The rift beckoned with the sweet gravity of standing at the edge of a steep cliff. It looked like a square meter of air made solid, like a sphere, or a disk infinitely turning in on itself. Isaac caught himself reaching out to touch it in a trance as a small wave soaked his socks.

Idiot. I found a rift and the first thing I try is touch it? What if I got sucked in?

His heart was pounding, urging him to either take one step forward or ten steps back. Was this fight or flight? His body certainly knew that he was in danger, but weighing that against the fear of jumping into the water, he managed to focus on the rock he was holding onto for a moment.

He was drawing a blank on whether rifts even pulled people in, or if you had to willingly step through them. The only thing that came to mind was one of those security videos they played on blimps or cruise-liners that traversed the East and Southwest Deep.

“When confronted with a sub-realm spatial anomaly,” the primly clothed bob-cut reporter had said, “commonly referred to as rifts, remember your four S’s: Stay calm, Survey the area for possible threats, Secure a means of egress, and Send word to the police, local delver’s guild, or nearest figure of authority.”

Stay, Survey, Secure, Send word, it echoed in his mind. Hah, I’ve got step one down. This is usually the part in the movies when a monster comes out of a rift and kills the unfortunate first victim.

I’m totally not freaking out.

Seeing as he was still alive, he went to step two, and, well. He looked around. There was no sign of life, unless he counted a carpet of off-yellow lining the cliff face around the splash zone. A small mudcrab was wedged in a nearby nook, hiding as much as he should have been from the clearly magical phenomena. It pinched him as Isaac grabbed it before gently lowering it into the water.

“It’s for your own good, little buddy.”

Slowly, he felt around the nearby rock for his old handhold and once he secured it, pulled his body back the way he came. The sand felt infinitely soft beneath his feet when he had finally left the cliffside and landed on the beach. He would have nearly kissed it if it weren’t made of sand.

Now to send word.

He dug his heels into the sand and raced across the beach and up the hill, unbinding the still barking purple terrier before picking him up and legging it into the forest. It was hard not to look over his shoulders, to see if he was being followed. Every sinking step felt traitorous, and every second passing gave whatever monsters were inside the rift more time to follow his tracks.

Nothing was coming after him for now. He reached the treeline, then decided to double back and take the long route through the surf, where his footsteps would be obscured in seconds, and where he wouldn’t have to stumble over discarded branches and prickly agaves.

The sun had almost set, a sliver of red bathing the horizon. Nervously, he looked over his shoulders again.

Maybe I’m being paranoid. That rift can’t be that old, or Claire would have taken care of it, definitely.

Ortho’Wuur had noticed it, and he would definitely tell her. Except, what if he was not planning to? Did he point it out in the hopes that Isaac would find it?

Isaac slowed down.

That would mean he had a rift all to himself. He couldn’t do anything with it, but still, this was the kind of front-page sensation millions of people dreamed about while rubbing their scratch-cards. Except, Isaac couldn’t sell the information to anyone, since ownership would just fall back to whoever owned the ground it spawned on, which in this case was Claire.

And Claire would never let them delve the rift.

Sorry Claire. I’ll tell you eventually.

He most certainly couldn’t take advantage of the rift in secret, by himself. People trained relentlessly just to be able to reliably delve rifts filled with slightly magical creatures, at Tier 1. And even after all the professional humbug, delving was still one of the professions with the highest rate of lethal workplace accidents. It was not where he saw himself, certainly not delving the same two or three rifts for the rest of his life while paying half his loot to some guild or other and using the other half to replace and repair his gear.

Do guilds offer consultations? He stopped, kicked the ground. I don’t even know the first thing about rifts. I don’t even know who to ask—

The lights were still on in Torwig’s skillshop. It had to be past business hours, and Torwig famously never missed a break and always closed right on the dot. Today at least, Isaac had two excuses to knock. He would know what to do in Isaac’s situation and he could be trusted not to blab.

“Torwig, Torwig, Torwig” Isaac hissed as he knocked on the door.

The door opened. His old, tired face peeked out.

“I see you’ve walked Fluffkins longer than necessary… And he is still purple.”

Isaac handed him the dog, who seemed as sleepy as Isaac ought to have been. “I’ll wash him tomorrow. Can I come in?”

“No.” Torwig had almost closed the door when Isaac jammed his foot in the opening.

“Please, Torwig, I need some help. You’re like some kind of secret wizard, a tier twenty monster pretending to be a shopkeep, right?”

“... no.” He scoffed, then after digesting it, scoffed again. “Who put that kind of nonsense in your head? Was it your friend, the blonde one?”

Isaac grumbled, counting just the weird things he could remember off the top of his head. “Half the sweets in your shop are brands I can’t even pronounce, you sell magic from a catalog spanning all of the empire’s known skills, you have a wood golem protecting you, and your dog is so high tier he uses me as a plow to dig up beaches. I don’t even know where you live! Do you just… stand there and meditate with your eyes open? Do you even need to sleep at all?”

A single eye scrutinized Isaac from head to toe. He had to be seeing how ruffled Isaac was, how desperate.

“Alright, come on in,” he grumped before opening the door ever so slightly. “I’ll put a tarp down and you can cultivate your essence in peace, without bothering me when I’m off the clock.”

Isaac opened his mouth, but shut it right up. Claire had ears sharp as heck. She couldn’t hear him from all the way up the hill, could she?

Better play it safe.

“Thanks,” he said, and then he slipped inside.

There was always something odd about Torwig’s skillshop, but seeing it after hours, with most lights dimmed and only the one window as a connection to the outside world, it felt downright ominous. When the door closed behind him it almost sounded like someone was letting out a sigh. But there was only him, Fluffkins, and Torwig chewing on some sweets.

Get it together. I’m just a bit spooked by the rift.

Torwig already had a black waterproof tarp in his hands, the kinds used to keep tent-bottoms dry.

“Get on it,” he said as he spread it out. “Do what you gotta do, but don’t get any residuals on my parquet flooring.”

“I won’t,” he promised, uncertain whether the process of turning from baseline to Tier 1 had a splash radius. All he knew that it was messy, and it stank, and that you better not get attached to whatever clothes you were wearing while doing it.

Sitting down, he felt the essence suspended in his lungs and poked it. It had gotten lazy, but just that little touch was enough, and his breath fell into a practice rhythm as the essence coarse through his body, depositing itself layer by layer like sediment. It was relaxing, but only until he realized that even this first step was going to take hours.

He looked up. “Can I have the catalog again?”

Torwig handed the catalog over with an arched eyebrow. If there was any cheap, easily accessible skill that would allow him to delve a rift on his own, maybe that would be worth doing some drastic things for.

He flipped a page when he noticed the shopkeep staring intensely at him. “You really are cultivating and reading at the same time.”

“Is that so unusual?”

Torwig squinted. “That’s an adventurer technique. They’re always on the move, so they can’t sit down and meditate for eight hours a day. Technically, they only popularized it, which is the only reason why your mother is even allowed to teach it at all. If you had a library card, you could probably find a book or two on it, but without someone to guide you through the steps, it would be as helpful as cotton-candy toilet paper.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Lucky me, I guess.” Not that he could go about his day while cultivating natural essence, since that would gum up his cultivation by tier four or five at the latest.

“So, what did you find that’s got you spooked?” Torwig asked and Fluffkins gave a bark as an answer. “A rift?”

He nodded. “It just… happened. It looked new.”

“That’s dangerous stock. You gotta move it, or gotta sell it quick, if you catch me.”

“Yeah.” He flipped a page, staring at rift loot drop tables full of averages and medians. Math. Ugh.

He thumped the catalog on the ground, then winced at how loud it had come out as. “Today has been a bit much. It’s just up and down and up and down. I’d like just one piece of solid land to stand on, a bit of certainty. I don’t suppose you could…?”

Could what, offer some advice, help him out, give him a loan?

Torwig chuckled. “Boy, give it up. You shouldn’t be trying to be an adventurer when you’ve got so much life ahead of you.”

“I’m not…” Isaac breathed out. “I grew up knowing that I will live my entire life on Wett. I’ve got maybe a hundred twenty years of uneventful life in me. Hammond once let slip that I’m likely to die before Claire.”

Which by extension implied she was Tier 8 at least.

“I don’t want to do that to her, I don’t want to be a burden, and I don’t want to be the eternal D+ failure bumming about like my aunt and uncle.” They had been unable to change their life, and angry because of it, and they let that anger cap themselves at the knees. “No matter what happens, I don’t want to become like a Tuttle. But if you’re not going to help me, then I’ll have to help myself.”

The shopkeeper hmm-ed in a noncommittal way as he emptied a bag of food in Fluffkin’s bowl. It sounded like he was emptying a bag of lead ball bearings. The little bark-machine happily dug in, and Isaac found the ambience oddly calming.

He continued to read and cultivate on his tarp until the sky outside grew truly dark.

+++

Essence swirled. He could feel it expanding through his veins from where he had been injected. It was odd, since he’d always trained under the impression that it would expand from his lungs outwards, but this worked too, and felt just as good. Getting lost in the feeling of his body becoming more more was ill advised. Like Claire and Hammond had taught him before, he let the feeling of mild euphoria ebb and flow, allowing small portions of sediment settle inside him, again and again.

‘Tier 1 is free,’ they’d said, ‘you’ll barely feel a change, besides always waking up fresh and ready for the new day.’

To Isaac, tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough. But if he was the last person to reach Tier 1 then Sophia and Zach wouldn’t let him live it down.

He was almost there, he had to be. The feeling of lightness, of heaviness, of more and less was taking all his focus, like watching a soap bubble and anticipating when it was going to pop.

A hand shook his shoulder.

“It’s a few minutes to midnight. Time to leave Isaac,” Torwig said.

Isaac blinked blearily. The catalog was still half draped over his legs. He didn’t have the answers he was looking for yet, and he wasn’t Tier 1 either.

“A few more minutes?” he asked. “I’m almost done, I can feel it.”

Torwig blinked, chewing with an odd slowness that seemed as if age was catching up to him all at once. “Go home. This place is not for you, not at night. Come back tomorrow.”

“And what?” Isaac asked, standing up and pushing against the counter. “Let you tell me how you can’t do anything again? I looked through your recommendations in the catalog, through every single one. They’re nice, great even, if I could afford them. But I can’t, because you need money to make money and I don’t have any because my aunt and uncle drank it all away!”

Maybe he really should have asked Ortho’Wuur instead of Torwig. It wasn’t like they’d known each other for four years now, it wasn’t like he was asking for anything but a hint, a single instance of helpful advice on what to do with his life. But Torwig didn’t care, he just sat there, lounging behind the counter with his godsdamned newspaper, chewing on his hard candy as if everything was alright with the world.

“There is more to magic than skills and builds, boy,” he said, after a long silence and with deliberation. “You’re in a difficult spot; it’s up to you to get some leverage, or a new perspective.”

“Or maybe I should go to a different shop who’ll let me take out a loan.

“I would not recommend… being hasty.” He settled onto his chair and for all the world it looked as if something was halting the clockwork mechanism connected to his very existence . “In fact, there is… little… anyone can… do…”

The old clock struck twelve o’clock. Torwigs eyes, which for a moment had stuttered with life, were halfway closed, completely still like the rest of his body. It was quiet in Torwig’s Skillshop & Sundries, freakishly quiet.

Isaac slowly waved a hand in front of Torwig’s face, but he did not move. He snapped his fingers. Nothing.

An opened snack-wrapper was scattered right on the counter.

“Ground Mana Bits - for constructs and magical creature consumption only.” He squinted at the shopkeep, and for a moment, the simplest explanation seemed too outlandish to accept. The way he sat in the chair, shoulders relaxed, not a sign of breathing or a beating heart implied…

“He’s like you,” Isaac said, pointing to the wooden security golem. The mannequin seemed to look at him through its three pairs of sunglasses. He was half expecting it to wave. The other half of him was expecting for it to stand up and throw him out at any moment.

“Can I… am I allowed to touch him?”

The mannequin, in its eternal wisdom, declined to answer.

He poked Torwig again, to give weight to fact and feeling. He sure as hell felt like flesh and bone. The hardness in his hairy arms could be explained away by being Tier 4 or up. But what about the rest of him, was there some other giveaway?

Isaac was leaning over the counter, having just confirmed that his eyes were made of some sort of hard crystal, when Torwig started to tip, and fell over with a heavy clonk.

“Crap,” Isaac hissed with a wince. He hurried around, trying and failing to pick Torwig up again. “Heavy. Why are you so goddamned…”

He was wet. Why was Isaac wet? Right, there was tea on the counter — had been, since now it was all over Torwig’s face. Isaac watched a drop across his eyeball. He rubbed it with his sleeve, but that only distributed it, because for some reason the tea was incredibly oily.

Soap. He needed soap.

He turned to the wooden, faceless mannequin. “Hey, do you have a bathroom, or a supply cupboard I could maybe… use?”

The mannequin, wise beyond infinity and likely to experience the death of this star, ignored him.

“Guess not.” Why would two mannequins even need a bathroom, or a bed? “Can you help him up?”

The answer was as unsurprising as it was absent.

Fine, I’ll do everything by myself then.

He looked away, only to stare right into Fluffkin’s soulful eyes.

“Please tell me you don't run on manastones too,” Isaac whined. “I don’t know if I can deal with another surprise today.”

The little terrier barked. Then he turned around and strutted happily around a corner stacked with packages of the latest merchandise. There was an ordinary wooden door hidden behind them. The little dog was running circles impatiently right in front of it.

“I’m guessing this is where they keep your food,” Isaac muttered. And hopefully there were some cleaning tools there too. He leaned around the corner, speaking to the back of the security marionette. “I’ll be letting myself in, if that’s alright?”

No answer. It was as good a ‘yes’ as he was going to get.

The door swung open, and the first thing Isaac felt was the cold. It was freezing in here, the frost biting into his cargo shorts and t-shirt. He could see his breath and could feel it prickling like a thousand pins all over his body.

Some sort of walk-in freezer?

There were more packages here, stacked to the ceiling and practically falling over themselves. Isaac tried to manuever around anything sporting a ‘fragile’ or ‘explosive’ explosive tag.

Why does a kiosk owner even need explosives? And Maerdon, why is it so godsdamn cold?

Rubbing his arms, he stumbled around a tower of packages into a main room with a single tiny window in it. He blinked, because when he looked out of that window, he saw blackness, a moving void full of immovable lights. It was space, the way he’d seen it on TV, and below him, there was some planet that wasn’t Wett.

This isn’t Seagull island, he thought, shivering and growing tired. Am… am I even still in the Wett System?

“Boy.” A man. There was a man talking to him, wearing a wizard hat, a bathrobe pulled up to his knees, and with a plunger in his hand. Isaac couldn’t quite make out his face, everything was getting blurry from the icicles crawling down his eyelashes. “What are you doing on my island?”

“N-nothing…” He breathed in and out, but the pain in his chest just grew worse. “Air.”

There was a sharp intake of air. “What tier are you? Baseline? Crap-and-thunder, Fluffkins, help me with…”

Isaac didn’t catch the rest of it, only that he hit the ground, that everything that felt cold now felt warm in a deeply comforting way.

+++

The skillshop was quiet, just how Torwig liked it. There was nothing quite like well-deserved rest after a day of work. He’d even had customers, though the delvers only bought a few oxygen tanks and an emergency-bubbler before leaving. He almost laughed when, from his rather uncomfortable position on the floor he saw Fluffkins pulling the orphan boy by the scruff of his neck, eyes closed, lashes frozen stiff, and muttering something only he himself could make any sense of.

“What happened?”

Bark.

“I see. Get him back safely, if you would.”

Borf.

“Did he get the shock he needed to make up his mind? Good.”

The boy certainly needed a good scare; the fish-woman had practically smothered him in soft wool his entire life. Under those circumstances a bit of terror was good, healthy even.

The dog left, and just as Torwig was coming to enjoy the next few hours of silence, he was interrupted again.

*What happens outside the shop is not our concern,* a little voice said in his head.

“I know, sonny.”

*Customer satisfaction is paramount.*

“You’re still young, still have things to learn. This is, in a way, a service.” Though he knew his coworker would disagree. “It was just a bit of cold, and some mana-shock. He’ll be alright. And if he isn’t, we can offer a discount as a way of apologizing.”

The cabin was silent for a long while. One of the sunglasses fell off the featureless mannequin’s face.

*Why?*

Because he’s a curious young fellow, he thought. Because he reminds me of you. Because Fluffkins likes him, and that means he has a good heart.

But the voice wouldn’t understand any of that. “Call it an investment, sonny. By the way, have you chosen a name for yourself yet?”

The mannequin remained silent. Torwig listened to the lapping of waves and the sounds of the night.

Maybe it was still a bit too early.