“Are you alright?” I asked, staring at his arm. The nub where his arm should be. Then I caught myself and looked away from it, looking back at him. His face was pained, but he hid it after a moment, smiling.

“Do I look alright?” He asked.

Stupid question. Stupid of me. Of course, he wasn’t alright. My heart sunk into my stomach.

“I — I’m sorry.” I said, walking towards him. What kind of charity did this world have for the homeless? He was clearly a veteran, or something. He still had a physique that looked like a body builder. Broad shoulders, and a body riddled with scars.

He stiffened up at my approach, so I stopped, leaning down on the ground and unpacking my bindle.

I offered him stale bread. He looked between me and the proffered food.

“You first.” He said.

“What?”

“Take a bite of that or I’ll break your legs.” His eyes darkened.

Did he think it was poisoned? Was he joking? No, he looked dead serious. I stared for a moment. He reached for the wooden cane.

I took a bite of the bread. I had to work hard to chew and swallow it.

The man leaned back, softening. His eyes searched me, full of questions. He offered a hand, and I handed him the food.

I sat across from him.

“Did you fight in a war?” I asked him.

“No. I just offended someone I shouldn’t have.” He said, chewing on the bread. Then he pointed behind me. I followed his gesture. “That house is unoccupied. Farmer that owned it died. Wife died right after.”

“What?” I asked.

“You’re homeless, right? No family?”

“I… yes.” I said.

“Go move into it. There’s dozens of empty houses here. No one wants it. They had no next of kin.”

I looked back at the house. Looking closer, I could see that the wooden door was hanging off the door frame. They had tracked mud and dirt in and around the entrance, and the windows were just empty frames. If there had been glass or shutters, someone stole them. But is it really stealing if the owners are dead?

I didn’t have any intention of staying in that little farming village. But I felt exhaustion from the long night, and longer day, setting into my bones. So I stayed the night there.

At the orphanage, they had afforded fine floors of wood. There was no such luxury here. The floor was packed earth, part engraving cold, and it sucked away the heat from my body.

It is still better than sleeping outside.

I remember it rained that night. It surprised me it didn’t leak from the roof. I wrapped myself up in old bedding, lying in what remained of the bedding in the house. Almost everything else had been looted.

When I woke the next morning, I was refreshed and determined to continue on my journey. But that changed with a single step I took out of the house.

The old man was still there, lying against the side of the road. The rain from the night before drenched his head, his hair clinging to his scalp. If he was cold, he didn’t show it. Instead, he snored, dead asleep. It looked as if he hadn’t even moved.

I sat down across from him, pulling out breakfast food — a hard ration of bread — and shook his shoulder to wake him.

I couldn’t perceive what happened next; one minute my hand was on his shoulder, the next minute his hand was around my throat and I was in the air, and then he tumbled over trying to catch his balance on one leg gasping for breath. His eyes fluttered.

When he dropped me, I rush to pull the piece of food off the ground, brushing the dirt away.

I couldn’t afford to waste it.

“So the homeless man taught you magic.” Xavier said.

“Not magic –“

“Cultivation.” Kim said.

I licked my lips. I told him how he formed a friendship with the man, I intended to leave every day, every day I would find the man waiting outside in the cold, alone without a home. Without a home despite there being so many.

Eventually we bonded. The man would tell me stories. Stories of other worlds. I thought that maybe, if I had the power to explore worlds like those, I could find my way home. The man told me stories of cultivators. He told me stories of how anyone who pursued that power was corrupted by it.

When I ran out of rations, the man taught me how to hunt. It started with small game; traps and snares to kill rabbits. They were close enough to rabbits that I just called them rabbits. The farmers were more than happy with it; it meant less pests eating their crops.

He built the fire and cooked. One night while sitting around, I asked him the obvious question.

He used to be a cultivator.

Until his peers turned on him. Now he was too weak to show his face anywhere, bless his enemies find him finish what they started. His stories got darker after that night. At the time, I didn’t even believe much of what he said.

Then I skipped forward a bit in the story, where I actually began to learn cultivation.

I told them how he had led me to a cave forest; that of the great lizard he had defended me from. I talked about the destruction of the village.

“He sounds like he was a good man.” Willow said.

“He wasn’t.” I replied

“So what happened?” Xavier asked. “I don’t understand. What was wrong with the medicine he used?”

“A cultivator aligns their qi to a concept.” I paused. “The progress down the path, you have to gain power tuned to that thing. When the man gave me his medicine, made with his qi, I was permanently set on his path.”

“The moonlight path?” Kim asked.

“No.” I looked down at the table. “The blood path. A path that demanded sacrifice of yourself and others.”

“The red technique used in the gate…” Kim said.

“Not a technique. Just evidence that I’m broken. Or that I was.” I looked at him and smiled. “It’s better now.”

“if you don’t mind…” Xavier said, pushing object across the table.

“Xavier…” Willow said, her face showing her irritation.

“hold on…” Xavier raised his hands as if to ward off Willow’s anger. “It’s not that I don’t believe him, but it’s not like this is an easy claim to swallow. We’ve seen lots of other worlds, yes, but I’ve never heard of anyone being reborn in one.”

It was the object to me. I recognized. On the way back in that snowy kobold cavern, that businessman handed me a similar device. It was a portable rank assessor, but this woman is missing the fancy technology. Instead it was a smooth, glossy stone, black with swirls of white flowing through it. They seem to be a glow coming from inside of the stone, deep beneath the surface. As if there is more depth to it than could be seen.

It was a magical artifact, without a doubt. But I understood why they didn’t believe me. I sounded crazy so I picked the stone up.

Nothing happened.

I looked up at Xavier. He looked back at me expectantly. So I tried pushing qi through the stone.

It vibrated in my hand, a projection slowly unrolling in midair.

“See? Unranked.” I dropped the stone leaning back. The displayed midair slowly faded but, as clear as day it displayed 2 characters: unranked.

I relax in the chair. They were suddenly tension. Everyone stared at me. Kim, Rose, Xavier, and even Willow.

“What?” I asked.

“Rain…” Willow started. “You can read that?”

“Of course I can read that.” I frowned looking, back at the display for a second to figure out what they were also confused about. “Oh.”

It was in English. It wasn’t in any language from Earth.

“He can read it.” Xavier began excitedly digging through his pocket, pulling out a brown bag that was much too large to fit in it and setting it in the middle of the table. He stepped out of the booth, standing, reaching down into the bag with both arms.

It was loud. I heard the sound of clashing metal. There must’ve been hundreds of objects in that bag; it sounded like a landslide. Around the bar several people stared.

Xavier pulled out a booklet.

He looked through it, skimming the pages, looking back at the unranked characters fading out of midair. His eyes lit up.

Then he handed the book to me.

“I’ve been trying to decipher it. It’s like so many languages, but also… Not.” Xavier said, seeming to completely forget about the previous conversation. “What is it?”

I took the book gently, flipping through the pages.

It was a cultivation manual. I paled.

“Where did you get this?”

“We shouldn’t… It was a government job – “ Rose started, but Willow interrupted her.

“We found it in a gate.”

I flipped through the pages.

“The factions often name themselves after the mountains they control.” I swallowed, then I stood. “There’s a mountain where lightning falls like rain. The cultivators there, of course, cultivate lightning aspect paths. They’re known for being territorial. Tyrannical rulers — not as bad as we were — but they were imperialist conquerors. Where did you get this?” I asked again, lifting the book and shaking it.

If they were close, if they had found a way into our world. It was a matter of time before something worse than monsters poured through a gate.

They would bring an army.

Willow and Xavier looked at each other.

“You have to close that gate.” I said. “You have to destroy it.”