After some faults and failures with certain systems that were easily fixed, I found myself outside of reality. The viewport was almost beyond useless as everything was just a soup of primordial chaos and stray dimensional energy.

I wasn’t even going to try to describe what was going on outside my ship, lovingly named the Azure Horizon, since dimensional shenanigans tend to not be describable with the measly three that I was used to working with.

I took my time getting used to my ship and practiced just maneuvering for a while. It wasn’t exactly outer space, but the experience was somewhat comparable and it was every bit as fun as I imagined. Eventually I needed to stop playing around and actually make my way somewhere livable, so I began skimming the edges of different dimensions just to get a sample of what they were like.

It was actually more guesswork than anything scientific, the instruments I was working with were meant to be used in the same Reality so if I was using them correctly I would end up in another Universe that operated on Bleach physics. But I had gone a bit further than any sane person would simply because I already knew other Realities were out there and I had an inkling on how to navigate to them. Which led to me skimming over Realities like they were giant soap bubbles looking for the one I wanted.

And that was probably the best metaphor I could use for the situation.

Each Reality had a ‘film’ that I could bump up against and peak inside. I couldn’t actually go inside without using the Azure Horizon’s reality drive to pierce through. So I was just moving along and checking out each one I came across looking to see if they had a method of healing my injuries/fixing what was broken with my soul.

I got a few hits that had potential. One,from what I could see, was a Universe that had a bunch of martial artists that dealt with soul related artifacts. Unfortunately it was a xianxia world from what I could see, and those worlds moved on a timescale of centuries. By the time I managed to either track down a soul related artifact or tried to use one I would likely have died by then anyway.

Another didn’t seem to have any obvious signs of repairing a soul, but when a golden light started to search the area I was investigating and the images of huge gothic styled buildings covered in skulls I had a very unpleasant guess about what went on in that Reality and I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I almost redlined the engine getting away from that particular destination.

After that particular encounter I started having less luck. Each Reality I looked into either didn’t have what I needed, would take too long to matter, or was unsuited for one reason or another. I wasn’t exactly unsurprised. I was meandering almost blindly and while I was getting better at navigating, I wasn’t an expert by any standard.

-o-

Nathanael wanted to cry as he looked at the amount of reality errors that had come in after he came back from his short century long break.

Fifteen realities under his authority had nearly collapsed due to timestream failures. Three more were about to start contaminating their counterparts on other reality wavelengths. And to top it all off, his request for a more useful Avatar template had been rejected again.

Why couldn’t he get approval for that new one that had started catching on, what was it called again? The Astral Furnace or something like that? Yeah, it was expensive as hell but it would make his job so much easier if he could just load it into all troublesome realities and let the Avatar deal with it.

Sure some of them might cause a few dimensional collapses due to incompatibility or stressing the Reality too much, but really, he was only joking when he outlined using that template for an agricultural reality setting.

Another error popped up and Nathanael groaned.

A 901. Fantastic.

The overseer for this reality wavelength sector pulled up a request form. ALG-184-G was in need of a new Avatar and was starting to unravel. Unfortunately he was down to only a few hundred templates after his last audit. He would actually need to ensure this one was carefully chosen or his budget could be cut even more.

-o-

I couldn’t say how long I had been searching since time was rather...fluid...at the moment, all I really knew was that I was getting low on supplies and would need to get food soon, but eventually I skimmed another reality and saw six brightly colored jewels shining back at me.

A wide smile broke out on my face when I saw those. I had found it!

When I realised that my soul was actively degrading I had made a list of all the places that I could think of with objects or techniques relating to healing or affecting the soul. It was surprisingly much longer than I was expecting, but the one I figured would be the easiest was the Marvel Universe’s Infinity Stones.

With each one being a literal crystallization of creation for each universe even if the one I was interested in, the Soul Stone, couldn’t fix me it was nearly guaranteed to be powerful enough to stop any further damage from occurring and give me plenty of time to either heal or come up with a solution to the problem.

Finding the stone itself might be an issue, but I had some ideas about that.

I didn’t waste anymore time before activating the reality drive and dove through the barrier. From there I just chose a Universe at random. I didn’t have the experience to narrow it down to the one I wanted, but inter-universal travel was already a thing here. I could hopefully find someone willing to send me where I need-

My musings were cut short when my ship shuttered to a halt and the controls locked up.

What the hell was going on?!

”What’s this? Another creature thinks they can trespass where they are not wanted?” A severe voice suddenly came from nowhere.

“Sorry?” I said back, a little confused and wary. From what I knew, nothing should be able to stop me from entering a Universe. “I was just traveling, I had no idea I was trespassing or anything like that.”

”Lies. I can sense your destination, creature. You would attack the domain under our protection! Too bad for you, the Sanctum is well equipped to deal with your kind.”

Sanctum? Wait…

“Are you a Sorcerer?” I asked. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m looking for-”

”It doesn’t matter what you seek.” the sorcerer cut me off. ”As a master of the Mystic Arts and as a master of a Sanctum it is my sworn duty to prevent any incursions of creatures such as you. Now begone! I, Mogwai, fifty third master of the Sanctum Sanctorum deny you!”

Before I could open my mouth to argue the Azure Horizon jerked backwards and I ended up slamming my face into the dashboard. The sudden impact disrupted my thoughts and it felt like my nose was broken so I think I could be forgiven for not noticing Mogwai doing something until everything warped and I found myself flung out of reality.

Actually that was putting it mildly.

Not only was I flung back out into the Greater Dimensional Sea, I was skipping through realities at random as the ship’s drive activated and deactivated without my control. The rapid transitions were quickly giving me a migraine.

Ignoring the growing pain in my head, I started wrestling with the controls, trying to get the reality drive to disengage. A short while later I gave up on the idea. Whatever that sorcerer had done, I couldn’t stop it and it looked like it wasn’t slowing down any either.

So unless I wanted to wait and hope that things just stopped by itself I was going to have to do something fast. And since I had no desire to stab my new ship with one of my Noble Phantasms and pray that did something, I did the next best thing I could think of; I made my way to engineering and waited until I felt myself entering another reality and physically cut the power.

Immediately, everything but the backup lights blacked out and I found myself being pulled into a local dimension as the last bits of energy from the reality drive bled off.

I smiled in relief when nothing exploded.

That relief vanished like smoke when I felt the subtle vibrations in the metal floor beneath me.

Vibrations meant air. Air meant atmosphere.

Oh fuck, I was crashing onto a planet with no power!

In a mad scramble I raced back to the cockpit and did my best to somehow not paste myself or my ship in re-entry. Not that I had much luck. The last thing I saw before the Azure Horizon hit the ground were some mountains bigger than any I had seen before. Then there was an impact and I found myself thrown from my seat and into blackness.

-o-

Nathanael no longer knew what was going on.

He had been doing the final selection for an Avatar template when suddenly dozens of reality errors started popping up. Something was tearing through them at an incredible rate before vanishing before Nathanael had the chance to do anything.

He had to abandon his selection to quickly stabilize the errors that popped up and even then, quite a few would need an Avatar’s intervention to fully recover.

If he ever found what caused that string of errors, he was going to pull it apart and spread its atoms across the Dimensional Sea.

With a tired sigh at the prospect of even more work Nathanael went back to his template selection. This one wasn’t much to work with but he had spent a good amount of time tweaking it to ensure it could handle it’s job. 901 errors were serious and had the potential to spill over into other dimensions. He sighed again and entered the confirmation code. If this one couldn’t handle the task Nathanael wasn’t sure what he would do. He was already in a bit of trouble for his rate of dimensional collapses and he wasn’t looking forward to an audit if his rate kept going up.

The code went into his terminal and beeped. Nathanael blinked at the sound of another error and started cursing. All that hard work selecting a template, wasted!

Ugh, this was too much. He was taking another break.

As the overseer walked out the monitor continued to innocently display the last error code.

Error : Avatar Template failed to upload.

Reason : Avatar Template #29872 already detected.