“It’s a bit overwhelming,” he eventually admitted, feeling an unexpected urge to be honest. “Not long ago, I lived in a city of over three million people. None of us had cultivations, but nobody had to worry about being killed in the streets for nonsense reasons like they do here. Back then, I lived with my parents, I had a couple of friends but not many.” His eyes took on the gaze of one that had suffered through all sorts of sadness. “Then the Interspatial Migration happened, and everyone died.”
He didn’t look at Sersa. Instead, he kept his gaze on the stars and wondered where his home world resided in the vast sea of foreign stars. Not just Earth, but the pervasive cloud of unknown matter that had eradicated all life on Actius’s home planet. How far had that ominous, living mass of blackness expanded in the millions of years since Nia had met its end?
Something changed in Sersa’s gaze as she watched him stare up at the stars, though it was difficult to tell with someone that was usually so reserved with their expressions. “What you said yesterday before the fighting broke out. You asked me if I would believe it if you said you’d been to another world…”
He nodded. “I wasn’t born on Venara. In the world I used to live in, things were much better. At least where I lived.” His voice grew quiet as he contemplated things from a different perspective. “No, that’s not right. Just in the place and time that I lived. No matter where you go, humans are humans.”
Sersa approached the tub and leaned in to stare directly into his eyes, as if suspicious of any falsities in his words. “You don’t look any different than people here. I have a hard time believing that you’re from another world. After all, that’s just a myth.”
He lowered his gaze from the skies and gave her a flat look. “It’s pretty much common knowledge that the Interspatial Migration is real. If this war didn’t break out, I’m sure everyone would still be talking about it.”
“People say a lot of things. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Without hesitation, Jason stood up in the tub so that the water reached about midway up his thigh. Fully exposed, he held his arms to the side in a ‘get a good look’ sort of way and then showed an indifferent shrug. “Well, you’ve seen it.”
Sersa openly stared at him, her eyes narrowing a bit as they trailed up and down his body.
That’s…is she blushing?
Settling back into the tub, he felt a slight amount of embarrassment. Sersa was the definition of a stoic, and rarely showed emotion. Sure, she mocked or teased Jason here and there, and talked down to their subordinates as if it were an activity that she enjoyed. But on the whole, she tended to wear a mask of neutrality. He hadn’t expected her to blush, and hadn’t thought that seeing the light flush of her clear, angled cheeks would make him a bit more conscious of his actions.
Don’t be a simp, he told himself, treating the moment as further cultivation of his thick skin.
Clearing his throat, he said, “Anyway, I’m not the first Otherworlder you’ve met.”
“How’s that?”
“Remember that guy you told me about that helped you kill Milson outside of Davenhold?”
“Meldon.”
“Whatever. Anyway, the guy that used the same explosive barrels as me. He’s the one that taught me how to make them.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” she muttered, her voice careful and probing. “You’re saying that he’s an Otherworlder, too?”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Jason nodded, plucking a fallen leaf from the bathwater as he admired his athletic build. He’d been chubby and out of shape for the majority of his life, and he still wasn’t used to the fact that he had such a well-tempered body.
“His name is Nolan, and I’d like to think that me and him were best friends.”
Jason briefly outlined his opening weeks on Venara, of how he inexplicably appeared in that small shack that had served as his and Nolan’s home in Redfox Village, of the fear at being weak and helpless in a far more dangerous world than they could have ever imagined. Of how Nolan had constantly looked out for him and encouraged him to persevere, even sacrificing himself on several occasions for the sake of Jason or their friends.
“We were from the same country on Earth. It was about the size of North Island.”
Sersa let out an unexpected laugh, covering her mouth as this clearly wasn’t a fitting response for the tone of the conversation.
“What?” he said dryly, thinking to himself that she was surprisingly pretty when she smiled.
“How did you fight your wars? The thought of a bunch of weaklings fighting it out—what a hilarious scene that makes in my mind.”
Jason thought of the history books that he’d studied in school, and the ones that his father, a historian, had kept in his study. The Rape of Nanking at the hands of the Japanese, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans, how the ancient Chinese general Xiang Yu buried 200,000 surrendered soldiers of Qin alive to avoid the possibility of mutiny…
“Humans are humans,” he reiterated with a sigh. “God, I never realized how lucky I was to be born where I was, at the time that I was. I…really took it for granted.”
Thinking on it, of the hundred billion people that were estimated to have lived in human history, he had basically won the lottery of life. Most people that had ever lived had died in their thirties or forties, which had been considered old. Most people had never had cold water, let alone juice, smoothies, milkshakes; most had never enjoyed heating or cooling in their homes, reliable cures and remedies for their diseases and sicknesses, or the heightened entertainment of videogames, television, seeing movies in a theatre…and let alone enjoying a variety of foods from around the world, most people hadn’t even been sure if there would be food in a week.
And still, everyone was always bitching about things not being perfect. Looking back up at the stars, Jason knew in his heart that most if not all of those ‘complainers’ would have died almost immediately after the Interspatial Migration, for their perceptions of reality had been extremely skewed and unrealistic by virtue of the extremely lucky environments that they had been born into. After all, let alone dying of disease in the days of antiquity, it had been very common to be killed by the hands of other humans or to fall victim to the wiles of a wild animal, and a significant percentage of all humans that had ever lived had been slaves.
Seeing the forlorn look on his face, Sersa ran a subconscious hand through her long, tawny-blondish hair and asked, “Say for a moment that I believe you. What was this world of yours like, I wonder?”
Jason pointed up at the moons that dominated the night sky, one huge and one small with varying levels of brightness. “Without any cultivation, we made it up there.” When she didn’t quite understand his words, he said, “We only had one moon, but we managed to send people there, and they walked around on the surface.”
“Walk on the moon? But they’re just sources of light.”
Jason let out a loud laugh. “Light? They’re worlds, just like Vanara. Only, they’re dead. After coming here, I can see that they just don’t have any Origin Energy left to them.”
Sersa looked up at the moons with curious, albeit skeptical eyes. “You would have me believe that the world is just a disc?”
Jason pushed a pair of imaginary glasses up the bridge of his nose and adopted a wise demeanour. “Let me teach you some things. I’m not as good as Nolan, but this stuff was pretty basic knowledge back home.”
A short while alter and Jason had constructed a perfect model of the solar system that he’d originated from. “This was my home planet,” he said, pointing to Earth. “It was thousands of times smaller than Venara. This here’s my home country”—he pointed outlined where Canada was—“and yeah, that’s about the size of North Island.”
“So small?”
He pointed to Jupiter. “Even this beast is a lot smaller than Venara.”
“How could you know that?” If one were to ask a random person on the continent if there were shores beyond the known seas, they would immediately deny it. So how could an outsider like Jason know such a monumental secret?
“I’ll tell you another time. All I’ll say is that my time in this world has been crazy, and I’ve learned a lot of things that even the natives have no clue about.”