Excerpt from the third draft of An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe, as revised for the tenth draft

Experience

Your Path requires experience to advance. That’s obvious; what’s less obvious is how to get it.

In the Tutorial, it’s fairly obvious: the Trials and the Great Tutorial Dungeon straight up say that they give you XP - lots of XP. This lines up with many people’s expectations, since XP in games usually comes from killing things.

What’s less obvious is that you get experience for doing other things, too, once you choose a Path - as long as your Path isn’t completely combat-based.

The Tutorial gives vastly inflated XP awards; once you return to Earth, those will go down. The Voice is currently providing additional XP on Earth as well; I don’t know how long that will last.

This can make it hard to know what to do to get XP, but think about it like experience towards your Path and you will be able to figure it out. Look at the name of your current Path and what the skills are; that’s what you need to practice to progress on your Path.

For all the anticipation Serenity had for the portal-detector, the actual test was a bit of a let-down.

The first time they turned it on, it didn’t detect anything at all. Five minutes of frantic cord-chasing found that one of the connectors had come loose.

Once they reconnected it, it detected something - in exactly the wrong direction. They were still trying to figure that out when the signal they were detecting started moving noticeably. It wasn’t until Rachel started tracking the movement that she realized it was following Serenity.

That led to some digging and they figured out that someone had misconfigured the signal analyzer to filter out the portal and search for Serenity’s mana leakage.

They had just fixed that and were about to run the test again when everything seemed to shake. It didn’t last long and nothing was even knocked down, but everyone knew something important had changed. Serenity was the first to realize what it was when he felt the local mana density start to climb: the Earth had achieved a new Tier.

Serenity tried to remember the first time around; wasn’t this awfully early? He couldn’t be certain; he simply didn’t remember when the “Great Earthquake?” happened. There had been two or three before Earth fell … hadn’t there?

There was someone he could ask. Well, two people, but he couldn’t really ask Gaia from here. Maybe from a ley line, but the best place would probably be the Settlement’s Settlement Crystal.

Voice? Was that what I think it was? Isn’t it early?

[Your planet has achieved Tier 1. This is approximately a year earlier]

Tier 1? I thought we were already there.

[No]

Is it early because I fixed part of Earth’s World Core?

[That is the primary factor that accelerated this increase in Tier]

Primary factor?

Serenity tried to figure out everything that was different. Portals were closing earlier; that was probably a net negative, because it meant that the higher-Tier people that came through as invaders weren’t on Earth. The population of Earth, including Serenity, was probably a bit higher-Tier than the first time, but that was only a guess. The only other major difference Serenity could think of was Tranquil Conviction’s presence; he was powerful enough that he was probably leaking just as badly as Serenity was.

If his fix to the World Core was the primary factor, it seemed likely that none of the rest was that different overall.

Serenity could only hope that Earth would continue to rise quickly; the higher magic levels would help him the most, but they’d also help humans progress faster, which would make closing invasions easier. Even better, the increase ought to feed on itself. A higher-Tier planet made it easier to grow and growth of the populace would help the planet grow.

It couldn’t continue indefinitely, and it also worked the other way around; if the planet started failing or the population fell, they’d accelerate each other downwards with time. Serenity - no. The Final Reaper had seen it more than once.

Serenity was glad that wasn’t a real risk for Earth any time soon, between the large population and the Voice’s assistance.

Serenity shook himself and turned back to the table with the prototype portal-detector on it. He moved back around to where he could see.

Allen Ridge tapped the laptop and looked at a screen of data that Serenity couldn’t immediately interpret. “It says it’s that way. A little down; I think it’s pointing at the ground, not the portal itself.”

“That way” was the correct direction; he’d pointed directly at the hole in the ground.

“Woohoo!” Serenity wasn’t sure who started it, but several people cheered and almost everyone started clapping.

Dr. Mattingly gave everyone a few minutes to celebrate before she interrupted. “Well done. It’s time for the real test now! Serenity, I’d like you to be at least a mile away when you set up the test portal, but I don’t want to know which way you went.”

Serenity nodded. He’d originally planned to have Doyle give him a lift, but there wasn’t really much reason for that if he was only going to be a mile or two away. “No problem; I’ll pick somewhere close to a road, since that thing isn’t set up to be carried, but out of sight. It should be about an hour, but I’ll call when the portal’s up; you’ll have a good bit of time to find me. It depends on how my mana holds out.”

He didn’t mention that he planned to be near a ley line. That way, he’d be able to restore his mana faster than it was drained; he’d be able to keep the portal spell running as long as needed.

Serenity had found a perfect spot, where the ley line ran across a hill next to the road. There were even some short evergreens on the side of the hill in the ley line where he could sit and watch both the road and the hidden portal without easily being seen.

Fortunately, the portal spell was holding well.

Less fortunately, Serenity was very bored. He’d seen a pickup he thought was the right one several times, but either it wasn’t them or the portal detector wasn’t working; he’d been waiting for three hours already and had long since started wandering the internet, trying to figure out where other invasion portals were.

It seemed like he wasn’t the only person looking. There were a number of different collections of “portal sighting reports” or “portal collections” out there. They were interesting, but they weren’t what he needed; instead, Serenity was mostly looking for oddities that might mean a portal no one realized was there. He found a few - a man showing up at a hospital that no one could understand in Arizona, a plague of rabbits in a small town in Oregon, and a miraculous prophet in northern Mexico.

Serenity doubted he was finding anything that wasn’t already well known, but at least it was something to do while he waited. The rabbits were the most likely of the three; the unintelligible man would probably turn out to be someone who needed help and the prophet would probably turn out to be either a conman or an interesting Path, but they were all worth checking into anyway.

Serenity was tired of looking around online.

How would he duplicate the portal-detector with magic? It wouldn’t be nearly as easy to spread to other people as a technological solution, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be useful. In fact, if it could detect all portals, it would probably have some uses other than just looking for invasion portals; wards, for example.

Serenity started digging through the wards he knew. There were several that detected portals or teleportation, but when he dug into the details they wouldn’t work for what he wanted to do. They actually detected the magic either crossing the ward or inside the warded area; that wouldn’t help with trying to find portals in a large city, much less the vast wilderness.

He’d have to come up with his own. Maybe he could use something similar? Unfortunately, the best Affinity he had for detecting electromagnetic waves was Energy, and his Energy Affinity was only so-so. Better than most on Earth at this point, but not really useful for large-scale workings.

No, that wasn’t true. The best Affinity he had for detecting electromagnetic waves was Magitech. Unfortunately, it was worse than his Energy Affinity. It did have one large benefit that Energy didn’t, though: he could use a power source other than his mana for some of the power draw. As he’d told Morwen, he could use batteries. He could have Aide do the analysis; then all he’d need would be the antenna. He might even already have the one he needed, though he doubted it was good for long ranges.

Serenity flipped to the page in his Status where he could ask Aide questions when Aide wasn’t paying attention only to be surprised.

Required upgrades: Limited functionality available for abstract computing mode. Option determination paused.

Recommended upgrade: Additional computational resources for reduction in processing time (list available)

Optional upgrades: None

Request: ___________

Aide Status/Request: Analysis of location coordinates paused pending additional reference information.

Current results: Each coordinate set can be decomposed into three components based on the original Bridge numbering; updated file with separated numbers available.

A spherical location is indicated but reference locations are unclear

Request: Determine the actual location and location coordinates of additional portals. A minimum of three will be required to decode the portal location data but may be insufficient; seven is preferred and more will increase the confidence level.

Serenity was definitely interested to know that finding only a handful of the portals would allow him to know where all of the others were. He was confident that he wasn’t alone in that thought, though Aide was probably farther along than everyone else in deciphering the numbers since it could look at them in Bridge as well as base-10.

Serenity had just had Aide forward the updated coordinate list when he heard a vehicle pull off the road below the hill and stop. When he carefully turned his head to look, it was a white pickup just like the one he’d seen drive by several times. The back of the pickup had the same small generator running.

He hadn’t noticed someone sitting in the back before, though. Whoever it was was pointing up the hill towards the portal.

Serenity smiled and stayed in the shade motionless until the passenger finished climbing the hill and yelled that she could see the portal. Serenity was pretty sure that was Morwen, which only made the fact that she hadn’t seen him yet more amusing.

No one noticed Serenity as he headed up the hill behind the others. “Does that mean I can take the portals down now?”

“Fucking hell, Thomas. I hate it when you do that.” Morwen whipped around and punched Serenity’s shoulder. He’d always hated it when she did that, but it no longer hurt nearly as badly. Or really at all.

“I’m pretty sure I saw you drive past me several times. What happened?”

The man from the back of the truck jumped in. Serenity didn’t recognize him except as one of the other scientists. “Vibration. Vibration and a loose connector to the antenna. The signal kept fading in and out no matter what we did; I ended up having to hold it in place. But at least we know it works!”