Aarick was starting to get tired.

No, that was inaccurate.

He had been tired, even after waking up; the stress of extreme pain and the sudden absorption of foreign energies had taxed his system greatly.

Learning a new language on top of that, had not really helped matters.

So perhaps that was why, though he had lots of questions, his mind focused first on something mundane. All of the talk about his future was a bit too much to take in. He had just been a college student; nothing had been set in stone.

“What happened to my clothes?” he blurted out.

Not what I really wanted to know, but I guess it’s something.

Lurona gave a startled laugh.

“I was expecting a more serious issue, but I can certainly handle something small to start. They were rather... soiled as your body lost control from the pain. They have been sent out to be washed and dried. Also, in a more serious note, you should probably refrain from using them at all. They do not fit with your cover story very well. You could simply have them as an eccentric whim, and say that you like an unusual style, but it would invite questions.

“If you like, I can hold onto them, and the objects from the pockets, for you. It would be easy enough to seal them away until your secret is exposed. At that point, advertising your status as an Outsider might actually be beneficial.”

Aarick thought about it for a moment. He liked those jeans, but he couldn’t really say they were worth making his life harder. And it wasn’t like the robes he was wearing were actually uncomfortable. They just felt odd. And while his phone and wallet might be nice, he couldn’t see them actually being useful.

Somehow, I doubt they take Visa.

He didn’t have much on his phone, other than some games. If he had been teleported here with his laptop and his engineering texts, that would be a completely different story.

“Yes, please,” he said.

“Good, I’ll take care of it,” Lurona said with a sharp nod.

For a moment, he struggled with what to ask, but he figured he should go with the obvious. He had read some cultivation novels, but it wasn’t like any of them actually agreed on how it all actually worked.

“What exactly is cultivation, and qi, and well… everything else?” He said.

“A complicated question, but it is easy enough to simplify some of it,” she said. “Cultivation… is a refinement. It involves taking in spiritual energies to refine some part of yourself. The first step is being able to store the energy; this requires forming a dantian. Most people practice spiritual cultivation; it is the most direct method of cultivation. However, both the body and soul may be cultivated as well. All three methods overlap, you cannot strengthen one area without also impacting the others. And it is completely possible to cultivate all three of them.

“Cultivating two is the most common. Most cultivators will cultivate their own body to a certain degree. It has substantial benefits to health, and is usually fairly easy, at least at first. After a certain point cultivating the body becomes both extremely painful and difficult, so most people stop pushing so hard.

“As for the soul... it is the most esoteric. Few external things can actually affect the soul, whether to help or hinder. So, soul cultivation is done almost entirely on your own. It relies heavily on personal insight and inspiration. Without an easy path or shortcuts, few even try.”

She paused for a moment, looking at him and grimaced slightly.

“Of course, you lack knowledge of what qi even is. Ironic, that you should have gained the first step of qi familiarization without that.

“You come from what we call the Sealed Lands. A place where qi and ziu have both been reduced to minimal levels. There is enough to support life, but they both are minimal. We don’t actually know why such places exist. Without enough of either energy, however, all of the powers of both might as well not exist.

“First, let’s talk about qi. It is the energy of the heavens. Pulling it into your body allows you to cultivate. The exact properties of qi can vary heavily. Qi’s primary characteristic, however, is that it naturally wants to connect to what is around it, to pull it in and incorporate a part of it into itself.”

Aarick’s brow furrowed for a moment.

“You have a question about that?” she asked.

“Yeah, is that how my new qi sense works? Am I using qi to connect to the world around me?” he said.

“A good question. And yes, you connect to the qi near you, which connects to qi near it, and so on. For now, your sensitivity is limited so you can only feel a short distance. Theoretically, if you were connected to qi deeply enough, you could feel everything, everywhere.

“Honestly, past a certain point, you will gain senses that far exceed your ability to completely utilize. Learning how to manage them, and see what is actually important, then becomes a focus of your training. Fortunately, that is usually a gradual change, so people can adjust one bit at a time.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

That made sense. It reminded him of a computer issue. It was entirely possible to have far more data than processing power. Or would the incoming data be better imagined as bandwidth… Never mind, that wasn’t important. He focused back on Lurona.

“Ziu is the energy of the earth. It is corrupted with demonic energy. Learning to expel it and purify your own body is an important part of cultivation.

“A third energy exists, as well, but it is only stable inside your own body. It is called chakra. It is the energy of your own soul. Even inside yourself, it often breaks down. This is perfectly normal, as chakra is created by the soul to help sustain you. The energy breaks down into qi to help nourish the body and spirit. When there is enough qi in the environment already, then the soul will nourish itself, helping it to grow stronger. Theoretically, one could do soul cultivation just by using this energy, but it is so slow that it is impractical.”

He waited a moment, to see if she would say more, but nothing more was forthcoming. He reflected for a second before asking another question.

“You said before that if I didn’t form a dantian, you would be watching over me my whole life. What did you mean exactly?” Aarick asked.

“Without a dantian, you will die before the age of two hundred,” she replied. “If the only thing you manage to do is form a dantian, it will extend your life to three hundred. Past that, cultivation can make you live a very long time. I am on assignment to watch over this creche for five thousand years. I have been here for a little more than a thousand so far.”

Holy shit!

Right, he took that in for a moment. That was… functional immortality, especially compared to his old lifespan. Actually, why two hundred years? On Earth one hundred was pushing it.

“I would have been lucky to reach one hundred on Earth,” he said.

“Really?” she asked, her brows furrowed. “It must be due to having your soul starving. Not enough energy to nourish your body properly. Actually, how many days to a year?”

He should have thought of that. If the years were substantially shorter here, then that could be part of the explanation.

“365, most years, it varies slightly,” he replied.

Her eyebrows rose in surprise and then settled back down.

“Ah, I suppose that makes sense. A year here is exactly four hundred days,” she said.

It was Aarick’s turn for his eyebrows to rise in surprise.

The four hundred day count was slightly odd, but if he considered that it was equally likely for the year to be any number between, say… one hundred and a thousand, then the odds of it falling on a number perfectly divisible by one hundred was one in a hundred. That made it unlikely, but not so unlikely that it was really strange. The truly odd bit was if it was exactly four hundred without any variance.

“Exactly four hundred,” he said slowly, “that seems very exact.”

“Yes, the God-Emperors set it up that way,” Lurona replied.

His brain ran into a wall going sixty, and he had to regather his mental processes. That… that level of power was not minor. It could just be an explanation, a myth, but if it wasn’t then the power scaling here was… Well, he couldn’t properly imagine what they had done. No, that wasn’t entirely correct.

He could imagine it, and that was the problem.

It would take altering the rotation of the planet to change to an exact number. That would involve either accelerating or decelerating the entire planet. And it would need to be done evenly if they didn’t want to destroy the world. Conflicts at that level… would be enough to destroy the entire planet. How was the world still even here? Were they protecting it?

“Who are the God-Emperors?” he asked.

She looked at him, her smile a little wry, before she replied.

“Well, when you ask your tutors questions like that, they are absolutely going to believe that your memory was erased. I know your situation, and it still feels odd that you don’t know.

“There are five of them, and there are five empires; as you might imagine, each one leads one. Each one is immortal; they founded their empires and have been guiding them ever since. Most of the common people only know about this empire, as we don’t have much contact with the others. The distances involved can make interactions difficult.”

Aarick’s mind struggled to work out the logistics. The people at the top could affect the entire world, but actually interacting with the other empires was difficult. So that meant… what? Well, the average citizen would have a hard time traveling between them. The people near the top might be on an entirely different scale of power, and they might not care about trade or diplomatic interactions. Or, maybe, like he had thought before, the God-Emperors were each restraining the power or aggression of those under them.

His mind turned to home for a moment, finally allowing himself to think about one of his greatest issues.

Do I even want to go home, at least right away? If I can cultivate… then I want to do it. How far could I go? This is a chance for magic, for something beyond the simple cold equations that govern reality.

He... hadn’t believed in magic since he was a child, but a part had always hoped. Part had always longed for it with quiet grief; longed for it in a world that seemed too impersonal.

There was a cost though. He needed to get a message home. His parents had lost one child already. They had only just recovered from losing Delores. He wouldn’t have headed back to university at all, if they hadn’t insisted. And, if it came down to it, if there was no way to send a message and only a person could go through… then he would. He would return. At least then he would have seen real magic, even if he couldn’t bring it with him.

“My parents, my family,” he said, a faint trace of his internal strain reaching into his voice, “will be very worried about me. I know you said that the Eldritch is dangerous, but is there any way to send a message to them? I need to let them know I am okay.”

Lurona pursed her lips in thought, her eyes looking upward for a moment.

“Usually, I would say no, but you are destined to interact with it anyway. Choosing a path and doing it on your own terms might be for the best.

“If you want to do this… you will need to study rune work and arrays. They are, essentially, diagrams telling the world what to do. It is far more complicated than that, but I am not an expert in them. I do know, that to target someone else you need to be familiar with them. That means you are the only person in the world who could build the targeting seal. A seal master could build the rest of it, but your level of skill would need to be sufficient for that one piece.”

A look of startled embarrassment crept onto Lurona’s face, before she composed herself and continued.

“I was just thinking about your family, and realized that I never got your family name. I never actually asked your name at all, did I?”