People think our greatest achievements are the glowing runes everyone sees in broad daylight, but the secret of our success are the seals inserted into the materials themselves - the invisible veins of mana flowing through solid rock of a building, through the metal of the sword, and beneath the scales of an armor.

  — Excerpt from The Less Broached Topics of Sealscribing

  Day 144, 7:45 PM

  Apparently, asking about the dirt on the powerful went worse than expected. I got assassinated on the fifth day after asking questions sane people shouldn’t ask. Thank heavens for Redo. I did find out a lot of stuff; the citylord was a woman, her element was fire, her name was Flare Brighshine, she didn’t like people digging about the dark details of her life and path to power, including all the murders, blackmail, and kidnappings.

  She probably thought I was looking for leverage to escape her power without paying the fines and found it more convenient to just off me. A reasonable, expedient approach, one I approved even if I rarely used, because Redo stomped such nonsense before it happened.

  I was entering Thunderbluff for the second time on the eighty-seventh of season of earth. The first time I went straight to the rumor house and got myself summarily executed; the second time I went straight to the Noble Dragon. Nobody ever bothered me there unless I picked a fight first. I drank and ate, and got a restful night’s sleep on a premium mattress and man, did I need it.

  I ordered another massage and paid for it with a second realm manarium piece. She worked my muscles until I became putty. Redo was red, but the danger of asking a question in Noble Dragon was minimal.

  “Excuse me, shapely masked lady,” she was at the third realm while I was at the second, and her grip told me she was a knight or a mageknight. “Would you let me see your face?”

  The seductive porcelain doll with blue eyes and crimson lips shook her head. She wore her mask even when I used her as a prostitute, paying for the pleasure with a third realm manarium piece, and she wasn’t worth the price.

  I could sink all my forty-two points into physical attributes, overpower her, and take off her mask, but that felt like a violation worse than raping her, since she was willing to have sex for money, but not to take her mask off for money.

  “What if I gave you a third realm manarium piece?”

  She shook her head and left. I sighed; she was a mystery I was interested in. I could probably get the answer at the rumor house for considerably less than a piece of third realm manarium, but that also felt dirty.

  I sat and rolled my shoulders — not a single pop. The mystery masseuse was great at her job, and that was all that mattered. Except my curiosity didn’t like that answer.

  I sighed, got dressed, and went to the adventurers' guild to check out the quests they had lined up. There were two fourth realm ones meant for questors. One a bounty for some rich wastrel who had wandered into the Summersweald, and another about exterminating excess frostworms from a mine producing ice jade, a rare crafting material, basically fossilized bone of high-realm ice-attributed manabeasts.

  Frostworms were an evolved form of titanoboas, burrowing and reclusive creatures, and they should be rare in this part of the world. Summersweald greatly favored fire mana, saurians of all types and forms thrived in it.

  “How often do questors take quests around here?” I asked the youth cleaning the table.

  “Rarely, sir,” he said, and I was thrilled. He said ‘sir’ not because of awe or respect, but because he had manners!

  “Doesn’t that mean this Brand is done for?”

  “Nah,” he waved his hand. “When his family becomes desperate enough, they will increase the reward, and Manager will go out to search for him. He will find him too. The only question is whether the boy can survive until he does.”

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  I nodded. While cruel, it made sense. Where would the manager be if he jumped whenever anyone had a problem?

  “And the frostworms? I’ve seen it before.”

  The youth shrugged. “That’s been there since I started working here. The infestation is probably worse than it says, and frostworms are venomous while their cold is magical in nature, seeping into the body more easily than it should.”

  He offered no further explanations, and I thanked him, going through the missions for initiates. Only five of them were on the wall, two requiring an awakened to fetch exotic fruits and herbs from Summersweald, the reward being two dozen second realm manarium for either, and while I could take them both and complete them at the same time, fifty pieces of second level manarium weren’t much.

  Wait. When I head over to visit the citylord, I could hop over to Summersweald, pick the fruits for the missions and cash them in with a minimal waste of time. If I take a loop or two to find them first, I could harvest them in half a day.

  Twelve to sixteen hours’ work for fifty crystals. Not a bad deal for now. Unfortunately, the missions were labeled as leisure, and the imperial stipend didn’t apply.

  “Have these been around long too?” I asked the server, and for a tip of a single first realm manarium, he guided me through the missions, the general regions in which I could complete them, as well as how stale the missions were.

  The missions for second and third realm awakened asking for edibles were always active, issued by the Noble Dragon and other, even more expensive, establishments deeper in the empire. As for the rest, any missing person searches or saurian exterminations were urgent and much better paid since the imperial stipend applied. Sometimes adventurers completed them, sometimes the imperials canceled them after the damage was already done and the beast retreated.

  I wasted my time in safety, waiting for the Redo counter to reach zero, before I took some of those longer-term and perpetual missions, just to check them out safely in the dinosaur-infested jungle.

  Armed with a metal bar, at the middle of the second realm as I was, I posed little threat even to regular, ten-foot-tall, bipedal lizards. Stats made up the difference, at least partially, but flight was my only option when encountering a dreadwalker. True, such monsters were thousands of miles deep into the jungle. Mirror, the guild attendant, told me to visit the region on the fringes, barely two hundred miles in, but my luck was rotten. It always was.

  How else do you get reincarnated in a world infested with outer gods twice in a row?

  A useless question, and I asked myself a better one, one which I had asked myself several times already. How did humans happen in this world?

  With all my intellect, with all my cheats, I still failed to answer that one. The concept of evolution differed radically from what I considered natural evolution. Mammals were everywhere, true, but they were tiny. The largest ones were the size of a field mouse, with the lizards such as scuttlers taking even the rats’ place in the food chain. And boom, there were humans, sticking out like sore thumbs.

  One possibility was something like Everrain, a massive extinction for some reason at some point, which humans either caused or fortunately survived. The other is that it has something to do with the eldritch entities.

  With my thoughts so occupied, I entered the Summersweald. While winter was starting outside, the mana-suffused tropical jungle remained tropical. Most of the common saurians had retreated into the sweltering wilderness, where the cycle of life would do its job and the strong would cull the weak, reducing their numbers to something manageable.

  Is some similar cycle causing the saurian onslaughts? I wondered. Dandelion’s duty remained unfulfilled, despite the migratory event being years late. On one hand, I was an absolute winner of my circumstances; on the other, the longer the delay, the more terrifying the horde.

  Ruby was only at the fourth realm, her master probably at sixth. I hoped his presence guaranteed her safety, if not the safety of the whole town.

  The ambient really didn’t mix well with my dark thoughts. The surly weather outside the jungle, with its looming snowstorm, got me into grim thoughts, but the flowery, scented summer failed to dispel them.

  Hours passed, and in my silent debate, I reached an answer. I would come to Ruby’s rescue if, and only if, Redo was active.

  Maybe I was overly cautious. The vision of Newstar’s future guaranteed my survival regardless of what I did, but I knew that was another spiral into madness. Believing myself truly invincible would see me dead or captured in no time.

  A sudden rustle snapped me out of my thoughts, followed by a cry of joy.

  “Thank heavens you’re here! I got separated from my guide, and I can’t seem to find him.”

  A very familiar young man with gold-rimmed spectacles and somewhat torn clothing stepped out of a random bush.

  “Are you Brand Coldridge?”

  Brand pushed his spectacles up his nose, the move surprisingly elegant for someone who didn’t have a hint of mana about him.

  “One and the same, the failure of the Coldridge lineage, the book nerd, the weakling. And who might you be, and how do you know my name?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair, the encounter with Brand was guaranteed a Redo. I blew Newstar off and went out to party, but Brand would be here on this day, on this very hour, in all future timelines.

  “I’m Dandelion. There’s a guild mission to find you, dead or alive.”

  The man paled, and I laughed.