***** PoV: The Full Chosen One *****

As the white suddenly vanished, so did the Circle's grip on me, causing me to stumble a bit, only to find my balance was wrong as I fell forward onto my hands.

{Wait, why are my arms and hands albino white?}

[Why am I confused about that? They've always been white.]

Looking down at my torso, I discovered that my leather breastplate and the gambeson underneath had both ripped at the seams and were only just barely hanging onto my shoulders.

[Why is my torso black as charcoal?] I asked as I rolled over and sat up.

{It's always been that color. Why am I- Oh, oh, oh! There's two of us in here! The Universal Displacer must have dropped me exactly where you were standing seconds before that purple box thing teleported us to wherever we are now.}

[Oh… Ok. Why are we not dead?]

{That is a good question.} I acknowledged, trying to switch which right hand was in the active layer of reality. After a brief moment of disorienting discomfort, my arms and legs turned black, causing my leather trousers to also bust at the seams, while my torso turned white and shrunk back down. {Ah, I see. Tangled Reality Layer Syndrome. Let me fix that real quick before we end up having to deal with any of the other symptoms.}

Pulling up the First Aid app on my smart wrist bag, I selected the appropriate treatment option. {Fair warning, this is going to sting a bit.} I thought before hitting start.

PAIN.

***** Victrina Vitafina *****

[Ow! You said that would sting a bit! That hurt a lot!] I complained.

{That's what the directions said!} he defended himself, looking at the system-like screen his device was projecting, except it was white and red instead of purple. {Oh. They were written by a literal troll. Yeah, that would do it. They don't really feel pain the same way everyone else does. My apologies. I should have noticed that.}

[You're fine. I probably would have made the same mistake in your shoes. Wait, why are we in your body? What happened to mine?]

{Your body is currently in a different layer of reality that is partially active. You can still think and perceive the world through my senses, but doing so somehow consumes more than 95% fewer calories unless you are recovering from significant injury, in which case it uses more calories to heal you faster. It also makes it so that you don’t have to haul around any of the mass of your non-active layers.}

[Are you saying I’m fat?! That sounds like you’re saying I’m fat!]

{No, absolutely not. I don’t know what bloodlines you have that might be occupying your other layers, but one of mine is a fire dragon, which currently weighs in at two-hundred and fifty tons. Sure, I can borrow my draconic strength in human form to help haul it around, but most buildings, or even most terrain for that matter, cannot handle that kind of weight when applied with a human foot.}

[Oh. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like fun…]

System Compatible Add-on detected! Beginning integration!

{[Wat?]}

Integration complete! The Gift of the Faded Seal now has an interactive status screen! As this is a new feature, more data will be added to the Gift Status as deemed necessary by The System. To view your new Status, simply say or think “Gift Status” with the intent to open it. By default, your Gift Status is not visible to anyone else unless you wish it to be. The only other exception is the newly created New User Training Mode, which temporarily merges your Gift Status screens together.

{[Wat?]}

[What is the Gift of the Fadded Seal?]

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

{Huh. I think I know what it is, but let me check real quick to make sure. Gift Status.}

Gift Status for Arthur “Necrosbane” Boateng (Teacher)

Primary Race:

Fire Dragon - 100% Awake - 1st

Secondary Race:

Life Elemental (Hidden) - 100% Awake - 2nd

Tertiary Race:

Fire Elemental (Hidden) - 100% Awake - 3rd

Gift Status for Victrina Vitafina (Student)

Primary Race:

Life Dragon - 12% Awake - 1st

Secondary Race:

Fire Elemental (Hidden) - 6% Awake - 2nd

Tertiary Race:

Life Elemental (Hidden) - 4% Awake - 3rd

{Oh! So that’s why we didn’t die! Somewhere in your past, some of your ancestors must have been a dragon and a pair of elementals, so when I landed on you, you got forcibly added to my layers rather than exploding or worse. I’m honestly glad that the automated reality layer separator I used to deal with the Tangled Reality Layer Syndrome is the best one on the market. I’m not sure that a lesser one would have been able to deal with the two of us.}

[Wait, what do you mean it could be worse than exploding?]

{I had to help clean up a teleportation accident once. One literally bleeding mountain was enough, thank you very much.}

[Fair enough. That still doesn’t tell me what the gift of the faded seal is or how we can get unstuck.]

{Unfortunately, I have no idea how we can get unstuck, as you put it. I have literally never heard of anything like this before. As for the Gift of the Fadded Seal, that requires a bit of history, at which point I might as well include a brief description of who I am and how I got to where you were.}

[Sounds like a plan to me!]

{Great! So, somewhere between the time of Noah and the time of Moses, someone sealed away all of the magic of my world and forced all sentient non-humans into human form using Fae-type glamor. Yes, I know you have no idea who either of those two are, but they are literally the only two concrete historical references that we have as to when the Seal was put in place. As the generations passed and people forgot who and what they used to be, they started to intermarry, and the magic of the Seal eventually soaked its way into our flesh and bone. Unsurprisingly, a Seal of that magnitude was bound to fail sooner or later, but whoever made it knew that, so instead of failing, it just faded away over the course of a century.

{As magic gradually came back to our world, people started to gain access to the various bloodlines that were locked away in their other layers of reality. As people grow and change, which of their bloodlines they have access to will grow and change with them. Sometimes, this means that the bloodline itself will change. Other times, it means that a bloodline will fade away to be replaced by another that is more in line with who they have become.

{In my case, fire dragon was the first bloodline that I awoke at less than four years old, and my parents were completely unprepared for the chaos that comes with raising a dragonet. Between me routinely setting things on fire by accident, including things that are usually rather difficult to burn, like steel for instance, and me quickly becoming physically stronger and tougher than they were, they quickly realized that they could never take care of me properly.}

[Yeah, I don’t blame them. I’m assuming they put you up for adoption?]

{Absolutely! I may have turned into a little monster, but I was still their precious baby boy. Fortunately for me, I was adopted by Ulysses and Annabella Linwood, two of the oldest and strongest dragons of my… world? Universe? Wherever it is that I am from relative to here. Given that the people who threw me over here literally don’t care where I ended up as long as I’m not their problem anymore, I have no clue where home is.}

[Ouch. I’m sorry for your loss.]

{Thank you. I’m honestly not sure why I’m not freaking out more than I am, but at least I have no regrets about who and what I left behind.}

[I think that The System is meddling with our heads a bit so that we are actually productive instead of a pair of gibbering idiots merged together. On the one hand, I’m not thrilled at the invasion of privacy, but on the other, I think I’d rather postpone the freak out as we only have so long to get our game in gear before the first Faction Quest,] I thought at him, quickly looking around, before pointing at the large red numbers on the wall above the deployment portal. [Yup, the Deployment Timer says we only have 15 minutes left]

{I see. I’ll try to make this quick, then. Anyways, Ulysses and Annabella raised me as one of their own, teaching me what it meant to be a dragon of following the Light path. No, now is not the time to talk about that. Plenty of time for that later. Along the way, I unlocked both of the elemental bloodlines, which for some reason are a lot stronger and more stable if I don’t make them public knowledge, hence the Hidden tag.

{Skipping forward several decades, one of my polity’s neighbors, who are sentient, space-fairing ants that call themselves The Grand Colony, lost control of their necromancer problem, which then spilled over into our territory. Ulysses’ Foresight told me this was a good opportunity for me to get stronger, help people, and help Terra grow at the same time, so off I went to fight the necromancers. Turns out that my unique blend of inborn magic is ridiculously devastating to them, eventually earning me the title of Necrosbane.}

[Wait, what’s Terra?]

{Oh, that’s the name of my homeworld and also the polity that rules it. I’m just so used to everyone knowing what that is that I forgot to explain.}

[Fair enough.]

{Anyway, in the meantime, Terra was fighting another group on the far side of our territory called the Displacers, who have an annoying habit of taking things they deem to be inconvenient and Displacing them elsewhere. So when they got wind that we were about to finally finish the Necromancer War, they got scared that all of the forces that just got freed up were going to be redeployed to fight them. Given the Displacement countermeasures we had developed, they were struggling to fight our forces as it was, and our getting reinforcements would pretty much be the end of the war for them.}

[So they Displaced all of you guys before that could happen. Where did everybody else end up then?]

{No idea. While I am fairly good with space magic, having been raised by a family of celestial dragons, that would require far more skill than I currently possess.}

[Alright. Well, if we’re going to be stuck together for a while, I guess I should return the favor and tell you about myself and the picumber that we’ve landed in.]