Sirius woke before the wall told him to.
No alarm sounded.
No polite amber glow spread across the ceiling.
No manufactured chime informed him that sleep quality had fallen below recommended thresholds.
He came awake all at once, breath caught hard in his throat, one hand pressed against the inside of the pod lid as if he had been trying to push through stone.
For several seconds he did not know which world had him.
The air was too clean for Khradrin, too filtered and still, tasting of warmed polymer and old circulation foam instead of hay, smoke, animals, and mountain cold.
The pressure against his back was the pod’s support gel, not packed dirt or flagstone.
The dim ceiling above him was his ceiling, close enough to feel personal, with hairline seams where utility panels folded away when not in use.
Home, then.
His room.
His box.
Sirius swallowed and waited for his heart to stop behaving as if something were hunting him.
The dream clung in pieces, but even half-awake he knew it had only been a dream.
Not a message.
Not a hidden feed from Mordrea.
Not some secret tether to Serious Smith outside the pod.
His mind had taken everything he already knew – hay, smoke, Marik, the feed store wall, and the way Path to Gods Realm refused to behave like a normal game – and built a nightmare from it.
A wall of stone.
A laugh in a language he did not understand.
A blanket that smelled of animal sweat.
A body lying too still while people argued over whether it was asleep, cursed, drunk, or dead.
Not his real body.
Serious Smith’s body.
The character body.
The one that only existed for him while the pod was active, but might not have stopped existing for everyone else when he left.
The thought dragged the last of sleep out of him.
He opened the pod before the room could complete its morning sequence.
The lid unsealed with a soft hiss, and cool habitat air slid across his damp face.
The wall woke in response, white text blooming above the folded hygiene unit.
[05:12 – Outer Ring Local Time] [Recommended Rest Interval: Incomplete] [Work Shift Begins: 02:48] Sirius stared at the numbers while the dream fell apart, leaving the suspicion beneath it sharper than fear.
The dream had not told him anything new.
It had only forced him to notice the gap in his assumptions.
He had logged out beside the feed store wall.
Not in an inn.
Not in a rented room.
Not behind a locked door.
Not anywhere private, guarded, or even sensible.
He had sat down because exhaustion had finally forced him to admit that his real body needed sleep, and then the world had gone dark.
What had happened to Serious while Sirius was not there to control him?
In every ordinary Full Dive game he had ever played, logging out meant the character stopped mattering to the world.
The avatar vanished, locked, entered a protected state, or became an untouchable shell hidden from interaction.
Developers used different terms because marketing departments hated admitting everyone solved the same problem the same way, but the assumption was universal.
A player could leave.
The game protected the absence.
Path to Gods Realm had not behaved like an ordinary game in any other way.
Sirius pushed himself upright, nearly smacking his forehead on the pod frame.
He winced, twisted sideways, and climbed out into the narrow strip of floor that counted as walking space.
The room brightened by one reluctant degree.
The fold-out sink panel clicked from behind the wall, waiting for a command he ignored.
One step from pod to wall.
Half a step from wall to food dispenser.
A toilet behind one sliding panel, a shower folded behind another, a sink shallow enough to wash hands but not hope.
Every seam flush.
Every hinge efficient.
Every surface mass-produced to tolerate millions of identical lives stacked through the outer habitats.
A civilisation capable of folding a bathroom into six centimetres of wall had still decided that people like him only needed one room.
He did not have time to hate that properly.
He had to know.
He stumbled to the pod controls, thumbed past health prompts, and brought up Path to Gods Realm.
The launch screen appeared with impossible smoothness, all gold lettering and depth effects, as if it had not just driven a spike of panic through his chest.
He hesitated only long enough to glance at the work timer.
Two hours and forty-four minutes.
Enough time to check.
Not enough time to lose himself.
He hated that the second part needed saying.
Sirius lay back, sealed the pod, and confirmed entry.
The room vanished.
Cold scratched his cheek.
For a moment, he thought something had gone wrong with the transition.
The pod should have returned him to standing awareness, into the same posture he had left behind.
Instead he woke curled on his side, knees drawn slightly up, one arm trapped under his ribs.
Straw rasped against his face.
Dust filled his nose.
Something prickled under his collar.
He opened his eyes to darkness edged in blue.
Not the feed store wall.
Not exactly.
He lay under an overhang beside stacked hay bundles, half inside a storage lean-to that smelled of animals, rope, old grain, and damp wood.
A coarse blanket covered him from shoulder to thigh.
His cloak had been folded under his head with awkward care.
One boot had come loose.
His hand was tucked against his chest as if someone had moved it there after it had fallen limp.
Sirius did not move.
Disbelief came first, blank and cold.
His mind felt as if it had opened a document it did not have permission to edit.
Then memory caught up.
He had not logged out into a protected menu.
Serious Smith’s body had stayed here.
Breathing.
Vulnerable.
Unresponsive.
Someone had found him.
Someone had moved him.
His stomach turned cold as a prompt appeared at the edge of his vision, not bright enough to feel helpful.
[Local Intervention Recorded] Local intervention.
Sirius stared at those two words until they became worse than no answer.
A wooden latch scraped nearby.
He went rigid.
A shape moved in the blue-grey dark, broad-shouldered and carrying a lantern low enough that its glow spread across boots first, then legs, then a familiar tired face.
Marik stopped in the lean-to doorway.
For half a heartbeat the worker only stared at him.
Then his expression changed into something caught between annoyance and relief.
“So you are alive,” Marik said, and the words translated because they were aimed directly at Sirius.
That, at least, worked the way it should.
Being assessed by a stable boy should not have made him feel smaller than being assessed by a machine, but it did.
The wall in his room measured stress, hydration, and rest quality without caring what any of those numbers meant.
Marik had looked at a body in hay and decided whether it needed help, suspicion, or a shove out of the way.
Sirius pushed himself up too quickly.
The world tipped, and straw slid from his shoulder.
“I am.
Yes.
Sorry.” Marik snorted, though there was no real anger in it.
“You were sitting against the feed wall like a man waiting for judgement.
Then you would not wake.
” Sirius’s mouth went dry.
” You tried?
” ” Twice.
” Marik lifted the lantern and looked him over with the practical suspicion of a man used to livestock, strangers, and bad excuses.
” Shook your shoulder.
Called in your ear.
Thought you had drunk something stupid.
You were breathing, so we moved you where cart wheels would not find you before morning.
” We.
Of course it had been we.
People had seen him.
People had touched him.
People had carried him like a sack because the game had not cared to hide what he had left behind.
” Thank you, ” Sirius said, and meant it so hard the words felt inadequate.
” I did not know that would happen.
” Marik gave him a long look.
” You did not know sleeping in a street was foolish?
” ” I knew that part.
” Sirius rubbed both hands over his face, felt straw and grit drag across his skin, and nearly laughed from nerves.
” I misjudged how tired I was.
” That was not a lie.
It simply was not the part that mattered.
Marik crouched to retrieve the loose boot and tossed it beside him.
” Caravan gathers at first bell.
If you still mean to ride, get your feet under you.
Captain Voss does not wait because a boy enjoys hay.
” ” I still mean to ride.
” ” Then move.
” Marik turned to go, then paused as if remembering something.
The lantern glow cut a line across the bundled straw behind him.
” And if you have fits, curses, noble illnesses, foreign prayers, or whatever else makes a man sleep like a corpse, tell someone before you drop in public.
” Sirius forced himself to nod.
Marik’s order should have felt rude, but after the first shock it steadied him.
The man did not ask for explanations Sirius could not safely give, and he did not turn concern into performance.
He simply made survival practical: wake up, get dressed, do not be in the way when the wagons moved.
” I will,” Sirius said.
Marik left without another word.
The moment he was gone, Sirius sagged back against the hay and closed his eyes.
No safe logout.
The phrase arrived whole, clean, and terrible.
No protected state.
No invisible storage.
No pause button for the body in the world.
The System could disconnect his mind, but the body remained part of Mordrea.
If he logged out in a road, Serious could be robbed.
If he logged out in rain, Serious could sicken.
If he logged out in a monster den, Serious could die while Sirius’s real body slept inside a pod that would report normal rest quality to a housing wall.
Panic wanted to become anger because anger was easier to hold.
He wanted the System to have betrayed him loudly, dramatically, unforgivably.
The truth was worse.
It had warned him in the flat language of a liability note, and he had carried old game assumptions into a world that punished assumptions.
Sirius pulled up his interface with a thought sharp enough to snap translucent panes into place.
Menu.
Session.
Logout.
Character.
Status.
Safety.
He searched every category that sounded even vaguely useful.
There was no safe logout button.
No avatar protection toggle.
No emergency concealment option.
Only disconnection, and a line of neutral text beneath the command now that he knew to look for it.
[Avatar Continuity: governed by local conditions] The System had not failed to protect a game asset; it had declined to overrule a place where other people lived.
It had probably been there the entire time.
Sirius wanted to swear.
He did not, because Marik was still close enough to hear, and because his own anger felt childish beside the size of what he had missed.
Avatar continuity governed by local conditions was not a warning.
It was a confession written in system language.
He put his boot on with clumsy fingers, shook straw from his cloak, and stood.
His legs ached as if he had truly slept curled on hard ground.
Of course they did.
Serious had.
The body had not been an idea waiting for him to return.
It had kept existing without him.
Outside, Khradrin waited in the last dark before dawn.
The trade yard was a confusion of muted movement.
Lanterns bobbed.
Oxen snorted white mist into the cold.
Wheels creaked as workers checked hubs, ropes, and axle pins.
Men and women carried bundles from storehouses to wagons with the concentrated irritation of people who had done the job often enough to resent anyone standing in the way.
Most of what they said did not translate.
Not because the System had failed.
Because they were not speaking to him.
Sirius listened anyway.
A man slapped the side of a crate and barked a word twice.
Another answered with the same word and gestured toward the rear wagon.
Load, maybe.
Heavy.
This-one-goes-there.
A woman with a coil of rope clicked her tongue at a boy and repeated something while pointing at a knot.
Tie.
Tight.
Fool.
He could not tell.
He filed the sounds beside the gestures and kept moving.
The System translated conversations that included him.
The world did not.
Translation was assistance, not ownership, and learning the language would not be optional either.
Darric Voss stood near the lead wagon with a slate in one hand and a face made for refusing excuses.
He looked exactly as Sirius remembered from the previous night, which was both comforting and unpleasant.
People did not reset.
Captains did not forget.
Morning did not spawn around the player.
It arrived after a night of other people working while he slept in hay.
Darric saw him approach and narrowed his eyes.
“You are the guild stray.” “Serious Smith,” Sirius said, his voice rough.
“Eleanor sent me.
Passage to Briarvale if there is space.” “There is space if you can sit where you are told and not interfere.” Darric glanced at the slate.
“Coin?” Sirius paid the amount Eleanor had warned him about, each coin leaving his small purse with more weight than it should have possessed.
Darric counted by touch, bit nothing, and handed back no sympathy.
“Third wagon.
Rear left bench if the goat crates are not loaded there by the time we roll.
If they are, you sit on sacks.
You fall off, we do not turn around until the next safe pull.” “Understood.” “Do you?” Darric’s eyes flicked over him, perhaps seeing the straw still caught in his hair, perhaps already knowing about the boy who had slept like a corpse beside the feed store.
“Road rules.
No wandering from line.
No drawing blade unless told.
No touching cargo.
No feeding animals.
If beasts come, get down behind the wheels unless ordered otherwise.
If raiders come, get down and pray they prefer cargo.” Sirius nodded, and Darric looked unimpressed by the nod.
“Good.
Third wagon.” The third wagon was not romantic.
It was a broad practical thing with iron-banded wheels, a patched canvas roll, and a bench built by someone who believed comfort made people soft.
Crates filled most of the space.
Sacks filled the rest.
A woman with a basket of live fowl had already claimed one corner and eyed Sirius as if measuring whether he would crush her birds by accident.
He climbed up, tucked his knees out of the way, and sat where Darric had told him.
The sky above Khradrin’s Descent had begun to pale.
Blue seeped along the peaks first, turning the jagged ridgelines into black teeth against the coming day.
Below them, the city shifted from lantern-light to shape: towers, roofs, gates, chimneys, walls cut into stone and reinforced with runes that caught early light like veins of old fire.
Somewhere behind him, the fountain would be waking with its holographic hero, Khradrin standing forever in water and light.
Sirius almost wished he could watch it again.
Instead he opened his menu.
Work shift begins in one hour and fifty-seven minutes.
Real time sat in the corner of his interface like a threat from another universe.
If he stayed, he would miss work.
Missing work meant penalties, supervisor notes, ration adjustments, perhaps a mark on his housing account if absence stacked with other warnings.
He did not have the cushion to pretend otherwise.
If he left, Serious Smith would sit unconscious on a wagon heading into mountains.
The thought made his hands cold.
He looked around.
The woman with the fowl was tying a cloth tighter over her basket.
A grey-haired man near the rear checked the wax seal on a bundle and muttered to himself.
A boy not much younger than Sirius slept sitting up against a sack, mouth open, utterly at peace with the fact that a moving wagon was not a sensible bed.
Locals slept in public all the time, then.
But locals woke when shaken.
Locals could answer when spoken to.
Locals could shout if they slid toward an edge.
Serious would not.
Sirius leaned toward the woman with the fowl.
“Excuse me.” She looked at him, sharp-eyed and already irritated.
“What?” “If I fall asleep, could you shove me upright if I start to slide?” Her expression did not soften.
“Why?” “I did not sleep well.” “Then do not sleep.” Asking felt ridiculous and necessary in equal measure.
He had crossed galaxies inside a machine built for impossible immersion, chosen a hidden race, seen history made of light and magic, and now his best safety plan was trusting a woman with live fowl to elbow him before he broke his neck on a wagon bench.
“I will try,” he said.
She stared at him for a moment longer, then snorted.
“If you crush my birds, I shove you off instead.” “Fair.” It was not enough.
It was not safe.
It was a thin thread of local intervention tied to a stranger with chickens and no reason to care about him beyond avoiding damage to her basket.
But it was more than the System offered, and a thread was not nothing.
Darric shouted from the front.
The shout did not translate because it was for the caravan, not Sirius alone, but movement followed it: reins lifted, wheels complained, people braced.
The first wagon jerked.
The second answered.
The third creaked beneath him as the animals took the weight.
They had not yet reached the gate proper when Sirius made himself choose.
He wedged one boot under the bench rail, pulled his cloak across his lap so that his hands would not fall visibly limp, and opened the logout command.
[Logout Confirmation] [Avatar body will remain subject to local conditions.
Confirm disconnection?] [Yes / No] He selected Yes while hating every part of the plan.
The wagon lurched under him.
The world went black.
The pod opened to the sound of the wall complaining.
Sirius sucked in processed air and nearly sat up too quickly again.
His real body felt too clean, too light, too disconnected from the cold that had just been biting through Serious’s boots.
The ceiling glowed amber with three warnings stacked beside the time.
[Rest Debt: Accumulating] [Hydration Advisory: Active] [Shift Preparation Window: Narrow] “Shut up,” Sirius whispered.
The wall did not shut up.
It dimmed the warnings by exactly five percent, which was worse.
He climbed out, triggered the shower release with his elbow, and flinched as the panel unfolded from the wall.
Ninety seconds of warm mist and thirty seconds of cold rinse left him technically cleaner.
The toilet folded out while the shower folded away.
The sink followed, shallow basin extending with a sterile click.
Sirius brushed his teeth over recycled water and stared at his own reflection in the narrow mirror strip above it.
Sirius Smith looked like someone who had slept badly.
Serious Smith was currently unconscious on a wagon.
The difference between them suddenly felt administrative rather than real.
He dressed in work greys designed to be washed by machines that did not care whether fabric still felt like cloth.
The food dispenser produced breakfast paste in a sealed cup after a pause long enough to remind him his credit balance was low.
It tasted faintly of oats, protein substitute, and resignation.
He swallowed half while standing because sitting would cost time, then carried the rest into the corridor.
Work was not far by distance.
Nothing in the outer ring was far by distance.
It was far by access, queues, broken belts, and corridors full of other bodies moving on the same schedule.
Sirius left his room with seven minutes of margin and joined the morning current.
The corridor smelled of metal, cleanser, and people pretending not to smell one another.
Doors opened in sequence along the curved hall.
Workers stepped out in grey, brown, utility orange, and sanitation blue.
A child cried behind one wall.
Somewhere another wall played an upbeat productivity reminder in a voice too cheerful to survive honest contact with the outer ring.
Sirius walked with his shoulders tucked in and his mind split in two.
One half counted time to work.
The other stayed on the wagon.
Had Serious slumped sideways yet?
Had the woman with the birds noticed?
Had Darric stopped at the gate?
Was the road smooth enough to keep him upright, or had the first rut already thrown his unconscious body into someone’s cargo?
At access hatch C-17, the morning queue stalled.
A maintenance reader blinked red above the turnstile.
Three people ahead of Sirius groaned with the exhausted unity of citizens who had been betrayed by infrastructure before breakfast.
A station attendant slapped the side of the reader.
It blinked green long enough to let two workers through, then red again.
“Brilliant,” muttered the man behind Sirius.
“Maybe if I hit my wall hard enough, it will dispense steak tonight.” A few people laughed because the alternative was silence.
Sirius did not.
He was watching the reader casing.
Four exposed screws.
One misaligned plate.
A pressure clip that should have sat flush but had warped after too many manual impacts.
The attendant hit the casing again, and the red light flickered green.
Not magic.
Not in this world.
A physical system.
Parts, tolerances, stress, wear, bad maintenance, human habit.
In Khradrin, runes sat under soot on hinges and gates.
Here, diagnostic lights hid behind scratched polymer.
Different skins.
Similar bones.
What would Old Bran think of a screw?
The thought should have belonged to the game.
It followed him into work anyway.
He reached the maintenance bay three minutes before shift and swallowed the cold remains of breakfast paste before anyone could comment on it.
The bay was a long room built around tool racks, parts printers, repair lockers, and benches that never looked clean no matter how many times they were sterilised.
Everything had a place because space was expensive.
Half the labels were peeling because replacement labels were apparently less important than productivity metrics.
His supervisor, Kellan Price, looked up from the assignment board with the expression of a man who had begun the day disappointed and expected evidence to support the decision.
“Smith.
You’re early enough not to be late.” “Morning,” Sirius said.
“Do not waste it.
Hab block D-9 has three hygiene modules sticking.
One toilet locked open, one shower panel refusing seal, one sink cycling hot water into a wall cavity.
Take Kade and do not flood anything that is not already wet.” Sirius collected the task slate.
Kade, a broad-shouldered apprentice with a talent for looking awake without being useful, appeared beside him carrying a tool roll and a cup of something that smelled better than Sirius’s breakfast.
“You look dead,” Kade said.
His grin faded almost immediately into a quick mechanic’s inspection: face, posture, grip, the delay before Sirius answered.
Outer-Hab workers learned to read damage in one another because management only cared when it lowered output.
“Didn’t sleep?” “Not much.” “Game?” Kade asked, and Sirius froze for less than a second.
Kade noticed anyway, because people noticed weakness even when they did not know what shape it had.
“Everyone is playing or complaining about not playing.
My cousin got in.
Says the tutorial forgot to exist and some old woman charged him for asking directions.” Game was too small for what was happening, and yet it was the only word available in the habitat without sounding insane.
Sirius forced his hands back to the work because Kade knew him well enough to notice stillness and not nearly well enough to understand it.
“Sounds possible,” he said.
“He says the NPCs do not act like NPCs.” “Maybe that is the point.” Kade snorted as they crossed the bay.
“The point is rich kids getting better starting packages.
Always is.” Sirius did not answer.
VIP account.
Hidden races no one should be naming in public.
A thread full of people mocking the only person reckless enough to hint that some options had vanished before ordinary players ever saw them.
A body left unconscious in hay because the System did not consider absence a reason for mercy.
“You going to stand there philosophising at the scanner?” Kade asked.
Sirius blinked and lifted the diagnostic kit.
“No.” Hab block D-9 was older than Sirius’s block and smelled of damp plastic, body heat, and cleaning foam.
Residents had been told the modules were high-efficiency integrated domestic units.
Everyone called them wall organs, because when they malfunctioned they opened, leaked, and made a whole room feel like something biological had gone wrong.
The first unit belonged to a woman who stood in the corridor with two children and the furious dignity of someone whose toilet had folded out at three in the morning and refused to fold back in.
“Do you know how small the room is when the toilet stays out?” she demanded before Sirius could introduce himself.
He did.
Deeply.
“We will get it closed.” “That is what the last team said.” Kade made the mistake of smiling.
The woman’s stare killed the expression before it matured.
Sirius crouched beside the unit, removed the plate, and studied the hinge assembly.
It was not complicated, which was the point.
Outer-Hab prefab design used as few moving parts as possible because anything multiplied by millions became expensive.
The toilet folded on two reinforced arms, locked on a sanitation seal, and retracted after the cycle cleared.
The error log blamed obstruction.
The parts blamed neglect.
The scoring on one pin told the truth.
“We can get another few weeks if the lock tooth is not cracked,” Sirius said.
Kade braced the fold-arm.
“And if it is?” “Then it becomes critical when it breaks during inspection, and Price can explain why he refused a pin.” The woman smiled for the first time.
Sirius worked the pin loose while Kade held the weight.
It was dull, awkward work, the kind that left fingers sore and no one impressed.
But as he turned the stripped fastener, something in his mind shifted back to Khradrin’s gates, to wagon wheels, to Old Bran’s unknown forge.
A screw was not a miracle.
A pin was not a discovery.
A hinge was not a spell.
But a world without a certain fastening method did not know what it lacked until someone showed that method to the right craftsperson.
He imagined explaining threads to Old Bran.
No.
Not explaining.
Learning enough to make the explanation matter.
The toilet arm snapped back into alignment.
Sirius tightened the plate and ran the cycle.
The unit folded away with a reluctant but complete click.
The woman exhaled as if they had returned a whole room to her rather than a square metre.
In the outer ring, that was often the same thing.
The next job was the shower seal.
Then the sink.
Then an access panel with condensation forming behind it because the wall cavity had been warm for too long.
The work settled into rhythm: diagnose, open, brace, repair, reseal, log.
Kade talked because Kade always talked when no one stopped him.
Most of it was about Path to Gods Realm.
“Forums are losing it,” he said while holding a light strip under the sink cavity.
“One guy says he got robbed by children.
Another says a chicken nearly killed him.” “Chickens can be dangerous,” Sirius said absently.
“That sounded personal.” “General observation.” Kade laughed.
“There is a thread saying some VIPs got different starting options.
Everyone is calling the poster a liar, rich, or both.” Sirius kept his hand steady inside the wall.
“Did he give any useful details?” “Nothing real.
Just ” I saw something before it vanished ” and then twenty pages of people telling him to prove it.
Nobody is admitting anything.
Would you?
If I had a secret rich-person race or class, I would shut up until I could sell the information.” “Maybe they signed agreements.” “Maybe,” Kade said, angling the light better.
“Or maybe the poster wanted attention and knew everyone would chase the mystery.
My cousin says he hates the game, by the way.” “So he will keep playing.” “Obviously.
He found out quests do not hand you loot.
Some farmer promised him eggs if he fixed a fence, but when he did it badly he got two cracked eggs and the farmer called him useless.” Sirius paused.
“Did the System reward him?” “Proficiency tick in Basic Repair, apparently.
No coin.
No magic sword.
Just embarrassment.” That fit.
The System processed results.
It did not conjure fairness.
Sirius filed the story beside the no-logout discovery, because both rules pointed in the same direction.
Path to Gods Realm was not built around protecting players from consequence.
It was built around measuring their contact with a world that continued whether they understood it or not, and that made ignorance dangerous instead of harmless.
At break, he did not eat.
He found a corner near the parts lockers, opened the UWW through his wrist slate, and searched for logout.
The results were already multiplying.
[UWW Search: avatar remains after logout] [Official Support Notice: Persistent avatar continuity preserves world integrity and player consequence.
Players are advised to seek appropriate shelter before ending a session.] [Forum Thread: Logged Back Into A Temple Infirmary???] [Forum Thread: Can Inn Rooms Be Robbed While Offline?] Appropriate shelter.
Sirius read the phrase three times and hated every carefully polished letter.
He opened the infirmary thread.
A player had logged back in beside a shrine after collapsing in public.
Half the replies mocked them for roleplaying too hard.
The other half demanded to know whether temple healing counted as a quest reward.
No one seemed to understand the worst part.
Your body stayed.
He typed the words into a reply box, then deleted them.
He typed, Did anyone get a System warning before logout?
He deleted that too.
Asking the right question in public was its own kind of exposure.
He closed the forum and leaned his head back against the locker.
Kade appeared at the end of the aisle with his cup and the expression of someone pretending not to be concerned.
“You look worse than before.” “Thanks.” “That is what co-workers are for.” The rest of the shift dragged.
Sirius fixed what he was told to fix.
He signed what he was told to sign.
He listened while Price complained about response times and Kade complained about Price.
He marched back through outer-ring corridors with feet that ached in one universe and a mind that kept trying to feel wheels beneath him in another.
By the time his door closed behind him, the room seemed even less like shelter than it had that morning.
The pod dominated the space, gleaming with technological promise.
The fold-out sink hid obediently in the wall.
The shower panel waited to become a room only when commanded.
The toilet had disappeared so completely a visitor might pretend he did not live within arm’s reach of it.
The food dispenser offered cheap meals with the same blank patience it offered better meals he could not afford.
Everything worked.
That was the cruelty of it.
This was not ruin.
It was successful design aimed at the lowest acceptable life.
A broken prison at least admitted it had failed.
His room functioned perfectly, and every perfect little mechanism insisted that functioning was the same as living.
Sirius ordered the cheapest evening unit and watched beige paste extrude into a cup.
He did not sit to eat.
He stood beside the pod, staring at the lid.
Serious Smith was somewhere on the road to Briarvale.
If the caravan had kept moving, hours had passed.
Maybe the woman with the fowl had shoved him upright.
Maybe Darric had ordered someone to wake him and discovered he could not be woken.
Maybe they had left him at a roadside shrine, tied him to a wagon frame, or decided guild strays were more trouble than they were worth.
The only way to know was to go back.
Sirius drank the meal because fainting from low blood sugar inside Full Dive would be a stupid addition to an already stupid problem.
He used the toilet.
Washed his hands.
Checked the work schedule twice.
He had enough time before sleep became mandatory.
Not enough to be reckless.
Enough to confirm whether his body had survived his first experiment in absence.
He climbed into the pod.
This time, when the game loaded, he braced for motion.
He got it.
Wheels rattled beneath him.
His head bounced lightly against something coarse.
For one confused second he saw only canvas roof, swaying bundles, and strips of mountain sky through gaps in the wagon frame.
The smell of straw, feathers, leather, and road dust hit him like proof.
He was still on the wagon.
Alive.
Upright, mostly.
A sharp elbow jabbed his side.
“You sleep like the dead,” said the woman with the fowl.
The translation came through because she was speaking to him, and Sirius almost laughed from relief.
“So I have been told,” he said.
She sniffed.
“You slid twice.
My birds dislike you.” “I owe them an apology.” “You owe me patience if they scream.” The wagon hit a rut.
Sirius grabbed the sideboard before he could slide a third time.
Mountains rose around the road, vast and cold and impossibly real.
Khradrin had fallen behind them.
Ahead, somewhere beyond turns he could not yet see, lay Briarvale, Old Bran, and the first forge on a path that had already stopped being safe in ways no forum thread could fully explain.
Calla gave him no grand reassurance, and that helped.
Reassurance would have asked him to believe everything was fine.
Irritation let him believe the world had simply continued around him, rude and practical and full of birds that disliked being used as proof of consciousness.
No reward followed.
Of course it did not.
Understanding was not a reward the System gave him.
It was a cost the world charged.
Sirius looked down at his hands – Serious’s hands – and found straw caught under one fingernail, grease darkening another, and a faint bruise forming across the knuckles where he did not remember striking anything.
His body had lived without him.
Next time, he would make sure it had somewhere better to wait.
Respect was the word that frightened him most.
Not protect, not exploit, not optimise, but respect, as if Serious’s body had crossed some line from avatar to entrusted life while Sirius was too distracted by panels to notice.
[SYSTEM] Name: Serious Smith Location: Khradrin’s Descent – Lower Trade Road Current Status: Travelling Condition: Unprotected Absence recognised [SYSTEM] WORLD EVENT COMPLETE.
Contribution recognised: practical assessment; safe clearance; minor labour.
Reputation adjusted: Briarvale Caravan +1.
Proficiency insight recorded: Leverage and Load Awareness.
[SYSTEM] Creature identified from observation: Stoneback Biter – juvenile.
Threat: avoid direct contact.
Harvesting requires relevant knowledge and tools.
[SYSTEM] Item recognised: Caravan Passage Token – Briarvale Trade Yard.
Origin: Darric’s caravan.
Function: social proof; limited local relevance.
Rarity: Common