Blake sat in his last class of the day on the final day of his school career. In just a few hours he would be allowed to enter the spirit realm for the first time. His nerves made it impossible to sit still and listen. He wasn’t the only one to struggle either. Around him, the 49 other students in his governmentally mandated class grouping were fidgeting in their seats. The teacher's voice pierced his mind as the class came to a close.
“Remember, you have one year to reach tier 3 or fines will be levied against you.”
This was not new information to anyone here. Upon completion of high school everyone not continuing their education was required to spend a year in the spirit realm improving their tier. A higher tier meant a higher mana generation. That mana was needed to run much of the modern world so the New Earth Republic, or NER, did everything to encourage people to reach as high a tier as possible.
Blake thought it ridiculous that they felt the need to make people progress at all. Who wouldn’t want to reach a higher tier and the slew of benefits that came with it? There was even a rumor that a higher tier brought an increase in lifespan, not that there was any easy way to know in the 50 years since humanity got access to the spirit realm. Any increase so far could easily be attributed to healthier people not dying as easily.
Blake’s mind turned back to his goal. If he could reach a high enough tier then he could live easily just off the mana he generated. Mana banks are a common sight nowadays buying up people’s excess generation.
“All right class load onto the buses so we can head to the awakening facility.”
Awakening facility was a nice name for it. Most people just called it body storage. Going to the spirit realm was not a physical thing but rather a journey of the mind. From what Blake had been told it was like falling asleep then waking up in a different body. There was supposed to be no difference from the normal world outside the magic and monsters but while there your body on Earth was vulnerable.
Body storage facilities were the solution to people wanting and needing to spend long periods of time in the spirit realm. He would be placed in a tube that provided his body with nutrients and took care of waste for as long as he was gone. That did not sound fun to Blake but it was worth it for magical powers.
Lost in his thoughts Blake didn’t remember the trip to the awakening facility. There was a bus involved in there somewhere he was sure but the next thing he knew he was standing in a massive room that reminded him of a stereotypical warehouse.
Everything was grey with the occasional splash of brown. The ceiling was open showing the ventilation system and metal supports. There was a stage along the far wall with enough seating for hundreds if not thousands of people lined up in the room. The seats were the hard plastic chairs that said they were only used on rare occasions or the owners were just plain cheap.
Students from across the city were filing into the room and grabbing seats at random. Blake never had many friends and no close friends so he decided to sit alone. Nerves would make it impossible to socialize anyhow as he was no extrovert. Grabbing a seat near the front, as everyone always seemed to avoid the front, he did his best to stay in the moment and not get lost in thought again. It was a struggle but ten minutes later a man stepped onto the stage.
“Congratulations class of 50 ASR(after spirit realm)! In just a few minutes you will take the next step in …”
Blake tuned out the speech after only a few words. He couldn’t believe he had thought they would say anything important. No, just a stereotypical ‘you got this!’ speech. It went on for almost half an hour with more people coming up to join in. Some were the principals of the various schools there but many were just supposedly influential individuals from the community. Blake had never heard of any of them.
In the end, everyone was split into groups and shuffled off to various side rooms. Blake followed along without complaint, unlike some people.
“Do you know who I am?! I demand to have a private induction. And none of this waiting nonsense either!”
Blake heard a voice shriek over the murmurs of the crowd. He wanted to smack his head at the stupidity of such a statement. Some people around him did smack their heads. To his astonishment, Blake watched as a man his age was led away from the crowd with an attendant apologizing profusely to him. Now Blake was curious as to who he was to get such special treatment.
Soon enough Blake was in a much smaller room with human-sized tubes lining the walls. A short man with greying hair was leading his group of twenty. He turned around addressing them.
“Alright everyone go to a chamber and lay in it. I will be around shortly to connect you to the capsule. In case you were not listening earlier I will be administering a mild sedative. To enter the spirit realm you need to be asleep and many struggle to do so in these circumstances. Once you are asleep your stasis chamber will be flooded with mana to weaken the barrier between our realm and the spirit realm. This will allow you to make an initial connection. In the future, such measures will not be necessary.”
Moving towards one of the capsules Blake got a closer look at it. Seven feet long it was made of a futuristic-looking metal, maybe an aluminum alloy? It had blue streaks running through it that lit up occasionally as mana was run through it. The top part of the cylinder was a glass hatch that was already open. Along the edge of the metal part of the capsule, Blake could see glowing runes. He didn’t know what they did exactly but thought it was a safe guess that they were controls of some sort.
Inside the capsule was a grey bed that looked like it belonged in a hospital. Looking around Blake saw others taking off their shoes before getting in so he followed suit. The capsule bed was hard and he felt it should have been uncomfortable but a warmth suffused his body making everything feel perfect. When he was rich from his adventures in the spirit realm he would have to see about getting an actual bed like this for his ten-story mansion.
‘Pyromancer pyromancer pyromancer.’ He chanted in his head while waiting for the attendant.
Upon entering the spirit realm he would unlock his innate Talent that would set the course for his future advancement. Talents could be anything from being especially good at cooking to being able to teleport. They provided the innate ability to do something as well as instincts within a field of expertise. Blake wanted a Talent that had immediate combat potential. While they could be changed with time, effort, and money he lacked the time and money to do so.
The mancer Talent tree was the term for any Talent that related to the manipulation and creation of an element. Magic talents in general were sought after for their both immediate power and future potential. Only ten percent of people would get a Talent that was officially magic. While all talents were supernatural in some way, magic talents were those that used mana. Mana could be used by anyone in theory but magic was a complicated field of study that was very difficult if not outright impossible for most people to do without an appropriate Talent.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Pyromancer was a sub-Talent categorization of the mancer Talent tree focused on fire. Every Talent was different but the ability to manipulate fire, no matter the form, could immediately be used in combat. Some people could only throw fireballs at first as that was all their Talent could do while others summoned swarms of tiny sparks. There were an infinite number of pyromancer talents; all of them useful in Blake’s.
While there were many safe non-combat routes for Blake to take through the tiers it was slow. Combat would allow him to progress quickly and at a lower cost. Killing a monster to sell its body was much easier than trying to source materials to make something in a field oversaturated with crafters. Monster components were always in demand. Of course, this was all second-hand information he gathered through forums but it was a common enough opinion that there was no way it could be completely false.
“Are you ready young man?”
Blake nearly jumped out of the capsule in surprise. He had gotten stuck in his head again and hadn’t noticed the attendant arrive.
“Ye…” Blake's voice squeaked and he took a moment to clear his throat and deepen his voice. “That is yes I am ready.”
The attendant smirked at him but didn’t comment on his surprise. Reaching into the capsule the man grabbed something Blake hadn’t noticed before. A thin tube ran along the inner edge of the lid. On the end, the part the attendant grabbed, was a thin but long needle. Blake shivered a little at the sight. He was not a fan of needles. Ironic, he could admit, given he was preparing himself to fight monsters that more likely than not pierce him with claws and fangs at some point. Another plus for magic, it was usually range damage, no need to get up close where he was liable to get stabbed.
Blake got lost in his own thoughts again thinking about fighting styles that would minimize the risk to himself. He was going to get himself in trouble if he kept getting distracted like this. The attendant was able to insert the needle into his skin before Blake noticed what was happening. If that had been an attack he would be dead. Maybe. He would like to think that an actual threat would keep his attention. There was such a thing as danger sense, right?
A cold liquid entered Blake’s veins from the needle. The world began to spin around him as his hold on consciousness began to fade.
“Remember to wait at the village center for the rest of the group.” The attendant said.
Blake tried to ask what he was talking about but he had lost feeling of his mouth and all that came out was a garbled mess. What village center? He was now seriously regretting not listening to that long speech. There must have been more than empty motivational catchphrases. At this point, his mind was too fuzzy to think straight and he slipped into a deep slumber.
* * *
Blake’s regained consciousness in a black void. It wasn’t so much that there was no light to see by as he had no eyes to see with. Trying to figure out what was going on Blake attempted to maneuver around but found he had no body at all. The sedative might have been messing with his senses but Blake felt that there was more to it. As a kid, he had broken his arm and had to have surgery done. He had been put under for an operation to fix it and remembered clearly the sensation of the sedative affecting his body. Despite not technically feeling anything from his limbs at the time there had been a fuzzy sensation that told him they were there. In this black void, there was no fuzzy sensation.
Blake began to hyperventilate. At least he tried to. His mind was spiraling unable to form any coherent thought over his panic. He needed to breathe but he couldn’t. With no body, he had no lungs to breathe with. If he had been capable of rational thought he would have realized that he did not need air but his mind got stuck on the idea of breathing and would not let it go.
Blake didn’t know how long he was like that. He was just in the void, panicking, trying to hyperventilate, failing to hyperventilate, then panicking some more about not being able to hyperventilate. At some point, a warmth suffused his mind. Over a moment, or maybe an eternity, the warmth grew in intensity until it became almost painful. It never actually was painful more like the idea of pain. It was like looking at someone getting kicked. You know they are in pain but it’s not your pain. To Blake, it was the idea that he felt he should be in pain but just wasn’t.
The intensity combined with the strangeness of the sensation finally allowed him to get control of himself. Once he could have rational thoughts it was only a few seconds before he regained full control of himself. He couldn’t help but be embarrassed. He might not have listened to the speech back at the body storage facility but he knew from his own research and conversations with people that something like this would happen.
His spirit was adjusting to being without a physical body and his Talent was awakening. Everyone went through it. He had heard that a lot of people panicked during this step but he had thought them weaklings with no spine. He distinctly recalled thinking that there was no way he would panic. Blake resolved then and there that if ever asked he would say he was perfectly comfortable with the whole thing and didn’t panic once.
As the heat continued to increase Blake couldn’t help but get excited. Was this heat a sign of a pyromancer Talent? There were no clear patterns for what type of Talent people awakened but feeling ever-increasing levels of heat during his Talent awakening could only be a good sign. Time went on and Blake’s excitement eventually faded into boredom. With nothing else to do, he decided to focus on the body storage attendant’s last words. He was supposed to stay in some sort of village?
After a while, Blake vaguely remembered something from his spirit realm studies class over a month ago. The facility his body was at was supposed to have some sort of special item to prevent new realm walkers from appearing randomly. It would redirect people to a prepared location within a tier 0 spirit realm. Normally someone would end up at a completely random location within a huge area that was the ‘Earth spawn area’ as some people called it.
Blake hoped he wasn’t supposed to do anything to make sure he arrived at the right place because if he was he was screwed. He didn’t think there was anything he could do in his current state so he would just have to set aside the possibility that he messed up somewhere. The good news was, even if he had a random start, he would only show up in a tier 0 realm.
Despite everyone calling anything not Earth the spirit realm it was not one realm but rather multiple. A realm was like a mini reality that had naturally occurring magic. A tier 0 realm like the one people from Earth arrived at was weak in terms of its natural magical manifestations. Magical manifestation was a fancy term for magic items. This was anything from a plant that healed those who ate it to a monster that desired human flesh.
There was little difference between a tier 0 realm and Earth besides the monsters, which are more like angry animals, and the fact that only a small portion of a few realms had established civilization. Most areas were wild and unexplored. There wasn’t much benefit to staying in a tier 0 realm so most people tried to reach a tier 1 realm as soon as possible. The act of crossing over to a higher-tier realm was known as ascension and was the primary goal of many. Ascending to higher realms strengthened your Talent, enhanced your connection to your body making more benefits carry over to earth, and had many more benefits beyond that.
Time slipped by as Blake dreamed of reaching tiers unheard of. The heat kept increasing but still no pain. As far as Blake was aware the highest tier reached by a human was tier 15. It was reached by General Jerom of the NER army. There were rumors of others reaching as high as tier 20 but none had been confirmed. There were also other sapient races that humanity had encountered in the spirit realm but Blake didn’t know much about them.
After even more time had passed a tipping point must have been reached as the heat began to hurt Blake. Any defense he had against the pain and sensation disappeared all at once and a hot sharp pain assaulted his mind. As soon as it began it was gone but Blake still gave a loud yelp. It was mental since he had no mouth but still.
The heat and every sensation left with the pain leaving Blake once again alone in the void with no frame of reference for anything. He was just beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong when he felt a pull on his mind. No not his mind. Not quite. It was more like his sense of self was being yanked on. He didn’t have time to examine the feeling further before, with a start, he was once again in a body. Bright light shined into his closed eyelids burning his sensitive retinas.
Forcing his eyes open Blake sat up from his laid-back position and looked around. He groaned when he saw where he was.
“So I really did screw up. I hope my Talent is at least good.”
