Tenosyat, the Map. Seventh of the Worlds; home of my heart, home of my sorrows. That is where this takes place.

It is a world of Plates and Domains. Each Plate has two sides. Each side is a Domain. Each domain utterly dwarfs the earth, and though it seems vast, this is only on the mortal scale. To an immortal, it seems knowable.

To a Transcendent, it is a crippling cage.

In my myriad lives, I had know the entirety of the world - but at the moment?

I had no idea where we were. Because. You know.

We were in the middle of utterly trackless wilderness. Not that that was my fault.

I had incarnated myself with the turning of the Kalpa, but one of the flaws of the technique was that I had no choice of where I or who I appeared as.

As for Esorem, I wasn't sure he knew where we were either - oh, he moved with purpose - east, east, and always east - but that purpose was just too simple. Yes, Esorem went east. But no matter how many valleys we crossed, he seemed to only be heading east. It was as if he had decided to travel in one direction until he found a road.

Two months later - with some amazement, I found out that that was exactly what had happened.

The story came out in a tavern, where Esorem had traded some furs for a night's stay, food and ale inclusive. Honestly, I think it was more for the ale than anything else. There was a certain novelty in it for him that I...

...that I hadn't expected.

This is Esorem's story.

Whenever, wherever, a twelve year old nobody decided that farming wasn't too hard, just too boring. So he left his farm, wandering into the mountains. Twenty five years later, a transcendent two steps away from true amortality stole his rabbit, and a robot teleportaled away after killing said sage. Now, this boy was in his late thirties, getting drunk.

I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Over the kalpa of kalpas that I had lived, I had met all sorts of people, but Esorem... Esorem was the only person like Esorem I had ever met.

I mean, who ever heard of a farmer peasant walking into the demon-haunted world and surviving for more than a month without guidance? And for twenty five years!? Truly, my host was a singular individual. He could have gone far if he had been noticed by Philosophy or Alchemy. Even as a mere Immortal, he could have been some...

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Something more than this.

Esorem might have left his life for boredom, but the man he had become cared about almost nothing. He wasn't depressed, oh no. The world really was just that empty to him. He was either a mortal genius capable of ascertaining everything to be known without guidance, or an idiot so completely incapable of thought that nothing could captivate him.

I was leaning on the former. An idiot should have died.

The next day, after he asked for some directions, we set off down the road for River Mantis City, a minor outpost of the Green Sun Empire. Said empire, I gathered, was nothing special in the grand scheme of things. Just a typical solar theocracy.

There was one interesting tidbit, though. This World was now made of seven plates and fourteen domains. No longer thirteen and twenty-six.

To wit: Somewhere, out there, a World had been born, and the map had updated to better represent its territories. I wondered what it was like, that world.

Was it Dunamis? Askorra, maybe? Either was common enough in the cycle of the Worlds. Depending on the identity of the new World, and when it emerged, I could plot the most likely courses of the remainder of this iteration of existence.

...no clues forthecame, though. Mortals, ever mortal did not eve have the necessary senses to realise that the seven and fourteen was other than how it had always and ever selfsame been. Not even Esorem could sense the difference, though if he had been born after it, even if he could have, it would not have been new to him.

At any rate, without it being obviously remarkable to anyone, there was no patter about the recent singularity of mundane reproduction. Or even a clear discussion of what, where. All I could do was leave it for the future, assuming that I had the survivability for such a thing.

The remaining journey was uneventful. Halfway to River Mantis City, Esorem was robbed, and his furs got stolen. Subsequently, he walked into the forest and procured more with the help of that absurdly powerful spiritual sense of his.

Looking back on it, that same sense was probably a third of the reason that he did survive his choice.

Still didn't explain where he learned the rest of his skills.

Anyway, three months later, most of which was spent re-finding the road after Esorem left it to get more furs, and thoroughly lost it in preference to tracking animals, we arrived.

The city? Ah. This culture followed patterns of architecture and design suitably close to Denmark's for the purpose of your your imagination. Eighteenth century. One minor deviation - local artistic taste and styles verged Vedic with a hint of Mayan influence. There was also a natural and conspicuous lack of abrahamic symbols; which made sense given that we were in the wrong World for it. You want Yahweh, go to Earth. People do sun-worship here.

Ignorant fools, the lot of them. The Dao was not made throught worship.

Nor was it broken by it.

All of that's irrelevant though. This world is cast from the shadow of paradise.

They had almost no choice, barely culpable in their ignornance and foolishness.

...

Esorem circulated himself through the city in a desultory sort of fashion that led me to conclude that he had no idea what on earth he was doing. Eventually, he proceeded to sell and get ripped off for his furs, got drunk, went out hunting, and continued this cycle while asking people about metal men who could cut the air with such regular ineptitude that I concluded that his brilliance in the forest just may have come at the cost of his social intelligence.

The entirety of it.

He was fortunate that this was a society that just didn't care about madmen, as long as they were nonviolent.

Eventually, Esorem gave up, and obtained directions to the capitol. There, finally, things changed.