The hum under the science quad changed my plans.
The ordinary stuff stayed: advisor, Thursday, revised methodology, live the year. But underneath it, something new. The first war planning I'd done since the tenth world.
Find out exactly what you have.
A woman on my seventh world spent eight years drilling this into me, at a chart table, with ink on her forearms and little keys braided into her hair. You measure before you plan. You don't build around a feeling in your boots.
I'd been putting off the screen since the bus shelter, night one, right after the new class introduced itself. I'd read the numbers, understood exactly nothing about how they could be real, and put it away.
I'd been caught before, by traps that flatter. A dream trap shows you everything you ever wanted, and a sheet claiming I was ten times the man who killed a god was exactly that.
I needed to test it before I believed it.
So that night, I waited for the house to fall asleep.
Dad went down first, mid-episode, the remote riding his chest. Mom held out until eleven and then went under, and the second heartbeat upstairs settled into the deep, even rhythm of someone genuinely asleep.
I went out the back door in a jacket I didn't need, because my mother has sources everywhere and I wasn't giving Mrs. Alvarez the headline.
The oak behind the house is older than the neighborhood. I broke my arm falling out of it when I was ten.
Mrs. Alvarez's cat was on the fence, supervising.
"Don't report me," I said.
She informed me that my business was my own, that the night was hers, and that she'd stay quiet for chin scratches. I delivered.
Then I put my hand on the bark and asked the roots for somewhere high, old, and empty.
Trees don't answer fast. The question went down and along, passed from root to root like grandmothers handing a rumor down a pew, and the answer came back. Tall stone. Old spruce. No roads, no lights, nothing on two legs for a day's walk in any direction.
"Perfect," I told the oak. "Wait up for me."
I stepped into it, walked the green road for three heartbeats, and stepped out of a spruce three hundred miles away, onto the mountain the roots had picked for me.
The stone under my boots was rough limestone, still holding the day's heat. Cedar and dry scrub oak ran down the slope below me, and above the treeline the rock face went up sheer and flat-topped, pale in the dark. The sky had more stars than the campus had seen in thirty years of light pollution.
That was the wild call that roads the Worldroot. I hadn't known it would work here.
For the first time since the footpath, I stopped holding myself at human.
The mountain arrived all at once. Ten miles of heartbeats, none of them human. Wind in a valley two ridges over, a stream somewhere in the dark, cedar and warm limestone on the air. I pressed my palm flat against a boulder and breathed all the way out. Three days of holding everything at human, and I finally stopped.
I had an audience. Deer at the treeline, an owl on a low branch staring at me without blinking, something large settling into the brush to my left. None of them spooked.
The wild adopted me on my sixth world, and it had treated me as family on every world since. Earth's forests knew it too, the day I landed.
"Evening," I said to the general assembly. "Official business tonight. Feel free to watch."
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Then I pulled up the full sheet.
[ SAUVAGE, SOL · AUTHORITY 10 ]
Paladin 100 · Monk 100 · White Mage 100 · Bard 100 · Assassin 100Druid 100 · Summoner 100 · Artificer 100 · Gunslinger 100 · Spellblade 100
THE DIVINE PATH · Level 1
STR 2,612,004 · DEX 2,443,180 · VIT 2,988,751INT 2,204,317 · WIS 2,533,900 · CHA 1,967,442
LCK · [ DISPLAY ERROR ]
I read the strength number twice, then a third time, and sat down on a rock.
Every world made me learn under its own law.
Whatever I carried in arrived at a fraction of what it was, and I rebuilt it from scratch under each world's own rules. I finished near the top of every one. Somewhere around a quarter million, in the numbers this screen uses.
That had been the rule, and I'd never questioned it.
Earth doesn't do one at a time. Earth, apparently, converted all ten and stacked them.
The person those numbers described could catch a falling sky and hold it while people got clear. I remembered being proud of a hundred push-ups in this exact body. I sat there for a while.
The luck line didn't show a number. It hadn't shown one in forty years.
And under ten filled rows sat the new line. Level 1. One skill. It looked like a typo at the bottom of a war report.
"What are you for?" I asked it, same as the bus shelter.
Same silence. I closed the screen and went to work.
Two hours of work. I opened doors and found every one of them unlocked.
The shadow arts answered on the first reach. I stepped into the spruce's shadow and out of a boulder's, half a mile uphill, and didn't feel it.
The furnace in my core lit on the first breath. I pressed the white light from my third world into a storm-split pine, and by the time I'd finished the thought, the split had closed and the tree had put out shoots it had no seasonal right to.
Every art I own, full strength, all at once. For a hundred years these things had refused to share a room.
Then I did the strength test, and stopped doing strength tests.
I picked a dead boulder the size of a delivery truck, throttled down to one percent of one percent, and hit it once with a fist technique from my second world. The boulder stopped being a boulder. The sound went around the valley twice, and every heartbeat for ten miles went quiet a moment, then carried on.
I did not test two percent.
"Sorry," I told the audience. The owl reserved judgment.
The sheet was telling the truth. I'd half hoped it wasn't.
There is no safe place on this world to swing my whole arm. If I ever need everything I have, the fight had better be somewhere with a view of the planet.
I'd felt it since I set down on the mountain. A thin place running down the dark between two boulders where the ground never froze.
I stood in front of it a while.
A thin place leaks. Air, smell, temperature. Nothing with weight, nothing you could write on and send. I asked about the letter on my seventh world and lost a year waiting on an answer that didn't come. You need a door for that, and doors have to open from the far side.
Ninety years back down the chain there's a woman who was mid-sentence when I went out of the middle of a field in front of her. Sigrun, knight-captain, the one who knighted me with her own sword after telling me for two years that I held it wrong.
She doesn't know I lived. There's nothing I can do about that.
So I did what I'd done at every seam since the second world. I put my hand flat against the cold and told her I was home, out loud, on a mountain, to nobody.
The seam held still. I stood there until my hand went cold, and then I stood there a little longer.
Then I reached into the fold where I keep a hundred years of work, and opened the Atelier.
Warm oil and ozone and cold forges, and a hundred years of racked work that wasn't tonight's errand. I went straight back to a trunk I hadn't opened in years, and stood still in front of it a moment before I touched it.
Ninove's charts. She was my teacher on the seventh world, and she spent a decade building a method for dating doors. She didn't survive long enough to use it on more than one.
Her handwriting is on every sheet. She wrote small, and she never respected a margin, and when the margins ran out she continued up her own forearms, so some of these pages are copies I made, later, of her skin.
I said her name once.
Then I carried the charts out under the actual stars and spread them on the flattest stone on the mountain. The limestone was pale and pitted, a good three feet across, and the charts covered it edge to edge. I sat cross-legged on the grit beside it and started translating her life's work into the terms of a world she never got to see.
"You'd have loved this one," I told her handwriting. "All these doors, and a whole planet that doesn't know to be afraid of them yet. You'd have run out of arms by midnight."
I took the first reading off the thin place two valleys north, and logged it in her format, in my handwriting, on a fresh page she would have filled better. Then I keyed her framework to everything my senses had been passively collecting since the footpath, two days of a whole planet's worth of pressure. Her method answered a question I hadn't asked yet.
The campus door isn't the only one. It's just the loudest.
Her method is observation. Pressure, interval, drift, taken nightly, plotted against the door's own rhythm. You need a season of readings before the date comes clear. I had weeks of nights ahead and a whole planet's worth already started.
I went down counting doors.