“No, no, no. Maybe the mask is broken.” Zachary waved away the screen, still hopeful that it might have been a glitch with the features of the mask. Deep in his heart, however, he already knew that it hadn’t been – that the obvious truth was just that – obvious.

“Mask of Lies.”

The result, as expected, was identical; the total number of profiles he could switch to was still a grand total of zero.

The mask was torpedoed into the ground once more.

“When it rains, it FUCKING POURS!” Zachary sent a couple of swift kicks into a particularly solid block of ice growing on the cave wall, ice flakes scattering off each impact. “Can’t even do something as simple as keeping my essence intact huh, you shitty System? It’s been only five hundred iterations! Useless!”

“…okay, deep breath. Calm down. Let’s think this through carefully.”

He inhaled deeply, one hand on the cave wall as he steadied himself. There would be time for anger later. The priority now would be troubleshooting what led to this outcome, as well as likely remedies. Sitting down on the cold floor of the cave and picking up the stick he’d been carrying around, Zachary started to lay out the likely reasons for his predicament in messy scribbles on a patch of disturbed snow.

“Few possibilities here; one, they’ve been deleted. That’s the worst case scenario for sure – but shouldn’t be too likely. The override code should prevent that. Don’t even entertain the thought, Zachary. Then again… it should have also preserved my soul data across world transitions and it didn’t, so… Well, moving on. Let’s continue under the assumption that they still exist. Somewhere, somehow; it doesn’t matter. I’ll need to find them and re-assimilate them into my being.”

He underlined the words “somewhere” and “find” several times. That was the real question here; could he home in on the stolen fragments of power using any means at his disposal? Because if there was no way to do so, then they were as good as deleted from the Reality Stack. The worlds that were layered one on top of another were innumerable, to the point that it’d take less time just re-acquiring his Masks the old fashioned way than try and search for five hundred and thirty six microscopic needles in a galaxy sized haystack.

“I can make use of my base, I suppose; but Thing One and Thing Two have zero clue about the necessary procedures to get the information to me. Idiots. But I should have sat them down and walked them through everything, really… I guess I might share some of the blame for telling them to just stay put and keep everything neat and tidy until I returned. And to be fair, I didn’t expect to have to use it in this manner. It was always meant to simply be a trophy display case for stuff I fancied from different realities. Meaning that it’s up to me to establish contact instead. Can I do that?”

Zachary squeezed his eyes shut, running through in his mind the different ways one could communicate through the limits of one’s reality.

“Hit the walls with large amounts of mana – or any other complicated data packages, if I can come by it – to tear it down just enough to send a message through.” Zachary crossed it out immediately. “Don’t have enough of… well, anything viable enough to do that. This world isn’t magic oriented, either. Probably a dead end. How about the old man? Nah, he’s too busy to entertain my questions. Hasn’t even spoken to me since the very beginning; why would he help now?”

He circled the last point a few times with the blunt end of the stick.

“I guess it’s down to this, then. Waiting for a large scale world event; something that the system itself would weaken the barriers of this reality for, so that it can harvest the necessary data that results from it.”

Zachary sighed, arms splayed out in the dirt-flecked snow as he lay there. It was… feasible, he supposed. But the trouble was that it’d be a slow, drawn out process that he would have no control over. Events like the one that the System would reasonably recognise as meeting the necessary criteria to bring down the walls of the world would naturally have to be suitably big.

As in, global scale big.

In other words, they’d take time to build up towards. During which any number of tiny things might delay or entirely snuff out the Event, which would leave him back at square numero uno.

If he still possessed his Masks, it would have been a trivial thing. He’d incite a war by overthrowing a couple of world leaders and assuming their roles in secret, then lead their armies to slaughter each other for something or another. Maybe some vague struggle over race or money. The details didn’t matter in the end; people in any reality were always itching to find some reason to murder their peers.

But that hypothetical scenario was a pointless one; if Zachary still had all of his powers, he could bypass all of that and just weaken the walls of reality himself. And if he had all of his powers, he’d still be happily gallivanting across every world.

“So I’m left with a non-answer; an entirely passive strategy. Just build up power based on the logic of this world, and simply… wait for something big to happen.”

It was a rather depressing solution, but probably the only one that was available to him at this point in time. Unless he could magically reverse time to return his power to him, he was stuck in this world like the rest of its denizens.

“There we have it, then.” He clapped his knees, sitting upright. “Better get cracking.”

Finding natives – that was the first on the agenda.

The fastest way to learn about the world and ways to get stronger would be to locate and interrogate someone that grew up there. There were plenty of ways to go about it, of course. What he’d been doing thus far was… rather impractical, to tell the truth. Just wandering around looking for signs of life.

He chalked it up to being rusty.

“Skill Acquisition Conditions for scrying spells… or locator spells, I’m not picky…”

Acquisition Conditions for skills were universal, to an extent. For example, you could theoretically pick up the Flame Tower skill on Earth, an entirely scientific and magic-free reality. That was how it worked, after all. The underlying logic of acquiring skills.

The Soul System was the sole system running in the background; just with minor tweaks for different realities.

But as one might imagine, it wouldn’t be all that simple as twisting your fingers into the right configuration and yelling out phrases that related to the skill. They were almost always reality-specific; meaning that if you didn’t have the correct catalyst, the correct atmospheric mana density, the correct temple, the correct smells even, the acquisition would fail.

Zachary was now wracking his brains for a spell that would direct him towards the nearest population center. His Masks were generally isolated to their own Profile, but there was always some level of bleed-through based on the amount of times that he attempted a certain task in that life. Repetition created a form of muscle memory, in a way; and he was fairly sure that as the Wise Sage of Rikkon he’d worn through entire books simply absorbing the SACs of volumes and volumes of spells.

“Come on brain, I’m not asking for much here. Just one measly Spell of Finding. That I can cast with close to zero mana. And no catalysts. Doesn’t need to be specific; just need to know which direction to go-”

Bingo.

Direction; that was the word that had dredged up a very old memory of his.

Omni-directional Scan.

It was a very, very rudimentary and basic spell – long obsoleted by advancements in magic – and certainly, it was quite useless in most scenarios, since all it did was pulse outwards until it touched the mind of an intelligent being. Completely unusable in a fight against a practiced caster since they’d instantly recognise the unmistakable, tell-tale whiff of mana interference. Two minutes would be all it would take to then reverse-engineer your mana signature from the lingering spell and the result from your query would quickly be sent back to you – along with a nasty offensive hex of their own.

The Wise Sage had even come up with a couple of variations himself, all of which were a lot quicker and more accurate, while also being harder to trace back to its source. Naturally, the mana consumption had spiked to cover the new features of the spell, but for the Sage’s immense MP pool, it was worth it.

But the base spell didn’t share that increased mana cost, and zero catalyst was required. All one needed was 50 MP, the correct ritualistic chant, and the patience to wait until the pulse pinged something.

“Alright, perfect; how much MP do I have? Mask of Lies.”

Ah.

That was going to be a problem.

~

“…am I going to need two times my levels? More? I don’t know the exact distributions of stats per level, but it’s going to be a bunch. Damn it; why can’t this be easier?” Zachary muttered in frustration as he paced about the cave.

This felt like going back to square one; having yet another obstacle pop up just as he’d finalised a plan of attack. XP grinding was annoying in any world, let alone one where he had been stripped of all his tools. He was hardly a brawler in many of his lives, preferring to use magic or other such less physically intensive paths available in the world. Having to fight one on one with a monster or beast was downright barbaric, in his opinion. And there was every chance that he’d lose that fight since it was something he wasn’t intimately familiar with.

But… perhaps he didn’t have to fight one on one.

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“Ok, I know traps and indirect kills work for kill credit. Maybe I could bait a couple of pits with berries- no, it’d take too long. I don’t have anything to dig with, so it’d either be with my hands or stabbing at the ground with a stick; plus, I’m still in need of food. Too much exertion for too little reward. A fast way of gaining XP in a forest, with no tools other than a dirty berry-stained shirt and a stick…”

He snapped his fingers as inspiration struck.

“Got it.”

It was now noon of the next day, and Zachary was crouched behind a hedge, peeking out at the trap he had assembled. He was still hungry, but that would change very soon. As long as this worked, anyways.

The idea was simple – killing two birds with one stone, as one might say.

If he could capture and terminate a small woodland creature, then repeat the process several times over, that’d be food settled and progress towards his next levels. Might not be as sizeable a XP gain as that hog provided; but the idea was repeatability, not expediency.

“There you go,” Zachary whispered as he eyed the rabbit hop closer to its imminent death. “Keep going, little bunny.”

Its little snout twitched as it picked up a scent. It hadn’t smelt this before, but it could immediately tell that it was food. And as a weak and defenceless rabbit in a comparatively dangerous forest, filling your belly when you could was imperative to survival.

Following its nose, the rabbit finally found the item giving off that irresistible aroma – a strange, off-white cubby dangling a couple of inches off the ground. There were splotches of red on the outside, and within the walls of the burrow were similar splashes of dried yellow. No visible food was present in this cubby at a glance; but what if there was the leftovers of a half-eaten fruit within? The rabbit cautiously hopped a little closer, peering in. The cubby wasn’t open all the way, but there was a distinct black shape deeper within the cavity.

Jackpot, the rabbit thought.

And promptly fell for the oldest trick in the book.

Just as the small critter entered the shirt, Zachary pulled on the loose thread he’d been grasping, closing the hole of the tunic and trapping the rabbit in.

“SCREE! SCREE!” The panicked shrieks of the rabbit could be heard as it realised that the entire thing had been a set-up, and it struggled to free itself from the makeshift trap. Wasting no time, Zachary leapt out from his hiding spot and proceeded to end the life of the rabbit with a few well-placed swings of his trusty stick.

You have dealt 14 damage.

You have dealt 15 damage.

You have gained 73 XP.

Rubbing the sweat from his brow, Zachary pulled the shirt open and removed his prize – a small rock and a dead rabbit. He wasn’t too familiar with preparing rabbit meat or making a fire to cook the meat, but Zachary was sure that it couldn’t be that hard. The hardest part – catching and killing an animal – was already done with.

“Okay. That was easy. That’s lunch and the next bait settled. Now I’ll just have to do that another hundred or so more times until I get to the necessary mana requirements. Easy peasy.”

~

One and a half weeks.

That was how long it took for his MP to swell sufficiently to hit the necessary 50 MP for the Omni-directional Scan. It wasn’t all that bad; in fact, he’d managed to do pretty well for himself, amassing a small pile of tiny rabbit skins which was now filling his pack. Dig a hole deep enough that critters wouldn’t be able to jump out of, cover it with leaves, then balance a roasted piece of meat on top of it (perhaps with a thread from that spare shirt of yours) and wait patiently for your next meal to stumble and trap themselves.

At the end of this escapade, Zachary had six separate pitfall traps in different parts of the forest that he’d occasionally check on throughout the day so that he could harvest the XP from the creatures within.

By which he meant brutally whack with a stick until it was dead.

It wasn’t like he had any sharp implements to stab them with, after all.

First time starting a fire went pretty horribly too, given that it took him almost half a day just to get a pile of relatively dry tinder to smoke; but it did get easier and easier every subsequent attempt.

On the bright side, he was now rather well-versed in preparing rabbit meat. He’d do better with more spices and such – perhaps some salt, too – but otherwise, he was getting the hang of it. Didn’t taste like a Michelin Star meal, but serviceable enough. He particularly liked chewing on the tiny little hearts and feeling the blood gush out into his cheeks as they popped. It added much needed sensation to an otherwise boring and bland dinner.

“Mask of Lies.”

Name:

Zachary Altair (Edit)

Race:

Human (Edit)

Level:

7 (Edit)

Overall Animalisation:

16% (Edit)

HP:

164/164 (Edit)

MP:

53/53 (Edit)

Attributes:

LVL

STR:

27 (Edit)

DEF:

25 (Edit)

INT:

17 (Edit)

SPD:

37 (Edit)

LUK:

28 (Edit)

Skills:

LVL

Mask Generation

- (Edit)

Profile Swap (1/1)

- (Edit)

Wilderness Survival Mastery (Low)

1 (Edit)

“Oh right, I did get an extra skill, didn’t I? Not really sure what exactly the Skill Acquisition Condition was, but I suppose I don’t really need to know. Probably something to do with one of the many things I carried out while living in a goddamned forest for a week. Won’t need it after today, though. It’s all smooth sailing from here. Hopefully.”

Clasping his hands together, and spinning his palms such that they pointed in opposite directions, Zachary started the chant for the spell this had all been building up to.

“Unknowable God of Space and Time, accept my offering of 50 MP and provide me with the knowledge only you can find. Omni-directional Scan!”

Immediately Zachary’s vision blurred as the vast majority of his MP was drained from his body – mana fatigue. He leaned back against the cave wall and closed his eyes in pain, but nevertheless held his palms together to maintain the spell.

Skill acquired: Omni-directional Scan.

Scanning…

Now, it was simply a waiting game.

The pulse wasn’t exactly that quick – another reason why it had been abandoned – requiring multiple minutes to simply cover a few meters. It was why Zachary had filled up on rabbit meat right before he started.

He was multi-tasking, too – he intended to hold this position for an entire day even if the results of the Scan had returned prematurely, so as to also acquire the Inspect skill. Even if he had the workaround with the Masquerade Mask, it was still better to use skills that average people were likely to have heard about, instead of an equipment-specific feature from another reality. It would draw less attention.

Skill acquired: Inspect.

The location of the closest being has been discovered.

Finally, Zachary thought. The two tasks had finished almost simultaneously, which was very fortunate for him given that his stomach was already beginning to rumble. I’ll do a last pass by the pitfalls and prepare a last meal before heading out. Now… let’s see where these elusive natives are…

Zachary focused on the second notification intently, and an image was transmitted into his mind’s eye, with helpful arrows pointing towards where he needed to go as well as the distance required to travel.

“Okay, that’s not too bad. Just a few hours of trekking, no biggie. I can do that.”

It was then that he noticed something familiar about the direction the spell was pointing him in.

“No…”

It couldn’t be.

Could it?

“No…”

It was.

Damn it.

“GODDAMNIT, IT WAS RIGHT NEXT TO MY SPAWN POINT!”