Alvin rolled over in bed, pushing the blankets off with a groaning stretch. He reached out and jabbed the off button on his alarm clock, and glared at the clock blearily as if it had done him some grievous personal offence. He stretched again, then cracked his neck and rolled out of his bed. Slipping into the pajamas he had left on the floor the night before, Alvin slowly made his way downstairs, still blinking the sleep from his eyes. He rounded the corner, pacing down the hallway, the familiar creak of hardwood flooring following his footsteps. He rummaged in the pantry for a minute or two, more blank staring than true rummaging, before withdrawing a box of cereal for breakfast. He placed it on the table, moving to the cabinet for a bowl, then back towards the refrigerator by the pantry to grab the milk. After collecting everything, he made the bowl of cereal, cereal first as all good people know. After putting the cereal and milk away, and grabbing a spoon, Alvin sat down to enjoy his breakfast. He ate undisturbed, the entire house quiet, which was strange. Normally, with 6 people sharing a house, there would nearly constantly be the ambient noise of another person existing, if not outright yelling from his younger siblings. He looked back down to finish his cereal, but it had disappeared, bowl and all. When he looked back up, he was in a small room, where everything from the bed to the walls and ceiling was a pristine white. The walls started to move in, squeezing everything in the room into paste. Alvin screamed and pushed against the walls, but he couldn’t even delay the inevitable. The walls continued to close in…….

Alvin woke up screaming, covered in dirt and blood, and thoroughly disoriented. After looking around wildly for a few moments, he started to take deep breaths to calm himself down. He sat and meditated for a few minutes, only enough to recenter himself and bring him down from the post-nightmare panic. Once he was calm again, he examined the area he had fallen asleep in. There were several holes and small craters from him thrashing and pushing, and the carcass of the drake was battered and bloodied, looking like it had been dragged through another battle, if a much more vicious one. Most of the scales were cracked and dirtied, and all of the claws were broken. Without the creature being alive to passively imbue itself with Qi, its body lost much of the protection that made it so difficult to fight, and so Alvin’s midnight flailing turned the much more delicate corpse into a used pinata. He was in luck though, because the core was unharmed, and hadn’t been stolen while he was asleep. Any beast, upon reaching rank 2, would develop a core that would grow larger, purer, and more powerful as the beast grew. Cores were important ingredients in many of the crafting professions, and could even be used to increase one’s cultivation in a pinch. One had to be careful with this, because it weakened their foundation, and could even lead to them being little better than demonic beasts themselves.

Alvin dug the core of the drake out. It was a glowing, spherical crystal the size of his head, and it was much heavier than it size would indicate. He looked at the precious crystal, and as much as he wanted to keep could only see it being a nuisance. How could he travel carrying this cumbersome thing? How could he fight? Moreover, it would attract other demonic beasts for the same reason his bloodline attracted the drake; namely, because the core could help them advance and maybe even evolve. In his master’s haste to fastball him through the portal, Alvin hadn’t had time to grab even a mundane bag, let alone a spatial bag. He could forget that spatial rings even existed, because they were rare, difficult to make treasures reserved for important elders and their inheriting disciples. As much as he longed for even the most basic of spatial storage items, he would be content with a simple burlap sack at this moment. Mockingly, he decided to check his pockets while he cursed the heavens for granting him good fortune without the means to retain it. He stuck his hand in the first pocket, and turned it inside out, displaying his sole worldly possession, the communication talisman, to the world while laughing angrily. He stuck his hand into the second pocket, and his expression rapidly jumped from mocking, to surprise, and finally to complete confusion. He clenched his hand, and pulled his fist out of his pocket. When he opened his hand, sitting in his palm was a ring. The ring was small, and had a simple but beautiful engraving of a series of waves on it, each line glowing with Qi, a telltale sign that formations had been built into the ring. With great trepidation, he pricked his finger, and sprinkled a drop of blood on the ring. The blood disappeared nearly instantly, confirming that the ring was a magical item, but there was only one way to determine if it was a storage ring. Alvin quickly slipped the ring on his finger, took a deep breath, and imagined peering into a pocket space contained by the ring. His consciousness was transported into a small pocket dimension, which was about the size of a 2 meter cube, or 8 cubic meters. His overflowing joy almost distracted him from the piles of resources and supplies stacked in the ring, but the Qi signatures of some of the items caught his attention. He carefully went through every pile, and inventoried what he had. In all he had: 15 healing pills; 15 “beast pills,” made from the bodies of demonic beasts from the ocean to help his body cultivation; 4 glossy blue, round, palm sized communication tokens with waves on them; several talismans, 4 attack, 3 defense, 3 movement, 2 stealth, and 2 trap, all with the power of a Core Expansion elder; a week’s worth of food, water, and wine; a copy of each of the manuals for his cultivation methods; and finally, a letter from his master.

Alvin was very excited about the ring, and its contents, but that letter made him uneasy. Master Edosa was not the sentimental type, nor was she the type to offer encouragement that wasn’t some form of insult or threat, or more likely a combination of the two. He sat down against the base of the cliff, with the drake’s core in his lap, and pulled out the letter. Right before he opened it he paused, looked at the core between his legs, his newly acquired spatial storage ring, back at the core, then at the ring once more. Slapping his forehead and mocking his own stupidity, he held the core and willed it into the ring. Immediately the weight in his hands lessened, and he chuckled at the strange feeling. Still, he had little else he could use to avoid reading the letter, and he opened it nervously.

Idiot Disciple,

How long did it take you to check your pockets? And how long after that until you manned up enough to read the letter? My bet was on 5 days and 12 hours, respectively. Regardless of your bumbling, you show promise, and so I have included resources to help you further your cultivation, especially your body. This is all I, and the sect, can do for you. Your world is cut off from the outside for a decade, so you no longer have the backing of the sect to protect yourself. Joining or establishing a new subordinate sect or branch sect would give you some backing, but chances are that you would be one of the main powerhouses for your new faction. The factions on your planet will be pretty pathetic for a while, but you should still be a part of one, for protection and resources, but also because it is better to be the head of a chicken than the ass of a phoenix. Be careful if and when you have encounters with other people, especially the ones from more powerful factions. They will have better techniques, higher cultivation, and better resources. Remember, right now the only one who can protect you right now is yourself. Even if you are a barely capable witless buffoon, you are also my disciple, and so you aren’t allowed to die.

Your amazing and wonderful master,

Edosa

Alvin didn’t know if he should laugh or cry. He expected minimal aid from the sect, partially because of the restrictions on the planet, but also because he was only the #2 Earth disciple from the Boundless Azure Depths Sect. Still, his master didn’t need to be so brutal about it, he’s not stupid enough to mess with the young masters of powerful factions. Maybe stupid enough to harass the mooks, but none of the dregs from the factions would be powerful enough to really threaten him, nor would they have the backing to make his life difficult, especially now. Did Master Edosa really have so little faith in him?

Alvin shook his head, carefully folded the letter back up, and placed it back into his ring. He would worry about all of that later, right now he needed to get to the ocean, so he could locate others from the sect and hopefully establish a branch sect. He stood up, stretched a bit, then took off at a decent pace in the direction he remembered seeing the ocean.

Even without moving at the dreadful pace he had maintained to flee from the drake, the shore came into view within a few minutes, and a few more beyond that and his feet were in the sand, just beyond where the surf surged onto land. He knew he needed to enter the water, but was wary of doing so. Firstly, it would mean that he would end up playing second fiddle to Oriana, the #1 disciple of the Boundless Azure Depths Sect, once more, which worked because he preferred to avoid the spotlight. Except Oriana had declared him her rival, and insisted on dragging him into the limelight through competition. Secondly, the ocean is the largest area in the world, and with the highest average concentration of ambient Qi, it was a cauldron full of massive creatures powerful enough to make him not even worthy of being a snack. And they tended to be fiercely territorial, if what he read in the sect and saw in a few of his missions was true. Alvin sighed, knowing that he was just procrastinating the inevitable, and stepped into the waves.

He walked out into the ocean, until the water was just above his navel, and the waves smacked against his chest. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the specialized communication talisman, and held it under the water. For a long couple of moments, the turquoise rectangle laid on his hand, the oceanic map on it simply dull lines, if masterfully carved ones. Until one section lit up, and the light ebbed and flowed through the talisman like water in motion. As the light grew, the talisman started to get a little hot, and Alvin abruptly realized that he could sense an absurd amount of Qi in the thing, right before a nearly visible ripple of the energy blasted out of the talisman.

It’s not too much to hope that something big didn’t feel that, is it? Alvin hoped. He looked around furtively, but there was no deep sea behemoth leaping out of the water to devour him, so he supposed he was safe. All the while, the talisman had been shaking and making sounds, ones very similar to…… a ringing phone? Alvin brought the talisman up to his ear, and sure enough, it was ringing like a phone. The juxtaposition through him off for a second, and he missed the large shape rising out of the sand behind him. He did not miss a giant claw smacking him like it was going for a homerun, nor did he miss when he slammed into the ground like a ton of bricks.

“Ouch. If you didn’t like me being here, you could have asked me to leave,” Alvin complained as he pulled himself from the small crater he had made. His levity faded as he looked at the swarm of crabs racing towards him. Some were no larger than his palm, and couldn’t even be considered rank 1 demonic beasts. One the other hand, there were a handful of crabs with claws nearly 2 meters long, the crabs themselves standing closer to 4. These each had an aura at the very peak of the third rank, and certainly looked like it. There were crabs of every other shape and size between the 2 extremes, except for one particular crab with a familiar claw. Even half submerged, this crab was just as tall as the third rank crabs, and Alvin estimated that it was a rank 4 demonic beast, probably a low grade one. While not a good fight one on one, with the hoard backing it up, it should be a good challenge. Alvin stretched out his arms, and started walking to meet the swarm.

“Well, if you want to get rid of me that badly, don’t blame me for being impolite.”