It was one of many outfits supplied for his wardrobe by Gilbert of Gilbert’s Resilient Attire For the Discerning Gentleman, although he looked forward to replacing everything with bronze-rank apparel once he got back to Greenstone. If that was even possible.
The iron-rank clothes had basic self-cleaning and repair enchantments, along with some very light protection. None of that would hold up to the rigours of a monster fight, of course.
With his clothes sorted out, he moved on to hair, carefully applying Jory’s hair-growth cream, which had been stashed in his inventory. He felt his hair rapidly growing from his scalp, an odd, itchy sensation. It was doubtless an unruly mop, but it would suffice until he found a hairdresser.
Meeting those simple needs left him feeling much more in control of his circumstances. He thought back to when he had first woken up in a new world, naked, bald, and confused. Just the question of pants had been a tribulation, let alone the larger questions. If there were cannibals again, he was ready to take them on.
Solving the smaller question of pants left Jason with more confidence to take on the bigger questions. To figure out what had happened to him, he pulled up the system messages that he’d pushed aside.
You have died.
All equipment has been returned to your inventory.
[World-Phoenix Token] has been consumed.
“That explains how I survived, I guess—I didn’t.”
He only had a vague recollection of that system box appearing as everything faded out. He closed it and moved onto the next message.
You have been reborn.
You have received the blessing of the World-Phoenix.
If you accept the blessing, your outworlder racial ability [Astral Affinity] will evolve to [Nirvanic Transfiguration].
If you reject the blessing, your ability will remain unchanged and can be evolved by normal means or other blessings in the future.
Jason paced back and forth in the empty room. To call coming back from the dead a pleasant surprise was a fairly significant understatement. The World-Phoenix token had always been a mystery, but in hindsight, he felt it should have been obvious. The goddess Knowledge had told him that he lacked the faith to use it. He finally understood, since killing himself to trigger the token would having required a lot of faith that it would work.
The question of how he’d arrived solved, that left the question of where he’d arrived. Everything was telling him it was his own world, but that left him with a nervousness about being wrong. Belatedly, he remembered that he could just check and opened his map ability to check the location listing at the top.
Zone: Casselton West Regional Hospital [abandoned] (maternity theatre).
He was a deer in headlights as he stared at the words. After a long, stunned moment, he turned his eyes to the map itself and zoomed out. He expanded out from the hospital to the whole town, then the larger Casselton region. There was his hometown, Casselton Beach. Large portions of the map were uncovered as he’d travelled through nearly all of it at some point in his life. He kept expanding out through the Mid-North Coast to all of New South Wales and then the whole of Australia. When he zoomed out to the entire world, the continents were all where they should be instead of the funhouse mirror of the magic world’s geography.
Jason stared for a long time, not daring to believe. Then he closed the map, pushed open the heavy swinging doors, and rushed through the abandoned hospital. He’d been born there, but it had been closed down when Jason was still a kid. For the last fifteen years, it had mostly been a venue for the local teenagers to come smoke. The building had been emptied out, leaving nothing to obstruct him as he dashed down the hall in search of a window.
He found a patient ward, the windows opaque from years without cleaning. Without hesitating, he grabbed his sword from his inventory and smashed the scabbard into the window, sending glass raining down outside. He was on the fourth floor looking out on the semi-industrial part of West Casselton where the hospital was located.
It was deep into the night and the sky beat down with rain. Clouds obscured the moon and stars, but streetlights reflected off the wet asphalt of the street. On the other side of the road was a takeaway store he remembered. It had closed not long after the hospital. Next to it was the main depot for the Casselton regional bus service, the buses all parked for the night. It was far from a beautiful vista but, to Jason, it was more gorgeous than a sunset.
“I’m home.”
The words came out in a tremulous whisper, as if he were scared that to say them would make them untrue. His mind was once again sent staggering. Jason’s arrival in the magical world had been a stark dividing line. The difference between what came before that moment and after was like two different realities. Which they were, when he thought about it.
Seeing his old world with his new eyes was strange. The darkness did not obscure his sight, which was sharper than ever before. Colours had depth and nuance he had never realised, while the air carried a complexity of scents he could never have picked up when he was still a human. He could taste the ozone tang of water on the power cables, smell the grass of the overgrown hospital grounds. The damp and mould of the disused hospital interior, and even a lingering trace of disinfectant, some fifteen years after it was last used.
His brother, Kaito, had once gotten reckless with his bicycle when Jason was nine years old. He was stuck spending a few days in the hospital and their sister drove Jason in every day to visit. Afterwards, they would get chips at the takeaway store across the road. Now, under Jason’s powerful new perception, the familiar sights were somehow alien. Then he realised that the alien one was him.
He was not the man who left. He wasn’t even human. He took a long, deep breath that he didn’t need because he didn’t have to breathe anymore. The ramifications of coming back to his own world struck his mind like a storm hitting a ship at sea. He had no idea how to navigate what would be disorienting at best and deadly dangerous at worst. The things he had learned and the things he could do represented a fundamental shift in the general understanding of his world’s reality. His very existence would be an opportunity to the ruthless and a threat to those who already claimed to have all the answers.
Those were just his concerns for the world he found himself back in. He had further concerns over his adoptive world. Most pressing was that he would have no idea how his team fared until he found his way back across a dimensional gulf. That was a feat significantly beyond the rudimentary astral magic lessons he had taken from his teammate Clive.