“Welcome, Morgan.”

  A voice — clear this time, not echoing through dreams — drifted into my ears. I blinked awake again. I was still in the city of clouds, but the setting had changed: no drifting islands, no impossible sky-forests. Instead, I stood inside a pearl-white castle, smooth and iridescent, its halls lined with vases overflowing with plants I couldn’t name.

  Thorn stood before me.

  “I can finally speak to you without slipping into poetry,” he said, exhaling in relief. “My name is Thorn. Now we can communicate without me burning through hundreds of mana just to speak… English.” He paused, brow furrowing. “Why is it even called English? You don’t come from anywhere with ‘eng’ in the name. Your people really just… went with that?”

  I blinked at him. “I didn’t name it.”

  Thorn sighed dramatically, as if this linguistic injustice weighed heavily on his immortal soul. Up close, he looked… odd. Not frightening — just wrong in the way dream logic felt wrong. His wings were uneven: three sweeping feathers on his left side, two on his right, each shimmering like stained glass. He looked young, too — twenty, maybe twenty-two at most — though something in his eyes suggested he’d been that age for a very, very long time.

  “This realm, Morgan, is… well, this is Cadensia.” Thorn gestured around us, the pearl walls catching the light like a swallowed sunrise. “Technically, it’s one of the celestial realms above where you’ll be going. I’ll be sending you down to Aeternia soon. But before that, there are a few things we need to address. And if I send you in the state you’re in now…”

  He trailed off and released a long, weary sigh — the kind that suggested the universe had personally inconvenienced him.

  “Humans haven’t existed in this Manasphere for three hundred millennia,” he continued. “They went extinct after the Third Symphonic War—no, don’t bother pretending you know what that is. You’re not from here; I’m aware.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Either way, I’ll be granting you three gifts. Technically, one’s already done: your [Status], as the people below call it. The second is a [Sphere]. And the third…” He paused, visibly bracing himself. “A new body for the duration of your stay.”

  “A… new body?” I repeated. “Wait. Are you killing me?”

  Thorn immediately shook his head, almost offended. “No, no, nothing like that. While you’re here, your mana will inhabit a vessel. Think of it like—well, like piloting a very sophisticated puppet. Except it’s you. And it won’t fall over if someone cuts the strings.”

  “That’s… somehow not comforting.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, with the confidence of someone who did not worry nearly enough. “You already possess the genetics of one of the native races. A Sylvient. They’re tree?like people with a mycelium colony inside their bodies instead of a nervous system.”

  I blinked. “That’s the part you thought would be comforting?”

  “No. Honestly, Morgan,” Thorn began, voice calm but deliberate, “considering your age—and the fact that you’re a Gem-Bearer—I don’t expect you to find much comfort in this. The Dia-dron you carry marks you as a Bearer… which, while impressive, also paints a target squarely on your back. Bearers aren’t common. Not in this realm, not anywhere in the Manasphere. Rare, in fact. Less than a five-digit number, if I’ve understood your numeric system correctly.”

  He paused, letting that sink in. His wings twitched slightly, one of his quirks, as if to punctuate the weight of his words. “That brings us to the first thing you need to understand: your [Status]. Nearly everything you do will affect it. Run. Walk. Punch. Eat. Sleep. Even something as mundane as reading or debating the color of the sky—everything contributes. It grows with you. It is you, in many ways.”

  I nodded slowly. That part at least made sense.

  “The second,” he continued, a faint smile tugging at his lips, “is a [Sphere]. Consider it… a tool. A building block, if you will, like the dungeons in one of those tabletop games you’ve played. You can construct it. Adjust it. Expand it. And as it grows, it binds to you. You become the DM. The one directing the flow. Handy, isn’t it?”

  I raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t speak. Thorn merely nodded, satisfied I understood.

  “And finally,” he said, leaning back slightly, wings shifting lazily, “your focus should be on growth. On yourself. Strength isn’t enough. Not here. You need mental resilience, spiritual clarity, emotional fortitude. That is the foundation. Everything else—your gifts, your tasks—springs from that. Morgan, your task is… formidable.”

  I frowned. “You still haven’t told me what that task is.”

  For a long moment, Thorn’s eyes narrowed. Then, without warning, his composure cracked. A deep, thunderous fury roared from him—not at me, not at any human, but at the invisible hand that bound his actions. His wings flared, uneven and jagged, as if the air itself bristled around him.

  “Do you think I can tell you?!” he shouted, voice echoing through the pearl halls. “Do you have any idea what it does to me, to us, to every champion who has ever stepped forward, when the rules won’t let me warn them? Champion after champion, sent into the impossible, and I can’t say a word—cannot! Every step, every danger, every moment… dictated by a system that doesn’t care, that doesn’t bend, that doesn’t give a damn!”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  He slammed a fist into the ground, the pearl floor shivering under the force, his fury barely restrained behind his now shaking frame. Slowly, he exhaled, wings folding back to their asymmetrical calm. The storm in his eyes dimmed, leaving only quiet, simmering rage—and a weighty, unspoken warning hanging in the air.

  “Now,” he said, voice steady once more, though it carried the residue of his anger, “you understand why I cannot tell you what lies ahead. You will learn it the only way that works in this realm: by living it.”

  And the all familiar feeling approached–the clouds of the pearl castle gave way under my feet and I began to fall, until I once again had the darkness cover me.

  ***

  [Initializing Sphere]… [Sphere Initialized]

  [Master: Bearer Morgan Barlow]

  [Domain: Unknown. Please select Domain]

  [Core Type: Unknown. Please select Core Type. Core Type options will populate based on selected Domain]

  I blinked, trying to process the sudden surge of information. Hundreds of… notifications? They hovered in my vision like tiny, glowing glyphs, flickering in and out—some spinning, some pulsing. Each one carried a weight, a promise, a demand I didn’t yet understand.

  The world around me—Cadensia, Aeteria, or whatever fragment of it I’d landed in—felt distant, like I was suspended between reality and some impossible interface. My eyes darted from one notification to another, but they multiplied faster than I could follow, a digital storm layered over my vision.

  [Please Select Domain]…

  [Please Select Domain]…

  “Options?” I muttered, leaning closer to nothing in particular.

  [Options for: Sylvient Sphere Owner Listed]

  Forest [Sub Options Available]

  Swamp [Sub Options Available]

  Shrubland [Sub Options Available]

  “Sub… options?” I squinted at the flickering text.

  [Sub Options for Domains are usually based on either clarification or mana type. Listed are all Sub Options available for Domains available.]

  Forest: Temperate, Tropical, Rainforest, Arctic, Arctic Rainforest, Mangrove, Dead, Burning, Drowned

  Swamp: Mire, Tarland

  Shrubland: Tropical, Tarland, Temperate

  I groaned inwardly. “Uhh… great. That REALLY didn’t answer anything at all.” My eyes landed on one. “Mangrove?”

  [First Domain Selected: Mangrove Forest]

  [Core Types Available for: Mangrove Forest Listed]

  Insects

  Spiders

  Shark

  Fish

  Birds

  Birds of Prey

  I raised an eyebrow. “Wait… Fish and Sharks are separate?” I glanced at the pulsing menu. “Fine… Spiders.”

  [Core Type Selected: Spiders. Creating Aeteria Force of Power now…]

  A low hum vibrated through me. My vision warped, the glyphs spinning faster, then coalescing into threads of shadowy silk that seemed to grow outward from my body. My pulse quickened. Somehow, I could feel the potential of my choices form—something strange, alien, and terrifyingly alive—stretching into the world before I’d even fully woken.

  ***

  I was… standing in front of the water. And the person in the reflection was me—

  but absolutely not me.

  My skin was gone, replaced with smooth, living bark that shifted when I breathed. Where my hair should’ve been, a crown of leaves rustled softly, stirred by a breeze I couldn’t feel. Flowers dotted my shoulders and arms in soft clusters, and—was that fruit hanging from one of my branches?

  I was a fruit tree. A fruit tree person.

  Before I could process that existential crisis, lines of unfamiliar letters—letters I somehow understood perfectly—began scrolling through my vision.

  [Welcome, Morgan. I can’t give you many details, but I can tell you SOME things through the interface. As you can probably guess, this is me—Thorn. This message is prerecorded, so please don’t interrupt.]

  I blinked. That sounded exactly like something Thorn would say.

  [To start with the basics of Sylvient biology: Yes, you DO still need to eat. You can eat almost anything. Mushrooms tend not to be picky, but you’ll find that either mana?dense food or mana?concentrated fungus will benefit you most. The more fungus you consume, the more your internal system mutates. Don’t panic—mutation is normal for Sylvients.]

  Fantastic. I was a tree who ate mushrooms to mutate.

  Totally normal.

  [Secondly, if you’re reading this, you’ve awakened your Sphere. As you may have guessed from… well, the dramatic flare it tends to have, a Sphere is a tiny world that is yours alone. People WILL enter it to ‘challenge’ you. You’ll receive rewards whether they survive or not.]

  I swallowed. Or… whatever the Sylvient equivalent of swallowing was. My throat creaked like shifting wood.

  [Yes, being a Sphere Master is an excellent way to improve your Status. Make sure you use the Sphere Point Shop regularly.]

  A shop. My personal world came with a shop.

  [Finally—learn magic. You’re a Bearer and a Sphere Master. You have more potential than you think. Live well, Morgan. Both here in Aeteria, and on Gaia. You’ll be switching between the two faster than you expect.]

  The message flickered, then faded, leaving only my reflection in the water again.

  Leaves. Bark. Blossoms. Fruit.

  This was me now.

  And according to Thorn, this was only the beginning.