The first thing Sirius felt was thirst.
It arrived before the room, before the pod lid, before memory finished becoming one world instead of two.
His tongue felt too large for his mouth, his lips had dried into a faint split at one corner, and the air of the outer habitat tasted of recycled metal, cheap cleanser, and old ventilation filters.
For one confused breath he expected rain, smoke, damp wool, and forge ash.
Instead, the pod opened into the dim blue safety light of his own room.
He lay still while the disconnect sequence finished.
The soft restraints loosened from his wrists and ribs, more a precaution than a prison, and the cradle beneath his spine lowered by a few degrees with a mechanical sigh that sounded embarrassingly tired.
A small panel beside his shoulder pulsed amber, waiting for acknowledgement.
[Session Duration Exceeded Recommended Recovery Interval] [Hydration Low] [Muscular Strain: Mild] [Neural Fatigue: Moderate] Sirius blinked at the panel until the words stopped swimming.
Moderate felt optimistic.
His head ached behind the eyes, his legs trembled when he tried to bend his knees, and his hands had that hollow weakness that came after too many hours gripping something that was not there.
In Mordrea, the wound in Serious’s thigh had been the obvious pain.
Here, everything else had waited patiently to complain.
Mordrea was not staying politely behind the pod wall.
His body carried its own quiet record of what he had done there, written in thirst, tremor, soreness, and the strange certainty that the divide between worlds was thinner than the brochure had promised.
He rolled onto one side and sat up too quickly.
The room lurched, not enough to make him fall but enough that he grabbed the pod rim with both hands and stayed there until the nausea folded back into itself.
His room did not help.
It was barely wider than the pod and the narrow sleeping shelf bolted to the wall, with a fold-down desk, a storage strip that never closed properly, and a cracked hygiene mirror above the wash unit that caught the pod’s blue light in long, uneven bars.
He barely glanced at the mirror.
Hunger, thirst, and the ache of the pod claimed his attention first, hiding the quieter changes beneath them.
Later, he would remember that passing look and dislike how easily he had accepted not seeing himself properly.
At that moment, he only saw the water dispenser.
He crossed the two steps to it with one hand on the wall and filled the cup until the filter coughed.
The water came out lukewarm, thinly mineral, and ration-flat, but he drank the first cup in four hard swallows and the second more slowly because the pod’s warning had been right enough to make him cautious.
His stomach cramped as if offended by sudden usefulness.
The hab’s low ceiling hummed above him.
Somewhere beyond the wall, a neighbour’s unit cycled through a heating fault with the familiar triple-click pause that meant no one had enough credit to request maintenance until the sound became dangerous.
Farther away, through thin partition and utility ducting, somebody laughed at something broadcast rather than real.
The laugh track that answered them came half a second later.
Mordrea had been cold rain, frightened people, grey water, and a road trying to open under armed men.
His room was safer.
It should have felt safer.
Instead, it felt like a storage drawer someone had taught to breathe.
Sirius filled the cup again and made himself stand there until the tremor in his knees lessened.
Vayra had been right.
That annoyed him less than it should have, mostly because Dava would have been worse.
The thought of them pulled him toward the pod again before he had eaten.
He stopped himself with one palm against the wall and cursed under his breath, not loudly, because the walls were thin and his neighbours knew too much already.
It was not heroism to crawl back into a world while his real body was running on stale water and stubbornness.
It was just another way of making other people pay for his neglect.
The food dispenser was built into the wall beside the fold-down desk, its grey service mouth scratched by years of residents forcing stuck trays loose with cheap tools.
Sirius keyed in the lowest-credit recovery meal and watched the unit consider him with a delay that felt almost judgemental before it accepted the ration and began to hum.
Inside the slot, the printer head moved in tight, efficient lines, laying down pale protein, mineral gel, and broth concentrate in layers too neat to be mistaken for cooking.
Heat came a heartbeat later through direct motion transfer, not flame or coil, setting the printed meal steaming from within while the outside of the tray remained barely warm enough to touch.
Steam rose when the dispenser released the tray, carrying the artificial smell of salt, yeast, and something designed by committee to suggest vegetables.
Sirius leaned against the fold-down desk while he drank the broth first, letting warmth reach his stomach before he risked the printed loaf.
His body answered with an eagerness sharper than ordinary hunger.
He ate because Vayra had told him to, because Dava would somehow know if he did not, and because Bran had trusted him to make a clean map instead of collapsing into pride.
By the third bite, the shaking in his hands had softened into a faint tremor.
By the fifth, his thoughts began to arrange themselves into something less like alarm, while some deeper part of him took the food and put it to work with unsettling speed.
His personal slate chimed from the desk.
Sirius stared at it for three seconds before picking it up.
Work notices had a different tone from entertainment feeds, medical debt reminders, and citizen-credit warnings, each one designed by someone who had never lived in a room where bad news could not be ignored because it occupied half the air.
The message was from the maintenance pool.
[Shift Availability: Outer Ring Vent Cluster 9C] [Hazard Rating: Low-Moderate] [Manual Crawl Access Required] [Bonus Credit: +4.5] [Response Window: 2 hours] He read it twice, then lowered the slate and looked at the patched sleeve of his undershirt.
Four and a half credits was not enough to matter and too much to ignore.
That was the shape of poverty: numbers that never saved you but always controlled you.
Crawling through vent access should have felt impossible after the hours he had stolen from his own body, yet beneath the fatigue odd pockets of steadiness kept returning too quickly.
Refusing the shift would leave his account thinner before the next rental deduction.
Accepting it would mean trusting a body he had not properly checked.
He set the slate down without answering.
A second notification waited beneath the work message, this one from Path to Gods Realm’s external companion interface.
The sensible thing would have been to eat, shower, and sleep before looking at anything game-related.
Unfortunately, sense had not yet developed a method for stopping hands.
He opened the companion feed.
The public board rolled past in fragments of player noise, all confidence and half-knowledge.
Someone had posted a shaky clip of a warrior build killing oversized marsh rats near a southern river town.
Another thread argued about whether early magic classes were underpowered or whether most players were simply too impatient to learn spell structure properly.
A third had become a marketplace brag about rare hides, cheap ore, and whether selling to the System market was better than waiting for player demand to rise.
Sirius scrolled until his thumb stopped of its own accord.
[Thread: Northern Continent Goblin Mine Event?] The post had already gathered replies.
Most were useless.
A spear-user claimed goblins were bugged because they used tools instead of rushing.
A fire initiate complained that mine corridors punished flashy casting.
Someone else asked whether there were hidden achievements for rescuing local workers before they despawned.
Sirius read that line three times and felt his appetite go cold.
Tollen did not despawn.
Renn did not despawn.
Bran, Dava, Nim, Mirel, Old Sanna, Jory, Cale, Berren, Calven, and Vayra’s careful public face did not belong to a list of content outcomes.
They were people in the only way that mattered to the part of him still capable of shame.
He closed the thread before he replied.
Nothing useful would come from shouting at strangers who had not seen Tollen turn his face away from the smell of trapped water.
The marketplace tab waited beside the feed, bright and clean.
Sirius should have left that alone too, but the work shift notification still sat unanswered on the slate, and hunger had made his thoughts practical in ugly ways.
He opened crafting listings and filtered by early-game mechanisms.
Most entries were trash: crude hinge variants, decorated buckles, poor knife templates, decorative nails, copied cooking frames, overpraised straps with System-enhanced naming.
A few sold for small but real money, enough to make a player with no rent anxiety laugh at the difference.
His screw blueprint was not listed.
He had kept it private.
The System had offered ways to release it, license it, sell it, or let other players pay for use, and he had chosen not to.
Looking at the market did not change that choice, but it made the cost visible.
Sirius rubbed his thumb over the edge of the slate until the casing creaked.
The screw was ugly, slow, weak, and dependent on careful pilot holes, but it was still new.
In player hands, novelty became currency before meaning had time to become responsibility.
Someone would sell bad copies.
Someone would buy them.
Someone in Mordrea would watch a stranger arrive with stolen shape and no understanding of why Bran had locked three crude prototypes in a box.
Another message appeared, this one private.
[Vayra: You had better be eating.] Sirius looked down at the protein loaf in his other hand, then raised his eyebrows at the empty room.
[Sirius: That is unsettling timing.] [Vayra: You have habits.
Bad ones are loud.] Her reply arrived quickly enough that she must have been watching for his status to change.
[Vayra: Road still closed.
No fresh collapse.
Bran has watchers rotating because villagers listen to him faster than they listen to Calven’s seal.] [Sirius: Renn?] [Vayra: Dava cleaned his leg until he confessed crimes he had not committed.
Mirel says infection risk stays low if he stops trying to be brave.
You are not needed this minute.
Eat properly.] Sirius looked at the broth, the protein loaf, the work shift notice, and the marketplace listings.
[Sirius: Are you all right?] There was a longer pause before Vayra answered.
[Vayra: Arm aches.
Pride intact.
Trust strained by your attempt to become a cautionary tale.
Otherwise fine.] He smiled despite himself, but the expression faded quickly because the room did not know what to do with it.
He could picture her in Bran’s doorway, cloak damp, good hand near her sword, pretending to be only a traveller while watching for monsters, officials, and human stupidity with equal suspicion.
[Sirius: Thank you for staying.] He nearly deleted the message because it looked too bare, but left it.
Some things became worse when wrapped in cleverness.
[Vayra: Someone had to make sure the road did not eat your village while you remembered you owned a body.] The answer softened only after that.
[Vayra: Bran says the map is ugly enough to be useful.
Dava says if you come back without eating, she will feed you in front of everyone like a child.] [Sirius: That threat is credible.] Sirius took another bite of the loaf before sending the message, mostly because he felt watched through the private channel.
[Vayra: Good.
Keep making wise choices under duress.] Her status remained active for several seconds, then shifted back to idle.
Sirius set the slate down and finished the broth.
The heat helped.
The food helped.
Neither fixed the fact that part of him had remained in Briarvale, listening for scraping under a road he could not currently see.
He answered the maintenance shift with a delay request rather than acceptance.
The system gave him a narrow warning about priority loss.
He accepted the warning because his hands were still shaking and because dying in a vent cluster for four and a half credits would be a stupid end even by outer-ring standards.
After that, there was nothing urgent enough to justify avoiding the hygiene unit.
The wash water was rationed and lukewarm, cycling through a narrow spray that never quite reached both shoulders at once.
Sirius stood under it with one palm against the wall and let the pod sweat, stale air, and panic rinse away in pieces.
His muscles felt wrong under his skin, not painful exactly, and not as ruined as they should have been after such a long session.
He blamed dehydration first because it was an easy answer, then adrenaline because that was nearly as convenient.
Easy answers were useful when a person needed to finish washing before the hot cycle ended and did not want to ask why weakness kept giving way to brief threads of strength.
When he stepped out, the mirror had fogged around the edges but left a jagged clear strip through the centre where the old surface coating had worn thin.
Sirius saw a slice of his face there: one eye, part of his cheek, damp hair stuck flat to his forehead.
He reached for the towel without studying it.
The towel shook once in his hand.
He stopped, frowned at his fingers, and waited.
The tremor faded.
Neural fatigue, the pod panel had said.
Moderate.
He accepted the explanation because he needed it to be enough.
A sharper version of himself might have looked properly then.
He might have noticed that missed meals had not hollowed his face the way they usually did, or that the old bruise on his forearm from a maintenance crawl had faded faster than it should have.
Sirius was tired, and tired people are generous with explanations that let them keep moving.
He dressed in the cleanest shirt he had, sat on the sleeping shelf, and set a timer for one hour.
The number looked small.
It also looked like a promise, and promises had become less disposable since Bran had placed his trust in a map and Vayra had stood watch while he left.
For a few minutes, he tried to sleep.
The room resisted him.
The vent clicked through its neighbour’s fault again.
A pipe knocked somewhere overhead.
Someone in the corridor argued with an automated payment panel in a voice that rose, cracked, and fell into silence.
Sirius closed his eyes and saw grey water pushing through a road split instead of darkness.
He rolled onto his side and opened his personal notes.
The first page he made was not for the System, because he did not trust himself to think in clean boxes yet.
He wrote in rough shorthand, the way he had learned to keep maintenance fault notes when supervisors wanted results more than explanations.
Briarvale: old drains not isolated.
Lower Drift crack, culvert, quarry run, lower bend, ash grove, cellars.
Grey clay carries old mortar.
Watch weight, vibration, water direction.
Unknown abrasion in grit.
Do not mention claw until confirmed.
He stared at the last line, then underlined do not mention.
Fear became more useful when given rules.
The second note was for the screw.
He wrote Bran’s box, no public release, Caldus letter sent, local claim not secure.
Improve pilot holes.
Need metal?
Need better thread cutting.
Need secrecy that still lets tool help people.
The third note took longer.
Real body: eat before long sessions.
Hydrate.
Sleep.
Check mirror?
Tremor after logout.
Bruise fading fast?
Recovery odd.
Don’t ignore.
He almost deleted the mirror line.
It looked foolish on the screen, melodramatic in a way he disliked.
Then he remembered how quickly he had looked away from his own reflection and kept it.
His timer showed forty-one minutes remaining.
He lay back again, this time with the slate resting on his chest and one hand over it so the next alert would wake him through touch.
Sleep did not arrive cleanly.
It came as a series of falls: first into the hum of the room, then into the ring of Bran’s hammer, then into rain on the forge roof, then back to the room when the neighbour’s heater clicked too loudly.
At some point, he dreamed that the road under Briarvale had veins.
The slate pulsed against his hand before the timer finished.
Sirius woke fast enough to make his neck hurt.
For a second he was certain he had missed something catastrophic, but the message light was private-channel blue rather than emergency red.
He opened it with his breath still caught high in his chest.
[Vayra: Still not a collapse.
Read that first before you panic.] He let his head fall back against the wall and breathed out.
[Sirius: I am calm.] [Vayra: Liar.] Her next message followed almost at once.
[Vayra: We have a new sign.
Widow Merth’s cellar stone shifted, but no one was hurt.
Grey water seeped through the back seam for three breaths, then withdrew.
Bran says the map was right enough to be useful and wrong enough to be dangerous.] Sirius sat up slowly.
The room seemed to narrow around the words.
[Sirius: Withdrew?] [Vayra: Yes.
Not drained.
Withdrew.
Mirel saw the wet line pull back from the mortar.
Old Sanna says water should not change its mind.] He read the message twice.
Water rose, spread, drained, soaked, flooded, evaporated, froze, and fell.
It did not withdraw like a hand from a hot surface unless something else had moved it, or unless the space beneath Briarvale was shaped in ways the map had not yet understood.
[Sirius: Did anyone hear scraping?] He typed carefully because the answer mattered too much.
[Vayra: Not scraping.
Knocking.
Three slow knocks under the cellar wall.
Everyone is pretending not to count them as deliberate.] A pause followed, then another line.
[Vayra: Do not come back without finishing your hour unless I say emergency.
That is not a request.] Sirius looked at the timer.
Twenty-three minutes remained.
His body wanted to move.
His hands had already gone toward the pod before he noticed and stopped them.
Trust, he reminded himself, was an arrangement of burdens people agreed not to steal from one another.
He forced his hands away from the pod rim and picked up the printed loaf instead.
The next bite tasted like paste and discipline, but his body accepted it almost hungrily, pulling warmth and substance inward with a quiet efficiency that made the ration feel less like food and more like fuel.
For once, he made himself look longer.
The reflection remained mostly ordinary: tired eyes, damp hair, a too-thin face, and a young man from an outer habitat who had spent too many hours inside a machine and not enough hours being careful with the body outside it.
Yet mostly ordinary was not the same as unchanged.
Potential had looked like a number when he made the character.
His body made it feel like a question.
Nothing in the mirror explained grey water withdrawing from mortar, or why his bruise had faded, or why the hunger under his ribs felt less like weakness now and more like something waking.
Maybe that was imagination.
Maybe fatigue had made a story out of bad light, bad food, and fear.
Maybe the pod’s warnings were exactly what they appeared to be, and the strange steadiness under the tremor was only his body recovering from neglect faster than he deserved.
Sirius held his own gaze until unease became too sharp to ignore, then lowered his eyes first.
Twenty-one minutes remained.
In Briarvale, people were standing over old stones and pretending not to count knocks.
In the outer habitat, a work shift waited, rent waited, hunger waited, and the mirror kept its own counsel.
Sirius finished the loaf, opened a fresh note, and wrote one line before the words could leave him.
It felt too dramatic even as he typed it, but the mirror, the fading bruise, and the stubborn steadiness in his limbs would not quite let the thought go.
The game is not only changing the avatar.
He stared at it, felt foolish, and did not delete it.
Then he sat beside the pod with the timer still running, one hand clenched around the slate, and waited for the minute he had promised not to steal.