“So, what now?” Cass asked, flopping back into the moss.

You should kill the Lord of the Deep.

Cass scowled. “You said that earlier. Why is that so important to you?”

It would be the easiest way to leave the Deep, for one. The rewards it would provide would be another.

Cass shrugged. “I don’t know how much I care about the rewards. Leaving sounds good, but I don’t know if it's the ‘easiest’ way out. I’m sure I could find my way back to where I fell. It would be tricky Elemental Manipulating a gust in the opposite direction of that down draft, but Wind Blade might do it.”

You are in the deepest part of the Deep, Salos said.

“What? No chance. I didn’t—“

You did not, he agreed.

Cass fell silent, his words turning over in her mind, grinding to an inevitable conclusion.

“Did you purposefully take me deeper, Salos?”

He coughed. You needed a Safe Zone to heal. They are not exactly common.

“And that it would incentivize me to try to kill this lord is only a convenient side effect?” Cass said. She crossed her arms over her chest. Had she been too quick to trust him?

But no, what reason could he have to force her to fight monsters she couldn’t handle? If he wanted her dead, he hadn’t needed to bring her to safety after the rats. If he could take over permanently somehow by weakening her, he could have already done that.

Hardly. Salos snorted. I shouldn’t need to twist your arm for this. Slaying the Lord of the Deep is the obvious next move. Slaying it is the goal of all Trial takers.

“Well, it isn’t my goal. I just want to go home. Any ideas how I’d do that?”

That depends on where ‘home’ is and, potentially, how you got here.

“Home is Earth. I got here by being pulled through an extradimensional, tentacle-filled portal.”

You realize that does not clear anything up, right?

“How do you think I feel?”

Where did you arrive exactly? Salos asked.

“By some big cliffs beside a glowing forest? There was this magic circle thing inscribed on a flat stone platform. Sound familiar?”

That sounds like one of the feeder summoning circles. But that should not be possible, Salos muttered. The ones around the edges usually only summon weak monsters. They aren’t supposed to be able to summon sentients. Or named things.

Then again, it wasn’t like anything was put in place to stop such a thing… He trailed off in thought mumbling more to himself than to her. Given the time scale, the number of monsters summoned, and the probability, perhaps it was stranger that it hadn’t happened yet.

It should be statistically impossible. But, that is how odds work, I suppose. One in trillions is still fairly high if you have a sample size of hundreds of trillions.

“What are you muttering about?” Cass asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s a feeder circle?”

A feeder summoning circle. They are a method of artificially increasing the density of monsters in the area and increasing the diversity far beyond what the ecosystem can naturally support. This is a Trial after all. It was created to train young warriors. The more varied the monsters fought the more experience one can expect to gain from it.

“And what does that have to do with how I got here?”

That has to do with how summoning circles work. They are a nifty magic that reaches across the Realm Boundary and pulls other beings from one realm to this one.

“You think that’s what happened to me?” Cass asked. “I got yoinked across ‘realms’?”

Yes, but no.

Cass wished he had a body she could glare at. She settled for glaring at the empty air instead. “What does that mean?”

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The summoning circle pulled you into this Realm from outside, that is the simplest explanation. As I said, it should be technically possible, if statistically improbable. Slyphids fit at least one of the summoning profiles as a Spirit-bodied being. Add your low level placing you within the desired power parameters… He was talking more to himself than to her again, his words trailing off into unspoken thoughts.

“Okay, it was possible for me to be summoned as a slyphid, I got that much. That’s the ‘yes’ in your ‘yes and no’. What’s the ‘no’?”

Oh, right, Salos snapped back to attention. You should not have been given the option to change your Avatar settings. The summoning circle just isn’t that powerful. Nothing in this world is that powerful.

“But I definitely did.”

I do not doubt that. But that does not change that it could not have been the work of the summoning circles.

“Which is why you say ‘no’ it wasn’t the result of summoning that I’m here.”

At the very least, it wasn’t the result of our summoning circles on their own that dragged you here, Salos said.

“So you have no idea what happened?” Cass asked.

An impression of a shrug floated across their connection. If you made me guess–and I do mean, if you forced my hand, held a blade to my throat, and forced a near baseless conjecture from my lips–I might suggest it was a two-step process. Something–the Gods perhaps–pulled you from your Realm into the Void–that is, the space between Realms–and then left you there. No, I cannot even begin to speculate why.

From there, perhaps the summoning circles in the valley grabbed you. It would be trivial for them to pull you across a single realm boundary, preferable even compared to needing to reach across both our own and the boundary of a neighboring realm.

Cass frowned. “Two separate processes? You really think that is more likely than one?”

It has to be, Salos said. Otherwise, you would have been summoned as a human—except, I know for a fact we put restrictions on that sort of summoning… He only wandered off for a moment before returning his attention to Cass. No, you could not have been summoned into the Uvana Valley with the summoning circle alone. Not assuming you were human initially.

I can only speculate on what the other process was, but it was definitely two.

Cass sighed. She understood the general argument if not absolutely every term Salos had thrown at her. She probably could have made him explain each one, but she had a sinking feeling she’d be here forever if she did. It wasn’t like he was going anywhere, she’d get the details on them if they were important later.

Instead, she brought the conversation back to her original question, “Does any of that give you any ideas on how I might get home?”

Well, not really. I am not exactly an expert on summoning or realm traversal, or whatever the opposite of summoning would be called, if such a person even exists.

That said, I have two thoughts. Both are likely wild goose chases, that should be clear upfront.

“Sure,” Cass said. She didn’t even have that right now, so she’d take it.

First, I could be wrong about the nature of the summoning circles. I doubt it, but I could be. It has been known to happen.

If I am, and it really was just the summoning circle that pulled you from your Earth to these Fractured Skies, then it may be possible to reverse engineer a path back with the circle that you were summoned to. Maybe.

I have never heard of someone doing it successfully, but I have heard someone once speculate it was theoretically possible.

We should try to check the circle in question if you want to attempt to pursue this. But, as I said, I think the chances that one of the valley’s summoning circles pulled you from Earth is near zero and, even assuming it did, the chances the two of us will be able to invent a new runic circle to reverse a summoning on our own is even lower.

“Optimistic…” Cass muttered.

I would rather not string you along with false hopes. I apologize if that is not what you wish to hear.

“No, that’s fine. You’re probably right. What’s your other idea?”

This is possibly even less realistic. Where the first idea has some magical studies I half remember backing it up, this thought is entirely based on legend, superstition, and myth.

“That’s fine,” Cass said, with a sigh. How impossible was her task?

Alright. Reach level 99.

“That’s it?” Cass asked.

People say all sorts of things about what happens when one reaches level 99. Immortality. Godhood. Extended system access.

In the old stories, Travelers reach level 99 and join the gods or leave this world for new distant adventures.

It is just a story, but, well, if the gods did pull you from Earth, then who knows.

Cass shook her head. Level 99? That seemed impossible. Sure, she was 10% of the way there, but she’d done that by fighting things 2 or 3 or more times her level. She didn’t want to keep doing that. And, even if she did, that had a limit.

Assuming monsters also were limited to level 99 before they became gods or whatever, by the time she was level 50 there wouldn’t be anything double her level to fight anymore. And that assumed she could keep fighting things above her level as the gulf between them kept growing.

He must have felt her disappointment. I apologize. I should not have brought it up.

Cass shook her head. “No. It's good to know, but there has to be another answer. Isn’t there someone who would know?”

Salos hummed in thought. Perhaps one of the summoning experts at the Scholar’s Spire might have some ideas. He sighed. If they’ll even work with me…

“Why wouldn’t they?”

A cold tension spiked over their bond. Because I am a demon now. And they are the world's leading experts on demon hunting and extermination.