There was a small jetty from which they could see the village. There were several dinghies tied up, one of which had been sunk in the shallow water. A streak of dried blood was on the part jutting above the waterline.

“Looks like someone’s hurt,” Clive said as he tied the airboat to the jetty.

“I hope so,” Jason said.

“You hope someone’s hurt?” Clive asked.

“You can fix hurt. Can’t fix dead.”

Jason stopped, looking at Clive.

“You can’t fix dead, can you?” Jason asked. “It never occurred to me to ask.”

“Not at our rank,” Clive said. “Some gold rank healing effects can bring you back if they’re used immediately,” Clive said.

“Like magic CPR,” Jason said.

“I don’t know what that is,” Clive said. “There’s also diamond rank, but there are always rumours about diamond rank.”

They walked towards the village. Like the others they had visited, there was no one to be seen. The people had holed themselves up as they waited for adventurers to arrive. The buildings were mudbrick, with woven reed doors and window shutters. Many of the doors had been scratched into shreds, revealing barriers of stone or metal that had been placed behind them. The people of the delta were prepared for monsters.

Jason loudly announced their presence and the village mayor came out to meet them. She described the monster, which sounded to Jason like a claw-footed, six-legged crocodile.

“That’s a mangrove snatcher alright,” Clive said.

“Is someone hurt?” Jason asked.

"There is," the mayor said. "We're worried because the healers don't make it out here every month. Even if they do come, I don't know if he can last that long. The injury is bad enough, but the infection has set in."

“Best show us, then,” Jason said. The mayor started leading them through the village.

“I imagine infection would be a problem here in the delta,” Jason said.

“It is,” the mayor said. “Do you have healing abilities?”

“I can handle the infection,” Jason said. “The injury will take a potion. Unless you can heal injuries, Clive?”

“No,” Clive said, shaking his head. “I have some self-healing, but I can’t use it on others.”

“We can’t afford potions,” the mayor said. “We could probably put together enough for some healing ointment, if you have some.”

“Ointment won’t get the job done on deep wounds,” Jason said. “I learned that the hard way. I’ll probably use a potion, maybe two.”

“We really can’t afford it,” the mayor said.

“We’re here to save the day, Madam Mayor,” Jason said. “All part of the service.”

The mayor looked at him, nonplussed.

“You’ll just give us a potion?”

“Adventure Society,” Jason said, flashing her a smile. “We’re here to help.”

The mayor called out at a house and the barricade was removed from the door. Inside was a man laying on a bed, stripped down to his underwear, with a stained-through bandage wrapped around his leg. He was sweat-covered and muttering to himself.

Jason winced.

“I’d better get straight onto that.”

Jason walked over to the bed, where a woman was dabbing the man’s forehead with a wet cloth.

“Excuse I,” Jason said as he stood next to her. He held a hand over the injured man and chanted out his spell.

“Feed me your sins.”

Red life force shone out from the man, tainted with the yellow and purple colours of a bruise. Those infecting colours rose up from the red light, disappearing into Jason’s hand. What remained was the clean red glow of life force, which retracted into that man’s body.

You have cleansed all instances of disease [Infection] from [Human].You have cleansed all instances of disease [Sepsis] from [Human].Your stamina and mana have been replenished.Stamina and mana cannot exceed normal maximum values. Excess stamina and mana are lost.

The injured man took a shuddering breath, then started looking about, confused. His eyes became focused, looking at all the people around him.

“Welcome back, mate,” Jason said. “I’m Jason. Adventurer, raconteur, man-about-town.”

“What?”

Jason pulled a knife from his inventory. It wasn’t his fighting knife, but a magically sharp utility knife he had purchased. He dug it under the filthy bandages and cut them away with a single, smooth slice. There were deep claw marks underneath that started pulsing out blood immediately. Jason pulled out a healing potion, carefully pouring it into the wound.

“Alchemist mate of mine made this stuff,” Jason said. “More effective on external wounds than just chugging it straight down.”

The wounds quickly closed up. An iron-rank potion was more effective on a normal person than it was on an iron ranker. The fact that it would be longer before they could use another was a middling drawback, which was why many adventurers kept a high-rank potion on hand for emergencies.

In moments the open wounds had closed into glaring welts. Jason took out a tin of ointment and handed it to the woman by the bed.

“Give him a half-hour for the potion to work its way through his system, then use this,” Jason instructed. “There won’t be a mark left on him.”

“We can’t afford this,” the woman said, although Jason noted how tightly she clutched the tin.

“On the house,” Jason said. “Well, on me. This is your house. Come on Clive; we’ve got more villages to check on.”

“Something’s not right,” Jason said.

“You mean other than your idea to stake me out, covered in meat?” Clive said.

“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?” Clive asked.

“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,” Jason said.

“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,” Clive said.

“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,” he said. “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,” Clive said.

“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?” Jason asked.

“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,” Jason said.

“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,” Jason said.

“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?” Jason asked.

“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,” Clive said. “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?” Jason said.

“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,” Jason said.

“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.”

“Or she lied.”

“She wouldn’t have done that,” Clive said. “Lying is one of the core sins of her religion.”

“She isn’t a member of the religion,” Jason said. “She’s the object of it.”

“Maybe she just told you what you were ready to hear,” Clive suggested.

“You’re telling me that I died,” Jason said, pulling things back on topic.

“I suppose you did,” Clive said.

“Then how am I here?” Jason asked.

“Well, the body died, but the soul isn’t physical. It’s magical. Do you know how summoning a familiar works?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well,” Clive said, “summoning a familiar is like deliberately creating a monster. A chunk of magic is brought into our world and forms a body. What makes it different from a monster is that it also summons a creature from the deep astral. Such entities are purely magical, like a soul. They normally can’t exist in physical reality, any more than we can exist in the astral. But they inhabit the body you’ve made. Give it a mind, and stability. So it doesn’t break down and go berserk.”

“You’re saying that I’m basically a familiar?” Jason said.

“Exactly,” Clive said, with academic fascination. “Your soul came into this world, and like any other chunk of magic, constructed a physical manifestation for itself.”

“So, my body is the same thing as a monster’s, just with a soul to stop it breaking down.”

“Yes,” Clive said. “You’re picking this up very well.”

Clive’s enthusiasm had blinded him to the growing horror on Jason’s face. Jason leaned forward in his chair, head in his hands.

“Jason?”

“Give me a minute, Clive. You kind of dropped a bomb on me.”

“Oh,” Clive said, realisation suddenly hitting. “Sorry about, you know, dying.”

Jason sat head bowed, mind reeling.

“Is this why I didn’t have hair?”

“Uh, Jason?”

“I said give me a minute, Clive!”

“Not sure you have a minute,” Clive said. “I just sensed the monster’s aura.”