Kindred and the green one exchanged a look that Cade couldn't quite read.

  "Yourself," the green one finally said. "A past version of yourself. The trials pit you against what you used to be, enhanced with attributes from labyrinth creatures. It gets... difficult. Adding an essence type gives you an edge over your previous self, helps you overcome what you were."

  "Tier-seven is where most people stall," someone else added. A small voice from the back, one of the few remaining tier-zeros who had somehow kept pace. "The trial there is brutal. A lot of Kindred never make it past, just cycle between dying at tier-seven and respawning at zero. Over and over, forever."

  Cade absorbed this. Advancement trials. Fighting past versions of himself. Essence types that granted abilities but were limited to three per lifetime. A whole system of progression he'd known nothing about.

  "What's the labyrinth actually like?" he asked. "Inside, I mean. What should I expect?"

  The quiet that followed was different from before. Less informative, more... anticipatory.

  The Kindred were whispering to each other. Quick, hushed exchanges that Cade couldn't quite catch. Glances in his direction, then away. Something that might have been suppressed laughter.

  "You'll have to find out," the yellow one finally said, and there was definitely amusement in the voice now. "The experience is... personal."

  "But surely you can tell me something. What kinds of creatures? What's the layout? How long does it typically take? Do I have to kill?"

  More whispers. More poorly hidden smirks.

  "Details don't travel well to the outer rings," the green Kindred said, in a tone that suggested this was technically true but deliberately unhelpful. "We don't know much. You understand. However, it is well known that labyrinth creatures live for battle, love it in fact, and resurrect as we do, but with rewards in place of a penalty."

  They were holding back. Obviously, deliberately holding back. Cade could see it in their faces—they knew something, or suspected something, about what would happen when someone his size entered a tier-two labyrinth. And they weren't going to tell him.

  He tried one more angle. "What about the essence types? Can you at least tell me what kinds there are? What abilities might I gain?"

  Shrugs. Smirks. Theatrical expressions of ignorance.

  "So many varieties," someone said. "Hard to keep track."

  "Really depends on the labyrinth," someone else added. "Very unpredictable."

  "You'll just have to see for yourself. The first life is best experienced than instructed. There will be plenty of time for learning later."

  Cade gave up.

  They'd told him as much as they were going to. The rest, apparently, was entertainment they weren't willing to spoil.

  "Fine," he said. "One last question. How do I find a portal? I haven't seen one since tier-zero, and I didn't exactly have time to study that one."

  This question, at least, they seemed willing to answer.

  "Close your eyes," the yellow Kindred said. "Picture the symbol. The one you saw during your tier-one advancement—the spiral with the branching edges. Hold it in your mind, and you'll feel... a pull. A direction. The nearest portal calling to you."

  The symbol. The spiral that had appeared in his mind during his breakthrough, the same pattern carved into the tier-zero portal. He hadn't thought about it since, too focused on walking and eating and not crushing anyone.

  Cade closed his eyes.

  He pictured the spiral. The outer edges forking into delicate branches like roots or rivers. The curves tightening as they wound inward, each loop denser than the last. The intricate knot at the center where everything converged.

  For a moment, nothing. Just darkness behind his eyelids, the sound of water lapping against his chest, the murmur of Kindred voices nearby.

  And then—

  A tug. Faint but unmistakable, like a compass needle swinging toward north. Not a physical sensation exactly, more like a certainty. A knowledge of direction that bypassed his normal senses entirely.

  To the right. Away from the city, deeper into the swamp. Maybe half a mile, maybe less.

  Cade opened his eyes.

  "I felt it," he said.

  "Then you know where to go." The yellow Kindred was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read. "Good luck in there, giant. Try not to break anything."

  More snickers from the group. Whatever joke they were enjoying, Cade clearly wasn't in on it.

  He stood up, water streaming off his body, and turned away from the city. Away from the answers it might have provided, away from the attention it would certainly bring. Toward the portal, toward the labyrinth, toward whatever waited inside.

  Maybe he'd find strength there. Power enough to protect himself if the wrong people came looking.

  Maybe he'd find privacy. A space where no tiny eyes could follow, where he could finally be alone with his thoughts and his body and the strangeness of what he'd become.

  Maybe he'd find answers.

  Or maybe the Kindred were right to smirk, and he was walking into something he didn't understand.

  Only one way to find out.

  The portal stood in a clearing of sorts—a gap between the mangroves where the water was shallow and the stone floor rose slightly above the surface. Cade spotted it from fifty feet away, a freestanding doorway that seemed to glow faintly against the gray-green backdrop of the swamp.

  It was larger than the tier-zero portal. Much larger.

  But not large enough.

  Cade stood before it and felt his stomach drop.

  The portal was just under three feet tall and about a two feet wide. For a foot-tall tier-two Kindred, it would be spacious—room to walk through comfortably, maybe even side by side with a companion. For Cade, at five-foot-seven, it was...

  Tight. Very, very tight.

  He could fit. Probably. If he went sideways, kept his arms positioned correctly, didn't panic. He could squeeze through.

  But the thought of it made his skin crawl.

  Cade had never been seriously claustrophobic. He'd been in elevators, in crowded subway cars, in the tight confines of MRI machines without panicking. But this was different. This was voluntary. This was choosing to wedge himself into a space barely large enough to contain him, with no guarantee of what waited on the other side.

  He thought about the spelunking stories he'd read online. The ones about cavers who'd pushed too far into narrow passages and got stuck. Wedged in stone, unable to move forward or backward, dying slowly in the darkness while rescuers tried desperately to reach them. The famous ones had names that stuck in his memory, names attached to horrifying accounts of failed rescues and bodies left entombed forever.

  He thought about the online videos that made him cringe even through a screen. Thrill-seekers launching themselves through narrow gaps in coastal rocks, the ocean churning below. People sliding into water-filled pipes, trusting that they'd emerge on the other side rather than getting wedged halfway through. Every time one of those videos crossed his feed, his reaction was immediate and visceral.

  Nope.

  And yet here he was, staring at a gap that led to God knew where, seriously considering cramming himself through.

  For privacy, he reminded himself. For strength. For answers.

  For the chance to be something other than a spectacle.

  Cade approached the portal, reminded him vaguely of the Stargate from TV—though the shape was wrong, and there was only one symbol. The spiral with branching edges, the tightening curves, the central knot. It looked different at this scale, the details more apparent, but it was unmistakably the same pattern he'd seen during his advancement.

  The portal's surface shimmered faintly. Not quite solid, not quite liquid. Something in between, something that suggested passage rather than barrier.

  He was going to have to go in headfirst. There was no other way to manage the angles—his shoulders were too broad to fit through vertically, but if he turned sideways and extended one arm overhead, he might be able to slide through. Lead with his hands, let his body follow, trust that the other side would have room for him to emerge.

  And if it wasn’t? If the labyrinth corridors were scaled for tier-twos, sized for foot-tall Kindred, with no accommodation for giants who'd squeezed through portals that were never meant for them?

  Then he'd die, probably. Stuck in a stone passage, unable to advance or retreat.

  Maybe he'd come back. That was how this world worked. Death was temporary, a reset rather than an ending… probably? Even if he died in the worst possible way, he'd told himself he would respawn somewhere in the Outer Ring, confused all over again but intact.

  Cold comfort. But comfort, nonetheless.

  Do it, he told himself. Stop thinking and do it.

  Cade positioned himself sideways to the portal, his right arm extended overhead, his left arm pressed against his side. He turned his head to lead with his right ear, presenting the narrowest possible profile.

  The shimmering surface accepted his fingers first. Cool, tingling, like pushing through a membrane of static electricity. Then his hand, his wrist, his forearm—all disappearing into whatever lay beyond.

  No turning back now.

  He began to shuffle sideways, feeding himself into the portal inch by inch. His shoulder pressed through. His chest. The tight squeeze forcing him to exhale—uselessly, since he didn't breathe anymore, but the instinct remained.

  His followers watched from the shallow water, their tiny faces upturned, expressions ranging from curiosity to anticipation to what might have been genuine concern. The yellow Kindred raised a hand in something that could have been a wave or a salute.

  Cade's hips entered the portal. Then his thighs. His knees.

  Two figures emerged from behind the portal's frame.

  They'd been hidden there, pressed against the back of the freestanding doorway where Cade couldn't have seen them during his approach. Kindred, both of them. Tier-twos, by their size—about a foot tall each. One pale silver, the other deep rust red.

  They moved quickly but quietly, approaching Cade's calves as the shimmering surface crept upward. The sensation was strange and disorienting—half his body in the swamp, half somewhere else entirely—and Cade was far too focused on the squeeze ahead to notice the soft footsteps in the shallow water behind him.

  His ankles disappeared.

  Only his feet remained, bare toes still visible on this side of the threshold.

  The silver one—Rhys, though Cade wouldn’t recognize the face—took hold of the rust-red one's shoulder. The rust-red one—Zyrian—crouched low and carefully twisted a wrist around Cade's largest toe, palm pressing lightly against the toenail. The palm was roughly the same size as the nail itself, the touch gentle enough that it might go unnoticed amid the tingling strangeness of the portal's membrane and the struggles to squeeze through.

  A chain of contact. Rhys to Zyrian to Cade. Maintained but minimal, designed to hitchhike without alerting.

  Cade's feet slid through the final inches of the portal, carrying his unwitting passengers with him.

  The shimmering surface enveloped all three.

  And then there was nothing visible but the empty doorway, standing alone in the swamp, its surface still and quiet as if no one had passed through at all.